Her Detective Wolf

by Alice C. Summerfield

  Ajax grunted again.

  “Do you even like coffee?”

  “Three creams and a sugar,” he rasped and then winced.

  “I’ll remember it for next time,” she said, and he nodded, making her heart glow with happiness. Apparently, could be a next time.

  Breakfast was a quiet affair, but Tessa didn’t mind. Ajax’s head was probably ringing.

  When they were nearly done, Tessa got a text message. Her red soda pop top stools were not only on their way, the delivery guy was about twenty minutes out from her place.

  To Ajax, she said “Hey, I’ve got to go back to my apartment. The stools are going to be delivered soon.”

  He nodded then winced, clearly regretting it.

  “I’ll come with you.”

  “You go ahead and get cleaned up,” said Tessa. “When you’re ready, you’ll know where to find me.”

  Briefly, Ajax looked torn. Then he nodded, winced, and stuffed a handful of cooling fries in his mouth. Tessa tried not to laugh.

  That plan, of course, necessitated going up to her apartment to wait for someone to deliver the aforementioned stools, something that set Tessa’s heart to pounding in her chest before she’d even cleared the stairwell.

  It was ridiculous. She wasn’t the one that had been attacked and beaten up in their apartment. Everything that had happened to her in that apartment had been creepy or annoying, but not particularly dangerous.

  And someday, when the case was solved, she was going to have to move out of Ajax’s apartment. On that day, she was probably going to have to move back into this place. She had had to work for everything that she had ever had, and all of her thrifty, hardworking soul rebelled at wasting the money that it would take to break the lease. She was going to have to suck it up and live in her cursed apartment.

  I just need to get comfortable here again, thought Tessa, as she shoved her apartment’s key into the lock. I just need for bad things not to happen here sometimes. And, hey, there is no time like today. Today, nothing bad is going to happen inside of this apartment.

  Tessa sent up a quick prayer to anyone friendly who might be listening that she was right, that nothing bad either happened here while she was still here, and that nothing bad had happened here while she was out.

  But if something bad has to happen here today, and there’s to be a choice, added Tessa, then I would prefer it if whatever bad thing was slated to happen in this apartment had already happened, while neither I nor Madison was here to be on the receiving end of it. Amen.

  Prayer finished, she twisted the key in its lock and shoved the door open. As it did not immediately catch on anyone’s dead or unconscious body, she chose to consider herself on a roll.

  Inside, the place looked more or less like it had the last time that she had been in there: disheveled, the tidy patches drawing attention to themselves for their exceptionality.

  Telling herself that she was only a little afraid – and that her apartment definitely wasn’t cursed with bad luck – Tessa forced herself to go inside. She gave the place the quickest once over of her life, finding neither corpses nor bloody lettering in any of the rooms.

  Frankly, it was a relief.

  Then, to keep moving (and maybe keep the apartment’s bad luck from catching up with her), Tessa began picking up. Just because she hadn’t spent much time there lately was no reason to let the delivery guys think that she was a slob.

  And it was better than doing nothing while she waited for her ridiculous red soda pop top stools, which were proving more of a hassle than she had originally anticipated when she’d bought them.

  They’d better look as fantastic in this space as I’d imagined, thought Tessa grumpily.

  If they didn’t, she was going to be disappointed.

  Ajax showed up when they were lugging the last two of her stools into her apartment. Flashing him a quick smile, Tessa signed for the stools and tipped the delivery men, sending them on their merry way before she turned all of her attention on Ajax.

  He smiled at her. “So, now we have your stools.”

  “What do you think?” asked Tessa. “Worth the trouble?”

  “They’re neat,” he said, casting a look at the stools in all their bubble wrapped glory. “Very… you.”

  Tessa narrowed her eyes at him. “Is that an insult?”

  “No,” he said quickly. He smiled at her, that same sweet smile but slow this time. “I like you very much.”

  Tessa beamed back at him, her face hot and her heart happy. For a moment, she was tempted to say something sappy like ‘I like you too.’

