Vargas shifted back to human, and Jack followed suit. “That’s five to two, my orange friend,” Vargas said smugly.
Jack shrugged. “Your territory, your justice. I just wanted to find the wolf who was hiding in the place Mr. Clark disappeared.”
“Check the tents?”
“Yeah.” Jack unzipped the first tent, but smelled nothing but stale beer and wet wolf—either Frank or the moron, or both, slept in that one.
The second tent yielded nothing.
The third, though…maybe. Jack bit the bullet, stuck his head in through the tent flap, and inhaled deeply, in spite of the unwelcome aroma of dirty sock.
Bingo
.
“He was here. The wolf from the town hall,” Jack said, striding over to where the moron huddled on the ground. “Where is the wolf who slept in that tent? The one who wasn’t here today.”
The man snuffled and cried, and Jack lost patience and yanked him up. “Your brother isn’t dead, he’s just unconscious. You can go forth and do bad things together when he wakes up.”
“If I don’t kill them all,” Vargas pointed out, making the moron cry even harder.
“Fair enough,” Jack said, shrugging. “But first, I need to know who was in that tent.” He lifted the sobbing man off the ground by the throat.
“Marvin,” the moron cried out, choking and gasping. “It was Marvin, but he stayed at his girlfriend’s last night and he hasn’t come back yet. Let me down.”
Jack dropped him, and the man curled up in a pathetic ball again. “I’ll leave you alone as soon as you tell me how I can get in touch with Marvin. What’s his phone number?”
“He ain’t got no phone,” the moron said, with a touch of defiance. “He’s broke, like the rest of us.”
Jack reached for his throat again, and the man collapsed back in a heap.
“You can find him at his girlfriend’s, I bet. Go see her, already. Leave us alone,” he blubbered.
Vargas sighed. “This is what you get when you allow rogue wolves to run freely. No pack discipline, no training, no courage. This man is a pathetic coward, and his brother is a vicious criminal.”
“Yeah, pack discipline, great, fine,” Jack said impatiently. “But I need the moron to tell me how to find Marvin’s girlfriend first.”
The man sat up and glared at Jack. “My
name
is Fred, not moron.”
Jack crouched down, getting right in Fred’s face. “Okay, Fred. You’re not a moron. You’re a perfectly intelligent guy who realizes that if you don’t give me Marvin’s girlfriend’s location within the next ten seconds, I’m going to reach into your chest, rip your heart out, and eat it right here in front of you.”
Fred’s face turned red, then white. “You’d do that?”
Jack bared his teeth. “Tigers love to eat hearts. It’s our favorite dish.”
The man nearly passed out, and Jack realized he might have overdone it with the heart thing. He grabbed Fred by the shoulders and shook him. “The girlfriend, Fred.”
“I don’t know where she lives,” Fred shrieked. “I only know her name.”
“Then. Give. Me. Her. Name,” Jack said, biting off each word.
“Maya. Her name is Maya.”
“Son of a
bitch
.” Jack dropped Fred back on the ground and started running. “Vargas, I need a ride to Hope Springs. I’ve gotta talk to an elf.”
V
argas drove, while
Jack worked the phone, dialing the wolf’s contact list. Vanessa didn’t answer. Her dad still didn’t answer his phone, either. Jack called the sheriff and sketched out the details of what they’d discovered, and the sheriff kept saying “I’ll be damned,” and “Maya cleaned our house last month before Thanksgiving,” like that mattered.
“I need to know her address,” Jack said, finally losing patience. “And can you meet us there, or even get there first? We’re still—” He looked at Vargas.
“Twenty minutes out,” the wolf said grimly, pressing down even harder on the accelerator.
“Twenty minutes out,” Jack repeated to the sheriff. “Vanessa was going to go talk to Maya, and now she’s not answering her phone. Sheriff, if this rogue wolf, Marvin, already shot one person over ten grand, he’s not going to hesitate to shoot another.”
“I got that,” McConnell growled. “I’m more than a half hour in the other direction, though. Maya lives in the little green house next to the old elementary school. Tell Alec, he knows how to find it. I don’t have a deputy in town with the experience you’ve got, Shepherd, so I’m going to authorize you to go in, but you’d better be damned careful. If anything happens to that girl—”
“Got it,” Jack said, ending the call. He didn’t give a damn if the sheriff authorized him or not; he was going in after Vanessa.
