Chapter 9
Jack
After less than fifteen minutes in his presence, I was convinced that Sheriff Bernard Lawless of Riverton was as much of a dirtbag as his cousin Bertram Lawless, the former Dead End sheriff.
Even more fun? Both of them hated my guts.
I stood outside the law enforcement building that housed the Riverton jail and sheriff’s office. It was a squat, ugly building made of concrete blocks that looked like it had been designed by a drunken bureaucrat who’d hated his job.
After I’d called Dead End deputy Andy Kelly for input on what to do, Brenda and I had taken his advice and contacted the Riverton sheriff’s department. If I’d known the sheriff was another Lawless, I probably would have advised Brenda to take someone—anyone—else. The situation was enough of a mess without the sheriff’s grudge against me for my part in getting his cousin sent to prison further messing things up.
But I hadn’t known, so here we were. Well, here she was, in danger of being tossed in jail, and here I was, kicked out of the building entirely.
A big guy roughly the size of a Sasquatch and almost as hairy walked out of the building. He wore a deputy’s uniform, so I didn’t know if he was looking for me to kick my butt for the sheriff. When he saw I was watching him, though, he nodded at me and jerked his head to the right toward a diner next door. I waited for a beat and then followed him in. He took a seat at a booth in the back and waved me over.
A plump, pretty server bustled over and ruffled his hair. “Hey, gorgeous. Come here often?”
He caught her hand and kissed it, and I noticed their matching wedding rings. “Just coffee, honey. Shepherd, you want coffee? I’m Reynolds. This is my wife, Vicki.”
“Vicki Reynolds. Nice to meet you, Shepherd.”
“It’s Jack. Nice to meet you too. Yes, to coffee, please.”
When she went to get our coffee, Reynolds sized me up. “All right. First, don’t judge all of us by that jerk wearing the sheriff’s badge. We can’t wait to get him out of office, and preferably in whatever dark hole of a jail y’all got his cousin dumped in.”
“Noted. Is Brenda okay? Did he arrest her?”
He held up a hand, and his wife came over and poured us coffee.
“We’ll let you know if we see the sheriff heading this way, so you two can duck out the back,” she said.
“He wouldn’t be too happy to see one of his deputies with the enemy,” I guessed.
“You were never here,” Vicki said, grinning at me. “We’ve been dealing with this guy for years. We have our ways.”
“About Brenda. What happened? I know you didn’t have time to say anything before Lawless threw you out,” the deputy said.
I drank some pretty good coffee and studied him for a minute. Finally, I nodded. “Shapeshifter?”
“Wolf.”
“I’m a tiger.”
He threw his head back and laughed. “Heck, man, even us small-town Riverton folk know who Jack Shepherd is.”
I waited. There would be more; there always was when people recognized me. Sometimes good, sometimes not so good.
When the various councils of supernatural beings in the world got together and let the world know we existed, almost a decade and a half ago, there had been a lot of shock, waves of hatred and discrimination, and worse. Of all of us—shifters, vampires, Fae, and others—the vampires had been the most unhappy with the reaction.
So unhappy that a lot of the more ancient ones had taken over by killing any humans who didn’t bow down and recognize them as kings and queens.
I was one of the fighters who showed them the error of their ways. That’s how I’d met Poseidon’s Warriors, an elite group of fighters from a continent everyone had still thought was mythical. Now that Atlantis had surfaced, the world had changed forever.
Anyway, all of that is a long way to say: Sometimes, when people found out who I was and who I used to be, I got pushback. Sometimes, I got gratitude.
Both made me equally uncomfortable.
His expression turned serious. “I fought in the war, too. Nearly got my ticket punched by a vampire’s human servant. I figure we were on the same side, then, and we’re on the same side, now. I’m friends with Andy Kelly, and he says you’re good people.”
“So is he,” I said sincerely. Deputy Kelly’s misleadingly short stature and young-looking face made many people underestimate him. Including, when I’d first met him, me.
Not anymore.
