Page 6

CHAPTER SIX

S aint…

She’d finally said something interesting.

She was into kink, and I found myself wondering what end of the spectrum she found herself on – dominant, submissive, or somewhere in the middle where she switched between the two. It finally made me curious.

I liked her fire. It was hot. In that regard, she was kind of a diametric opposite of ol’ Louie. He was as beta as they came but had his moments. I missed the kid. He’d been a good dude – made the best out of the shit sandwich life had handed him. Hadn’t let it change him for the worse. It’d been something watching him grow and come into his own, and he’d had so much further to go. It was a fuckin’ shame he would never have the fuckin’ chance to fully find himself.

I let my eyes rove the woman in front of me as Collier chatted her up. It wasn’t long before the conversation turned to Louie, and Collier tapped my foot under the table twice with his. I clued into the conversation as she called Louie by his government name and said, “Garnett said why you all called him Louie. What’s with that, anyway?”

“You asked him?” I asked.

“Well, yeah,” she said. “Is that supposed to be off-limits or something?” she asked.

“Actually, yeah,” I interjected before Collier could say something. He gave me some side-eye and clarified my point.

“Road names, while given to you, are deeply personal things,” he explained. “It’s considered rude to ask.”

“All Garnett would tell me is that it was stupid. That I wouldn’t believe him if he told me.”

I chuckled at that. He’d been right, but that wasn’t Louie. Louie never hesitated to tell his story about his run-in with a Roux Garou. Although that’s not why we made fun of him for it. It was that he called the thing a Loup Garou – which wasn’t wrong , per se. That was the French word for “werewolf,” but Roux Garou was the correct nomenclature around these parts.

Made me think, though, the way she said it, her voice softening and somber as it was, that maybe Louie didn’t tell her because the kid had finally been growing up – learning about what he should and shouldn’t be talking about.

That was my mission, though, wasn’t it? To see how much Louie may or may not have been talking out of turn. To learn if big sister here was trustworthy, or if she was going to be a problem.

“Guess I’ll never know unless you tell me,” she said. “I get that it’s a deeply personal thing, or whatever, but does it go beyond death for you guys, or...?” her expression was a study in neutrality, and I let my eyes catch hers. She tipped her chin, barely, raising it, a subtle act of daring or defiance, and I felt a little thrill.

“Not much transcends death, as far as I’m concerned,” I said. “When you leave the mortal coil, you leave everything’s between you an’ God at that point.”

Her eyebrows went up, and her interest seemed piqued.

“Does that mean you’ll tell me about my brother?”

“Quid pro quo,” I said, seizing the opportunity. “You ask, I’ll answer, but I get a question of my own for every one you ask.”

Her green eyes flashed, and she leaned back into the backrest of the booth, which was pretty unforgiving. The food in this place made up for it, though. For real.

“Why do I feel like I’m about to make a deal with the devil?” she asked, a hard set to her jaw as the wheels turned behind those brilliant green eyes.

“I’m a perfect Saint,” I said, raising my eyebrows, doing my best to look innocent – which I knew was a joke. “It’s even my name.”

She snorted and laughed, and I felt Collier shake with silent laughter beside me, his arm and shoulder next to mine, hitching with it.

“Bet,” Velina said. “Why was Garnett’s name Louie, then? Seems as good a place as any to start.”

“Around these parts, there’s an old legend.” Collier, the natural-born storyteller, took over. “The Acadians and Cajun around here call it the Roux Garou. You know it as a werewolf – but it’s also known by another name in French – the Loup Garou.”

“Okay.” She drew out the word and gave a look like is this getting somewhere?

“Louie swore he saw one, one night,” I told her, cutting to the chase. I liked that about her.

“Except he kept calling it a Loup Garou rather than a Roux Garou,” Collier said.

“The boys never let him live it down,” I said. “Neither that he said he saw one nor the fact he kept calling it the wrong thing for around these parts.”

She cocked her head and asked, “Do you know the story?”

Collier snickered. “Only heard it about a thousand times,” he said.

“Every time he got drunk, an’ every time he was sober and encountered someone who ain’t heard it from him before. It was his favorite story to tell,” I said.

She swallowed hard and looked like she wanted to ask but didn’t.

“Your question,” she said.

I smiled, and I knew it was a feral thing. I wasn’t quite capable of smiling any other way. I took it easy on her and lobbed a softball one at her, or so I thought.

“What you do for a living?” I asked.

She hitched a laugh and looked to the ceiling, blowing out her cheeks as she contemplated how to answer that one.

