Crazy Town by Jason M. Waltz

Author:Jason M. Waltz [Waltz, Jason M.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780982854846
Publisher: Rogue Blades Entertainment
Published: 2018-11-30T04:30:00+00:00

All Our Yesterdays

Julie Frost

DRIVING RAIN SOAKED the glossy black hair of the dead werewolf. Fur sprouted across my shoulders and stood at attention, and I staggered back to lean against the alley wall opposite the one she was propped on. “You didn't tell me your murdered packmate was a woman.” My voice was strangled, my chest tight. “Or that she'd had her throat cut.” Or that she'd been artfully arranged in a sitting position, ankles crossed and hands palm-up in her lap.

“You all right, Lockwood?” Fernando Gutierrez, the pack alpha, had dark hair and eyes and a soft Spanish accent, and he was built like a heavyweight boxer, dwarfing my lighter—and much shorter—runner's physique.

I dropped down to a crouch, trying to beat back the screaming Pashto pounding my subconscious and making a fair attempt to send me to a cold cave in Afghanistan. “It's. A bad button,” I managed. Squeezing my eyes shut against a mental movie reel was useless, but I tried anyway. It played out in technicolor behind my eyelids: Corporal Priscilla Hansen, spitting in the insurgent's face right before he slaughtered her in front of me, while I raged helplessly. We'd called her ‘Prissy,’ and I'd never told her I loved her. “Gimme a second.”

I wrapped my arms around myself and shivered. The rain had broken a Los Angeles heat wave, and I'd come out without a jacket, wearing one of my patented clearance-rack t-shirts. Gutierrez peeled out of his hoodie and draped it over my shoulders, taking care of a subordinate wolf in alpha fashion. I shot him a grateful look, even while I tried to recover from the incipient panic attack.

Intimately familiar, four years after the fact, with how my body reacted to my brain's stressors, I had mechanisms for dealing with it. I thought about my wife Janni, imagining her gentle hand in my hair and her soothing voice in my ear. She'd rescued me from myself after I got back from Afghanistan, and still did, every day.

Questions. I should be asking the client questions. “You haven't called the Protectorate because…?” Supernatural law enforcement generally handled stuff like this.

“Pack business. We take care of it ourselves, without getting authorities involved.” He practically spat the word. Bad feelings there, then. I didn't really blame him; my own relationship with them was prickly as hell. “It's why I called you.” Me, a fellow werewolf, but not in his pack. As a former Army Ranger turned private investigator, I had certain skills, so it made sense. “And if I'd been able to get a scent, I wouldn't have called you in either.”

Breathe. In two, hold three, out two. I could do that. Nominally. I cracked my eyelids open and took in the scene. She hadn't gone down easy; defensive wounds marked her arms and hands, and the downpour hadn't quite cleaned all the blood spray from the dirty brickwork. The coppery stench saturated the alley and overwhelmed the odors of garbage and rats.

Unfortunately, our perp had chosen his night well.

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