by Alyssa Day
“You’re not going to lose me,” I promised, and then I laughed. “Without me, you’d have to promote Dice to best friend, and you’d wind up beating her over the head with her own guitar. I consider it my civic duty to keep you out of orange jumpsuits.”
She gave me a side-eye. “Just so you know, I understand that you’re deflecting this serious conversation with humor, but I’m going to let you get away with it, because it’s a beautiful day out, and I’m in a good mood.”
With that, she turned on the radio and started singing along.
“Can I sing too?”
She shuddered. “Not a chance. Nobody’s mood is that good.”
She had a point, but it was still just a little bit hurtful.
*
My phone rang just as I was parking the car next to Molly’s in my driveway.
“Watch out for my mirror,” she shouted.
I slammed on the brakes.
Molly looked out her window at her car and then back at me, her eyes wide. “I don’t understand how you do it. There’s nobody else in the driveway. You could’ve parked with ten feet between our cars, and instead you manage to be so close that I have to climb over to the back seat to get out of here.”
“It’s a gift,” I said dryly, fumbling for my phone. It was Jack.
“Hey, Jack, what’s up?”
“Are you at home now?” His voice was grimmer than I’d ever heard it. “I need to know that you’re safe, Tess. Tell me where you are right now.”
I put the phone on speaker. “Molly’s here, Jack. We just pulled up to the house. What’s wrong?”
“Other than your parking skills,” Molly muttered.
I glared at her, and she stuck her tongue out at me.
“What’s wrong is that I went downtown to talk to the sheriff, to find out if they’d made any progress on Jeremiah’s case. I thought I’d ask him about the gun while I was at it, but I couldn’t get anywhere near the police station. It’s chaos down here.”
Molly quit smiling and started to look worried. “What do you mean, it’s chaos? What’s going on?”
“It’s Gator,” he said.
“Did you talk to him? What did he say? Do you think he had anything to do with Chantal?” The questions kept tumbling out of my mouth, but the tone of Jack’s voice was freaking me out, and I babble when I’m stressed.
“Tess.”
“Did he—”
“Tess. Stop. No, I didn’t talk to Gator. Nobody’s ever going to talk to Gator again. His head exploded.”
I watched the color drain out of Molly’s face and knew that mine was turning just as pale. “Jack, we must have a bad connection. I thought you said that Gator’s head exploded.”
We could hear shouting and alarm bells in the background, and the noise was like an exclamation point to the finality in Jack’s voice. “No, we don’t have a bad connection. His head exploded when he was in the jail cell alone. I caught Deputy Kelly for a few minutes before he ran down the street to get Doc Ike, and he told me.”
“So somebody shot him through the window? He shot himself with a gun they didn’t notice when they brought him in? There was a bomb?” I didn’t understand what Jack was trying to tell us.
“There was no gun. There are no windows in the cellblock. There was no shooting, no bomb. Gator’s head exploded on its own.”
“That’s not even possible,” Molly said, her voice shaking.
I thought back to the conversation that Jack and I’d had in the middle of the night. “It’s possible. But it means that black magic has come to Dead End, and none of us are safe.”
“I’m on my way out to you right now, Tess. Please go inside and lock your door. Molly, you too.” With that, he hung up, and Molly and I sat in the car staring at each other in shock.
“This is bad, Tess. This is really bad.”
“Jack is staying here at my house, as a kind of bodyguard. You should stay with us until we catch whoever’s behind this.” I was proud that my voice was only shaking a little bit.
Molly shook her head. “No, I’m headed to the airport in a couple of hours actually. We’ve got a gig and a meeting with a music exec in Chicago. I’ll be gone for a week.”
“Good. Then you’ll be safe from whatever the hell is going on around here.”
I silently turned the car back on and backed it up so she could open her door. We climbed out of my car, and she transferred her packages.
“You should come with me,” she said impulsively. “The hotel room’s paid for, and I have an expense account with the record company for the week. You can have a vacation—a real vacation—and get out of the line of fire at the same time.”