“
We’re
going in after Vanessa,” Vargas said. “You are not on your own.”
Jack snarled at him. “Now you’re a mind reader, too?”
“It wasn’t hard to read,” Vargas said sardonically. “Chapter One: Do Gooder Goes to Utah.”
“Fine.
We’re
going in. Just don’t screw this up.”
Vargas pressed the gas pedal to the floor, pushing the truck up to 110 mph. “She’s my woman, Jack, although she doesn’t know it yet. I’d give my life for her.”
Jack shook his head. “Then slow the hell down before we’re both giving our lives right here on the damn road, which won’t do Vanessa or her father a bit of good.”
It was actually only fifteen minutes later when Vargas pulled the car off the road and parked. They got out of the car, and Jack scanned the area.
“The elementary school is right around that curve, and the green house is just beyond it,” Vargas said. “I didn’t want to pull in there, tires squealing, and give them the chance to kill Vanessa and her father before we can get into the house.”
Jack shook his head. “Good plan, but it doesn’t make any sense that Marvin and Maya would still be there.”
“Except for the fact that Vanessa’s not answering her phone,” Vargas said.
“Except for that,” Jack said grimly, knowing there was another reason why the Clarks might not be answering their phones, but not wanting to say it.
“I’ll walk down the road, whistling and acting slightly drunk. They don’t know me, and I look a hell of a lot more harmless in this shape than my other one. You shift to wolf and sneak around the back,” Jack said.
Vargas nodded. “Sounds like a plan. See you there.”
Jack took off at a moderate pace, hands in his pockets and pretending to be the kind of idiot who’d go for a walk on a country road just before sunset in freezing weather. It wasn’t all that hard; he just channeled some of the criminals he’d met over the years. Seemed like something that moron Fred would do, come to think of it. He passed the schoolhouse and, sure enough, there was a little green house, with a little green car in front of it, its trunk and doors hanging open.
Vanessa’s truck was parked right next to it.
The screen door to the porch banged open, and a bearded man wearing a red parka, jeans, and boots walked out carrying a suitcase in each hand. Before he’d taken three steps toward the car, he caught sight of Jack and froze.
“Dashing through the snow, in a one-horse open sleigh,” Jack belted out, putting a drunken wobble in his voice. “Something something something, laughing all the way.”
The man, whom Jack was guessing must be Marvin, dropped the suitcases and started toward Jack. “Who the hell are you?”
Jack smiled vacantly, wishing he could drool on command. He needed to stall, so he could give Vargas time to go in through the back and find Vanessa and her dad. So he pretended to stumble into the man and took a big sniff while he was close, confirming his suspicions.
This was, without a doubt, the same wolf who’d hidden behind that Christmas tree in the town hall. Almost certainly the man who’d shot Ray Clark, too, since Jack could smell gunshot residue and a trace of blood on him.
Jack wanted to beat the man until he was crying on the ground like his friend Fred, but he needed the signal from Vargas first.
“Merry Chrishmas, friend,” Jack slurred. “Wonderful day for a walk. M’wife tossed me out of the house to sober up, don’t you know it.”
Marvin whipped his head left and then right, scanning the road. “No, I don’t know it. And I don’t know you. I don’t know you, and I don’t like that you just happened to walk by here right now.”
Jack forced his eyes open as wide as they’d go and peered owlishly at the man, who was as tall as Jack and carried a lot more muscle, at least as a human. That didn’t worry Jack, though, because, hey. Tiger.
But he still couldn’t hear any sounds from Vargas, which
was
starting to worry him.
“Why? What’s wrong with now? Is Santa coming?” Jack bellowed out a laugh and pretended to almost fall over.
“Look, asshole, I don’t have time for this,” Marvin growled, pulling a gun from behind his back.
Right at that moment, Jack heard the back door of the house slam open.
“
Wait!
” Jack shouted at Marvin, who was startled enough that he actually froze for a second.
“I’ve got them,” Vargas called out from inside the house. “All clear.”
“Okay, we’re good,” Jack happily told the startled thug who was holding a gun on him.
Then he exploded into action and took Marvin down. He remembered not to crush the gun, because it was evidence, so he just kicked it several feet away from the now-unconscious man.
