Uncovered (Dev and Lee Book 4) (17 page)

Instead of apologizing, he says, “You like that, huh?”

Up close, I can see he’s got huge shoulders. My thumb twitches. Even if I wanted to get into a fight here in the crowd, I wouldn’t take this guy on. “Not really.” I try to duck around some people in front of me. My heart’s going faster now.

A strong paw grips my tail at the base. “Nah,” a deeper, slurred voice says, and I spin in time to see his friend the wolf behind me holding a plastic bottle of beer. “He likes it under the tail.” He yanks my tail up and turns the bottle over, shoving the mouth of it between my tail and my jeans.

Colder liquid gushes out over my underwear and the smell of beer rises thick and strong. I reach around to pull the bottle out, but the wolf’s holding my pants with one paw and the bottle with the other. The position is awkward; I have little leverage to begin with, and it gets worse when the rabbit grabs my wrist and twists it.

Sharp pain shoots up my arm. I give up formal aikido and just swing my hips away, slapping at the bottle with my other arm, and I hit the wolf’s wrist. The bottle comes out, landing on the floor with an empty clatter, and though the wolf lets go as I stagger and lose my balance, the rabbit doesn’t. My underwear, my rear, the back of my legs are all soaked with beer.

People around us notice. How could they not? I’m being held half off the ground by a big rabbit, stinking of beer. The wolf backs away, stepping hard on my tail as he does. I do manage to use an aikido slip to get out of the rabbit’s grip, and as I regain my balance, the wolf shoves me hard. “You fuckin’ hit me,” he snarls.

I slam into a jaguar, who shoves me back at the wolf. “You threw beer—you dumped a bottle of—”

“Hey,” someone yells, “take it outside.”

“Christ,” someone else curses, looking disdainfully at the three of us.

What I’d love to do is yell for a cop, but in this crowd, the better part of valor is definitely running away. My tail hurts and my lower half is soaking, stinking wet, and I’m a little worried about what these two might do next. I’m trying to keep an eye on them as the crowd pushes us along, and so without meaning to, I stumble forward into the jaguar again.

“Watch it,” he snarls, and shoves me again.

In trying to spin away from the wolf, I fall against the rabbit, and he grabs me and drives a fist into my stomach. “Faggot,” he spits in his light voice.

I double over, gasping for breath. That gets a little more attention from the crowd around us, either the word or the punch or both. An armadillo yells, “Hey! Security!” and a wiry cacomistle tries to get between us.

“Calm down,” he says, with broad Midwestern geniality, and then he sees my Firebirds shirt. “Come on. It’s just a game. We’re all fans.”

“He’s not just a fan.” Even over the beer soaking my clothes and fur, I can smell the rabbit’s boozy breath as he leans in. “He’s that faggot Firebird’s boyfriend.”

I’m slowly recovering, still sucking down air, not really able to form words yet. The cacomistle looks at me and frowns. “Uh. Hey, you guys, just, just settle down.”

I have about a half-second to think that maybe things are over before there’s a hard yank on my tail, enough to pull me backwards and send a jolt of pain up my spine, bringing tears to my eyes. I turn and see the wolf shoving his way through the crowd, running away.

The rabbit brays a laugh, and I can’t help it; I run after the wolf. It’s not hard to catch him, because he’s making little progress through the annoyed crowd. I’m not sure what I want to do, but when I grab his shirt, he turns and throws a punch. I duck in time, and he hits a doe beside me. She stumbles against her boyfriend or husband or whatever, a big stag, and when he grumbles, she says, “He
punched
me!”

The stag sizes up the wolf for just a moment and then leaps at him, and I take advantage of the distraction to land a punch on the wolf’s stomach. It’s not as hard as the rabbit’s was on me, but then again, it’s not a sucker punch. It’s enough to slow the wolf just as the stag gets to him, and maybe, maybe, the wolf thinks that the stag is the one who punched him, because he flails at the stag’s muzzle with both fists. The stag lowers his head and smacks the wolf hard with his antlers, sending him to his knees with a yelp.

