Wolf Hunt (Book 2) (13 page)

"I need the keys for the locks," said the man.

"Who has them?"

"I don't know."

"Okay, I'm really not going to play this game. Whoever has the keys had goddamn well better get in there and set George free, or I swear I will just go on a killing spree."

"Do it!" said Mr. Dewey.

For a second Lou thought that he was referring to the killing spree, which seemed odd considering how cooperative Mr. Dewey had been so far, but then he realized that Mr. Dewey was referring to setting George free, which made a lot more sense.

A short guy with thick sideburns walked over to the door and punched a code on the keypad. The door popped open.

"No surprises," Lou warned him.

The short guy walked inside the room.

When he came back out, there was a surprise. 

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Overstuffed Transportation

George was not typically one to promise people that they'd get out of messes. He tended to be more of a matter-of-fact, "Sorry, but the chances of surviving this are almost nil" kind of guy. Why give false hope? So it surprised him to hear himself vowing to get him and Eugene out of this, especially since neither one of them were real werewolves and thus the chances of them suddenly acquiring the superhuman strength necessary to snap their bonds was woefully low.

The door opened. A short guy walked in, looking nervous instead of sadistic. He took out a pocketknife and quickly cut George's hands and feet free, then, after a moment to find the right key on the key ring, unlocked the chain around George's foot.

"Come on," he said.

"Where are we going?"

"You're free."

"Seriously?"

"Yeah."

"Unlock Eugene. He's coming with me."

The short guy hesitated, as if considering how he was going to explain that George was lucky to be free at all and really wasn't in any kind of a position to start making demands about who he'd be bringing with him. Then he walked over and crouched down next to Eugene's foot.

George had only just met Eugene, owed him nothing, and didn't much enjoy looking at him, but this whole thing had gone so badly that maybe if he helped rescue the poor bastard from an existence that was almost literally worse than death, it could help balance out what they'd done to Ally.

As the short guy unlocked the chain, Eugene said, "I'm not leaving."

"What?"

"This is where I belong."

"
What
?"

Eugene grinned. "I'm kidding, kidding, kidding. Let's go."

It was clearly painful for Frankenwolf to walk, but there was almost a spring in his step as they left the room.

Outside, Lou was standing there with a gun to Mr. Dewey's head. Ally stood on the other side of him, one foot covered with blood, bracing herself against Lou's shoulder as if using him to keep her balance.

"I missed some shit, didn't I?" asked George.

Lou didn't reply. He was too busy gaping at Eugene.

"Don't worry, he's cool," George assured him.

Lou continued to gape.

"You're not taking him," said Mr. Dewey.

"I disagree," said George.

"Can we go now? Please?" asked Ally.

The van that had transported George and Lou from Canada was still parked in the warehouse. "Give the van keys to George," Lou told the man who'd unlocked the chains.

The man took a key off the ring and tossed it to George. George caught it and hurried over to the van, with Eugene limping behind him, and the Lou/Ally/Mr. Dewey trio behind them.

George opened the rear door. The cage took up pretty much all of the space back there, which was inconvenient, since there was only room for two people up front.

George pointed to Mr. Dewey. "You. In the back."

Mr. Dewey shook his head as well as he could with a gun pressed against it. "Absolutely not."

"You don't have a choice."

"If you put me in the cage, I have to assume that you're not planning to keep Lou's promise to release me as soon as we drive out of here."

Crap. With only one hand, Lou couldn't drive the van and keep a gun pointed at Mr. Dewey's head. Unless Mr. Dewey sat on Lou's lap—and that wasn't going to be acceptable for anybody involved—George was going to have to drive, and Lou, Ally, and Eugene would have to go in the cage.

George quickly helped Ally into the back of the van, noting with some anger that there was a hole in the side of her foot, as if somebody had jabbed her with a meat thermometer. His anger was hypocritical, since he'd been personally responsible for the many bruises on her body, but her new wound didn't look like self-defense.

Then he helped Eugene into the back, not oblivious to the fact that Ally, not knowing Eugene's tragic backstory, would think she was being caged up with some sort of horrific and possibly murderous lab experiment. "Don't worry, he's harmless," George assured her. Ally was pretty much in a state of shock now, so she didn't have any particular reaction as Eugene climbed into the cage and scooted all the way to the back.

"Trade me," George said to Lou, reaching for the gun.

Lou gave him the gun, then got into the cage with the others. George shut the rear door of the van with one hand, keeping the gun pointed at Mr. Dewey's face with the other.