Vargas opened the door and walked out, supporting an older man who had Vanessa’s dark hair and eyes. She followed close behind until they were through the door, then she put an arm around her dad on the other side.
Jack crossed the yard to the trio. “Mr. Clark, I’m guessing? Are you okay?”
The man nodded, then grimaced. “Damn scalp wounds bleed like crazy. That man was hiding behind the tree, and he jumped out and shot me, then hustled me out the door into Maya’s car. They brought me here and tied me up, so I couldn’t get away while they packed up. I think they just wanted the ten thousand bucks, but I surprised them by coming in early when I decided to skip lunch with Vanessa. Nobody else was in the place, since it was a holiday, so they would have gotten away clean—”
“If not for those pesky Clarks,” Jack said, grinning.
Vanessa grinned back at him, catching the Scooby Doo reference, which made Alec scowl, but Mr. Clark just looked confused.
“Well. Right. Then Vanessa showed up to talk to Maya, who has the backbone of a jellyfish. She started acting squirrelly, which made Vanessa suspicious, and I heard my daughter out in the front room and managed to work my gag loose and yelled. The loser boyfriend—”
“Marvin,” Jack said.”
“Marvin,” Clark continued, not missing a beat. “He decided he needed to tie up Vanessa, too, and maybe kill us because we could identify him.”
Vanessa rolled her eyes. “Because it never occurred to either of them that we knew who Maya was and could identify her, too.”
Jack looked around. “Where is the deceitful Maya, by the way?”
“I tied her ass up,” Vanessa said triumphantly. “And I
enjoyed
it. Teach her to touch
my
dad.”
Clark beamed at his daughter, and so did Vargas, and Jack was very relieved to hear the sound of sirens.
“The sheriff is on his way,” he told Vanessa.
“And I called an ambulance,” she said.
Her father immediately started to object, but she was having none of it. “It’s not every day you get shot in the head, Dad. Give me an early Christmas present by not arguing about going to the hospital to get checked out.”
Everything seemed to happen at once, after that. The sheriff and the ambulance got there at the same time, and Jack briefed McConnell on what they’d learned and what had happened. The prisoners and the evidence were collected, and Jack gave the sheriff his phone number, in case he had any questions later. Then McConnell took off, presumably toward the jail, and Jack wondered what he should do next and how he was getting back to his bike.
Vanessa, standing next to the ambulance, said something to the EMTs and then looked around for Jack. He nodded and walked over.
“I can’t thank you enough,” she said, looking up at him with those fine, dark eyes.
“You don’t have to thank me at all. Consider it a Christmas gift,” he said, smiling a little.
“More like a Christmas miracle,” she said. “Do you—I don’t even know where you’re headed, but would you like to spend Christmas with us? We’d be very glad to have you.”
Jack was almost tempted, but he had business in Dead End, and he’d delayed going home for long enough. Besides, there was a certain alpha wolf staring daggers at him right now.
Just to mess with Vargas, Jack leaned over and kissed Vanessa on the cheek. “Thanks for the invite, but I have to go. You might ask the wolf, though. He’s nuts about you, and I wouldn’t have made it here in time without him.”
She glanced over at Vargas, who looked ready to march over and try the heart-ripping-out trick on Jack. “Really?
Alec
? I guess it would only be the right thing to do, after he helped and all… Right now I need to go with the ambulance, though.”
“If you don’t mind, I’ll drive your truck back into town and get my bike, then,” he said.
“Oh, that would be great. Just leave the keys with Donna at the diner, if you would,” she said, digging the keys out of her pocket and handing them over. “It’s been nice to meet you, Jack Shepherd. I hope there’s someone who is nuts about you wherever you’re going.”
“I doubt it. But, as the sign said, Hope Springs…”
The peal of laugher he’d surprised out of her was a lovely sound, better than Christmas bells, and probably the only Christmas present he was apt to get. Jack waved to Vargas, fired up the truck, and headed out.
From Hope Springs to Dead End. Hopefully that wasn’t a metaphor for his life. And had he learned anything from all of this?
Watch out for Santas? Beware of small-town diners? Never order the mayonnaise and pineapple sandwich? Nah. Life was better without lessons, anyway.
When he pulled up to the diner and parked, though, Jack started laughing. He’d thought of something, after all.
Stay away from women wearing red-soled shoes.