“Hey, Beane,” Levi said into the burner cell. He watched the girl, Harper, lean forward and scratch her ankle just above the edge of her short black boot.
“What’d you do this time, Harris?” Chay Beane sounded wary.
“What makes you think I’ve done anything?” Levi said defensively. The girl straightened and appeared to stare at her boot’s toe as she tapped out a staccato rhythm.
“Because when you call me out of the blue sounding that cheerful, it’s always because you need me to save your ass. Always,” Beane returned.
“Maybe I’m just happy.”
“You don’t call me when you’re happy, Harris,” said Beane.
He had a point there.
“Okay, so maybe you’re right,” Levi admitted. “You know that job I talked to you about last time?”
“Yeah, the one that I told you to forget about, because there was no way that you’d survive?”
“That’s the one.” Levi paused for a moment to admire the line of the girl’s body as she stretched luxuriantly back against the hood of the car. What he’d like to do to her there…. That kiss, seized so impulsively, had only whet his appetite for more.
“Harris.” There was a warning in Beane’s voice.
He was going to find out sooner or later. “Well, I did it. And I’m still alive, thanks.”
“God, are you a complete idiot? Mortensen owns half of Baltimore, and he’s got a controlling stake in the Newark port. The Genovese are in his pocket, and so’s half the law enforcement on the East Coast.”
“Look, it wouldn’t work if we didn’t go after someone big like him,” Levi returned. “The major players are the only bloodsuckers with enough pull to make a difference. I’ve got the package, but if I’m going to do anything with it, I’m going to need your help.”
“I’m not much help against mobsters or police,” Beane said. “Not that there’s any difference when there’s a vampire in the mix.”
“I’ll handle that. I always do. I need technical support, man. That’s it.”
Beane sighed. “Okay, so it’s a dagger.”
Levi pulled it out from his waistband. “Right.”
It was absurdly ornamented, a tacky, impractical thing, the sheath and hilt chased with curlicues and inlaid with gems and pearls. An obvious fake, though the gems were real enough, except they were lab-created.
Some people took Levi to be stupid. After all, as a werewolf, he was often hired to do jobs that relied on stealth or brute force, rarely finesse. And he had to admit that he had made rather a habit of going off half-cocked.
But he’d discovered a few years ago that he had a knack for observing small details, the little things that told him whether something was what it appeared to be. He’d had almost a sixth sense for sniffing out lies and frauds, and his natural talent had been honed when he’d started taking cases to verify the provenance of unique and expensive art and memorabilia.
Levi credited his wolf senses for a good part of his success. He looked at things differently than ordinary humans did, and the parts of an artwork that appeared most strikingly unique to him were rarely the same things that humans concentrated on. Forgers always made the wrong things look good, and with a substantial education to both back up and better inform those observations, he’d built a thriving business.
But it was a business that few who knew his true nature had heard about. To most nonhumans, he was Levi Harris, tracker, muscle, and general problem solver. And as long as there were those out there in that world who would like to use his werewolf relations to manipulate him, that was all they needed to know. If he’d let his worlds mix, he would have been dragged into smuggling by some bloodsucker with grandiose plans, lending his good name to a disreputable enterprise until it was discovered and he was ruined.
The vampire would, of course, get off scot-free. They always did.
Until now.
“Have you opened it yet?” Beane asked.
“Not yet.” Levi held the phone against his cheek and turned the knife in his hands, his sharp vision able to pick out slight inconsistencies and imperfections on the surface even in the shadows. “I’ve been kind of busy.”
“When you say ‘kind of busy,’ it usually involves people with guns,” Beane said, his voice dripping with disapproval.
“Not this time. I swear.” There it was—in the most obvious place. Levi snorted. He should have guessed. He held onto the grip and twisted the pommel carefully. It gave instantly, unscrewing from the knife. “The guards were werewolves. It’s hard to hold a gun in your paws.”
“One of these days, I’m going to get a call, and it’ll be from your sister, telling me that you pushed your luck too far and now you’re a wolfskin throw.”
“Nah. I’d have to be turned into a lampshade. We always turn back human when we die.” The pommel came loose. Levi shook the hollow sphere over his hand. Nothing. He peered into the body of the grip. There was something white stuffed inside. Cotton wadding. He tried to shake it out, but nothing happened, and his fingers were too big to fit inside. He could use his own pocket knife, but he didn’t want to risk damaging whatever was inside it.