  What she actually said was “How much would you like to help me carry one of my cool, new, very ‘me’ stools downstairs?”

  When they left the apartment, they took a stool with them. That, after a certain amount of effort on both of their parts, was stowed in Tessa’s spacious trunk.

  The day’s plan was to go pick up her hopefully now framed painting from Michael’s then swing by the furniture appraisal places to get her red soda pop top stool evaluated. If they were lucky, maybe persuade at least one of those local galleries to look at the painting today. And somewhere in there, Tessa planned to eat lunch. Dragons rarely skipped meals.

  They were on their way to the Michael’s when Tessa’s cell phone rang. Ajax picked it up from its customary place in the cup holder and glanced at its screen.

  “It says Sharkbytes,” he reported.

  “Then I leave it to you,” said Tessa cheerfully.

  Ajax answered the cell phone and, putting the device on cell phone mode, said “Did you manage to find something so quickly?”

  “I was under the impression that this was extremely time sensitive,” returned Sharkbytes.

  “It is!” exclaimed Tessa.

  “And that’s why I gave it a higher priority in my workload,” added Sharkbytes. “Your Mr. Lee – the one whose stuff sold out almost immediately? Tessa you bought the painting from his lot.”

  “I remember!”

  “Yeah, well, he’s been living well beyond his reported means. Over the last forty years, he took a lot of exotic trips that seem to coincide with valuable paintings or other art objects going missing.”

  “Oh,” said Tessa, surprised. “That sounds ominous.”

  “It sounds like he’s a thief,” said Ajax flatly. “Good at his trade, perhaps, but a thief nonetheless.”

  “Well, he was,” stressed Sharkbytes. “A couple months back, Mr. Lee had a heart attack and died unexpectedly. His grand-niece and grand-nephew inherited everything. They put his estate through probate and got rid of all of Mr. Lee’s unwanted odds and ends – mostly, via that junk shop of yours.”

  “And I bought his painting,” said Tessa.

  “Which is probably worth a lot more than you paid for it,” said Sharkbytes. “Probably tens or even hundreds of millions, judging by my preliminary list of things that have gone missing while Mr. Lee was in the same city as them.”

  “That’s the kind of money that makes a person dangerous. It makes harassing you – and beating up your roommate – worthwhile,” said Ajax grimly. “And it explains why they kept coming back to your apartment: because the painting wasn’t there to steal yet.”

  “How would they have even known any of this stuff?” asked Tessa.

  “Given the stakes of his work, it’s unlikely that he was working entirely alone,” said Ajax. “He died unexpectedly – and probably before they could get the painting or any of the other stuff that they were holding at his place – to their fence, so they had to bide their time and wait for the opportunity to buy or steal it back. I’d lay dollars to donuts that Mr. Lee’s niece and nephew also suffered some unsolved break-ins and thefts – assuming that they kept any particularly nice keepsakes from their relative’s house, that is.”

  “So, what are we going to do?”

  “Call the police,” said Ajax swiftly. “And then go get your painting, before they figure out where it is and steal
it back.”

  A few quick, but heartfelt, thanks to Sharkbytes, and then Ajax used Tessa’s cell phone to call the police, arranging with some of his colleagues to meet them at the Michael’s where Tessa had taken her painting to have it reframed.

  The strip mall in which that particular Michael’s was located had been built with two lanes in and two lanes out, a narrow median separating the two sets of pairs from each other. In front of the strip mall lay a large parking lot, and behind it a narrow alley that connected the loading dock behind the store with the front parking lot and a nearby side street.

  That morning, the parking lot at the front of the strip mall was maybe three-fourths full of parked cars, not to mention the pedestrians and cruising vehicles.

  Tessa frowned, not liking the look of things at all. To her mind, all of those cars and shopping carts and people represented a sea of accidental sideswipes, escaped carts traveling at ramming speed, and careless door openers, all lying in wait to ding her sweet ride.

