Chapter 6
—It’s science
Hector
Iris was too damn cute.
I wasn’t sure why I enjoyed watching her friends embarrass her. Likely it was because they were all awkwardly bad at trying to set us up on a date.
She seemed a bit more relaxed once we came outside, but not by much.
We had just looked over the camera setup for the front and left sides of their building, which also covered their parking lot.
“Around back, we have two extra cameras because we often come out this door to do weather balloon launches,” Iris added, pointing to a small shed out back, which I assumed was where they had their balloon equipment.
“How often do you come out to do those?” I asked her.
“Oh, I don’t usually do balloon launches unless we are short-staffed for the day or it’s a very windy day and they need an extra set of hands to control the balloon,” she explained. “But we typically do two balloon launches a day. Unless there’s bad weather, and then we do more.”
“You said two extras, but I see three cameras,” I told her after spotting one on the far-left side.
“That one is broken, but they left it there to make people think it still works,” she answered. “If you look under the gutter, you can see the back part snapped off.”
She walked closer to lean in, pointing at some cords in the back. As I took a few steps closer to get a closer look, she screamed.
“Snake! Holy crap! Big snake! Oh, my God!”
She tried to take a step away from the supposed snake but tripped and fell backward into me. My arm circled around her waist, holding her upright so she didn’t fall on the ground. That just made it worse, because now her plush ass was nestled right up against my upper thighs.
She squirmed, trying to back both of us up, so I turned to my right side and pulled her with me.
I was about to release my arm from her to go see if there was, indeed, a snake.
However, she pulled away first. She whipped around, stared at me with a frightened look on her face, and began to apologize.
“Sorry…umm, jeez. I’m sorry,” she said, looking to the ground and shaking her head.
I wasn’t sure if she was still nervous about the snake or if it was me she was nervous about.
I hadn’t seen anything at first, but after looking closer, I found the snake coiled up against the building. The camera she had pointed at was positioned above three small sagebrush bushes—making a nice spot for the snake to hide.
“It’s all good,” I told her after seeing it. “It’s a Great Basin Gopher Snake. They’re nonvenomous.”
“Umm…no. That thing definitely hissed and rattled,” she argued back.
“Gopher snakes can mimic the sounds rattlesnakes make, but unlike rattles, these guys are harmless,” I informed her.
“I’ll just take your word for it and stay back here, away from the snake,” she said as she did a whole-body shiver.
I smirked. I had two sisters and a mother who were all petrified of snakes, so I knew when to let it go.
“Well, that completes our tour of embarrassment today,” she muttered, but I still heard her.
“Thanks for showing me around,” I told her. “Again, the odds of someone nefarious coming onto the property are extremely low, but I’d just like to be sure.”
She nodded at me as we walked back around to the front of the building.
“I’ll get this letter over to the ISB,” I said. “Reach out if you get anything else.”
“Okay,” she said, not really making eye contact with me. “Have a good day, Hector.”
I told her to do the same, though I wasn’t sure if she heard me, since she practically bolted into the building.
I spent most of the car ride back to the office thinking about the case and the letter since Jennings brought it up as soon as we drove off.
That was a lie.
I only spent about ten percent thinking about that.
The other ninety percent was spent thinking about Iris’s ass up against me when she found the snake.
My arm wrapped around her waist as she wiggled up and down against me.
Goddamn, it had taken everything in me not to get a hard-on standing there.
Being a bigger guy myself, I preferred women who had some meat on their bones and weren’t going to snap if I touched them—and this woman did it for me.
It was her reaction to me that had my near-hard-on retreating.
Once I had moved her to the side, she had practically jumped away from me as though I was on fire.
I had noticed several times now that she was nervous around me.
What I wasn’t sure about was whether it was something I said or just my general size and demeanor. It could be either.
My large frame and not exactly friendly demeanor often made people keep a distance.
I wasn’t a dick on purpose, but I just gave off a vibe that told people to stay away.
It was thanks to years of being special ops in the Army as well as an undercover cop.
You learned to channel the don’t mess with me vibe quite well in those roles specifically.
It was that intimidation factor that made me perfect for undercover work at LVPD.
After coming home and retiring from the Army, I’d struggled to settle back into civilian life.
I hadn’t known exactly what I’d wanted to do, but my brother Manny had been a cop.
