“You’ll be sorry,” Caprico suddenly snapped at Duke. “That bitch will wait until the most embarrassing moment possible and then she will do what she can to humiliate you.”
“I don’t think so,” Duke murmured. “But then, I don’t have to worry about her wanting to leave me because I’m such an abusive son of a bitch. I don’t hurt women. I find it an abominable trait in a man to hurt a woman. Only a coward feels it’s necessary.”
“Are you calling me a coward?” Caprico stood up and slammed both palms down on the tabletop.
“I don’t know,” Duke drawled. “Are you saying you were an abusive son of a bitch to Olivia? Because I believe I already know the answer to that question. And now that you’ve confirmed it, I think it’s a little ridiculous to think that you’re upset with her for leaving you at the altar. My guess is she tried to tell you before, probably many times, and I bet you wouldn’t listen. I bet you wouldn’t take the hint at all. I bet you were too full of yourself to possibly believe a woman could ever want to be with any man other than you. So, you made her go through with that wedding and that was when she did the only thing a woman has left to do when a man won’t take the hint. She made a public statement that the relationship was over.”
“Bastard!” Caprico launched himself across the table, his hands held out in front of him and his fingers curved like claws.
It was simple to just draw back out of range. Duke didn’t even stand up. He could just sit back in his hard plastic chair and watch Caprico do a face plant in the middle of the table. Caprico strained for a moment and then Detective Sellers swatted his shoulder and the gesture seemed to bring Caprico back to the moment.
“You know,” Sellers mused in a voice filled with sarcasm, “it’s still not really clear how your man Dunbar here managed to conveniently get Riley Saunders to shoot himself.”
“Conveniently?” Duke snorted. He had no doubt that they were going to try to turn this into a murder investigation. “You can waste as much time as you want trying to pretend this was anything other than self-defense and an accidental discharge, but you won’t get anything from me to support your theory. That man was going to kill Olivia and he would have happily killed me. And then he would have made it look like a murder-suicide pact and your lot would have happily believed it simply because you’re too lazy to look elsewhere and because that’s an easy way to get rid of someone you’re already angry with. This was about punishing Olivia because you’re not man enough to admit you were wrong.”
Duke was dancing on razor blades and he knew it. A little bit more of this guilt trip and they were going to make up some charges to stick Duke in jail and he would be stuck calling in favors from old law enforcement connections just to keep his ass out of jail.
Titus seemed to decide the same thing because he raised his hand and sent Duke a look of warning. “Look,” Titus began in a firm voice. “I don’t know what’s going on with your department. I just know that you let a very dangerous man out of your lockup last night on bond and now he’s dead because of your decision. Not only that, but he managed to nearly kill my client as well. So, I’m telling you now I take it pretty seriously when someone tries to kill one of my clients. Our firm runs on reputation. That’s not good for business. Is that understood?”
There was more sullen eye contact, but no nods. Not that Duke really thought Titus believed he would get any. Titus was already standing up and moving toward the exit. Duke rose and did the same. This was obviously not over, but it was done for the moment. Anything else and the policemen would just balk and find some way to get their petty revenge.
Duke followed Titus out of the building. He waited for his boss to say something when in reality, Duke was ready to hightail it out of there and get back to Olivia at the Moonrise. She and the other employees were packing up the Riley Saunders show. The donkey had gone to a foster home until they could find a place for him. The Siamese cat was still at large in the theater. It was going to take time, but Duke was willing to put in the effort.
“You go ahead,” Titus told Duke. “I think I’m going to stand out here and make a phone call just so they can see me doing it and wonder what in the hell I’m doing.”
“Great plan, boss,” Duke said.
Titus grinned. “Oh, and Duke?”
“Yeah?”
“I’m really happy for you about Olivia. She’s a great girl.”
Duke smiled and nodded. “She’s my angel.”
Chapter Thirty-Two
It was hot again. Titus shook his enormous gray head and felt his ear flap back and forth. He wasn’t really all that large as far as wolf shifter males went. Titus was more of a mid-sized wolf, but compared to a wild wolf, he would be enormous. And even compared to a large dog he would have seemed extremely oversized, like a Bullmastiff compared to a toy poodle. This meant he had to be careful with his tracks. He could not leave them in obvious places where passersby could chance stumbling upon them and start freaking out and calling animal control. Nothing ruined Titus’s day quite like animal control.
He stood in the trees less than a hundred yards from his own little house and listened to the night sounds around him. Raccoons scurried through the brush. An owl hooted from the top of a tree somewhere. There were rustlings from squirrels and gophers and probably even a few rabbits. A few drips from Titus’s fur hit the pile of last year’s leaves that he was standing in. In this climate, he sometimes felt as though he would never dry off after taking a swim in the lake. Talk about unpleasant. Nothing said gross like lake scum building up between your toes. But this was where Titus had settled and he had no doubt that shifters had suffered worse in their attempts to start up new communities in previously unclaimed territories.
The snap of a twig drew Titus’s attention away from the normal night sounds of animals and birds settling into their regular routines. That was not a regular twig snapping. Meaning that no animal was going to make such a noise. Nothing but a human animal anyway.
