Page 25 of Radar (Iniquus Certified Cerberus Tactical K9 #2)

Xander

Saturday

Lumberjack, Alaska

It was time to let the squirrel guy bring up Orest Kalinsky’s name. “What’s the connection? How’d you all meet?” Xander asked. They were obviously here together, and he needed to know if Eddie and Elyssa were involved with Orest, too.

“We just met Paca today,” Eddie said. “But I conferred bestie status on Elyssa the night she threw me over her shoulder and sprinted with me out of a party, popped me in her car, and drove us into the sunset.”

Xander waited for the punch line.

“Dude, what?” Paca leaned forward.

“I was at this cocktail party barbeque thing. Let’s just say I was on the wrong side of the tracks, and it wasn’t a safe zone for someone of my delicate stature.”

Eddie was as thin as a bean pole, but he was about as tall as Xander, and Xander was six feet three. Eddie was hardly delicate. Granted, Elyssa was tall, too. Five ten maybe five eleven? Hard to tell with boots on.

The image of her walking across his lodge room, bare feet, long legs, his T-shirt just brushing the tops of her thighs, slid unbidden through his imagination.

Eddie was perched on the arm of Elyssa’s chair as he told the story.

“These frat boys, smelling strongly of beer, surrounded me. And they had a lot to say about people ‘like me.’” He threw those last two words into finger-flexed quotation marks.

“And how they were going to punish me for daring to be different from them. Now, I had never been in a fight before. I mean,” he spread his hands wide, “I’d have no idea what to do in a fight even today.

I am of the strong belief that everyone should just chill out.

So, this boy-circle starts to edge closer and closer, like someone was pulling a lasso around a poor little calf.

And all I can think to do is cover my face to protect my eyes when I hear.

‘’Scuse me. ’Scuse me coming through. He’s mine.

’” Eddie was animatedly miming this sequence.

“Then Elyssa—I had no idea who she was at the time—grabs this guy’s shoulder and tears him out of her way.

I mean fierce! She goes, ‘Yup, he’s mine.

’ Then she bends at the waist, shoves her shoulder into my midsection, grabs me by my thighs, and stands.

I am both confused and incredibly impressed.

And also, all the blood was running to my head, so slightly dizzy.

Anyway, she powers through the other side of the circle, through the party, and sets me down outside by her car and says, ‘Can I give you a ride somewhere safer?’”

“What?” Paca was grinning hard from his cross-legged seat on the floor.

“Oh, Elyssa here was on our university rugby team. She is a warrior.” He gritted his teeth and pulled his lips back, making his eyes fierce.

“She does that on the field,” he relaxed his face.

“I’d say she was trying to terrify her opponents, but they’re all doing it.

Just this side of berserker. Just raw, brutal aggression.

Women rugby players scare the living crap out of me. ”

Elyssa sighed and shook her head at him.

“You?” Xander couldn’t keep the incredulity out of his voice. Elyssa presented as warm and soft but also forthright and intelligent. He couldn’t imagine her as fierce, though.

“Elyssa,” Eddie insisted. “My warrior angel saw I was in trouble and did what she’d trained to do, grab up the opponent who was clinging to the ball and put them down where she wanted them.”

“Elyssa for the win!” Paca laughed with victory fists in the air.

“Years ago.” She waved a hand through the air. “Back in the day, as they say.”

“Wanna see?” Eddie pulled out his phone and started scrolling through his photo album.

“Please don’t,” Elyssa said quietly. “That was a long time ago.” There was just enough wistfulness that caught the edges of her words that Eddie immediately looked contrite and slid his phone away. He followed up with a side hug.

Xander read that as Elyssa was an athlete benched by events.

He’d watched it happen to friends and family alike.

Some of them came through the change of circumstances okay, but different, some people became so uprooted that they wilted to the point of being unrevivable.

Elyssa was obviously resilient in her effort to make a meaningful life for herself, regardless of what had happened.

“Rugby,” Paca said. “How did you get interested in that sport?”