"I'm going to make you the offer that your partner declined," said Mr. Dewey. "Leave the werewolf with me, and we'll call it even."

"Which werewolf?" George asked. "The real one, or your third-grade science project attempt at making one?"

"Eugene was a way to keep my frustration level under control. Some people use alcohol or drugs, some people take long walks, and I express my creativity."

George walked Mr. Dewey over to the passenger side of the van and opened the door. "Get in."

Mr. Dewey turned to his men, all of whom were pointing guns at them and carefully watching the situation. "I've been promised that I'll be released as soon as we leave this building. If that does not happen, open fire. Kill everybody in the van, including the girl and Eugene. I authorize use of whatever force is necessary."

George wished that Lou had negotiated for a slightly further release spot, like the end of the block, but this should be okay. You couldn't just go blowing people away in the middle of the street of downtown Tropper.

"We're going to let him go," George promised the men, a little surprised that none of them had taken a shot at him. "You'll get your boss back, don't worry."

Mr. Dewey climbed into the passenger seat of the van. George told him not to worry about buckling up, and not to bother shutting the door all the way. He wouldn't be in there long.

George hurried around the front of the van, keeping the gun pointed at Mr. Dewey the entire time. If any of Mr. Dewey's men were going to risk a kill shot, now's when they'd do it, so George was even more tense than he had been during the other bad moments today.

Nobody tried to shoot George as he opened the driver's side door and got inside, which was a relief. He stuck the key in the ignition, trying to simultaneously watch Mr. Dewey to the right of him and whatever he could see happening in the side-view mirror.

Lou, Ally, and Eugene had all ducked down beneath window-level, just in case.

"I'm offering you one last chance," said Mr. Dewey.

"And I appreciate it."

"We don't have to be enemies."

"I feel like we kind of do, at this point."

"You're making a terrible mistake."

"Listen, we're letting you go as soon as we're clear of this place, so be happy about that. If you decide that you're going to hunt me and Lou down to the ends of the earth, fine, but all we ever wanted to do was be left alone. We never did anything to harm you, or disrespect you. A job went bad because we didn't have enough information. This job went bad because we also didn't have enough information. Data is useful. When we have data, jobs go well. Lou and I had a perfectly good reputation before the whole Ivan the Werewolf thing; that's why you hired us."

"I didn't hire you. Mr. Bateman hired you. And that's why I had him killed."

"Is somebody going to raise the door for us or what?" George asked. He honked the horn.

One of the men—the guy in the bulletproof vest—walked toward the sliding door. He was still holding up his gun. George didn't care that all of the other men were, too; he didn't like this guy getting so close with it.

"Lower your gun," said George.

The man lowered his gun, but only a little. Not down to his side. It was at about a forty-five degree angle to the floor. He could still pop off a shot at George pretty easily. Whether he intended to shoot George or not, it was obvious that he was at least keeping his options open.

This was too much to keep track of.

Mr. Dewey moved.

It wasn't
necessarily
an aggressive move. George was too focused on the approaching man to also devote enough attention to Mr. Dewey, so he
might
have simply been shifting in his seat. He'd definitely leaned toward George.

Perhaps it was an innocent lean.

Perhaps not.

Either way, George shot him in the forehead.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

A Tinge of Regret

Before the first chunk even began to slide down the window, George wished he hadn't done that.

He hadn't
completely
done it on purpose. There was an element of having an overly nervous finger on the trigger involved. Still, the man walking toward the sliding door was clearly hoping for an opportunity to take George out, and Mr. Dewey had (probably) tried to take advantage of him being distracted.

George had no choice.

He had to defend himself.

That said...this was extremely, intensely, mind-bogglingly bad.

Ally screamed.

At least now things were simplified. Whereas before George had to figure out the best course of action, and weigh the consequences of his decisions, now everything could be conveniently distilled into:
get the hell out of here, fast.

No other gunshots had started firing yet. Apparently everybody needed a moment to process the fact that Mr. Dewey had just taken a round to the head.

George couldn't just plow through the metal sliding door without building up some momentum. He put the van into reverse and slammed his foot on the gas pedal.

Now the men started shooting.

George ducked down and braced himself for the pleasant
thunk
of one of Dewey's men getting struck by the van, but it didn't happen.

None of the windows had shattered. The men were shooting through the body of the van, either trying to get at those in the cage or trying to hit the fuel tank. There were no screams of pain coming from behind him, so as far as George could tell, nobody had been hit.