I’m keeping my tail curled between my legs for safety, backing away. As much as I’d enjoy watching the wolf get the shit beat out of him, I’d rather make myself scarce. The exits are about ten yards in front of us, but there’s little chance I’m going to get there anytime soon, as the whole crowd has stopped to either watch, participate in, or try to stop the growing fight.

“Fuckin’ Firebirds,” someone near me says, and shoves me.

“Whoa,” someone else says, “cut it out.” Me, I just try to stay quiet and watch the wolf and deer, who are now grappling on the floor. The deer lands a couple good punches; the wolf has his mouth open, snarling, showing off his teeth, and his claws have already torn the deer’s shirt in several places.

“Break it up!” someone yells, and a uniformed wolverine drops to his knees by the wolf and stag and reaches out to separate them. Another security guard, a badger, starts directing the crowd to move on, away from the fight. I start to go with them, and then my sense of morality kicks in. I tell myself that the security guys will need a complete account of the fight, so the wolf and rabbit can have charges pressed against them.

When I walk up to the badger, he says, “Just keep moving, sir.”

“I was involved,” I say.

He waves some other people around me. “It’s all right. We’re just breaking this up.” The wolverine’s got the wolf and deer on their feet and is talking to them. The badger looks their way and then back at me. “You can just go on.”

“I want to file assault charges,” I say, and point at the wolf.

The badger looks at me steadily. His eyes drop to my beer-soaked pants. “He did this?”

“Partly. His buddy helped—big rabbit, sleeveless shirt. I don’t know where he went. But him, he grabbed my tail and poured beer down my pants. And then yanked on my tail after. Also he tried to punch me.” The wolf and stag are still shouting at each other. “That’s when he hit that guy’s girlfriend.”

“All right. Stay here, sir. Don’t go anywhere.”

The badger goes and talks to the wolverine. He keeps his voice low, but I hear him say “assault” and at that, the wolf yelps and points at me, yelling, “He started it! He fucking started it!”

I keep quiet. The crowd’s thinning out, so I have room to pull out my phone and check it—keeping one eye on the wolf—without worrying I’m going to jostle someone or drop it. I have a message from Dev that’s just,
YES!!!
, and one from my father that says,
Can’t wait for the championship!

And there’s a voicemail from Brian. The corridor is still very loud, too loud for me to hear anything, and of all the people I don’t need to hear from right now, he’s at the top of the list. I put the phone away and wait.

They have a holding area where they bring me, the wolf, and the stag. It’s lit with harshly white fluorescents and it smells like a stale locker room. There’s all kinds of fur clumped in the corners; I guess the janitors skip this room on their rounds.

After some discussion, security lets the stag go; he doesn’t want to press charges, and the wolf pretty much admits he hit the guy’s wife (it turns out), if only by accident. I describe the rabbit for the security chief, an imposing bear, even though I’m sure the guy is long gone. The wolf doesn’t volunteer the name even when they semi-threaten him. “You won’t be coming to games for a long time, so you might as well tell us your buddy’s name,” the security chief says, and the wolf just shrugs and doesn’t say anything.

He’s pretty beat up. The stag landed a good punch in his face, or else it was the antlers that got his eye all swollen up. He has blood on his muzzle which I hope is his; the security chief photographs it before handing him a towel to wipe it with. One of his ears is nicked, but I can’t tell whether that happened during the fight or if it’s an old injury.

I text Dev:
Held up. Will let you know when I get back to the hotel
. Then I just sit there in the slowly-drying beer and relax. My stomach and tail feel sore but improving. Hopefully the only lasting injury was to my pride. To assuage that, I recall the punch I landed on the wolf, and make it better in my head than it probably was.

The police, a male otter with a shoulder bag and a female red fox with a sour expression, arrive half an hour later and get right down to work. The shoulder bag holds a scent-swab kit and a camera, which the otter starts using while the vixen records the statements of the security chief, the badger, and the wolverine. The wolf, who’s sobered up some, tries to interrupt, but she turns with an ice-cold stare and says, “I’ll get to you, sir.”

