“Sure, I owe you one,” I replied, returning his smile in kind.
Patrick kicked Bo under the table, not so subtly that I missed it. Bo shot him a look before returning his attention to his meal. Jack sipped at his wine, not touching the small portions of food Nikki had put on his plate, earning a frown from her.
It was probably the most awkward dinner I’ve ever attended, even counting the time Chaz and Arnold came to my parents’ house for my younger brother’s birthday. Every time Bo would try to strike up a conversation with me, someone else would cut him off. Dr. Morrow was as disinterested as could be in anything but his food. Jack, Nikki, Patrick, Jason, and Adam seemed as if they couldn’t care less whether I lived or died.
Keith surprised me by being the first to show interest. He finished his second helping before anybody else, and swirled the wine in his glass while he stared at me from across the table. He had to lean slightly to one side to peer around a vase of flowers Nikki must have put there as a centerpiece.
“So, you’re looking for somebody, right? Is that why you’re here?”
I glanced up, fork halfway to my mouth, uncertain if he really was talking to me. Everyone else but Bo feigned disinterest in the conversation.
“To hunt, right? Some Weres?”
“Yeah. Yes, I guess Jack must have told you. I had a run-in with the Sunstrikers. There are a few of them I need to find.”
“Good,” Keith said. He was surprisingly eager, leaning forward and setting his glass aside. “I’m the resident computer nerd, so it’ll be my job to track them down. You have their full names? Addresses, places of work, anything like that?”
Though I knew my face was burning red, both from embarrassment and anger, I didn’t hesitate. “Yes. The pack leader was my boyfriend. I can give you everything you need.”
That earned another round of awkward silence. So, Jack hadn’t told them everything. I was quick to cut into the quiet before they could start jumping to the wrong conclusions.
“I know where to find him. Plus, I’m a private investigator, so I can probably help you search. I’m not after the whole pack, just a few specific people.”
“Oh,” Keith said, his eyes aglow with excitement. “Oh, this is good. This is very good. Lady, forget your after-dinner movie. I’m going to need to pick your brain.”
“Hey,” Bo protested. “That’s not fair.”
Jack pushed his chair back, leaving his food untouched. “Fair? Who said anything about fair? We’ve got a month before we might have a new shifter on our hands, gentlemen. We move fast on this, or not at all.”
Though his words turned my blood cold and killed what was left of my appetite, I nodded and firmed my resolve. With Keith’s skills, and my knowledge of Chaz’s haunts and my talent for skip tracing, it shouldn’t take long at all to find the Sunstrikers.
I hoped.
Chapter 5
(Days left to full moon: 19)
“Stop that.”
For the umpteenth time, I did my best to put a cap on my nervous fidgeting, but even Patrick’s growled command couldn’t scare me into being still for long. Soon the grip of one of my stakes was squeaking again as my fingers tightened on the leather.
We were waiting in a van parked outside of some skeezy-looking place called The Tease in northern Jersey. Nikki was in the bar wearing clothes that made her look like she might be one of the featured strippers taking a night off. How she expected to fight a werewolf in those heels and with that much skin showing was beyond me, but I had problems of my own.
Sitting in the van doing nothing was torture. The belt kept yammering about its violent urges and sending surges of adrenaline through me. If not for my worry about hitting innocent—okay, maybe not innocent, but human—bystanders, I might have charged in with guns blazing.
Keith hadn’t been paying me much mind. His attention was focused on the panels in the back, and on listening in on Nikki’s conversations through headphones that must have led a former life in a sound studio. Their equipment had drawn my interest for a while. Any P.I. worth their salt would have been drooling over the high-resolution video feeds, listening devices, and GPS tracking systems. Judging by the quality, I had to guess that some of the stuff was military grade.
If the belt hadn’t been a constant earache—and if I weren’t feeling so paranoid about whether or not I’d survive to return to my job as a private investigator once the month was out—I would’ve been far more interested. As it was, the van was too overcrowded and I was too irritated to do more than fidget.
We hadn’t had any luck until yesterday digging up any information on where the Weres had gone to ground. Visiting Chaz’s, Dillon’s, and a few other Sunstrikers’ homes a few times a day hadn’t yielded anything of use, other than noting cops staking them out, too. Somehow the Weres had known, and found, places to hide where even I couldn’t find them.
Finding out about Vic had been a stroke of luck. I’d been so frazzled by Chaz’s disappearing act that I hadn’t thought to search for one of the lower ranking Weres to interrogate until after two fruitless days of hunting for my ex. Jack didn’t want to waste time and had used his network of contacts to find one of the thirty or so werewolves high enough in the pack who might know where Chaz and Dillon and the rest of the dominant wolves were hiding. Even then, it took some time to dig up the info.
Somehow, through whatever connections the White Hats had and some legwork on Keith’s part, they’d tracked Vic Thomasian to this crappy neighborhood just a few miles southeast of the Newark airport. Nikki was supposed to lure him out. The stink of a nearby wharf and the surrounding industrial buildings only added to the charm of the sagging brick shithole. The place was cradled between two abandoned warehouses, centered in a cramped parking lot that had long since had the lights burned or shot out. The only illumination came from above the entrance in the form of a flickering neon sign depicting a dancing naked woman, and one other sign advertising Budweiser dimly seen through a dirty window.
The Were was in there, somewhere. His car, a rust bucket that might once have been a blue Geo, was parked at the far end of the lot. According to whomever it was Jack had contacted, Vic spent a good portion of his paycheck here on his nights off. So far, Nikki hadn’t had any luck. Unless you counted nearly breaking the hand of the guy who tried to feel her up. It raised my respect of her a notch. She’d since settled at the bar, facing out so the tiny video camera hidden in the big gem in her necklace would pick up whatever was going on in the room. As much as it might have engrossed the boys in the van, I wasn’t interested in the floor show.
“There he is.”
I glanced up at Keith’s announcement. He was pointing at a figure on the screen who was coming out of a back room toward the bar. The Sunstriker pack tattoo—a stylized sun pierced by a spear—was visible on his upper arm. Vic’s stringy black hair looked greasier in the video than it had in the picture we’d found on the Internet. He slicked it back when he spotted Nikki, giving her a toothy smile. She must have returned it, because he took it as invitation enough to make a beeline to the empty seat beside her.
After Keith adjusted some dials and flipped a switch, obnoxious boom-boom music flooded out of some speakers, and Keith hung the headphones around his neck while we listened in on Nikki’s conversation.
“Looking for a job, pretty girl? Or a good time?”
Nikki handled his proposition with more aplomb than I would have managed. “A little of both, baby. You think you can handle this?”