“I’m a cleaner,” she said, finally. “Specializing in biohazardous materials.”

I frowned at that, reading in her face there was something more to it than that. I was almost ashamed to admit Collier caught on quicker than I did.

“What, like one of those crime scene cleanup outfits?” he asked.

“BINGO,” she answered.

“You work with the cops?” I demanded, and I knew my expression darkened.

She shook her head. “Only in that they refer us out to families and businesses that need our services, but I’m just a grunt, a pleb. I don’t dispatch. I’m the one who shows up to clean up the human soup when someone’s been left to rot in their apartment for weeks.”

“Eww,” Collier said, sniffing like he could almost smell it. “How the hell did you get into that line of work?”

She shrugged one shoulder and said, “I was going for a degree in Criminal Justice and Forensic Sciences. I got my Associates, but I couldn’t make it to a Bachelors. I got most of the way there, but it just got to be too cost-prohibitive. Turns out, you can’t do much with an Associates these days. Couldn’t even apply to a lab to try and gain experience. About all I was good for was security work – which just wasn’t my thing. I did have an aptitude for all the really gross shit and enough of a cast-iron stomach that I could deal with it just fine. Turns out there’s some pretty good money to be made cleaning up a scene and I already had most of the education and certifications to be able to do it. I switched tracks, and I’ve been doing it ever since.”

“No shit?” Collier asked, and he sounded impressed.

“No shit,” she said, nodding slowly.

Ain’t that a hell of a thing, I thought to myself, but it made me wary. Doing a thing like that meant she was closer to law enforcement and the law enforcement side of things than what made me comfortable. I couldn’t do much about it other than follow LaCroix’s orders, so I filed it away to report to him or Hex on it later.

She had a strange sort of smile on her lips, one full of something that I couldn’t pin down until she said to me in a sarcastic, almost self-deprecating tone, “Does that lose me cool points with your little club?”

I smirked back and told her honestly, “No, but the disrespect certainly does.”

Her eyebrow went up. “Disrespect?” she echoed.

“Don’t even try to pretend,” I said. “Can’t say we aren’t used to it. We don’t expect a citizen like you to understand.”

She looked non-plussed at the disrespect I flung right back at her. I was thinking that she could dish it, but she couldn’t take it, when her smile turned genuine, and she laughed a little and said, “Touché, to-fucking-ché.”

I sat back, eyeing her, and before I could say it was her question, she spoke up and said, “I think the key difference here is that I want to understand, though. I’m just really bad at processing emotions, and I’ve got a lot of them right now. Big ones. Probably some of the biggest I’ve ever felt, so I’m sorry if I’m coming off like a bitch. It’s a defense mechanism.”

I glanced at Collier, who glanced at me, and I raised a questioning eyebrow. A sort of, do you believe her? He picked up what I was putting down and nodded. I simply said in her direction, “Your question.”

She looked thoughtful, her green eyes searching my face keenly, and finally sat back on her side of the booth and looked out over the empty bar dance floor.

“Now I feel like anything I’m going to ask is going to be considered rude or whatever.”

I shook my head. “We cleared that up.”

“Just like that?” she asked.

“Just like that,” I said evenly.

She took a deep breath, huffed it out, and said, “Tell me my brother’s story – the one how he got his name. That seems safe enough right now.”

I nodded, and Collier and I exchanged a look, mostly to gauge who was gonna start talking.

He deferred to me, and I started…

“It all started when…”

I told her the story as Louie had related it to us damn near a thousand times or more. About how he’d only been a teen back then, out late at night with some buddies, playing hoop and cuttin’ up – when it hit that appointed time and the park lights went out.

How they decided to walk along the old train tracks down a ways to the corner store, lookin’ to score some beer or malt liquor from some good Samaritan who was alright with contributing to the delinquency of some minors. About how they was smokin’ a joint, passing it between ‘em as they walked.

“The way Louie told it, things got real quiet,” I said. “No birds, no bugs, no nothin’ – and a real eerie calm came over him an’ his friends.”

“Yeah?” she asked, leaning forward, rapt.

“Yeah,” Collier said. “Happens sometimes when a predator is nearby.”

“It got one of Louie’s pal’s attention, and he got ‘em all to shut the hell up and listen,” I said.

I told her the rest, as detailed as Louie had ever told the story. Funny thing was, he never wavered in the retelling. Didn’t deviate from his story one bit. It was the same every time. Sure, a lot of the guys gave him shit, claiming there was more in that joint they was passing back and forth than just weed – but as much as some of the guys gave him shit about it, we’d all, at one time or another, talked among ourselves and came to the conclusion that Louie wasn’t just tellin’ stories. That he definitely saw something that night.

