Damn shoes.
It was another diner in a long string of diners, all so similar that Jack had quit noticing them a few weeks back. He’d been aimlessly wandering around the country on his bike, without much to do but think about life choices. Specifically, his life choices. More to the point, his
bad
life choices.
Like joining the rebel forces. Spending ten years battling evil vampires and other supernatural punks who wanted to take over the world, or at least their corner of it. Criminals—the stupider they were, the more grandiose their plans, or so he’d figured out.
He and Quinn had even kept a mental “stupid criminals” file that they trotted out over a few beers when talking to trainees.
Quinn. Put her under bad life choices? Nah. Fighting with Quinn as his partner had been the best part of it all. They’d attempted a lot and achieved most of it.
Falling for Quinn, on the other hand? Seriously bad choice.
And not accepting that he had no chance with her after that damn Atlantean came into the picture? Went beyond bad to stupid.
So now he was on the way to Dead End, Florida, to wrap up his late uncle’s effects, because the lawyers hadn’t been able to find Jack in time for him to make it to the funeral. A shot of pain hit him in the gut at the reminder that he’d never see Jeremiah again. The man who’d raised him; the man who’d believed in him. Gone.
“More coffee, hon?” The waitress had a look on her worn but pretty face that said she might have asked him the question more than once. Her tone was gentle, though, so he smiled at her.
“Sure. And can I still get breakfast?” It was two-thirty in the afternoon, and the few people still there were probably enjoying a late lunch.
She nodded. “Sure. It’s Christmas Eve, after all. If you want eggs, you should get them. I’m Donna, by the way. Merry Christmas.”
Jack blinked. Christmas Eve. Hell, he hadn’t even realized what day it was. Not that it mattered. He was officially fresh out of family members, and he’d never had much in the way of friends. Quinn would be with Alaric…
Jack shook his head to get that unpleasant picture out of his mind, and glanced down at the menu, although he didn’t know why. Diner menus were all the same.
Except, not this one.
“Merry Christmas to you, too, Donna. Ah, what does this mean?” He pointed to the list under the word
SPECIALS
:
The Ericka
The Gloria Ellen
The Kimberley
The waitress laughed. “Oh, that’s Charley’s little bit of fun. Those are his three daughter’s names, and the specials are their favorite meals. So, the Ericka is a PB&J with cheese and pickles on it, Cheez Doodles on the side.”
Jack’s mouth twitched, in a grin or a grimace, he wasn’t sure which. “And the Gloria Ellen?”
“That’s my favorite,” she said, smiling back at him. “A banana, pineapple, and mayonnaise sandwich on white bread.”
Jack shook his head. “I’m almost afraid to ask, but the Kimberley?”
“Tomato soup with sliced hot dogs and macaroni in it,” Donna said.
“So, these are normal kid foods?” Jack hadn’t been around kids all that much, but if he’d ever thought about it, he probably would have expected them to eat normal food, on smaller plates.
Donna shrugged. “Kids are weird.”
He couldn’t argue with that. “Well, with all due respect to the girls, I’d like a stack of pancakes, four eggs over medium, wheat toast, bacon, and hash browns. Orange juice. And throw in a side of ham. And a steak.”
Donna didn’t even blink at the size of his order. “Got it. Shouldn’t be long.”
She took his menu and bustled off toward the counter, and he drank some more coffee. It had been six hours since his first breakfast, it was damned cold on the bike, and the last thing a tiger shapeshifter needed was to run low on fuel. Made him cranky, and cranky tigers weren’t fit for human company.
Not that he gave much of a shit about human company.
The bell over the door jangled, and the woman who walked in made him rethink his position on that last one. She was a sleek brunette, tall and lean in a dark green peacoat and jeans, and she was wearing a very un-diner-like pair of high, sexy black heels. Her hair curved in at chin-length and swept around her face when she turned her head. She noticed him noticing her and gave him the long, slow perusal of a woman who’s used to being stared at and can give as good as she gets. He was surprised to find himself mildly disappointed when she took a seat at the counter instead of walking over to talk to him.
“Hey, Vanessa, I’ll be there in a sec,” Donna called out, on her way to drop a steaming bowl off at the table of a tiny, elderly woman.