Titus shifted his stance and began creeping away from his position in the old leaves. He did not make a sound when he moved. His paws were utterly silent, their calloused and yet shockingly elastic pads whispering along the mixed terrain of rocks, grass, and leaves as he moved in the direction of Mrs. Ursuline Wankenfurter’s home.
The neighborhood was desirable for its remote location near the bottom of a slope above a finger of Tablerock Lake. The street had houses on both sides, but behind that was nothing but trees until the rocky slope plunged downward to the water and a cove with limited boat access and no docks. There were no dock associations with their inroads and parking and traffic to deal with there. Just the rocks and birds and trees. And now apparently, an intruder of some kind.
A breeze whispered against Titus’s face. It ruffled his whiskers and brought a strangely familiar scent to his nose. He could not be entirely certain, but he felt as though he could safely say that he’d smelled this before. He simply could not put his finger on where he’d smelled it. It wasn’t cologne or lotion, not a scent like that. It was something else. Industrial perhaps.
Another twig snapped.
Titus’s big wolf’s head turned one hundred eighty degrees to see what was behind him. Was the stalker bumbling around in the dark woods so badly that he had accidentally managed to get behind Titus?
Titus kept moving toward Mrs. Wankenfurter’s house. He had a fleeting memory of her bitching about intruders. He’d told her they were most likely raccoons. At the time it had seemed plausible. Now, he was beginning to wonder if she’d spotted something else entirely. Something a little more human in nature.
A shifter’s night vision was like that of any other predator in nature—excellent. He could see almost perfectly well in the dark. The terrain, the trees, and now the shape of something strange hunkered down behind the burn bins at the back of Mrs. Wankenfurter’s yard.
Inside the Wankenfurter house, Pugsley the pug was going absolutely insane with the task of barking the st
ranger away from his territory. Titus could see the creature on the back of Mrs. Wankenfurter’s sofa, his little body bouncing on the cushions with the force of each bark that left his tiny lungs. His tail trembled, going halfway straight and then curling up even tighter as he tried to get rid of the threat.
Titus could have gotten closer. He presence was completely hidden from the shape behind the burn bins. It was obviously a person. Obviously, someone doing something they shouldn’t have been. And yet, Titus could not stop thinking about the snapped twig behind him. What if all of this was a trap? Shifters did not get caught in traps. Why? Because they usually refused to engage. They had human brains in an animal body. What could be a better combination?
There was a snap. A sound like someone taking a picture. The click clack noise most definitely came from the creature hunkered down on the ground. A camera. Was that what Titus had been smelling? The scent of film instead of a digitized photograph? No. It wasn’t that.
Titus continued to back away. He turned and walked far around Mrs. Wankenfurter’s house and heard the sound of voices. Young women. There was a crackle of fire and the orange glow from the fire pit was glaring after all the darkness. A clink of a bottle. Wine. Titus could smell the slightly fermented scent of it on the night breeze.
“You know who deserves a ten on the hot scale?” An unfamiliar female voice suggested. “Kylie’s neighbor.”
“Kylie’s neighbor?” someone else chimed in. “Do tell. Which neighbor? Because from what I’ve seen when I’m over here, there are nothing but old farts living in this neighborhood.”
Kylie Overton’s familiar voice drifted through the night. “You two need to stop. I swear, he’s probably listening in. My neighbor Mrs. Wankenfurter keeps complaining that there’s a prowler hanging around at night. But I’m pretty sure it’s Titus Holbrook. He’s the prowler.”
“Whoa, so like a peeping Tom?”
There were feminine giggles. Their words should have given Titus pause. Kylie seemed to be dead on without even having a clue that she was right or why. But the urge to peek into the backyard through the privacy fence was overwhelming and Titus didn’t really want to resist anyway. He was curious now. What did young women say or do when they were alone? It was one of the great mysteries of the world really.
Titus crept closer to the six foot privacy fence. There were trees growing up rather close to it, the result being a tangle of underbrush and limbs that would have made a squirrel faint from the stress of trying to sneak past. Finally though, Titus found a small crook in one tree’s trunk.
Placing his front paws on the crook in the tree, Titus levered his body carefully up and into the tree. He braced his back paws in the crook and lay his body flat on the bent limb hanging low over the other side of the fence.
Now he could see with a surprising amount of accuracy. He had never peeked into Kylie’s backyard before. It was like an oasis. She plainly spent a lot of time out there. Along with her fire pit and a collection of comfy looking Adirondack chairs, there were some foot rests and a table and chairs sat on another rounded part of the patio with the umbrella down and covered for storage. The ladies were all seated in lounge chairs a decent distance from the fire pit. They had glasses of wine in their hands and someone had placed a bowl of fruit nearby. It looked as though Titus had stumbled upon a party. There were four women in total. He recognized them in a vague sort of way, but could not place them as people he’d seen around town or hanging out at Kylie’s house.
“I’m not sure I would call my neighbor a peeping Tom,” Kylie said slowly. “I can’t see him running around with his fly open jerking off because he finds out that someone left the blinds open while they were taking a shower. More like he’s creepy in a stalker sort of way.”