After backing up about twenty feet, George put the van into drive. He floored the gas pedal and the van shot forward. A bullet fired through the driver's side window, leaving a hole and a spider-web pattern, but the window didn't shatter.

If the van didn't break through the sliding metal door, they were all essentially dead.

The van struck the sliding metal door, broke
most
of the way through, then stopped.

The man in the bulletproof vest was right next to the van. Sadly for him, he wasn't wearing a vest over his head, so when George squeezed off a shot, it put another hole in the driver's side window and then went through his left eye.

George put the van back into reverse.

This time, as he sped backwards, he did hear the
thunk
of somebody getting hit, although the sound wasn't as satisfying as he would have hoped.

Ally screamed again. She was entitled.

George put the van into drive, slammed the gas pedal, and smashed into the sliding door (which would never slide again) a second time. This time the van plowed right through it, and George pulled out onto the road, took a sharp right turn, and sped away from the warehouse.

It was dark out already. Wow. Today had just flown by.

"You killed Dewey!" Lou shouted from the cage.

"I know!"

"Why? Who does that?"

"It wasn't completely on purpose!"

"We're screwed!"

"We're not screwed!"

"We couldn't be more screwed!"

George eased up on the gas pedal a bit. It was still snowing and this would be an abysmal time to get into an accident. He made a right turn to help lose any of the men who might pursue them, which was probably all of them.

"Are we really worse off now that he's dead?" George asked.

"Yes! Yes, we are!"

"What if this means our problems are over?" George asked. "Maybe with Dewey dead, we can finally relax?"

Mr. Dewey's corpse slumped over and hit the dashboard.

"Have you lost your mind?" Lou asked.

"A little, yeah."

"Why did you shoot him?"

"I told you! He moved aggressively! Don't blame me! If you had both hands then you would've been up here driving and keeping him covered at the same time just like I was, and you would've done the exact same thing!"

"No, I wouldn't have!"

"I guess we'll never know!"

"Couldn't you at least have shot him in the leg? That would've stopped his aggression."

"I'm not saying that I weighed every option."

"You said I would've done the same thing!"

"You would have! In my place, you would have made an equally poor decision."

George checked all of the mirrors. There was not, at the moment, any sign of anybody chasing after them. That wasn't going to last.

Just ahead there was a tiny Mexican restaurant that looked dumpy enough not to have security cameras. He pulled into the parking lot, drove around to the back of the building, stopped the van, reached across Mr. Dewey's body, opened the door, and shoved his corpse out onto the ground. Then he rolled down the window to hide the blood on the glass, and drove away.

"I can't help but feel that somebody will find him," said Lou.

"We can't drive around with a dead body in the front seat. Who cares if they find him? It'll be something to distract the police. We probably should have dumped him right in the middle of the road."

Damn. They really
should
have dumped him in the middle of the road. Oh well. Too late now.

Okay, yeah, he wished he hadn't killed Mr. Dewey. When you killed somebody with Mr. Dewey's power, a lot of vengeance came your way. But, technically, they were already on his shit list, underlined and in boldface. Would Mr. Dewey have ever stopped seeking his own revenge?

The answer to that was: yes. Because Mr. Dewey was dying of brain cancer. Once his expiration date passed, they would've been more or less fine.

Out of the frying pan, into the fire, then into the volcano.

"Well, what's done is done," said George. He said stupid things like "what's done is done" about as often as he reassured doomed people that everything was going to be all right, but it seemed appropriate in this case. It was done. Mr. Dewey wasn't coming back. They were dealing with werewolves, not zombies.

"Yeah, our
lives
are done," said Lou, who was also not bringing his A-game to this particular conversation.

"Can you two please stop arguing?" asked Ally. "It's not accomplishing anything."

She was right. She was also thirty years younger, had a hole in her foot, and was in a cage with one of her kidnappers and a ghastly freak, so the fact that she was the one proposing rational discussion was kind of embarrassing.

"Yes, we can," George announced. "Thanks for getting us out of there, Lou."

"Anytime."

In the rear-view mirror, George could see that Eugene was pressed tightly into the corner of the cage, chin against his knees, covering his face with his hand and paw.

"That's Eugene," said George. "Dewey messed him up bad."

"Yeah," said Lou. "I was going to ask about that."

"I don't want to talk about it," said Eugene.

"I can respect that."

"Where are we going?" Ally asked.