  Not on my watch, thought Tessa grimly, as she parked at the very back of the lot.

  “You definitely have a thing about parking at the very back of any given lot,” remarked Ajax, as they got out of the car.

  “I like the exercise.”

  “Really? I assumed it was because you were worried about your car.”

  Tessa smiled. “That too.”

  “Mostly that,” countered Ajax, and Tessa’s smile widened into a grin.

  She liked that he knew her so well.

  Today, Michael’s was bustling with shoppers. With Halloween over, Thanksgiving and Christmas were now just around the corner, after all. There was suddenly a very finite number of days in which to find the perfect gift or decoration or stocking stuffer, and everyone seemed to be feeling it.

  Tessa led Ajax to the back of the store, past sixty percent off plastic pumpkins, twenty-five percent off cookie cutters, several rows of fake flowers, and several full price Christmas displays. There, behind aisles and aisles of picture frames, they found the framing counter.

  To Tessa’s relief, her picture was framed and ready to go. And to her delight, it looked amazing in its new frame. Love it or hate it, it was going to look good in her space. Well, it would have, had things been different. As things were, Tessa had the feeling that her strongest feeling about that painting was going to be relief, when she saw the backside of it. Love it or hate it, that painting had made her life unduly stressful.

  Although it wasn’t all bad, thought Tessa, sliding a look sideways at Ajax, while the associate helpfully wrapped her purchase up for her.

  She loved that painting – or possibly hated it. A week later, her feelings on the matter were still too strong and too jumbled to be easily defined – so of course she managed to own it for all of five hundred meters. That was about how long it took for disaster to strike.

  One moment, they were walking back to her beloved Sweetie, the next, Ajax disappeared under a tangle of bodies in casual summer wear. Tessa just had time to gape at him – at them, really – when there was a wrench on her painting.

  Tessa yelped, her attention swinging back to her painting. Her hands had automatically tightened on it, but apparently not enough to keep it in her hands as, with a twist and another sharp jerk, the painting was liberated from her hands by a man in a faded red-pink t-shirt.

  He bolted, shoulder checking Tessa as he ran past her.

  Under the force of the blow, she staggered and gasped, all the air knocked out of her. A long, spine-chilling howl rang out, and several figures went sailing past her in a blur of motion. They landed hard, dirt and parking lot debris flying up around them as they skidded down the pavement.

  That thief was getting away with her painting.

  Scowling, Tessa chased after him.

  Behind her, there was another spine-chilling howl, and then a blur of motion raced past her, one that tackled the thief.

  It was only when he stilled that Tessa got a good look at him. His tongue lolling out, a wolfman sat on the thief’s back. Nearby, the painting lay on the pavement.

  The wolfman looked almost like he was laughing.

  Ajax! Tessa thought, amazed.

  There was definitely a difference between knowing a guy was a werewolf and seeing it for herself.

  Abruptly, her wolfman snarled and, half turning, Tessa saw that it was because the rest of the thief’s gang was getting away. As she watched, they all crammed themselves into an old Volkswagen bug.

  That, at least, was something that Tessa could do something about.

  Leaping into the air, Tessa transformed. In a serpentine whip of movement, Tessa propelled herself forward. She landed in an almighty crash on the getaway vehicle, its steel frame buckling and squealing under the pressure of her additional weight.

  Under her butt, there was no way that that car was going anywhere.

  Pleased, Tessa flashed all of her pearly whites at the wolfman, who howled a long, warbling note as his response to her. Tessa hoped that it meant something good.

  It had better mean something good, at any rate, she thought grumpily, as the remnants of one of the car’s windows was kicked out. A slim figure in black slid through the narrow gap –

  – and was delicately plucked up by one of Tessa’s clawed forepaws.

  For some reason, having seen such a thing, the rest of the gang was less willing to try to make a run for it. Clearly, they didn’t trust her half as much as Ajax did.

  Rude, thought Tessa, smoke curling around her long muzzle.

