"Ten percent of your combined take,
not just ten percent of what one of you is getting."
"Of course."
Michele extended her hand. George shook it.
He had to admit, he now liked her on a much deeper level than just
her physical attractiveness.
"You guys are going for that?" Ivan
asked. "Seriously? Well, shit, if I knew it was that easy to
negotiate, we could've saved ourselves a couple of hours. Let me go
and I'll make it worth your while. How much do you
want?"
"One hundred bazillion dollars," said
Lou.
Ivan sneered. "How about twenty bucks and a
gently used porno mag, you fuckin' Neanderthal?"
"Watch the potty mouth," said George. "My
partner doesn't appreciate foul language around women."
"Yeah, well, your partner can go fuck a
duck-fucked pony from Fucksville."
"I don't even know what that means, but I'm
going to quote it every chance I get."
"Fuck you."
"What's the matter, werewolf? You don't sound
quite as arrogant as you were before."
"Well, I'm either terrified, or I'm faking it
because I have some sinister plan ready to go into effect. You'd
better hope it's the first one, because I'm really in the mood to
exsanguinate a couple of minor-league thugs and their new
hooker."
"Is that another word that I'm not supposed
to know what it means?"
"What word? Hooker? Surely you know that
one."
"Hey, George, I think you're getting a bit
worked up," said Lou. "Just ignore him."
"Oh, no, he's not getting ignored. Not at
all. There's our exit."
Lou gave him the
I knew that
look that
George had seen a hundred times. George cracked his knuckles. He
encountered a lot of scumbags in his line of work, but there was
something about Ivan that he truly disliked. He wasn't going to
hurt him, or even touch him, but the werewolf was going to lose the
attitude, no question about it.
This town seemed quite a bit larger
than the last one, although there still wasn't much there. Every
other establishment on Main Street seemed to be an antique shop.
George hated antique shops.
"Find us someplace
isolated," George said. Lou gave him another
I knew that
look.
It took about a mile and a
couple of turns to find a dirt road with a misspelled sign in green
spray paint that said "
No
Tresspassing
." Lou turned onto the road,
and after rounding a corner there was more than enough tree cover
to keep any witnesses from seeing what they were doing from the
paved road.
Lou parked and shut off the engine.
"You ready to talk?" George asked.
Ivan smiled and gave him a thumbs-up sign,
though now his smile seemed kind of forced.
"Please don't cause us any trouble," George
told Michele.
"Please don't damage our investment," she
said.
George grinned and got out of the van.
* * *
Michele's day had started with a pregnancy
scare. She'd thought it would improve from there.
The stick had not turned
blue, thank God. The non-father, Aaron, was the only guy to whom
she'd ever provided pity sex. He'd been
so
distressed when his girlfriend
broke up with him, and his prospects of landing another girl in a
timely manner were bleak, and Michele wasn't exactly getting it on
a regular basis, so she'd slept with him.
The "during" part had been pretty good,
despite the fact that he kept singing during sex, but when she woke
up in the morning Michele really wished she'd gone with the
original plan of spending her evening with some microwave popcorn
and a DVD. She'd carefully extricated herself from their spooning
and hid in the bathroom for an hour, trying to will herself not to
take the cowardly way out and sneak out of the apartment before
Aaron woke up.
When he did wake up, beaming, she'd sat on
the edge of his bed and explained that it had been a one-time
"friends with benefits" thing. He'd cried. For ten minutes he'd
sobbed into his pillow about how his heart had been broken a second
time in twenty-four hours, and finally Michele decided that her
best plan of action was to go away.
He kept calling and sending her text
messages and e-mails. He changed his Facebook relationship status
to "It's complicated." She kept trying to explain that she'd lost
herself in the moment and wasn't looking for a boyfriend. Finally,
a week after their night together, she'd gotten completely fed up
with the situation and used the term "pity fuck." He quit calling,
texting, and e-mailing. He changed his Facebook relationship status
to "Single."
Michele felt terrible. She hated losing a
friend.
This morning, after a mildly restless
sleep that came from being nervous about the fact that her period
hadn't started quite yet, she'd awakened feeling sick to her
stomach, rushed into the bathroom, and vomited.
She couldn't be pregnant.
They'd used protection
and
she was on the pill. One-night-stand pregnancy
came from drunken flings, not pity sex.
She'd prayed to God that it was just food
poisoning. She'd thawed the chicken out on the counter. You weren't
supposed to do that. She knew that, and now she was suffering for
her careless meal preparation.
She'd driven forty-five
minutes away to ensure that she didn't run into anybody she knew
while buying the pregnancy test. Then, with the bag and receipt in
her hand, she'd suddenly decided that she had to know
now
, and so she found
herself in a Walgreens restroom, peeing on a stick.
When the test showed that she wasn't
pregnant, she'd cried with relief.
Then she'd cried with disappointment.
She certainly didn't want to have Aaron's
kid, and the test being negative was a one-hundred-percent good
thing. She was emotionally wrecked from all of the stress and
that's why she was crying like this. That's all it was. She'd had a
rough day.
On the way out of the store, she'd bought
some flowers to make herself feel better. Carnations. Even if
buying herself flowers was mildly pathetic, it did cheer her
up.
And then, while fueling up, a bunch of dogs
went berserk and she got stuck in a van with a couple of
mobsters.
If she believed in karma, she would've
thought that she was being punished for breaking Aaron's heart with
their ill-advised intercourse. Or that her habit of pulling on the
family dog Tin-Tin's tail when she was three had finally come back
to haunt her. But she didn't believe in that stuff, so it was just
bad luck. Wrong place at the wrong time.