It was tempting. So very tempting. But I couldn’t do it. Even if I wanted to run away and leave Jack alone to figure this all out on his own, which I didn’t, I couldn’t do it. It would all just be waiting here for me when I got back, and I’d spend the entire week freaking out about what was happening in Dead End. On the other hand, it was a really good time to send Aunt Ruby and Uncle Mike on that Alaskan cruise she’d been talking about.
Molly could tell by the look on my face what I was going to say before I even said it, and she started trying to talk me out of my decision.
“Tess—”
“I can’t. I’m sorry, Molly, but I can’t. I have to stay here and help Jack figure this out. We have to make Dead End safe again, before any more dead bodies show up. Sheriff Lawless is useless, or he’s just not trying, and Susan doesn’t have the authority on her own.”
“You don’t have any authority, either,” Molly said, her voice almost hysterical. “You work at a pawnshop, Tess. You’re not Sherlock freaking Holmes.”
I shrugged. “I know. But maybe Jack is. Maybe that’s what all those years of mysterious awfulness you were mentioning has turned him into. Between the two of us, we’re going to find out what’s happening, and we’re going to stop it.”
“You call me every day, and text me twice a day,” she demanded.
I promised I would, and she hugged me, and then she jumped in her car and drove away, but not before I saw the tears in her eyes. It was like she thought she’d never see me again. Just thinking that scared me a lot. Standing there alone, I wasn’t nearly as brave as I’d pretended to be for Molly. I grabbed my packages and ran up the steps to my house, feeling as if I had a target painted on my back the entire way. By the time I got inside, I was so relieved to be in the house, with the door closed and locked, that I picked Lou up and sat down holding her right there in the middle of the floor. It took me at least five minutes to stop shaking, by which time my cat had had more than enough of being squeezed too tightly. She jumped out of my arms and up onto her favorite perch on the back of the couch.
I smiled a little and stood up. “You’re right, Lou. I’m overreacting. I’m in the house now, and Jack is on its way, and what happened to the biker guy in the jail has nothing to do with me.”
Except…his head exploded.
In a windowless jail.
Suddenly, I started shaking all over again.
Chapter Nineteen
Monday morning, I woke up with a pizza hangover and a plan. Jack and I’d stayed up till midnight, arguing things out and jotting them down on the whiteboard he’d brought from Jeremiah’s home office. Details of what happened at the jail must not have gotten out yet, because I didn’t have to spend any time talking Aunt Ruby off the ledge when she called me full of plans about the Alaskan cruise that I had no intention of taking. Then Jack turned back into a tiger and curled up on the floor next to my bed. I’d slept through the night without a single nightmare—at least, none that I remembered—so I felt pretty good.
I showered and dressed, getting ready for the day. I was going to work, naturally, but I’d promised to call Jack if anyone suspicious showed up in the shop. Jack was going to Jeremiah’s house to search through every piece of paper in his home office to find out if there were any records of the sale of the gun
to the sheriff. There was just something about that gun that felt like it was the key to a lot of things, but I wasn’t sure why.
In the kitchen, I poured myself a cup of coffee and looked at the whiteboard that was propped up on my desk, against the wall.
“It made more sense last night,” Jack said, standing in the doorway and tilting his head at the board. I noticed his hair was wet.
“I know. Half of what seemed like reasonable theories last night seem like wild speculation this morning. Did you go home?”
“Yeah, I went home for a shower, but first I went out patrolling. There’s no evidence that anyone was here during the night snooping around.”
“Did you expect there would be?” It was bad enough they’d been at my shop; I didn’t want them at my house. Not that the bad guys would care what I wanted. People who caused other people’s heads to explode probably didn’t worry about the niceties of a person’s sense of privacy.
He shook his head. “Not really, but I try to expect the worst. Then I’m more prepared for it.”
I drank some more of my coffee, staring at the board. “Okay. What do we have? Jeremiah and Chantal were killed the same way and left in the same place. The sheriff doesn’t seem to be able to find any clues to either murder.”