“Did you scent anything? Or anyone?” Werewolves had heightened senses of smell like their animal counterparts.
“Nobody who shouldn’t have been there. His cousins. Brenda. His softball teammates, the old dude who run the annual ball game, and the like. Of course, foul play—heh, no pun intended—is usually committed by somebody close to the victim.”
I had to grin at “foul play,” but then I told Reynolds about my conversation with Brenda. “I’m pretty sure she was telling me the truth. There was no reason for her to call me if she had anything to do with Ace’s disappearance. She could have just gone home and gone to bed. Nobody would have been the wiser unless he had security cameras.”
The deputy shook his head. “No cameras. No notes. Nothing labeled CLUE.”
Despite the situation, I had to grin. “No CSI Riverton coming to solve the case for you?”
He growled, and I laughed. Everybody I knew in law enforcement complained about how those kinds of shows gave the public a skewed idea of how—and how fast—crimes were solved.
“The problem is that they dated, and she dumped him. It’s common knowledge around here that it was pretty acrimonious, because he got drunk and whined about it at a bar downtown. If he was harassing her, and his history says he probably was, then maybe she got rid of him.”
“Come on. He’s built like a truck, no pun intended. She’s a little thing. How would she do that?”
“As you know very well, guns can level the playing field against a superior predator.”
Yeah. I knew that, despite usually being the superior predator. “Did you smell gunpowder?”
“No. If somebody’s pointing a gun at you, though, you don’t need them to fire it to be scared enough to do what they say.”
“Point. But we’re back to why would Brenda call me if she did it?”
“I can’t get past that, either. And even our fool of a sheriff won’t be able to arrest somebody for going into a house with her own key. There’s no body. Not even much blood. Not enough to put anybody in jail. Do you know what was weird, though?”
“Tell me.”
“The case he was building to hold the softball trophy? Somebody’d smashed it to smithereens. And the trophy? Was gone.”
“A softball-related kidnapping? I know everybody takes this game seriously, but that seems unbelievable.”
“You’re not wrong there. And it’s not like Ace didn’t have a lot of people who disliked him. Enough to hurt him, though?” The deputy shook his head. “I can’t think of anybody, off the top of my head, unless it’s one of his cousins. He treats those boys like dirt.”
The cook leaned over the counter and whistled to get our attention. “Reynolds. Sheriff’s on his way over.”
The deputy drained his mug. “Time to go.”
I stood, put money on the table for our coffees plus a tip, and followed him out the back door. We waited there a minute until his phone buzzed, and then I followed him to the ugly municipal building, where Brenda waited outside, just raising her phone to her ear. My phone buzzed once, and then she saw me and hung up.
“Jack?” She looked back and forth between me and Reynolds, looking worried and exhausted. “Can you take me home now?”
“Definitely.”
Reynolds gave me his card, and I could reciprocate, since Tess had ordered nifty business cards for me that had an image of a prowling tiger across the front.
“Let me know what you hear?”
He nodded. “You, too.”
With that, Brenda and I headed out. She said little and, when I looked over at her, I realized she was asleep. Understandable after the night she’d had. I’d followed her home so she could drop off her car before we went to Riverton, so I knew where she lived. When I pulled into the driveway in front of her house and shut off my truck, she woke up.
“We’re here.”
“Thanks,” she said, reaching for the door handle.
“Brenda. You should tell me what’s happening,” I said quietly.
“I … I don’t know anything,” she said, avoiding my gaze. “Send me a bill for your time.”
“I don’t care about that. I just want to help you.”
“I know. I just … I need some sleep. I’ll see you at practice tonight.” She opened the door and hopped out.
“We’re still having practice?”
For the first time since we’d left Riverton, she looked directly at me, her eyes wide. “Of course! Nothing gets in the way of the big game.”
“Not even the disappearance of the Riverton team captain?”
She hesitated and then shook her head, closed my truck door, and fled into her house.
I waited until the door closed behind her to text Tess and, showing great restraint, I avoided the phrase “foul play.”