The otter, to distract the wolf, hands him a scent-swab and says, “I need you to run this under the base of your tail, sir. If you need privacy to do it, you can use the restroom.”

“I didn’t do anything wrong!” The wolf shifts his pleading to the otter. “This fag—this guy picked a fight with me and then I hit that fuckin’ deer by accident and her boyfriend started whalin’ on me.”

“She’ll take your statement in a moment, sir.” The otter’s getting the camera ready. “I just need you to do that for me.”

The wolf scowls and reaches behind himself with the swab. The otter turns to me with the camera. I hold out my arms for him to photograph the brown/red demarcation of the fur, and his eyebrows rise. “Someone knows the drill.”

“It’s not my first fight,” I say. “But I don’t start them. I guess I just have one of those faces.”

The otter grins as he takes some pictures. “You wear that shirt down in Hellentown, too?”

“Yeah, but they didn’t pour beer down my pants.”

The wolf says loudly, “He spilled beer on himself! I saw him!”

“That’d be a neat trick,” I say, “getting it all down the
back
of my pants.”

“Hey,” he shrugs, “I hear that’s how you people like it.”

The otter looks up at that, and the vixen turns around. “‘You people’?” she says, her voice low and dangerous.

The wolf’s ears go back. “Firebirds fans,” he mutters.

“I was sitting with the players’ wives,” I say. “He recognized me.”

The security guys get it then, but the two cops don’t. So I say, “I’m Dev Miski’s boyfriend.”

It’s harder to say than I would’ve thought. I would’ve said I was used to coming out to people, and the guy most likely to react badly to it already knew. But I’m still sort of steamed about the wolf and I’m in the mood to force people to deal with me.

The otter just goes back to photographing my arms, and then the whisker pattern on my muzzle. The vixen narrows her eyes and looks between the two of us, then turns back to the security chief. “What happened to the stag?”

“He didn’t want to press charges. We got his name and all that.”

“Good.” She shakes her head and turns to the two of us. “Now, you two, tell me your story. You first.” She points at the wolf.

He spins some crazy story about how I was waving beer all over and bragging about the Firebirds win and then started chasing him through the crowd until he had to throw a punch at me in self-defense and hit the doe by accident. The otter shakes his head and finishes with my photos, then gives me a scent-swab.

“I don’t know how good it’s going to come out,” I say. “Since that’s right where he poured the beer.”

I time it so that it falls in a break in the wolf’s story, and everyone looks at me. It has the desired effect; he falters and the vixen folds her arms, glancing at me more often as the wolf stumbles through the rest of his lie. When it’s my turn, they want to see the evidence, so I have to kneel on the floor, leaning forward with my arms on the chair, while the otter takes photos of my beer-soaked rear and tail. I think about telling Dev that I was late getting back because some cops wanted to take pictures of my butt, and that brings me the first real smile I’ve had in a while.

“Use the swabs anyway,” the otter says when they’re done, and hands me two. “We’ll be able to get your scent off them, and it’ll help as evidence of the beer being there.”

So I rub the swabs around the base of my tail and hand them back, sitting back in the chair. “Now,” the vixen says, “what’s your version?”

I tell my version of what happened—the real version, not leaving out my chasing the wolf after he yanked my tail. “I know I should’ve just let it go,” I say, “but I felt like—like really? He pulled my
tail
? That hasn’t happened since sixth grade.”

The vixen’s tail curls, I hope in sympathy. We long-tailed species come in for more abuse as cubs in school, and girls have it worse than boys. I tell the rest of the story and she takes down notes in addition to the digital mini-recorder she’s using to capture it. “All right,” she sighs, when she turns it off. “Shore, process the wolf. I’ll get the fox’s info and we can get out of here.”

“Process?” The wolf’s ears come up. “What’s that mean?”

“We’re releasing you on your own recognizance, but we need to write you a citation for fighting, and we need your address and phone so we can contact you for your court date.”