A stalker sort of way? It was tough now to just sit there on the branch of that tree and listen to them be silly. Even though he was totally peeping right now, Titus refused to classify himself as a peeping Tom. She was right; he wouldn’t be trying to get glimpses of his neighbors while they were naked in the shower or anything. Even the thought of Mrs. Wankenfurter without her muumuu was horrifying.
“I tell you what,” one of Kylie’s friends said through her giggles, “I think we should go over to his house and try to peep on him. The man is yummy! I can’t believe you haven’t tried to get a piece of that action, girl. Umm um!”
“I second that idea,” someone else agreed. “We could just see if he’s taking a shower.”
“Oh, and what would you do then?” Kylie asked in a tone filled with exasperation. “Ask him to come over in a towel and fix a lightbulb?”
One of the ladies raised her hand and waved it in the air. “I will break a lightbulb if that’s what it takes.”
“Don’t be silly,” Kylie muttered to them all. “Yes, it’s true, Titus Holbrook is hot. The man is like sex on a stick. If someone told me he was actually a male escort who made millions a year just looking at a girl in order to make her panties wet, I would believe it.”
“So?”
“That’s just physical attraction, remember?” Kylie sounded scornful now. “There’s more to life than getting a good man between your legs. I’ve had some great sex, but I’ve never met a man I wanted to spend more than a night with.”
“Honey, you reek of bitterness.”
Kylie seemed unperturbed by this description. “Yeah? Maybe I do.”
They continued to talk and Titus ignored their rant about his biceps and tried to focus on Kylie. There was something very sad about her. He could not help but remember all of the times she had tried to make sure Titus wasn’t scaring Mrs. Wankenfurter or that Titus was going to remember he had volunteered to make some kind of dish for the neighborhood Halloween party. Kylie was polite and unassuming and Titus kind of liked her.
The crack of a twig brought Titus back to full awareness of the forest around him. The dark shape had moved. Titus knew this without being anywhere near Mrs. Wankenfurter’s house because the shape was directly beneath him. He held his breath and remained very, very still.
Someone was stalking them. That much was obvious. The old woman and her nosy pug had been right. As the individual in black leaned forward to peer through a tiny crack in the fence, Titus had the bizarre urge to drop out of the tree directly onto the unwanted visitor.
Another click clack noise from the camera below. Titus was sure of it. But why would someone be taking pictures of the people on Hawthorne Lane? It wasn’t like they were celebrities. There was no story there. Nobody was hiding a secret life. Well, nobody but Titus.
He peered down below him and felt his heart beginning to slow down as the individual did not look up, but moved around to the other side of Kylie’s backyard instead. Inside the yard, the conversation had stopped. Titus waited. It was time for him to go. But he couldn’t leave before he was sure the intruder had moved on to the next target.
“Hush,” Kylie whispered from inside the yard. “Do you guys hear that?”
“Hear what?”
“It sounds like someone is out there on the other side.” Kylie’s voice was shifting in tone and tempo as though she were getting up to investigate. “Hand me that flashlight, please?”
“You’re nuts, Kylie! Are you going out there?”
“It’s probably just a raccoon,” Kylie reasoned. “I want to go scare it off before it dumps my trashcan and makes a total mess.”
“It might be rabid,” came the whispered warning of her friend. “Ohmigod, do you know what happens if you get rabies?”
There was a round of ridiculous gasps. Below Titus’s position in the tree, he watched the prowler in black stiffen as Kylie’s footsteps crunched over the gravel path leading to what appeared to be a back gate. The latch squeaked. Titus remained utterly still. He was a wolf in a tree. That was hardly a normal sight to see, but he wasn’t necessarily afraid of Kylie seeing him. He had no idea what the prowler might do if he was found.
The prowler began to back away
bit by bit, inching backwards in the darkness. But there was nowhere to go. Kylie had gotten the gate open and was less than five yards off. Five yards covered in tangled brush, tree limbs, dead and fallen leaves and other forest refuse from the tangled hillside.
A beam of light cut through the darkness. Kylie’s flashlight swinging back and forth as she no doubt searched for tiny eyes that would shine in the darkness.
The prowler made a low sound. A curse. Titus watched in fascination as the unknown stranger realized he or she was stuck in the brush. At the last second, the prowler seemed to hunker down low to the ground. Hiding its face, the individual seemed to become part of the rocks and brush. The rough black clothing blended well with the hillside and Kylie’s light went over the bump but did not stop.
So involved in the scene below, Titus did not realize his danger until it was too late. The swath of light cut abruptly upwards and spotlighted Titus in the tree.
“Holy, shit!” Kylie breathed. “How in the hell did you get up there?”
Titus didn’t pause to answer her question. He ran. Bounding out of the tree, he made no small amount of noise as he sprinted back down the hillside to the lake. He cut a wide path around the houses of Hawthorne Street and did not stop running until he was safely at the edge of his own property in a tiny hollowed out spot he’d made for just the purpose of shifting from human to wolf and back.
Titus had accidentally exposed himself to his neighbor. Sort of. What would come of it he might never be able to guess.
Rock Wolf Investigations: Boxset Page 24