“I was a wrestler in high school. There wasn’t a girls’ team, so I was allowed to compete with the boys’ all the way up to the State Championship.”

“That means you made State Champion, and they wouldn’t let you participate?” Paca asked.

“Exactly. My read on it was that the parents who wanted their boys to get college scholarships were putting up a fuss because they were afraid their sons would miss their opportunity if I showed the males up. But I tell you, a woman’s leg strength is formidable.”

“It’s the truth,” Xander said. “When I go to the gym, the women are deadlifting three-fifty-four hundred pounds. The men won’t go near that. Arms, shoulders, and skip leg day.”

“Butts are the powerhouse.” Elyssa had a look of curiosity glinting in her eyes as she looked at Xander, then she blinked it away.

“After an article about the situation showed up in the local paper, my future university’s Rugby coach contacted me.

She said that since there weren’t a lot of high schools with girls’ rugby teams, they recruited athletes from track and field, and when they could, wrestling.

I’d never heard of rugby. The coach showed me a Māori women’s team performing the Haka before a match.

To me, the utter power they displayed was so antithetical to the messages I had heard growing up.

There was such conviction in their power. ”

“What you’re saying is that you were a rebel?” Paca asked.

“You would rebel, too, if your mother wanted you dressed in ruffles and bows and sat you like a doll on a chair.”

“True,” Paca said. “But I was a boy.”

“Your mother didn’t do that!” Eddie said to Elyssa.

“She did,” Elyssa countered. “I can show you pictures. But soon enough, she learned that life was easier when I ran off my energy. The bigger the girl, the bigger the energy, so when I said wrestling, she adapted.”

“I have three kids, and I know for certain that a child shows up with their own personality,” Paca said. “I was an early disappointment to my father, who would have reveled in having a child like you, Elyssa. Instead, I wanted to stare at animals through binoculars all day long. Poor dad.”

“My mom and dad wanted me to be a musician,” Eddie said. “But I was told I have a tin ear. My piano teacher said they shouldn’t waste their money.”

“Oh, Eddie!” Elyssa exclaimed.

“To be fair. I was actually pretty good. But when anyone was home, I banged around like an elephant trying to play the keys because I said electric guitar, and they said piano. And I was a shitty little kid.”

Elyssa turned his way. “Xander, did you disappoint your parents?”

“Every single day. Mostly, I think that I left them feeling lonely because I spent so much time with my nose in my books. I read everything and anything. I wanted to know it all. When I got uncomfortable because I was growing faster than the different body parts could keep up, my doctor suggested going to the gym and lifting weights. And she was right. Lifting and exercising hard took away the aches. I became a book-reading gym rat.”

“And when you graduated from high school, what did you do with your brains and brawn?” Elyssa asked.

“I became an analyst.” Shit, he hated not giving her a more honest answer. Not telling her the whole truth physically hurt. Now, wasn’t that a revelation?

Xander reminded himself that, in this situation, Elyssa was a siren, drawing his attention away when he needed to focus on the rocks around him.

Though thinking of Paca as dangerous was hard for Xander to do with any level of seriousness.

Still, Xander’s job wasn’t to flirt with an amazing woman.

He was here to thwart Orest Kalinsky, and that meant figuring out why Orest was interested in Paca and his squirrels.

“So, how do you find yourselves in the wilds of Alaska?” Xander looked directly at Paca.

“Me? Oh, I live here. Well, in Fairbanks. I come out to Lumberjack every year to play with sled dogs.”

“What kind of work is there in Fairbanks?” Xander asked.

“I’m the only one of us from Alaska,” he said. “But we’re all scientists. Eddie is in meat.”

“Meat?” Well, Kalinsky did have a thing for food. Was that a link? Was Eddie another Carpathian scientist? “Like ranching?” Xander asked.

“No.” Eddie shook his head. “No. I produce it in a lab.”

“Lab-grown meat?” Xander made a face.

Eddie turned to Paca. “See? Every single time. I’m trying to save the environment. But when I say how I’m doing it, it sounds like I want to make soup out of their old running shoes.”

