Whiskey Sour (2 page)

I’d just decided to get down and try another window when the face of a beast crashed against the window—snarling jowls and strings of snot hanging between razor sharp teeth.

I screamed as the kennel collapsed beneath me and I went sprawling on the concrete
, my arms wrapped around the camera to protect it. I hit on my back with a
whoomph
and the air was knocked out of me. Something sharp had pierced my leg, but I barely noticed, my eyes wide and unfocused as I focused on getting my breath back.

“Ouch,” I croaked out.

The growls intensified and the window shook as the beast rammed its head over and over against the glass. If that was a dog, it was unlike any kind I’d ever seen before. Unless you counted Cujo.

I inhaled air painfully into my lungs and rolled to my hands and knees, looking around to make sure no one had witnessed my latest disaster. Granted, I’d gotten better
at my job in the last few months, but that was probably along the same lines as telling Forrest Gump he was being promoted to remedial math.

The beast kept ramming its head against the window as I got to my feet. I gave it the middle finger because it made me feel better, and then I turned to head back to my car I’d left parked in a ditch near the marshland about a hundred yards away. My leg throbbed and blood coated the bottom part of my jeans.
Good thing I’d already had a tetanus shot.

T
he growling and head butting stopped as suddenly as it began, and I breathed a sigh of relief. It was short lived, because the door of the trailer shook with a mighty force as the beast rammed against it. Apparently, he didn’t like being flipped off, because his determination only seemed to intensify.

I shook my head in pity at his stupidity and kept limping in the direction of my car. The
trailer house doors were reinforced just like the windows, and there was no way that dog was breaking through. Noogey was definitely hiding something inside that trailer.

I heard a yelp and then silence
, wondering if the dog had knocked himself out, and then I heard a different kind of noise. One resembling a can opener peeling back a metal lid.

“Oh, shit,” I said, staring wide-eyed as I realized what the beast was doing. Maybe he wasn’t so dumb after all.

The doors and windows to the trailer were reinforced, but the trailer wasn’t. Teeth ripped through plastic siding and insulation, and I saw the metal on the outside of the trailer bulge and bend grotesquely, reminding me weirdly enough of when the alien was trying to burst out of Sigourney Weaver.

I started to run, the adrenaline and fear
masking the pain my body was in, and I didn’t look back as I heard the metal give. Vicious barks and snarls gained on me with alarming speed. My car came into view—an old white Volvo that had about 300,000 miles on it.

I’d lef
t the windows down because the air conditioner didn’t work and I was tired of the cracked leather seats cooking my ass. I’d never been so grateful to see that stupid car in my whole life. I dived head first into the open window and turned back to roll it up just as the beast hit the side of my car.

Seeing him in his entirety was completely different then seeing his head through a window. He was the size of a horse and built like a monster truck.
His fur was black with blotches of brown and gray and his paws were the size of dinner plates. It was safe to say the beast hadn’t been neutered, considering he was half sprawled on my hood, humping the shit out of my side view mirror while he tried to eat his way through the metal to the inside of the car.

He changed positions and
the passenger door caved in under his weight. I was trapped inside the Volvo oven, paralyzed with fear. Slobber and snot coated the car window, and all I could see was miles of snapping teeth and beady black eyes I’d see in my nightmares. My hands shook as I dug out the keys from my pocket, and it took me three tries before I was able to get the key in the ignition.

The car started
easily, and I rammed it into drive, peeling out in a cloud of dust as I kept my foot on the accelerator. When I looked through the rearview mirror, the beast was still standing where I’d left him, his eyes intent on my car. With my luck, he was probably memorizing my license plate.

I rolled my windows back down to let the hot air out and decided I really needed a beer. Maybe a lot of beers. Unfortunately, there wasn’t a drive-through beer store in the Savannah area. I was i
n no shape to go in anywhere. I’d have to settle for ice cream.

***

Thank God for Dairy Queen. I was finishing off my second Oreo Blizzard by the time I found a parking space in front of the McClean Detective Agency offices.

Kate had bought a corner building just across from Telfair Square. It was three stories of red crumbling brick being overtaken by the ivy that seemed to grow on every available surface in Savannah, and
it was shaded by willow trees that looked as if they’d been there since the dawn of time.

I remembered to turn off the car and managed to get the door open without falling flat on my face into the street. I was fadi
ng fast. Maybe it was the adrenaline, maybe it was the blood loss, but I knew if I stayed out in the heat for another minute they’d have to scrape me off the hot pavement like a fried egg.

I focused on putting one foot in front of the other until I got to the glass-paned front door. A cold blast of air hit me in the face as I stumbled inside and I stood there in the entryway with my eyes closed
, savoring it.

The agency was made to look like a comfortable home. The front entryway
was large. Warm golden tiles sat in a diagonal pattern across the floor and rugs that picked up the color were scattered around. The walls were painted a lighter shade of gold and a leather couch and two matching chairs were placed in front of a large stone fireplace that never got used. A massive walnut desk sat in the center of the room, and the person who sat there guarded the inner sanctum of the agency with an iron fist.

Lucy Kim was technically the agency secretary
. But I had a feeling she had some other duties as well—like ninja or vampire—but that was pure speculation. She was about five foot four—a few inches shorter than me—but her posture was rigid enough that she looked much taller. She was exotically beautiful—her Asian/American heritage giving her the best features of both—and her black hair was straight as rain down to her waist.

In the few months I’d been working for the agency, I’d never once seen
any sort of emotional expression cross Lucy’s face. I’d pretty much decided she wasn’t human, but the look on her face now completely blew my theory out of the water.