Vanessa languidly waved a hand, apparently in no rush. She took her coat off and put it on the stool next to her and then hooked one foot over the railing and swung the other in a slow arc, none of which Jack would have noticed if it hadn’t been for those damn shoes. The shoes were black, but the soles were red. Blood red. Hell, what did he know? Maybe there was a thing with women and shoes that they had to wear Christmas-colored soles in December, and Donna’s sturdy white sneakers secretly had green soles.
Or maybe Jack’s mind was going, and thinking about shoes was the first step toward the very early onset of senile dementia. He looked out the window, determined to quit speculating about sexy brunettes with weird shoes, until Donna showed up with his food.
“Okay, hon, this keep you a while?” She stood back and surveyed the table, now covered with heaping plates of food. One thing you could say for diners, they didn’t stint on portions.
“Thanks, I’m good,” he told her, and then he bent his attention to his second breakfast of the day and worked his way through the meal. He was on his third cup of coffee, and down to nothing but crumbs and a single honey-covered biscuit on his plate, when the diner door slammed open and a teenaged boy rushed in, red-faced and panting.
“Vanessa, you’ve got to come right now. Somebody shot Santa Claus!”
J
ack was halfway
out of his seat before he remembered two important facts:
1. This was none of his business, because he was done with crime-fighting, and,
2. Santa Claus didn’t exist.
So he sat back down and shoved the rest of his biscuit in his mouth.
The effect on everyone else in the diner, however, was pretty damn dramatic. Donna dropped the coffee pot she was holding, and the glass carafe shattered on the black-and-white tiled floor. Vanessa jumped up, but her heel caught on the rung of the stool and tangled up her legs. When she pitched forward, her face was on a collision course with the shattered glass on the floor. Jack was up and across the room before he even realized he’d moved, and he caught her on the way down.
“Thanks,” Vanessa said, but she was already pushing away from him and turning toward the messenger who’d caused all the commotion. “Dad? Somebody shot Dad? Bobby, are you sure?”
Dad? Ah, that explained it. Her dad must be dressing up as Santa for some party or festival or other small-town holiday feel-good crap. Jack felt a twinge of empathy for the woman, considering he’d just lost his uncle, but still. Not his town, not his people, not his problem.
The door swung open again, and the bulky figure of Hope Springs law enforcement filled the doorway. The man was wider than he was tall, and he wasn’t short. His uniform was dark brown, just a shade lighter than his skin, and his bald head and badge both gleamed.
“Sheriff. What is going on?” Vanessa demanded, grabbing her coat and heading toward him. “Dad? Is—did something happen?”
The sheriff’s sharp gaze scanned the room and then came to a pointed stop on Jack, before returning to Vanessa. “Yeah, I’m sorry. Your dad is missing. Old Mr. Arbuthnot heard a shot from town hall, where Ray had the Santa chair set up for the little ones, and he called me. Of course, Hope Springs being Hope Springs, I had to run a dozen armed men—and Bessie Fortnoy—out of there before I could see what was what.”
Jack understood that. Concerned citizens carrying guns had caused more than a few problems in his job, too. Once in a while one of them came in handy, but usually civilians were prone either to shoot blindly at everyone—innocent or guilty—or to freeze in fear and get their guns taken away by the bad guys. Neither option was particularly useful in a firefight.
“Are you—how—” Vanessa paused to take a deep breath. “Bobby said somebody shot Dad. Where is he? Is he on the way to the hospital?”
The sheriff put his hands on his hips. “That’s the problem. We don’t know where your daddy is. But we found a good bit of blood on his chair.”
Vanessa’s face turned white, and Jack wondered if she was going to hit the floor after all, but she was apparently made of sterner stuff. She pulled on her coat and headed for the door.
“I’m going over there. This is my fault. If I’d stayed and helped wrap presents when that stupid elf didn’t show up on time, he wouldn’t have been alone,” she said, pulling her arm away when the sheriff reached for her. “I just dropped him off not half an hour ago. I’m going to go find him, Chuck.”
She was out the door before the sheriff could stop her. The big man sighed and then turned around to face Jack, who had already pulled out his wallet and put it on the table, open to his ID. He knew this drill. Stranger in town, something bad happened—the sheriff would be a fool if he didn’t check Jack out, and Chuck didn’t look like a fool.
