Jess waved a hand in the air, encouraging him.
“Guy tosses money at me and grabs the kid and the groceries. Thought for a second he was gonna put the kid in the plastic bag as well. He’s puffing up a storm and burns through the smoke like he was on the way to his execution.” He shuffled his feet. “I didn’t think nothing ’bout it until the alert came in.” He gave Jess a halfhearted smile. “That should count for something, eh?”
We all ignored it.
“When?” Jess asked.
“Within the last hour.” Romano drew a finger along the counter. “Been nobody in since. You should get a good trail if you work at it.”
I sniffed the air. A mixture of bad cologne, feces, urine and...foul-smelling cigarettes. The scent cloud was here but it was like trying to pick out one specific needle out of a cluster of needles. I could barely identify the cigarettes, much less the smoker.
“Do you recognize him?” Jess’s gruff tone brought me out of the mental confusion.
“I can’t.” I shook my head. “There’s too much. Too many.”
“Filthy habit, cigarette smoking,” Romano scoffed. “I wouldn’t even sell them except they make me good money.” He rubbed his thumb and index finger together. “Raise the tax, I say.”
Bran let out a snort. I didn’t even try to figure out what he was thinking.
Romano pointed at a half-smoked butt on the floor. The smashed tobacco was smeared in all directions like an ugly brown flower. “Bastard didn’t even blink when he dropped it. Think he was afraid of burning the kid; that’s why he dumped it.”
Jess snatched it up and held it under my nose. “Try again,” she demanded. “Pull it in, breathe it all in.” Her words came through in a whisper, the urgency sending a shiver down my spine. “You can do this.”
I scrunched my eyes together so tight I felt the pulse against my eyelids.
The tobacco stung my nose. I caught the faintest whiff of a personal scent before it was swallowed up again by mud and dirt and the garbage he’d walked through before stomping on the cigarette.
“Still nothing,” I whimpered, the frustration gaining ground.
Bran’s hand landed on my shoulder.
“It’s okay,” he murmured.
I opened my eyes to see Jess shaking her head in disagreement. She reached over and plucked the mashed cigarette from my fingers without comment.
Her thin slender fingers rolled the butt back and forth, dissembling it in her palm. She lifted her hand up to her nose, close enough to snort the shredded tobacco.
Jess inhaled, so deep her white blouse tightened to the point of button-popping. Her eyes closed with a look of intense concentration.
She Changed in a flash, the light brown fur covering her facial features. Her Roman nose shrank down and retreated inward, her eye shifting to pure feline. The ugly scar on the left side of her face became more pronounced, the angry scarlet skin remaining bare.
She took another whiff and I remembered she’d fought her way onto the Board and into a position of power in the Pride—along with terrorizing generations of kits who viewed her with shock and awe.
Bran squeezed my shoulder. The warmth burned through my coat and shirt, soothing the nervousness building in my muscles. His fingers kneaded the leather in a reflexive move to calm me.
Jess didn’t notice, focused on her task.
She smiled.
Not a nervous smile, not a smirk, but a true hunter’s smile of satisfaction.
“Got him.” She tossed the cigarette remains to the surprised store owner and spun on one booted heel. “Let’s go.” She Changed back within seconds, shifting easily back into full human form.
“Can she track him?” Bran whispered as we fell into step behind her. “Just from that?”
“Damned right I can, kit.” Jess stopped shy of the door and shot us a sly grin over her shoulder. “I can track a flea in an animal shelter.”
Romano retreated behind the counter in silence to watch us leave. I resisted the urge to grab something on the way out to push my luck.
Jess paused for a half second on the store’s threshold before turning right. “He’s within walking distance and working alone,” she said, her long legs keeping her ahead of us.
“Based on what?” I tried to keep my tone respectful but a trace of disbelief crept in.
“No place to park here.” She swept her arm outward at the busy street. “He wouldn’t risk parking and taking the chance of getting noticed, or worse, getting towed.”
I glanced up at the prominent NO PARKING signs standing guard every few feet. It was a risk but a calculated risk.
“He would have taken a cab after killing Molly. He wouldn’t risk walking through the lobby with a newborn in his arms screaming and crying. Avoid the taxi stand out front and slip out the back, come around to a major street and flag down one of the cabs out of traffic.” I ran the argument to ground. “He didn’t have time to sit and wait for a parking lot attendant or juggle coins into a meter if he could find one.”
Jess spoke. “He brought the baby into the store because he didn’t want to or couldn’t leave the baby alone. If he had a car and a car seat he’d have left the kid there, less trouble to deal with. He’d already dismissed the cab, otherwise he’d have left the baby with the driver. Same reasoning tells me he’s working alone, he’s got no one watching his back.” She licked her lips. “Good.”
She stopped, so suddenly Bran grabbed my arm to avoid me smacking into her back. I missed eating her jean jacket by a fraction of an inch, bouncing back on my heels into Bran’s embrace.
“Should use a warning signal or something,” he muttered. He knew and I knew Jess could hear but she was too involved to snark back.
She sniffed the air in short, measured pants. Her mouth opened slightly as if she was about to speak but I knew she was gathering even more trace on her prey.
“This way.” The tall woman spun ninety degrees on her boots and led us down an alley.
I flinched as we picked our way between Dumpsters overflowing with garbage. A Chinese restaurant, a barbecue place and a sandwich shop spit out enough waste to fill up another whole store.
I could smell the decay, slimy meat turning worse with each second and rotting vegetables in wet cardboard boxes and in dank metal Dumpsters turning into a chemical sludge turning the strongest stomach. The tall narrow walls compressed the stench into a fat wall of smell we waded through. I flinched at the mental image of Liam being carried through this mess.
Bran coughed, a deep from-the-bottom-of-your-belly cough closer to a gag than anything else. “I can’t imagine how bad this smells to you.”
“Rank doesn’t even come close.” I huffed through my mouth, trying to cut out the worst of the smell.
Jess strode between stacks of rotting boxes and over half-empty wooden cartons of fermenting cabbage without hesitation, brushing aside the stench and stink. “This way.” It was a hunter’s run, a light jog I knew she could keep up for miles.
Not so much myself and Bran.
I remembered hearing rumors she’d tracked a wounded stag five miles in the middle of a thunderstorm, breaking its neck when she finally ran it to ground. I hadn’t believed it then.