She’d stood
so fast when I came in that her ergonomic chair had rolled across the tiles and toppled over when it hit an electrical cord. Her hand was clasped over her nose and her black eyes were round and watery. She made small gagging noises before she finally gave up and ran down the hall.

I guess just because I could no longer smell myself didn’t mean other people couldn’t. No wonder the girl at Dairy Queen hadn’t charged me for the ice cream
and shoved the two sundaes at me through the drive-through window.

“What in the name of all that’s holy is that smell?” I heard Kate yell from her office
.

I heard office doors opening and footsteps shuffling as everyone searched for the offensive smell. I had a hand on the doorknob ready to hobble back to the car when Kate came into the lobby.

“Oh, it’s you,” she said, wrinkling her nose. She stuck her head back through the door and yelled, “It’s all right. It’s just Addison.”

Heat rushed to my face as I heard the unhappy grumbles and office doors slamming closed.

“Sorry,” I mumbled. “I’ll go.”

“No, stay rig
ht there. You’re hurt,” she said, her worried gaze zeroing in on my leg.

“It’s not too bad.” At least I didn’t think it was too bad. I was going with the theory that if my leg was still attached, I was in no immediate danger. “It turns out Noogey has a big ass dog in his trailer.”

“Noogey’s a wily kind of guy,” she said, her lips quirking slightly. “Let’s get you cleaned up and then we’ll talk when you’re in better shape. I’ve got a new job for you.” 

“Will I have to hide in a dumpster?” I asked pathetically as I followed Kate down the hall to the large bathroom that was for agency use only.

“I doubt it. The FBI isn’t fond of dumpsters.”

I raised my brow at that bit of knowledge.
I’d never worked with the FBI before. Kate usually gave those jobs to her more experienced agents, and quite frankly I was more than happy to let the more experienced agents take them. I wasn’t even a real agent. I was a contract employee hired to do surveillance work. Period.

“I’m not meeting with the FBI contact until tomorrow, so don’t hurry your shower,” Kate said, putting a first aid kit on the sink
, her hand still covering her nose. That was Kate code for
scrub more than once, preferably with bleach and a sander.

I sighed and hoped
I didn’t drown. I wasn’t feeling all that great and the day’s events were starting to catch up to me. The good news was it was barely ten o’clock in the morning, so things would more than likely get better.

Kate left as quickly as possible and closed the door behind her.
I had to peel my jeans away from the wounded area where the blood had dried, and I whimpered as I saw the deep cut in my calf. It oozed blood sluggishly, but I was pretty sure I could get away with bandaging it up myself. I wasn’t a fan of stitches. Mostly, I didn’t want to have to make another trip to the emergency room. The doctors there knew me by name.

I looked under the sink and found a thick black
trash bag, the kind that wouldn’t leak if you put a dismembered body inside, and I stripped out of my clothes, putting them in the bag and tying it tight.

On one side of the wall was a row of cubicles that held personal belongings any of the agency employees might need. This wasn’t the first time I’d had to use this shower, and I was almost positive it wouldn’t be the last, so I had my own selection of soaps and lotions in the cubicle marked with my name. I grabbed
shampoo, soap and a loofah and stepped under the hot spray of water. 

I hissed as the water touched the cut on my leg and went through every curse I’d heard repeated in my thirty years of living. I grew up in a house with a cop, so I knew a lot of curses. The last thing I remember after I’d washed my hair and scrubbed my body twice was laying my face against the cold tile of the shower.

I think I might have fallen asleep because the next thing I knew, someone turned the water off and was lifting me out of the shower.

I inhaled a familiar s
cent and snuggled closer to the hard body that held me. Nick Dempsey wasn’t the kind of man a woman forgot. He was a little over six feet. Whipcord lean with the body of a swimmer. He looked amazing with his clothes on and even better with them off. His hair was black and cut short, though it had a tendency to curl some on top when it grew out, and his eyes—sweet Jesus those eyes were a miracle. They were pale, arctic blue with silvery flecks. When he was aroused, they darkened a shade so it looked as if the ice were melting. When he was angry they could freeze you where you stood.

“Does t
his mean you’re speaking to me again?” I asked.

“Let’s not get carried away.”

He wrapped a towel around me and set me down on the counter next to the sink. I finally gathered enough courage to look him in the face and wished I hadn’t. His eyes were fixed on the cut on my leg and his lips were pinched with anger. He opened the first aid kit and rummaged around, kneeling in front of me as he made quick work of doctoring the cut and bandaging me up.

I tried my best to think about my grocery list and the piles of laundry I had waiting for me instead of the fact that Nick’s face was about twenty-four inches away from a part of my body that wasn’t wet because of the shower.

I breathed a sigh of relief when he stood back up, but the relief quickly turned to worry as he slapped both hands on either side of me, effectively trapping me against him. His face was like granite and I knew I was in for it.

“Are you mad about my leg or
because I shot you?” I asked.

His gaze snapped to mine and I
tried to pull the towel tighter around me, but it was caught under his fingers.

“I have a l
ist that grows longer every day,” he said. “Your job is to take pictures from a distance. How in the hell do you keep ending up looking like a crash test dummy? Your palms are scraped, you’ve got bruises all down your back, your leg is cut bad enough that it might need stitches, and you’re so sunburned I can feel the heat coming off your body from here.”

Now that he mentioned it, I was starting to feel the aches and pains of my other injuries. Nick’s voice got softer and softer the longer he kept talking
, and I knew his temper was about to reach explosive proportions.

“
I had to start taking blood pressure medication,” he said. “Every time I got a call I was afraid someone was going to tell me you were dead. And believe me, after all the stunts you’ve managed to involve yourself in, I get a lot of calls.”