Ace, the man with the hard eyes and the giant knife, suddenly looked as enchanted as a little kid. “Like with olive oil and vegetables and special cheese?”
Eric nodded. “Yes. Uhm… would you all like some?”
Ace grinned. “Son, if you knew how good that sounded—but let me talk to Sonny. I’ll make it like a treat so he doesn’t feel like his cooking ain’t good enough.”
“I could show him how to do it,” Eric said hopefully, and that grin—oh God. It was so unfair to do to a person who had been forced to kill his last lover for an unforgivable betrayal. It wasn’t even the sex appeal, although dearGod! It was the offer of camaraderie, of kin.
“That’ll sound even better,” Ace said. “Alrighty, then. Let me go chat with our chickens, and you hang out here and wait for that cop. He’s supposed to show up soon. Give you two a chance to talk.”
Which, Eric surmised, meant givehima chance to lie. But that was okay too—Eric was rather amazing at it by now.
So Many Inconvenient Things
BRADY’S BODYfelt like it uncoiled in the drive from the small police station outside Barstow to Victoriana, the place that wasn’t really there.
Of course as a deputy in the desert, he mostly was a patrol officer—albeit one with avastand empty beat—and Brady knew there was more to the little town than met the eye. Any traveler from Las Vegas to San Diego or LA knew Victoriana only as a convenient place to stop for gas or a sandwich in the middle of a four- or five-hour journey and the last best hope for a place to get your car repaired in either direction before civilization. Both these things were true, but as was often the case with the desert, a little distance, a slight dip in the road, the long shadows of the day, were all it took to conceal a small, shy colony much like any other wildlife complex, but this one consisting of a couple of schools, some neighborhoods, some apartment complexes, and a small hospital.
Still the garage and the gas station seemed like the lonely outposts, deceptive markers to a larger world.
As he pulled up to the hardpan parking lot where he’d dropped off the Subaru that morning, he noted that some of the cars that had been there in the morning were no longer there, replaced by others that would need servicing tomorrow.
And the Subaru had been… messed with. Doors had been yanked on, and the hood had been hammered flat, the better to protect the engine from the elements.
They weren’t wasting any time, he realized, before they took him up on his gift.
He wondered what they would do with it.
But that wasn’t why he was there. He parked his unit and got out, taking a moment to look to the west, where the last of the sun was showing brilliant orange to intense pink to heart-stopping purple.
He breathed in deep, and since traffic was thin on a weekday, he could smell sage and sand beyond the car smells, and he’d always found those scents uniquely clean when it wasn’t hot enough to scorch the lungs.
For a moment, stresses of the day—and Walmart had been one big ugly paperwork clusterfuck—faded like the day into the night.
With a sigh he turned and headed for the business end of the garage, and found his target outside, leaning against the west wall, staring at the sunset as well.
“Oh!” Brady squawked before he could remember dignity. “I thought I was alone.”
“Only me and the coyotes out here,” said the mysterious Eric, who could hurl olive cans with enough velocity to shatter a behemoth’s nose.
“You, sir,” Brady said, feeling disgruntled, “are a lot more dangerous than a coyote.”
Eric chuckled, but it didn’t reach his eyes. “Coyotes have teeth,” he said mildly. “All I had was a couple of olive cans.”
Brady raked him with his gaze as he leaned there, and saw something… off. “Turn around like a runway model,” he ordered.
His new acquaintance’s eyebrows rose, and he took a few steps out from the wall and raised his hands from his sides, palms out, like somebody accustomed to being frisked for weapons.
Brady didn’t need to frisk him—he could see the concealed Beretta at the small of his back from where he stood.
“See,” he said, “I knew it. Oh, put your hands down and face me. I’m not going to arrest you. I assume you’ve got paperwork for a concealed weapon?”
“Of course,” Eric said, his voice smooth—too damned smooth—and suddenly accentless when Brady could have sworn the man had a touch of the East Coast in him that morning.
Brady would have put down money that any concealed carry permits were forged, or his name and ID were forged, or something was off about his paperwork, and he had about five minutes to decide if any of that posed a threat to any of the people in the desert.
Eric had turned around and was leaning back against the garage wall again, but his pose was… deceptively casual this time.
He was as relaxed as a coiled rattler.
