Off Leash (City Hearts #4)

Chapter 1

Skunked

The smell reached the twelfth floor before the elevator did.

Malcolm Reeves stood in the corridor of the Wardell with a French bulldog tucked under one arm like a warm, furious football, and watched two housekeepers at the end of the hall stop mid-conversation, sniff, and quietly reconsider every decision that had led them to this shift.

"I know," he told them. "I'm sorry. We're leaving."

Nigel sneezed. It was a wet, aggrieved sound, the kind that made clear he held someone entirely responsible for the last twenty minutes, and that someone was Malcolm.

Twenty minutes ago it had been a good evening.

A short walk before the Elevate party, the dog on his little leash trotting like a show pony down the ravine path behind the hotel, September cooling off the concrete, Malcolm in the one suit he actually liked.

He'd been thinking about nothing more urgent than whether the open bar would have anything brown and older than Nigel.

Then Nigel had spotted something in the brush — a shape, a rustle, a personal enemy — and lunged, and Malcolm had made the classic error of a man who trusts a fifteen-pound animal with his footing.

The something had been a skunk. The skunk had made its position clear.

Now the suit was a memory, Nigel smelled like a tire fire in a landfill, and Malcolm's phone had buzzed four times in his pocket, which meant Renata had graduated from texting to the special escalating fury she reserved for people who were about to be late.

He shifted the dog and answered on the walk to the elevator. "I'm aware."

"You are not aware," Renata said, "because if you were aware, you would already be in a cab.

Halveson's people confirmed. Halveson. The man does not come to these things.

He's coming to this thing, and you are going to be standing near him looking like someone who makes films, not someone who lost a fight in a parking garage. "

"I didn't lose." The elevator opened. He got in. The two housekeepers did not. "It was a draw. Nobody won."

A pause. Renata had known him fifteen years, long enough to hear the thing under the thing. "Malcolm."

"There was a skunk."

"There was a — is the dog with you?"

"The dog is very much with me. That's the problem. The dog is aggressively with me."

He heard her breathe out, the sound of a woman recalculating a plan. "Okay. Leave him. Shower, change, we lose the suit, you're forty minutes late but you're charming, nobody remembers late, everybody remembers charming—"

"I'm not leaving him in the room like this." Malcolm looked down. Nigel looked up, eyes bulging with the specific betrayal of a creature who did not understand what he'd done but knew he was being blamed for it. "Renata, he'll marinate. Housekeeping will find a crime scene."

"So you're telling me."

"I'm telling you I need an hour."

"You do not have an hour, you have a party where the single most important buyer in the building decided, for one night only, to leave his cave—"

The elevator hit the lobby. "I'll be there," Malcolm said, in the voice that closed rooms, the one he'd built a career on.

Warm, unhurried, certain. It worked on financiers and festival programmers and, most of the time, on Renata.

"Text me the address. Buy Halveson a drink.

Tell him I'm handling a talent emergency. "

"Your dog is not talent."

"He'd disagree." Malcolm hung up before she could.

The lobby of the Wardell was all brass and low gold light and people in very good clothes pretending not to look at each other, and every one of them looked at Malcolm, because Malcolm smelled like the apocalypse.

He walked to the concierge desk with the unbothered dignity of a man who had decided the only way through was to own it.

The concierge was young, gelled, and admirably professional. He did not visibly react to the smell, which Malcolm respected enormously.

"I need a groomer," Malcolm said. "Right now. Tonight. Emergency."

"Of course, sir." The kid was already typing. "The, ah — the spa we usually recommend closes at six."

"It's seven."

"Yes, sir." A beat. "There's a place in the east end. Leslieville. It says open till eight on—" He turned the screen a fraction, reading. "Clip Joint."

"That's a real name?"

"That's what it says."

Nigel chose this moment to shake, which did nothing except redistribute the horror and fling a droplet of it onto the pristine desk. The concierge looked at it the way a man looks at a spider he's decided to be brave about.

"Clip Joint," Malcolm said. "Great. Get me a car that'll take a dog that smells like this."

"That," the concierge said, with real feeling, "may take a minute, sir."

***

The bell over the door of Clip Joint was the kind of cheerful little chime that had no idea what was about to walk in.

