Either way, Angel had definitely loosened up about her car.
She’d really loosened up if she was taking it to a crime scene. I knew a time when she would have called a cab rather than risk scratching her baby by taking it somewhere filled with hotshot cops in city vehicles and lab-rat CSI guys and whatever else.
Maybe she got tired of looking at the thing parked in a garage and only wiping it down with an oiled diaper once a week. Nick used to always bitch at her about that, telling her what a waste it was, to leave an engine like that up on cinderblocks, essentially, and not drive it.
Or maybe something else had changed.
I knew the car had sentimental attachment for Angel. She’d fixed it up with her father before he died, so it was her last real connection to him.
I could understand that. I had nothing of my parents.
I used to envy her for having this.
When I glanced over next, Black was looking at me.
Before I could look away, he leaned closer, kissing me on the mouth. The kiss grew warmer, then deepened before I thought about whether I should let it. Then I decided I didn’t care about that either. When he parted my lips with his tongue, kissing me harder, I wrapped my arms around his neck. The next time he paused, I was stroking his hair with my fingers.
I’ll let you rip apart my motorcycle and put it back together if you want, doc, he sent, smiling faintly. I’ve got a few classic cars, too. Pick one.
I kissed his neck, leaning my face against his.
I’m sorry, I told him softly. About before.
His fingers tightened in my hair, and I felt that warmth on him flare.
Softer still, I added, I love you.
Pain ribboned out of him. It hit me intensely enough that my breath caught. He kissed me again, harder, but I could feel myself losing touch with myself again, losing touch with the car. It scared me, given where we were. That fear forced me to break off the kiss.
He didn’t seem to mind. Or maybe he just felt why I’d done it.
Either way, when I looked up, he smiled. Kissing my cheek, he pressed his face into mine.
Thank you for saying that... gaos, he sent, soft. He kissed me again, then met my gaze, his eyes more serious. I want to talk later. About the other thing.
Glancing up, I studied his eyes. Realizing I already knew what he meant, I nodded, forcing myself to relax. I know. And you’re right. We should.
I want to talk about what you need from me, to make that real... because it’s real to me, doc. It’s real now.
Meeting his gaze, I nodded again, swallowing. Okay. I understand...
But he wasn’t finished.
I’m willing to wait on making it formal with everyone else, he added, still caressing my jaw with a finger. I’m willing to wait for as long as you need... I mean that... but not forever, doc. And not if it means I’m pretending what happened with us didn’t happen.
I met his gaze and he shrugged, his gold eyes studying mine, intently enough that I knew his casualness was at least partly a front, if not an out and out lie. At the very least, he’d muted what lay behind it, dialing it down to where I couldn’t feel it well enough to react.
I knew he was probably doing it to keep both of us from freaking out again.
I was still watching him look at me when he went on carefully.
Eventually, I want us to tell your friends. His thoughts remained calm, borderline neutral. ...In whatever way you want to do that, doc. I want to tell my friends... and the people at the firm. I want to make financial arrangements so there’s no confusion there, either... and I want to talk about living arrangements, doc. When you’re ready.
Meeting the seriousness in his eyes, I nodded again, swallowing harder.
I couldn’t hold the intensity there, though, and looked away, biting my lip as the reality of what he was telling me started to overwhelm me again. When I averted my eyes from his that time, I saw Angel smiling at the two of us, looking between our faces again.
“You two are ridiculously cute, you know that?” she said, grinning. “Do I even want to know what you’re scheming about together right now? Or is it X-rated?”
I leaned back in the bucket seat, feeling my face warm.
Then, some part of me said fuck it.
Looking down at where Black’s hand rested, meaning the one that wasn’t currently wrapped around the back of my neck, I saw it laying on the storage space between the seats. Impulsively, I caught hold of it with both of mine, pulling it into my lap. Once I had it there, I wove our fingers together, my right hand with his left, caressing his long fingers and the few rings he wore with the fingertips and thumb of my other hand.
Black’s eyes shifted down, watching me do it.
Then I felt a pulse of heat expand off his light, coupled with that denser relieved feeling, and what definitely felt like desire. That desire grew liquid, then into a fire-like thread, right before he muted it, blocking me gently from his mind as he forced it back. I watched him close his eyes, letting it shift into a warmer affection when he glanced at me next.
Then he squeezed my hand and fingers in his, shifting his back somewhat to lean his weight against me openly. He left his hand in my lap, shifting his body and arm into a different angle to keep it there. Resting his head on my shoulder, he stroked my fingers with the same hand, merging into me in some way that caught my breath all over again.
I was still adjusting to the change in him when he looked back at Angel.
“I want to meet Anthony,” he said.
Angel turned her head, staring at him. “Excuse me?”
“Anthony,” he said. “That’s your boyfriend, right? I want to meet him.”
I couldn’t help it that time.
Seeing the startled look on Angel’s face, I burst out in a laugh.
Thirteen
WINGED DRAGON
NICK WAS RIGHT about it being easy to find him.
