Chapter 32 Bruno
brUNO
It was sometimes a challenge to actively listen to a client.
Bruno was careful to catalog expressions, to listen to subtle shifts in instinct, to guide the conversation, and to be patient with people who needed the process of talking, even when they rambled badly and said a whole lot of nothing for a really long time.
At first, he thought that the long-winded tale from Gloria’s childhood must have some kind of sinister undertone that he didn’t understand, but instinct went from slightly unsettled to absolutely on fire without any transition and it took Bruno a moment to tamp down his reaction and realize that it had absolutely nothing to do with the widow at all.
“I’m sorry, Gloria!” he said, standing abruptly.
“I’m going to have to cut our session short.
Something urgent has come up and I will call you as soon as I can to schedule a makeup session.
” He struggled a moment, unable to explain instinct, because Gloria was one of his few fully human clients and he wasn’t sure she knew about shifters.
Courtesy warred with secrecy.
“I’m sorry,” he repeated. “I’ll be in touch.” He didn’t wait for her to stand up and gather her stuff, only grabbed his coat from the hook by the door and left her in his office without a backward glance.
He had to pause when he turned on the car, in order to calm himself enough to drive, and to try to figure out what was happening.
He knew that Clarice was in trouble, and he knew where, in a vague way—he couldn’t have pointed it out on a map, but he knew which way to drive, and that would be enough.
But he didn’t know what kind of trouble his instinct was screaming about.
Was she hurt? In a car accident? Without any other clues, that seemed like the most likely cause of the screaming in his nerves.
His armadillo was catatonic, completely overwhelmed by his sensitivity to instinct, and no help at all when Bruno tried to dissect what he was feeling.
So Bruno drove, making turns that just felt right, swearing impatiently at red lights that thwarted his forward progress, and taking risks in the sloppy snow to pass slow drivers. Several people honked at him, and he was glad for the good tires on his truck.
He found himself in the Bluffs more quickly than his anxiousness suggested he would be.
The traffic thinned to nothing and the space between the grand houses increased dramatically.
Instinct guided him down a driveway through an open gate, where Clarice’s car was parked with a sleek black SUV and a white, windowless van.
A black luxury car meant the parking area was quite crowded and Bruno had to shove the nose of his car into a snowbank in order not to block the drive.
A black-jacketed figure came out from the van to greet him, and Bruno was neither surprised nor happy to realize that he was carrying a wicked-looking rifle.
This was not a car accident.
“You’re not one of Hunter’s guys,” the man said suspiciously, lifting the gun.
“I’m looking for Clarice.” Bruno put his hands up, but didn’t see any good reason to lie about why he was there. “She’s blonde, about yay high, wears glasses.”
“They got the real estate chick inside,” the man said. “Stay where you are.”
Bruno kept his hands up and the guard lowered the gun and made a phone call. “Yeah, there’s another one. Some guy. Who are you?” he asked Bruno.
“I’m Bruno Martin,” he said, as mildly as he could manage. “Clarice is my girlfriend.”
It wasn’t wrong, exactly, but it didn’t feel right.
Girlfriend sounded juvenile, and he should have checked in with Clarice before labeling her anything.
It was easier to try to categorize their relationship than it was to worry about her safety or wonder what he’d so stupidly blundered into.
“Look, I’m not here to make any trouble… ”
“Shut up.” The guard clearly didn’t consider Bruno a threat, but he also didn’t volunteer to look away while he continued the conversation on the phone so Bruno could think of something to do. “It’s the realtor’s sidepiece. I don’t know. Yeah. I’ll bring him up.”
Sidepiece was worse than girlfriend, but Bruno wasn’t going to argue when the man waved him with the gun to approach the house.
Training suggested that it would be best to just go along with everything and watch for an opportunity, even if instinct was still screeching in his skull that things were wrong and bad and off and dangerdangerdanger.
Bruno kept his hands up, walking carefully. “I’m not here to cause any problems,” he repeated. “I just came for Clarice. We aren’t involved in any of…whatever this is.”
Or was she?
Doubt managed to squirm in between the chinks of Bruno’s certainty.
How well did he really know Clarice? Maybe she’d been playing both sides this whole time and stringing him along.
Instinct didn’t always know best, and maybe he had been so eager for a connection that he was willing to ditch common sense and caution.
It didn’t seem likely that she was involved with this unsavory lot, but it was still dangerous how much she knew about Bruno and Gil. Bruno had been worried for Clarice, but maybe instinct was freaking out because it knew that she was going to break and tell them everything!
To Bruno’s surprise, his armadillo uncoiled enough to snort in disgust at the very idea. She’s safe.
Even if nothing else was.
“Up the stairs,” the guard said behind him when Bruno hesitated inside the front door.
The house was really something extra, with an entry suited for grand balls and whole circuses.
A staircase went up a half-floor and split in two, wrapping around to a mezzanine above.
Bruno was struck by the utter impracticality of it all.
There was no arctic entry, and the cold air fogged in freely with them.
Who in Nickel City had this kind of money?
Who, with this kind of money, would choose to live in Nickel City? No wonder it was on the market.
Bruno went quietly to the stairs and the guard followed him a few steps behind.
“I’m still not Veronica,” Clarice’s voice carried clearly down the hall above, and Bruno breathed a sigh of relief and quickened his pace. She was okay. So far. Instinct still suggested that something awful was going to happen, but at least they’d be facing whatever was going to happen together.
There were other voices, arguing in Portuguese, and Bruno followed the sound while his handler kept pace behind him.
The room that the hallway opened into was as useless and overblown as the entry below, with gold edging and high windows with frost suggesting that they were single pane. They were looking out over a big yard and…was that a swimming pool beneath them? In Montana?