The shop was small and sharp and clean in a way that surprised him — white subway tile, a long steel table under a window that faced the streetcar tracks, a wall of shampoos in colors like a paint store, everything smelling of oatmeal and something faintly sweet underneath.

There was a chalkboard that said TODAY'S SPECIAL: NO in confident cursive.

A radio was playing something with a lot of synth.

And there was a man behind the counter, back turned, coiling a hose, who said without looking up, "We close at eight and it's seven-forty, so whatever it is, the answer's already—"

Then he turned around and got the smell.

Malcolm watched it land. The man's whole face did something complicated and honest before he could stop it — the nose wrinkle, the flinch, the fast recovery — and then he was looking at the two of them, Malcolm in a ruined suit and Nigel steaming quietly in his arms, and one copper eyebrow went up like a drawbridge.

"Oh," the man said. "Oh, no. No, no. Absolutely not. It's Friday of the festival, I've done nine dogs and a cat that tried to kill me, and I am not — is that skunk? That's skunk."

"That's skunk," Malcolm agreed.

"On a Frenchie."

"On a Frenchie."

The man pressed his fingertips to the bridge of his nose.

He was maybe thirty, lean, wired for motion even standing still, hair a soft washed-copper that somebody had put real thought into.

Rings on most of his fingers, a black tank top, a canvas apron gone gray with a day's work.

There was a lot happening, deliberately, and Malcolm — who read people for a living, who could sit across a table from a man and know inside a minute what he wanted and what he was protecting — clocked the thing under all of it in about the time it took the door to swing shut.

The sparkle was real. It was also a wall. The man was watching Malcolm right back, sharp and fast, and none of that quickness reached his eyes, which had gone flat and careful the second he'd registered the suit, the watch, the whole out-of-towner-with-money shape of him.

Interesting, Malcolm thought, and then didn't have anywhere to file that, so he set it down.

"I'll pay whatever it costs," Malcolm said. "Double. I know it's late. I know it's a Friday. I have somewhere I'm supposed to be and I can't be there like this, and I can't leave him in a hotel room like this, and the internet says tomato juice—"

"The internet," the man said, "should be arrested.

Tomato juice does nothing. Tomato juice just makes a pink dog that still smells like skunk.

Whoever started that should be in prison.

" He came around the counter, still scowling, and crouched — not to Malcolm, to Nigel — and held out the back of one ringed hand.

"Hi, monster. Hi. You had a real bad night, huh. "

Nigel, who had spent the entire cab ride trembling and radiating grievance, leaned forward and put his flat wet face against the man's knuckles like he'd found the one person in the city who understood.

Something moved through the man's expression, quick, gone before it finished. He stood back up and the wall came with him.

"Okay," he said, to Malcolm now, and the warmth switched off like he'd hit a breaker.

"Here's the deal. It's peroxide, baking soda, dish soap — the real recipe, not the pink nonsense — and it's a whole thing, and it's going to take longer than you want, because if you rush it, it doesn't work and you've got a dog that smells like this for a week.

So. You're going to be late for wherever the suit is going.

Decide right now if you can live with that. "

Malcolm looked at him. At the flat eyes and the crossed arms and the decide right now, which was a test, obviously, a small mean little test to see if the fancy man would balk and leave.

"I can live with it," Malcolm said.

The man blinked. Just once. Recalibrating.

"Fine," he said. "Put him on the table. And take the jacket off, you're getting it on you either way and there's no saving it anyway, so."

"There's no saving it," Malcolm repeated, shrugging out of the ruined jacket. "You want to be gentle, it's had a hard night too."

That got him something. Not a smile — the man clearly rationed those like it was wartime — but a twitch at one corner of his mouth, there and gone. "It's a suit. It doesn't have feelings."

"You don't know this suit."

"I know it smells like a raccoon's regrets." He was already moving, pulling bottles off the wall, snapping on gloves, filling a basin, all of it fast and exact, no wasted motion. "Name."

"Malcolm."

"The dog, obviously. I don't care about you."

"Nigel."

The man's hands paused half a second over the basin. "You named a French bulldog Nigel."

"He came pre-named," Malcolm said. "Rescue. I inherited the Nigel situation. By the time I met him he'd already decided that was who he was, and honestly, who am I to argue. Look at him. He's a Nigel."

Nigel, on the table, had assumed a posture of deep tragedy, ears back, looking mournfully out the window at the streetcar like a widow in a period drama.