“That’s not how you should tell someone what you do,” Elyssa scolded.

Eddie tipped his head. “Then how would you do it?”

Elyssa turned to Xander. “Eddie is a NASA scientist.”

“Bovine in outer space?” Xander grinned. “Gives a whole new meaning to ‘the cow jumped over the moon.’”

Elyssa was laughing.

“NASA has a goal of sending humans to Mars by 2050. Eating solely freeze-dried foods for years on end would be difficult psychologically. They thought,” Eddie nodded toward Elyssa, “a fresh salad once a week or so, or some fresh chicken or fish.”

“I see,” Xander said. If Eddie worked for NASA, he wasn’t a Kalinsky fellow. Turning to Squirrel-guy, he asked, “You work for NASA, too?”

“Not until next month.”

“And your specialty is?” Xander asked. Come on, Paca, tell me what you know about Kalinsky’s goals.

“Uhm. Squirrels,” he said.

“Squirrels,” Xander repeated slowly. “For … for food?”

“Oh no.” Paca laughed. “Not for food. You’d starve.”

Okay, this was moving too slow, and his getting mini chunks of information would start to sound intrusive.

Xander was going to push. “I thought the only squirrels around here are arctic squirrels, known for going into—Wait. Does NASA think they can put the astronauts into hibernation so they can sleep through most of the flight?” He opened his eyes wide, and with his lips held tightly together, he dropped his jaw as he nodded.

“Genius if it works. No food. Less air. Less shit.” He turned to Elyssa. “Excuse me.”

“Don’t excuse yourself to me,” Elyssa said. “That’s a biological consideration the teams need to think through.”

“She shits, too,” Eddie said.

“Thank you, Eddie. While true, perhaps not a topic for conversation with our new friend.”

Xander grinned at her. Yeah, he heard Elyssa add him to their circle.

This was good. Tomorrow, he’d hopefully get another shot at trying to find his breadcrumbs, unless, of course, Paca was heading back to Fairbanks in the morning with Orest. “I’ve always loved reading science fiction.

It seems to me that a creative person imagines something, describes it, and then it becomes a possibility in the minds of the scientific community.

They start to talk amongst themselves, wondering if that something were feasible.

They begin to ask the question, how would you get there?

And in their wondering, the baton is passed, and the idea comes to fruition. ”

Paca closed his eyes and took a breath. When he opened them again, he said, “That was poetic. And so very true.”

Eddie clapped his hands on his thighs and suddenly stood.

“All right. That’s it for me. I was in Paris a couple of days ago, then D.C.

to Fairbanks yesterday, and in Lumberjack, Alaska tonight.

This has been very hard on me, as I am a man who adores his sleep.

And so, I bid you all a good night.” He gave a kind of jovial bow.

As he came back upright, Eddie shot Paca a look.

Paca obviously understood the meaning because he immediately stood, too. “Time to call home and read the kiddos their bedtime stories, or something. I’ll see you all in the morning.”

Elyssa stood. “Nope. I’m going to say goodbye to you now, remember? I hired a car to pick me up pretty early. I hope you guys have a cozy night and a lot of fun at the races.”

As she hugged them both, Xander thought that, intelligence-wise, he was walking away empty-handed, having learned nothing from Paca.

Honestly, he didn’t think there was any intel to mine.

It didn’t seem that any of the three were involved with the doomsday machine, or they wouldn’t be this relaxed and convivial.

Once the friends left, Elyssa turned to Xander, who stood to the side. “I should get to bed, too.” She reached for her purse. “I heard you give your room number to the waiter. I’m in the room next to yours. And I was just wondering if your cottage is as cute as mine is.”

Xander bent to gather Radar’s lead. “Why don’t you come take a look and tell me what you think?”

They pulled on their coats, and Elyssa tucked comfortably and naturally under his arm as they walked to his room.

What are you thinking, Xander? he asked himself. I’m thinking that if these are my last few days on Earth, I deserve a taste of heaven.