“The contractor was supposed to drain the pool,” Clarice was saying with a shake of her head.
She was standing at the window looking out at the frosted view, for all the world as if she was simply showing the house.
“The whole place was meant to be completely winterized. I will need to have firm words with the contractor and find out what else they neglected to do! Frozen pipes can be very expensive to fix!”
A man in a fur-trimmed jacket was talking quietly on the phone in one corner, keeping a watchful eye over the rest of the room, and he met Bruno’s eyes with a steely look.
Bruno would have put money on him being the one calling shots (Hunter?), and he did a quick appraisal of the rest. There were a dozen men in the room, which was large enough that none of them were crowded together, and the groups they had gravitated to were telling.
The well-armed men speaking Portuguese looked like mercenaries, and they were unhappy about something, but very disciplined, keeping careful watch with weapons at hand.
One of them turned to put Bruno in his line of vision, the others were keeping their attention on Clarice.
There was another cluster of men that were standing with Clarice at the window, and Bruno categorized them as investors in his mind at once.
They were unarmed, and looked soft and concerned.
They were wearing gray jackets with matching logos that might have been an S or a long-necked bird.
A sour-faced man and a woman stood apart from the others, looking painfully plain-clothed compared to the others.
They were older and wearing ordinary winter coats and stocking caps.
They wouldn’t have looked out of place in a grocery store or complaining about neighbor disturbances in a city council meeting.
Neither of them was outwardly carrying weapons, but Bruno wondered if their jackets covered sidearms. They made his instinct, already pegged, shiver in warning.
The man in the fur-trimmed jacket hung up and pocketed his phone. “This is a private event,” he said in a deliberately light voice.
Clarice turned from the window and Bruno was gratified by the look of hope and relief that she shot him.
He returned his gaze to the ringleader with effort.
“I must have lost my invitation,” he said, channeling every shred of self-control that he had to sound mild and unbothered.
The last thing he wanted to do was ratchet up tensions. “The name is Bruno.”
“I understand that you’re here for Veronica?” Ringleader sounded equally controlled and careful.
“I’m not Ver—” Clarice said ferociously as she stepped forward, but cut herself short when one of the mercenaries moved to intercept her. “Sorry!”
“I think there’s been some kind of mixup,” Bruno said, in his most soothing voice. “Clarice is a realtor that works for Veronica.”
“And you?” Ringleader managed to sound very reasonable. “What do you do, Bruno?”
“I’m a therapist.”
That got a chuckle of amusement from several of the men.
“Her therapist?”
“No!” Clarice said at the same time he did.
That got more laughter.
“Well, Bruno. It’s a pleasure, I’m sure. Perhaps you can be of some use to us, since Clarice has proved less…cooperative.”
“I’ve been cooperative!” Clarice protested. “I’m just not Veronica and I don’t know what you’re talking about!”
“He’s a shifter, Hunter,” the man at Ringleader’s side said suddenly, just as Bruno realized the same in return. Instinct was still acting like a thrumming undercurrent of unhelpful white noise, but it was clear about this.
There was another shifter among the men by Clarice, but Bruno couldn’t tell which of them it was. And shifter clearly didn’t mean safe.
“Look,” he said, hoping to get some kind of control over the situation. “I think there’s been some kind of mixup…”
“Bruno Martin,” one of the investor-types said suddenly. “He’s in the files. One of the parents. He could be useful.”
Bruno wasn’t sure he needed instinct to ring alarm bells for the fact that he was in their files, identified as a parent. If they knew he was a parent, they knew about Gil, and suddenly his own safety and even Clarice’s took a back seat. “Who the hell are you people?”
“You may know a Dr. James Becket?” Hunter said.
“A little.” He was a pediatrician that had come to town a year before, one that was safe to take shifters to.
He was not-so-secretly dating Vivian, who was his nurse.
(Vivian had brought up to Bruno her reservations about dating someone she was professionally close with, but had been firm on the fact that she wasn’t willing to dissolve the relationship.)
“We’re old friends.” The way Hunter said friends made it clear that they were not.
“What does this have to do with me?” Bruno said cautiously.
“Maybe nothing,” Hunter said. “I’m only interested in Dr. Becket, or a little girl of his acquaintance, Tara Yang. If we get her, we don’t need to bother any of the other children at a certain local day care.” It was a very pointed statement, and a not-at-all subtle threat to Gil.
One of the investor types made a noise. “I told you, the younger ones are worth more to us. We’re only here to get one of the babies.”
The man of the plain-dressed couple gave a noisy sigh. “We didn’t sign up to be babysitters.”
Bruno found his anxiety ratcheting with every statement. They were here for Tiny Paws children. He didn’t have to understand the dynamics of each group or the underlying motives. He did have to save his son and the other kids, and he had no idea how to do that.
“Tiny Paws has protections in place,” he tried to bluff.
“Laughable ones,” the investor scoffed, as Hunter said, “None that would stop us.”
“Are you honestly all standing around here talking about kidnapping little kids?” Clarice said in horror. “What is wrong with you?”
“They aren’t little kids, Ms. Chase,” Hunter scoffed. “They’re more like animals.”
“I’m not Veronica Chase, I told you.”
“When I called her number just now, your phone rang,” Hunter pointed out.
“She forwards her calls to me!” Clarice protested. “I’m a salesman at her agency!”
“Salesman or secretary?”
Clarice bristled, then deflated. “A little of both.”
Bruno was still trying to figure out how to stop them all, outnumbered, unarmed, and vulnerable in every way, a woman he was falling in love with as helpless as he was, and he stepped towards Clarice without thinking.