She felt like she should be
siding with the guy in the cage, but he just seemed...well,
evil
. Instantly unlikable.
If Ivan approached her at a bar, she'd be creeped out and refuse to
touch any drinks he bought her. Though he obviously wasn't a
werewolf, he probably deserved to be locked up in there--she could
imagine him wandering the streets, offering lollipops to little
girls if they promised not to tell.
Of course, George and Lou were clearly not
kind-hearted, caring people, and she genuinely believed that they
might kill her if they felt backed into a corner. She could
definitely see them walking her out into the woods, apologizing
softly, then putting a bullet in the back of her head. They'd feel
awful about it, but they'd do what needed to be done.
Swearing not to tell anybody
wasn't going to work.
Of course
she'd tell. There was no possible way she wouldn't
run to the police and describe the two thugs in their black van,
and they knew it. They weren't going to simply let her
go.
But if they thought that she thought they had
a deal, there'd be no reason to come to their senses and kill her.
They could stop constantly worrying about her. And then she could
find an opportunity to escape. Now that they'd stopped the van,
maybe an opportunity was approaching.
And--she couldn't deny it--this was all kind
of exciting. A werewolf? Where was this going to lead?
George shut the passenger-side door of the
van and walked around to the back. She could jump out right now and
make a break for it.
No, too risky. She didn't want to get
shot.
But with George distracted by whatever he was
planning to do with Ivan, she'd definitely keep her eye on Lou.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Don't Mess With Wolves In Cages
George opened the rear doors of the van. Ivan
seemed to be trying very, very hard to look amused by the whole
situation.
"You know, you have to actually open up the
cage if you want to beat me with a tire iron," Ivan said. "Don't
get me wrong, I'm all in favor of you making a fatal mistake, but
that seems pretty extreme."
"I'm not opening the cage," said
George. He waited for a few moments, letting the tension build,
then took his pistol out of the holster.
"So you're going to shoot the cargo?"
"Question for you. How long do you think it
takes to bleed to death from a kneecap that was shattered by a
bullet?"
"No idea."
"More than three hours. So you'll still be
alive when we deliver you."
"Okay."
"How long do you think it takes to bleed to
death from two kneecaps that were shattered by bullets?"
"More than three hours?"
"Exactly. And where do you think is one of
the most painful places to get shot?"
"We both know that you're not going to shoot
me."
"Oh, trust me, I know no such thing. I hope
it doesn't come to that, but if it does, I'll take my scolding like
a man. If there was ever a time in your life when you should be
cooperative, it's now."
"Do you really think that threatening me with
a gun is going to get you accurate information?"
George nodded. "I'm a good judge of when
somebody is telling me the truth."
"I saw how you flinched when I said I
had a bomb strapped to my leg."
George chose to ignore that. "When somebody
is scared, it's easy to tell if they're lying. And I don't care how
cocky you are, having a gun pointed at you is a scary thing."
"And what are you going to say when they ask
why you shot me?"
"I'll say that you told me you had a
bomb strapped to your leg, and that you wouldn't show me, and that
I felt I had no other way to keep their precious werewolf from
blowing himself up."
Ivan's smile vanished.
George pointed the gun at him and gave Ivan
his coldest stare. "What do you know about those dogs?"
"I didn't do anything to them."
"That's not what I asked."
"Point the gun someplace else and I'll tell
you."
"Do I need to start counting?"
"Okay, fine. Fine." Ivan looked a bit
flustered, though he was clearly struggling to maintain a calm
demeanor. "When I get stressed out, it has a weird effect on dogs.
I don't know why. It's been like that since I was a teenager."
"This bad?"
"No, never this bad, but I've never
been this stressed before! I don't know what it is; maybe I've got
some..." He trailed off. "I don't even know. That's how this whole
werewolf thing started, but I swear there's nothing to it beyond
that."
"That doesn't seem like enough to create a
werewolf theory."
"I told people that I was a werewolf, all
right? I used it to impress some chicks in a club. You know, those
ones who are all wet over Team Jacob. You tell them you're a
werewolf, you watch a dog flip out, and you're in their panties. I
don't think any of them really believed it, it was all just
role-playing, but word got back to Bateman and he sure as hell
believed it."
"So you're officially saying that you're not
a werewolf?"
"Why do I even need to
officially deny something like that? How am I supposed to prove it?
What should I do,
not
transform into a wolf? The full moon is two weeks away; I
couldn't change if I wanted to. You've got me in a no-win situation
here, George."
"If you've got dog blood in you or something,
how could that work from so far away, inside a van?"
"I don't know! If I understood it, I'd be
doing a lot more with the power than just trying to get laid. It's
just some weird effect I have on dogs that I can't control. Nothing
more."
"You're stressed now. Why aren't any dogs
coming after us?"
"How the hell should I know? Maybe the
residents of this town are cat people! I'm not a werewolf, for
Christ's sake!" He scooted over to the end of the cage and held up
his palm. "Like your partner said, no pentagram. If I was a
werewolf, I wouldn't care that you've got a gun on me, because I'm
sure you don't have silver bullets in there. What are the other
signs?"
"I'm not sure," George admitted.
Ivan extended his arm all the way out of the
cage. The barrel of George's pistol was still a couple of feet out
of his grasp. "I don't have hairy palms. I don't have an unusually
long middle finger. It's all a huge misunderstanding."
"Put your arm back in the cage," said
George.
"I don't know what you want from me! Do you
need me to break my arm to show that there aren't werewolf bones
underneath? Is that what I need to do?" Ivan bashed his arm against
the cage, hard enough to make George wince.
Ivan bashed his arm again. His eyes were
crazed, like he'd totally lost it.