George continued to carefully watch their surroundings. Obviously, it was going to be much more difficult to watch for cars full of gun-toting criminals speeding toward them in the dark, but so far things looked okay. It was entirely possible that Mr. Dewey's men
wanted
to riddle the van with thousands of rounds of ammunition, yet felt it was more prudent to just abandon the warehouse and worry about George and Lou later, since the police would be on their way to investigate the gunshots.

Or they might be right around the corner, ready to fling dynamite at them.

"We're going to get you someplace safe," George told Ally.

"Just pull over and let me out. I'll be fine."

"No. It's got to be a hospital or a police station or something. Well, preferably not a police station. But we can't let you out until we know for sure that we've lost these guys."

"We're closer to my house than a hospital. Just take me there."

George considered that. Thus far, as far as the police knew, Ally was just a fourteen-year-old girl who was a few hours late getting home from school. Even if her mom reported her missing, the house wouldn't be crawling with cops. Sure, somebody might have said that they saw the van outside her house, and maybe somebody noticed that the wolf-girl in the pictures was wearing the same dress as the missing girl, but it should be safe enough to drop her off near her home.

There was the issue that Mr. Reith probably knew her name and where she lived, and the whole werewolf element was something that she'd have to figure out how to deal with, but that wasn't George and Lou's problem. They'd get rid of her and get the hell out of town.

* * *

Shane tilted back his head and breathed deeply, taking in the cold night air.

"Anything?" Robyn asked.

"Nope. Crabs?"

Crabs closed his eyes as he inhaled. Shane could catch the scent of another werewolf from at least a mile away, but Crabs had an even more finely tuned sense of smell. If they kept driving around Tropper, they'd eventually find her.

"I can't smell your daughter yet," said Crabs.

Shane could only smell another werewolf when they were actually in wolf form, but Crabs could smell her even if she was human. In fact, he'd been the one to assure Shane that Ally had inherited his gift.

"Okay. Let's go talk to her mom."

* * *

"What happened to you?" Ally asked Eugene.

"Nothing you need to hear about."

Eugene should've been terrifying to her—okay, he
was
terrifying—but he also looked so
sad
that he was more heartbreaking than scary. She couldn't quite bring herself to place a reassuring hand on his knee, but she wanted to.

"At least you're free now."

Eugene nodded. "Yeah. Maybe I can be fixed, a little. They can do amazing things with plastic surgery, right? I think my ribs have healed like this, so they'll have to be re-broken. Do you think doctors have a rib-breaking machine, or do they just...you know what, you should talk to Lou instead."

"Really," said Ally, "you look kind of bad-ass."

"Think so?"

"Definitely."

Eugene smiled. "It's sweet of you to lie to make me feel better. So why are you here?"

"I'm a werewolf."

Eugene's smile disappeared. "Don't tell me you believe that, too."

"I am. I found out this afternoon."

"Come on."

"How do you think George got all ripped up?"

"No offense to George, but it seems like lots of people want to rip him up."

"Maybe, but I did it."

"Can you change now?"

"Please don't," said Lou. "Seriously."

"Well," said Eugene, "if you are a werewolf, then I wish you the best of luck with it."

* * *

There were no police cars at Peggy's house. Shane was simultaneously relieved, because it meant that he could talk to his ex-wife in person, and annoyed, because it meant that she wasn't taking their daughter's disappearance seriously enough.

"Both of you wait in the car," he said, as Robyn pulled into the driveway.

"Crabs will wait in the car," said Robyn. "I'm coming with you."

"Peggy hates you."

"She hates you, too. I need to be there to make sure things don't get out of hand."

"Robyn Miles, keeper of the peace," said Crabs.

"Okay," said Shane. "But you can't be antagonistic."

Shane and Robyn got out of the car. The yard needed mowed and Peggy
still
hadn't gotten that dent in the mailbox fixed. How the hell did the judge give her the house?

"How about I do the talking?" said Robyn, as Shane rang the doorbell.

"I don't need you to do my talking for me. I'm perfectly capable of speaking to her about this matter. I'm going to find out what she knows about Ally, and then leave. No big deal. Quit acting like it's going to be the apocalypse."

The front door opened. Peggy didn't look happy to see him.

He wasn't happy to see her, either. Her face didn't look great—her makeup was streaked and her eyes were puffy from crying—but her post-divorce body pissed him off every time he saw it. Did it occur to her that if she'd kept herself in shape while they were married he wouldn't have slept with other women? (She only knew about Robyn, but there'd been six or seven, not counting prostitutes.)

"Shane," she said, as if he didn't know his own name. She glared at Robyn. "You're not supposed to be here."