“Name’s Jack Shepherd. Just got into town and came straight to the diner,” he said politely as the sheriff approached. “ID’s on the table.”
The sheriff cocked an eyebrow. “Get asked for ID a lot, do you?”
Jack shrugged but said nothing as the sheriff examined his license, which had been issued by the state of Florida and was probably set to expire soon.
“So, Jack Shepherd, why don’t you tell me why you’re in town and why your name sounds familiar?”
Donna crossed the floor toward the table. “Now, don’t you be harassing my customers, Chuck. This young man got here about ten minutes before Vanessa did, and I saw him drive down the street from the south. He wasn’t anywhere near town hall.”
“And I don’t have a gun,” Jack added, standing up, holding his hands out to the side, and turning slowly around so the sheriff could see he wasn’t packing. He handed his leather jacket over, too, nodding his permission for the sheriff to search it. “As to why I’m here, I was hungry.”
The sheriff glanced down at the group of empty plates on the table. “So I see. And your name is familiar because?”
Jack sighed, but he didn’t see a way out of it. “You may have heard it on the news, associated with the rebellion.”
Chuck’s eyes widened a little bit. “You’re
that
Jack Shepherd.”
“Yeah, I guess I am. So you can see why I don’t need a gun, and that I don’t usually go around shooting Santas.”
Suspicion had changed to respect and a familiar sort of comradery on the sheriff’s face and in his body language. “Tiger shifter, right? You mind coming down to the scene and seeing if you can scent anything? I wouldn’t ask, but my deputy is on vacation with her family in Florida. She’s a wolf shifter and the best tracker I’ve got.”
Not my job, not my problem
, ran through Jack’s mind, but he’d seen the look on Vanessa’s face and heard the pain in her voice. He caught himself nodding before he could stop himself.
He paid for his breakfast and left a hefty tip, as much for Donna standing up for him as for the service, pulled his jacket on, and followed the sheriff out into the cold.
The town hall was about a block farther down the street, and he would have known it was the scene by the milling crowd of people and low hum of anxiety, even if he hadn’t begun to smell the blood when they were still fifty feet or so from the door.
“That’s a lot of blood,” he said quietly.
The sheriff shot a quick look at him. “My deputy would have been able to smell it from farther out.”
Jack shrugged. “Tiger. We don’t use scent for hunting; wolves do. A wolf’s sense of smell is a dozen times stronger than a dog’s, and far, far superior to a human’s.”
They pushed through the small crowd and made it to the entrance of the blocky brick building, and the sheriff waved at a young deputy to move aside and let them in. Jack followed the sheriff into a lobby space that looked like the North Pole had thrown up on it. Colored lights and shiny tinsel competed with fragrant pine branches and sparkly fake snow in a visual cacophony of holiday cheer. The explosion of ornaments surrounded an oversized red leather chair that looked like the favorite throne of a power-mad king.
Vanessa stood by the chair, her hands clenched into fists at her sides. “I’ve called his phone, but it goes straight to voice mail,” she said in a shaking voice. “That’s…that’s a lot of blood.”
Jack walked a couple of paces closer and looked at the floor beside the chair. It probably did look like a lot of blood to the untrained eye, but Jack knew how much the human body held and this wasn’t even close to that amount.
“He should be fine if he gets medical attention soon,” Jack told her, before he remembered that she didn’t know who the hell he was or why he’d be weighing in on her missing father’s condition.
She whirled to face him, her dark eyes narrowed. “Who are you? Why are you here? Chuck, who is this and what are you doing to find my father?”
The sheriff put a hand on her arm and spoke in a calm and soothing voice, which Jack could tell did absolutely nothing to either calm or soothe the woman. “Now, Vanessa, I’ve known your daddy since we were boys. I’ll figure this out and find Ray. This is Jack Shepherd. He’s a, well, a sort of federal agent, and I thought maybe he could lend his expertise. He’s also a shifter—”
Jack resisted the urge to roll his eyes as the sheriff’s voice trailed off. He was definitely not a fed. The federal government had only claimed the rebellion when it suited them. And Chuck hadn’t wanted to mention what kind of shifter he was, had he? Nobody was ever comfortable around a tiger, even the people who wanted his help.