  But then, what more could you expect from a group of people who tried to steal a girl’s best painting?

  The actual police who were on actual duty and not recovering from a traumatic brain injury arrived about three minutes late – and thirty-three million dollars short, as it turned out. Ajax, in the torn up remnants of his clothes, didn’t tease them about it too much.

  For herself, Tessa was glad that it was over. And, now once again human and snugly wrapped in a policeman’s long coat, she had a few questions. Starting with “So how do you think they found us here?”

  “There are a lot of ways that they could have followed us here,” said Ajax, his arm briefly tightening across her shoulders. “They could have had a multi-person tail on us or a friend in the phone company track our cell phones. My money, though, is on a tracker, specifically one attached to your car somewhere.”

  “Well, now I’m going to have to have my car detailed by someone else,” complained Tessa. “I wouldn’t even begin to know what one of those looked like.”

  Ajax laughed. When he looked down at her, the look in his eyes was one that might have been unabashed fondness. Under it, Tessa felt her heart swell and warm, just like when she went to blow fire, but not nearly so destructively.

  Briefly, Ajax nuzzled into her hair, murmuring against the shell of her ear, “Don’t worry about it. If there’s a trace on your car, our lab techs will find it. You won’t have to let someone else at your car with a scrub brush.”

  “Good thing too,” said Tessa, only semi-seriously. Or half-joking, depending on how you looked at it. “My car deserves only the best!”

  And Ajax laughed. He dropped a kiss on her temple, and if Tessa were any sort of feline shifter, she was positive that in that moment, she would have been purring. Instead, she settled for snuggling into his side, her arm around his waist and his around hers.

  If this was her future, one where she stood arm in arm with Ajax, then it wouldn’t be an unhappy one, at all. In fact, Tessa couldn’t wait to get to it.

  But first, a new bra. A girl liked to look her best when trying to pick up the man of her dreams.

  Chapter 12 – Ajax

  The wheels of justice turned inexorably, but very, very slowly. Ajax had absolutely no intention of waiting until they were fully done with all the legal proceedings surrounding the gang of art thieves to ask Tessa out. That would have taken months, if not years, to sort out.

  He did, howe
ver, wait just long enough for the preliminary investigation to be completed.

  By then, however, Tessa had disappeared from the apartment complex.

  Fortunately for him, Ajax was a detective, and a cracking good one too.

  He also remembered the name of her band. That helped, too.

  And so, on a particularly wet Saturday night, Ajax found himself clutching a beer in a bar packed with bikers, drunkards, and men just looking for a bar fight. The band was set to play in a cage, which, to Ajax’s mind, probably wasn’t a good sign for how the evening was most likely to progress.

  At least they take the band’s security seriously, he thought, trying to console himself. And hey, they sprung for a live band.

  Clearly, this place wasn’t the hole that it looked, smelled, and otherwise appeared to be.

  And then the band was announced, and Ajax forgot to be disgruntled, forgot even to breathe, because there was Tessa Johnson in all her punk rocking glory looking unspeakably hot as she took up her instrument. He didn’t know if it was her leather pants, which looked like they had been painted on, or her black shirt, which was entirely backless except for the pair of buckled straps that held it in place or the fact that he’d never seen her in red leather pants or a backless black top, but looking at her then, Ajax wanted nothing more to howl at her like she was the moon, throw her over his shoulder, and carry her off.

  He settled for watching her set instead.

  His blood at a low simmer, Ajax watched as his girl strutted and sang and strummed her guitar, a guitar hero in life as well as games. The band’s music wasn’t half bad, either, although if asked, Ajax would have sworn that the base player was not only the hottest person in the room, but probably carrying everyone else in the band too. But then, he’d played guitar hero with her. He knew how nimble her fingers; how powerful her power ballad could be. And he was highly partial in her favor. Looking up at her on stage, as she jammed on her guitar and sang her lyrics and was generally a punk goddess, Ajax was surprised to discover that he could be even more attracted to her.