“The same sheriff, by the way, who mysteriously ended up with Jeremiah’s prized gun, with no good explanation of how he got it,” Jack added.
I poured bowls of cereal for both of us. Jack made a face, but I laughed at him. “I’m sorry, you carnivore, but we’re not having meat for breakfast today. I need to get to work soon.”
We sat down at the table, and I pointed my spoon at the board. “Back to the sheriff. He has a long history of arresting the Kowalski boys, and then suddenly he doesn’t anymore.”
“Hank Kowalski is dating Chantal. Gator is dating Chantal. Hank won the lottery or is coming into money, somehow. Walt, Hank’s brother, is suddenly overly interested in Shelley’s coin-find money. Chantal and Melody, Shelley’s mom, are friends,” Jack summed up.
Lou meowed at me from the corner by her food dish. I hopped up to give her some Fancy Feast, and then I walked over to the whiteboard and added a name.
“Olga Kowalski,” Jack said. “Why her?”
“She keeps coming up again and again. She performed the magical resonance testing on the shop after Jeremiah died. She took custody of Shelley after Melody died. And of course, she’s Hank and Walt’s mom.”
“You think she might have bribed the sheriff to quit arresting her boys?”
I looked at him. “And the sheriff used the bribe money to buy the gun from Jeremiah? It’s certainly possible, but why wouldn’t Jeremiah have told me that?”
“Maybe money problems? He was embarrassed? I don’t know. We’re still on square one when it comes to Jeremiah’s death.” He shook his head in disgust. “He sold the gun to the sheriff, so there was no reason for the sheriff to shoot him over that. Jeremiah didn’t have anything to do with the Kowalskis—neither Hank nor Walt, right?”
“Nothing that I knew about. He didn’t like them much, but in a general sort of way. Nothing specific.”
It was all making my head hurt. I was starting to feel like we were never going to figure it out, but I didn’t tell Jack that. I didn’t want him to think I was giving up hope. Even if, possibly, a tiny part of me was.
*
Unexpectedly, my day at work was perfectly ordinary. A nice, normal number of customers. Nobody tried to shoot me, stab me, or make my head explode. I was happily calling it a win when I realized that my standards for “ordinary” had lowered considerably. Gone right down the crapper, as Uncle Mike would say.
Just then, the phone rang. I glanced at the screen. Speak of the devil, er, engineer. “Hey, Uncle Mike. What’s up?”
“Did you hear about the man at the jail?”
I sighed. I’d known it would get out fast; I was only surprised it had taken this long. Belle must have been taking a day off yesterday.
“I did. It’s pretty scary. Is Aunt Ruby okay?”
“She doesn’t know about it yet. In fact, that’s why I’m calling. Her sister in Georgia has to go into the hospital. Some minor surgery that might turn out to be more. A biopsy, I think. Anyway, Ruby is really upset because her sister didn’t tell her about it until now, so we’re driving out there. We’re leaving in a couple of hours.”
“Don’t worry about anything, Uncle Mike. I’ll go out and feed the animals and—”
“No, you won’t. I’ve got that all set up with a neighbor. We trade off when either one of us goes out of town. But that’s not the point. We want you to come with us.”
I stared around the shop, feeling a big, fat case of déjà vu rush over me. First Molly, and now Uncle Mike. I knew they were trying to protect me, but still, I wasn’t all that happy about the way everyone seemed to think I could just walk out of my shop like it didn’t matter. Like my job was a hobby. I’d worked hard for several years to earn my manager position before Jeremiah died, and he’d clearly seen something deserving in me when he put me in his will. I wasn’t just going to up and abandon Dead End Pawn at the slightest sign of trouble.
Even for exploding heads.
Especially when the head that had exploded had no connection to me.
“Tess?”