Cop cars covered the whole drive behind the Stow Lake boathouse, a long, brown, shoe-boxed shaped building with fake green board-lines painted on the sides and fake red and white sashed windows painted in a row below a peaked roof. Those painted windows and green-striped walls made the structure look like something that had once been part of a retro, Swedish-themed amusement park ride or maybe a low budget ski lodge from the 1950s.
I hadn’t been here in years. Zoe used to love coming here when we were kids.
“You sure there’s not a body here, doc?” Angel muttered as she pulled the Barracuda behind a black and white with its bar-lights flashing silently. She peered up over the steering wheel, leaning forward to look up at the upper floor of the boathouse before her eyes returned to all of the vehicles parked there. “This is a lot of uniforms. What did Nick say, exactly?”
I shook my head, but not in disagreement. “He said no body. Maybe he couldn’t tell me on the phone?” I glanced at Black, partly in question, but he was looking out the window too and didn’t return my gaze.
Angel frowned. She peered out over her steering wheel again, but didn’t say anything that time as she pulled the emergency break and turned the engine off.
“It’s a body. Just not a person,” Black said cryptically, giving me a glance.
When I gave him a puzzled look in return, he inclined his head, sliding over on the seat and popping the latch to open the back door. He waited for us to get out, then motioned with his head for us to follow him around the side of the boathouse towards the lake.
Apparently he already knew where the party was.
We took the path around the building, Angel nodding at a few of the uniform cops without slowing her pace. I glanced around the sea of uniforms without really seeing any of them. Like Angel, I was more bewildered by the sheer number of them. As we walked towards the water, I glanced up and saw what all of them were muttering about.
Whatever it was, it smelled bad.
At first I doubted my eyes, then I realized Black was right. Whatever that thing was, it
definitely had been alive once. It also very definitely wasn’t a person.
For one thing, it was way too big.
Some kind of... animal hung out over the water.
I stared up at it, lost somewhere between shock and trying to identify what exactly I was looking at.
The corpse hung from a hook and chain wrapped around a thick wooden beam that jutted out past the edge of the sidewalk and over the water. I had no idea how a person could have gotten it up there, but I suspected they must have used some kind of crane or pulley to do it, because it had to weigh close to a thousand pounds. A giant metal hook had been forced through the middle of the creature’s upper chest to keep it hanging and that hook had torn through a good foot of flesh just from the weight of the thing.
The beam itself was connected just under a peaked section of the roof on one side, supported by two green metal struts in an A-frame shape. I had no idea what the beam was for, but from the weathering and the fact that it looked roughly the same age and color as the building, it had to be a pre-existing part of the boathouse structure.
My eyes returned to whatever hung there.
It wasn’t just one thing, I realized, the longer I stared.
It was more like an assembly of things, like parts that had been stitched together into a gruesome Frankenstein’s monster.
Something about the overall assembly struck me as vaguely familiar.
After a few more seconds I found myself pulling apart the different aspects of it, recognizing the different pieces as belonging to different animals. It was like a crazed taxidermist had sewn together five or six different large animals––then painted them all the same bright, jeweled colors to make them seem like they belonged together, all part of a single thing.
The biggest part now looked to me like an enormous reptile, probably a crocodile or an alligator. Whatever it was, it looked over fifteen feet long. The thickly scaled abdomen had been cut open, displaying lumpy, ropey intestines that partly spilled down into the water and partly onto a white and orange paddleboat that floated in the water directly below.
From the reptile’s back, giant, feathered wings had been attached, and then painted to match the alligator’s torso. Stretched out on wooden sticks, glittering abnormally bright with metallic blues and greens and scarlet and sunset-orange paint, the wings had to be close to twelve feet in span, although that might have been exaggerated by the width of the reptile’s body. The mouth of the alligator had been cut so it opened abnormally wide, filled with sharp, triangular teeth covered in blood and more paint.
Nick frowned when he saw the three of us walking towards the water. I saw him say something to the people he stood with, right before he left the cluster of plainclothes detectives to approach us. Mozar stood in that group, I couldn’t help noticing.
I also noticed that all of those detectives, Mozar included, appeared to be staring at Black.
Mozar glanced at me a few seconds later as well, a strangely intent look on his face––then he went right back to staring up at Black.
He looked at him like he was trying to make up his mind about something. Or maybe like he’d already made his mind up about something and was now confirming that decision. He also stared at Black like he was trying to remember every detail of his face and appearance.
Nick walked right up to Black, too, giving Angel and me bare nods. Surprised at all the looks he was getting, my eyes shifted to Black as well, only to find him frowning up at the thing hanging over the water, a strange expression on his face.
I started wondering if I should read that group of detectives standing there, if only to figure out what the hell was going on. But something about the expression on Black’s face made me double-take him instead.
“What?” I said. “What is it?”
He shook his head perceptibly, then glanced at Nick who now stood in front of him. Whatever the look on his face meant, Nick seemed to understand it.
“Is it the same?” Nick asked him.