I was in the camp that firmly believed he saw what he saw and, truthfully, it made me uncomfortable. That was some kind of evil I didn’t want no part of. I fought the urge to cross myself just recounting the story.

“He said they were all standing there, in the quiet, in the dark. Said it was so dark that you had to stand within five feet of each other, or you’d lose track of your homie next to you, right?”

She nodded, rapt.

“Then he said they all heard it, out there in the trees along the side of the tracks, this low growling – foul and evil – enough to scare the fucking piss out of every last one of them.”

“A werewolf?” she asked. She didn’t look or sound too incredulous, which surprised me some, given she’d stated she had an interest in forensics and shit – a science-based field.

“Said that’s what it was,” Collier said, leaning back in his seat, playing with the edge of his napkin under his flatware absently.

“Did he see it?” she asked. “Like, actually see it, or just hear it and decided that’s what it was?”

I chuckled and said, “Now just hold your horses. I’m getting to that part. He said he heard it first, a growling out there in the dark, in among the trees, and all he and his homies could do was look at each other for a moment, crapping their pants. Then whatever it was moved, and they heard it a rustlin’ out there. That was enough for them. They booked it. Started runnin’ up the tracks like hell itself opened up a portal behind ‘em.”

“Jesus,” she said. “Then what happened?”

“Whatever it was back there howled , just like a wolf – scared the piss out of ‘em even more,” Collier said.

“Okay,” she said, and I could tell we had her hooked. She was hangin’ on every word, and I hoped for just a second there, I was doing ol’ Louie proud in the retelling.

“So, they’re all running like a bat out of hell, and Louie always said he heard one of his home boys – Tony or some shit – well, he heard him eat shit behind him.”

“I’m not familiar with the term,” she said, shaking her head.

“He fell,” Collier said.

“Garnett?” she asked for clarification.

“No, not Louie – his friend,” I said.

“Okay, I follow.” She nodded.

“So ol’ boy falls, and Louie, being the guy he is, he stops and turns around?—”

“No shit?” she asked, smiling, and I could see the pride in her eyes.

“Ah-huh.” I nodded. “So, Louie, he turns around, and that’s when he saw it, for real – said his homeboy is lying there on the ground trying like hell to crabwalk back from the thing. Louie says he saw it. Said it looked like a half-man, half-dog thing, rearin’ up on its hind legs over his homeboy.”

“What?” she asked incredulously. “How’d they get away?”

“His buddy J-Dawg pulled his piece, an old .38 special, and started plugging away at the thing. It took off running,” Collier filled in.

Velina sat silent for a long moment, looking troubled.

“I can’t believe he never told me this,” she said as our waitress returned and started setting dishes in front of us.

“Why’s that?” I asked, seizing on the opportunity.

“I mean, he’s told me literally so much else, ” she said.

“Yeah, like what?” Collier asked casually. He took the words right outta my mouth. We glanced at each other, both trying to remain looking lax and casual, but both of us simultaneously were on high alert – hanging on every word Velina dared to utter next.

The tension fizzled into a disappointing payoff when she said, “Private things. Things I doubted he would want you to know,” she said pointedly and stared fixedly into my eyes as if daring me to contradict her point.

I didn’t take the bait she laid out to start an argument, nor did I try to piss her off any further by simply blowing her off.

I simply dropped back a step and said, “I can respect that.”

Collier looked like he swallowed a whole-ass bait hook sideways and opened his mouth, but I kicked him under the table. He shut his gob and nodded, trusting in me that I had a plan – but fuck me. I didn’t have so much as a concept of a plan. I was just falling back to regroup and the food had arrived at the perfect time to do it.

We were digging in, and the conversation had its natural but not entirely uncomfortable lull.

I sniffed as the dash of hot sauce I’d slapped on my first bite of gator tickled my sinuses and made my nose start to run. That was some good shit.

She picked at her salad, stabbing at it a few times to build up a forkful and paused, her eyes rising to catch mine looking at her. She froze and didn’t say a word, just put her bite in her mouth while holding full eye contact and chewing thoughtfully as she stared me down.

It was hot. Hot and cute.

Made me want to bend her over the table and fuck that attitude right out of her, which took me by surprise.

My thoughts changed track just then, and it was a runaway train, and it didn’t head nowhere good.