“I’m not coming. Thank you for the offer, and thank you for caring about me. But that man in the jail had nothing to do with me, and I still need to find out who was threatening me and why, and what happened to Jeremiah. I’ve got Jack, which is like having my own one-tiger army, so you can quit worrying about me so much,” I said, with a lump in my throat.
It was a strange feeling, like part of me was finally growing up. I wouldn’t always be able to run to Uncle Mike to solve my problems and kiss my boo-boos. This was a problem I needed to solve myself.
“Ha. Quit worrying,” he scoffed. “Just wait till you have a child. You never stop worrying about them. Ever. I’m dropping the Remington off at your house on the way, with a box of shells. I’m sure soldier boy can remind you how to use it.”
I laughed, even though my eyes were burning a little bit. “Soldier boy? Really? You didn’t like Owen, and now you’ve got something against Jack too?”
“I liked Owen just fine. The boy just bored me to death. And are you trying to tell me something, comparing Jack to the dentist?”
Oh boy. I hadn’t even thought of that. Definitely not.
“Goodbye, Uncle Mike. Drive safely and text me when you get there. Give Aunt Ruby a kiss for me. And I promise to be careful, so you don’t even need to say it.”
He grouched and blustered a little bit more, but we both knew that he was going and I wasn’t. I’d passed some kind of threshold to independence, if only in my mind.
*
Jack showed up exactly at six, when I was locking up. He roared into the parking lot on his motorcycle and pulled up next to me with a flourish.
“Show-off,” I muttered. “Oh, look at me, I can park.”
Jack switched off the bike, removed his helmet, and grinned at me. “I heard that.”
“Stupid tiger hearing.”
“Actually, you’re right. A tiger’s sense of hearing is superior to all of our other senses. It’s the swiveling ears.”
I pointedly stared at first one, then the other, of his decidedly non-swiveling human ears.
“Yeah, it carries over to some extent, though. We’re also very sensitive to high-pitched sounds. That’s why your singing sounded like an animal in pain to me,” he said helpfully.
“Wow. Thank you so much for that. Should we go get dinner, then? Or will my high-pitched voice annoy you too much?”
Jack look confused, then sheepish. “You don’t sound high pitched when you talk… Ah. Sorry. You look great while you’re singing, though.”
“Too little, too late, buster.” I stomped off to my car, wondering how much singing lessons cost, and whether the basics—like terrible pitch
and the complete failure to recognize a song’s actual tune—were fixable. Then I decided I didn’t care, so I turned my radio on high and sang along with it all the way to town.
*
The special was fried chicken. Jack raised an eyebrow, and I nodded, so he asked for four specials. He must be running low on meat, or he was a really huge fan of cornbread.
“Shapeshifter metabolism,” he said. “We have to eat a lot, or we get cranky.”
“Pie’s on the house,” Lorraine said.
“What kind do you have?”
“I’ll bring you one of each, honey. Tess?”
“Just the special, thanks, Lorraine.” I handed her the menus that we hadn’t looked at and waited until she bustled off to ask Jack about his day.
He dumped the sugar packets out of the little porcelain box and started rearranging them one by one. “My day was a total bust. If Jeremiah ever had any records about that Colt, he doesn’t have them anymore. I would’ve thought he’d have paperwork about the history of the thing, at least, after the way he talked about it.”
“The provenance,” I said. “That’s the record of ownership. It helps prove authenticity. I know he had extensive documentation on the origin of the gun—newspaper clippings from the time period of the O.K. Corral and things like that. He showed them to me often enough.”
“He doesn’t have them anymore. Maybe he sold them to the sheriff along with the gun.” He slid the sugar box back and proceeded to dump out the tiny packets of jam and start building a tower with them.
“Did you find anything interesting at all?”
“Not really. Jeremiah was the opposite of a packrat. He had a big shredder in his office, and he clearly used it extensively. It was half full of paper, and his filing cabinets were neat and organized.”
I nodded. “I noticed that when I went in with Mr. Chen to look for the papers he needed for the estate, and to determine what Jeremiah’s final wishes were.”