It was all he’d ever wanted to do—get justice for the good guys and lock up the bad guys.
I was proud of my Army career, but it had kept me away from my family, and I’d missed many important events. It was part of the job, and I’d known what I’d signed up for, but missing my brother’s funeral had been my breaking point.
When Manny died, I had been knee-deep in a top-secret special ops mission, and by the time I had been located and informed of my brother’s death, the funeral was the next day. Thanks to bureaucratic red tape and a few weather-related flight delays, I’d ended up missing the funeral by seven hours.
I still got to see the rest of my family and had been given two weeks of bereavement leave, but I hadn’t been the same person after that.
Hearing how Manny had died, and knowing he would never get to have kids of his own—one of his biggest dreams in life—had officially flipped a switch in me, turning me into my infant stages of curmudgeon.
After he died, I made the decision not to re-enlist, but I’d struggled with what to do when I came home.
Ultimately, I’d decided to follow in his footsteps.
His captain had been more than willing to hire me and had welcomed me onto the force and told me my background and intimidating appearance made me ideal for special operations.
After my last case, though, I’d known I needed to get out, which was why I’d transitioned to the Park Service.
While it may have worked for my jobs, apparently being a large, intimidating guy was not so great for meeting women.
Especially gorgeous women like Iris. In an ideal world, I would attempt to pursue her anyway since she was everything I wanted in a woman.
But the vibes she gave off were full of uncomfortableness, not to mention I really should keep my distance because of this active case.
Speaking of the case, I shot off a text to Agent Andrews as I pulled into our parking lot, and she let me know someone would be by to collect the letter by the end of the day.
I walked back into our main visitor center and headed back to our break room which connected to our offices in the back.
I walked in to find a few of my colleagues there eating their lunch when I spotted something on the middle table.
“Oh, what in the fresh hell is this,” I grumbled, looking at the large display of dinosaur cupcakes surrounding the table.
“Good afternoon to you too, boss,” Lewis said with a grin on his face. That asshole was enjoying this because he knew I hated this sort of thing.
“Yeah, yeah,” I grumbled. “Where did these come from?”
“Your mom brought them by,” Diden mentioned, smiling with her mouth half full of a chocolate cupcake.
“She said you told her you’d never forgive her if she brought you cake to the office for your birthday, so she decided to bring cupcakes by—which she emphasized are not cake—several days before your birthday, so it doesn’t count. ”
The muffled chuckles told me they were all getting a kick out of this. My meddling mother just couldn’t help herself.
“However, she did apologize because she said your sister Rita ordered them, so your mom didn’t realize they had dinosaurs on them until she picked them up,” Jones added.
“She said your sister told her you had quite the excavation dig at the lake, so it reminded her of dinosaur archeologists,” Lewis noted, and I heard the sarcasm in his voice. “I’m guessing you didn’t tell them what exactly was dug up at the lake?”
“I told my sister since her husband is a cop, but not my mother.” I noted to myself that Rita had likely done this on purpose to needle me for not telling Mom the whole story.
Trying to control my inner aggression, I just shook my head and started to walk toward my office.
“Where’d you go, by the way?” Diden asked. “You bolted out of here real fast.”
I turned and held up the letter, filling them in on what it said and that Andrews had asked me to pick it up.
“Wait, so he thinks she took some kind of evidence from the crime scene and kept it at her house?” Jones asked, looking shocked.
“I don’t know what this guy thinks,” I responded vaguely, not wanting to get into it.
“And he really asked her to take something from police evidence to give it to him?” Diden questioned.
“Yes. The guy is a loose cannon in my opinion,” Jennings added.
“Someone from the ISB is gonna swing by in a bit to collect this, so let me know when they get here,” I said, hoping to redirect the conversation.
“Will do,” Lewis replied.
Diden had been here several years now—longer than I had.
Jennings was relatively new, having transferred from several other parks.
He’d even done a brief stint in Canada through our Peace Parks program.
All rangers were trained the same, so I never doubted his skills, but Diden, having been here in this particular park longer, held a bit more of my trust in her judgment for dealing with our local officials.
“You really think this weirdo is gonna try to go to the crime scene?” Jennings asked.
“No clue, so I’ll have whoever’s on duty on that side of the park put some extra cones and barriers up, not that those would stop them entirely,” I told them.
“Shit,” Jennings muttered.
My sentiment exactly.