Black frowned. Giving me a bare glance, he looked back at Nick.
“Pretty close,” he muttered.
Nick sighed, looking back at Mozar and the others.
“Yeah, I thought so too,” he said. He looked up at Black. “They’re going to want to see it, Black. And photograph it.” Nick grunted, folding his arms. “Half of them are wondering if you’re good for it now. Mozar looked up your military record.”
Black nodded, not answering.
He didn’t seem surprised though.
I was looking between them, bewildered, when suddenly it hit me what they were talking about. I looked back up at the creature hanging off that giant hook, at the colors, the pose it had been wrenched into with wire and wood and a spear-like pole through the tail, making it into a curl under the wing on the right side.
I knew now, why it looked so familiar.
“What is it with you and dragons?” I muttered, glancing at Black.
He didn’t answer me, not even to confirm my suspicions.
But now that I’d seen it, I couldn’t un-see it.
The dead alligator with the giant bird’s wings and what looked like parts of smaller lizards sewn into its sides formed a rough approximation of Black’s tattoo.
Nick folded his arms, exhaling. “We’re working on getting someone from the zoo down here, but they’ve verified they’re missing an alligator. Oldest one in the park... fucking thing is almost twenty feet long. The guy I talked to cried when I told him. They’re also missing two Komodo Dragons...” Nick pointed at the smaller lizards sewn into the sides of the alligator under each wing. “...And a trumpeter swan,” he added, motioning towards the painted wings.
Nick gave me a grim look, almost in apology.
Then he pointed at the alligator’s feet. I found myself staring down there, and realized I’d missed that particular detail. Someone had hacked off the Alligator’s back legs and sewn the legs of what looked like a giant cat to its lower hips instead.
The sight of the bloody paws almost brought my coffee back up.
“They’ve also got a dead tiger,” Nick said, sounding a little sick himself. “The thing was raised in captivity... practically tame. Our guy cut its throat and then removed its legs... he left the body in the cage. The vet tech who found it is a fucking mess. The guy down there was screaming at me when I told him we’d found the legs...”
I swallowed, again fighting a surge of bile in my throat.
When I looked at Black that time, he looked angry.
Only then did it occur to me to look at Angel.
She had tears in her eyes as she looked up at the mutilated bodies on the metal hook. She had one hand clamped over her mouth as she stared, like she was trying not to be sick too. Looking at her face, I felt a lot worse suddenly.
I knew Angel loved animals. Like... loved them. Maybe some of it was being a homicide detective and needing to purge some of the bad from the world by focusing on creatures less likely to kill one another for perverse emotional reasons.
Whatever it was, she worked at a lot at rescue shelters. She was also a big contributor to the zoo’s conservation efforts, and a lifelong member. She might even have been familiar with those specific animals, since I knew she volunteered at the zoo on first Sundays too, taking school kids from her old neighborhood around and teaching them about wild animals.
Nick walked over, massaging Angel’s shoulders with his hands.
He motioned with his head then, including me and Black in the gesture.
“Come on,” he said, his voice still grim. “I need to show you something else.”
Wrapping his arm around Angel’s shoulders, he steered her away from the animal corpses hanging over the water and towards the area where most of the paddle boats had been tethered. He stopped us right in front of a section of dock still being taped off by two uniformed cops.
Words had been written on the asphalt there, in white paint.
Tilting my head, I read them aloud.
>
“In that day the LORD will punish Leviathan the fleeing serpent, With His fierce and great and mighty sword...”
I glanced up at Nick, frowning. “The Bible again?”
Black didn’t say anything that time.
Nick nodded, glancing up at Black, then motioned for us to follow him again, this time down a narrow path around the side of the boathouse. More words had been written on the wall there as well, behind a cluster of trees that framed that part of the building. Whoever did it used the same white paint, covering most of the wall and leaving white paint splatters on the red flowers planted below.
I read the words aloud again, once we were close enough.
“...And the great dragon was thrown down, the serpent of old who is called the devil and Satan, who deceives the whole world; he was thrown down to the earth, and his angels were thrown down with him...”
“Revelations,” Black muttered. “King James, this time.”
I looked at him. I admit, him knowing so much about the Bible still surprised me.
“One more,” Nick said, giving me another grim look. “This last one is the one that worries me the most, Miri...” He glanced at Black right after he said it.
He led us back down the path and then to a clearing among the trees, just off the main walkway circling the lake. The clearing stood right behind a park bench that faced the lake, with willow trees on one side and what looked like plum or cherry trees on the other. The fruit trees were covered all over in delicate pink blossoms.
More white paint decorated that part of the asphalt path.
Angel read it aloud. “Then the LORD God said to the woman, ‘What is this you have done?’ And the woman said, “The serpent deceived me, and I ate...”
Staring down at that, I looked at Black.
He was frowning too. He gave Nick a thin-lipped smile.
“Genesis,” he said. “Always good for a few chuckles.”
Black Is Back (Quentin Black Mystery #4) Page 21