He made an impatient noise. Just his luck.
“What’s wrong now?” Beane asked.
“Temporary setback. I’ll call you right back,” Levi said, then flipped the burner closed and shoved it into his pocket.
He walked over to stand in front of the girl. She peered up at him, then at the knife in his hands. Damn, but she was tempting, all curves and pretty gray eyes. He should probably discourage her, since he knew very well how shifter pheromones could hit full humans.
Yeah, like that was going to happen, now that he’d taken her along. He wasn’t in the habit of refusing what women like that had to offer.
“If you’re looking for a virgin sacrifice, you’re a number of years too late,” she said, nodding at the ornate dagger.
“Very funny. Got a pair of tweezers in that deadly purse of yours?” he asked.
She pushed off the car. “I thought you wanted me to stay out of the car.”
“Just get the damn purse,” he said.
She did, rummaging around in its depths before handing over a pair of steel tweezers with slanted tips. Perfect.
He grasped the edge of the cotton and pulled it carefully, sliding out the whole wad from the hollow grip. She watched, curiosity naked on her face, as it came out. He handed back the tweezers and pulled the wadding free, shoving the knife back into his waistband and then carefully unrolling it on his palm. A flat black shape emerged.
“An SD card? That’s what you stole?” she said, sounding disappointed. “I hope it has like nuclear launch codes on it or something.”
Levi smiled and pulled out an empty coin pouch, slipped the card into it, and zipped it closed. The micro SD card was exactly the kind of thing he’d hoped to find. Until that moment, there was still a chance, however slight, that he’d been wrong, that all the intelligence that he’d gathered had been compromised and he’d fallen for a decoy.
“Something even better,” he said.
She raised her eyebrows. “And you’re not going to tell me, are you?”
“You wouldn’t believe it, anyway.”
“I’d believe a surprising amount from a guy with superhuman healing,” she said.
He grinned at her annoyed expression and decided, against his better judgment, to give her a small teaser. “The jewels on the knife? They’re all real. And the whole reason for the knife was just to disguise this puppy. ’Cause it’s worth that much more, in the right hands.” He patted his hip. “For you, it’d mean very little. For me, though, it’s freedom.”
He pulled out the phone, flipped it open, and hit redial, turning his back on her as he headed back into the furniture pile.
“Got it now?” Beane asked.
“Yeah. Just like we thought,” Levi said.
“Look, you might as well just tell me everything,” Harper called. “I’m going to get it out of you eventually.”
“Who is that?” Beane demanded.
Levi winced. “Just a tagalong I picked up.”
“Look, dude, if there was ever a bad time to pick up a chick—”
“Yeah, yeah. It’s complicated. Look, I’ve got a micro SD card here. How do I get the contents to you ASAP?”
“Got a tablet or phone with a data plan?” he asked.
“I’m calling you on my burner, but yeah, I’ve got my full kit.”
“So what you need is a micro SD to micro USB reader, if your phone will take that. Then Dropbox, and share it with me, and you’re good. If it copies.”
“What do you mean, ‘if it copies?’” Levi repeated, turning so that he had the girl in view again. “It’s on the card. Of course it will copy.”
“Look, if you bring it here, I guarantee that I’ll be able to copy it. But there are ways to make standard readers ignore data. It’s mostly so people don’t copy over files that are needed to make cameras use a card right and things like that, and so the important stuff isn’t lost if they reformat it, but that kind of data’s invisible through a regular reader.”
Levi let out a puff of air. “Great. Fabulous. So I can either try to make it all the way to your dungeon of paranoia, or I can just take a little trip to the store, like I don’t have people on my ass wanting my head, and take a gamble on whether I can use a card reader with it.”
“You could always mail it,” Beane suggested.
“Right. Let me do that. That totally won’t get intercepted at any point along the route.”
“Security through obscurity really does work most of the time,” Beane said.
“Yeah, except when it doesn’t.” Levi shook his head. “All right. We’ll try the reader. If that doesn’t work, we’ll be coming to you. Don’t shoot us when we get there.”
“Speaking of that ‘we’—”
“Yeah, not going to talk about it,” Levi said, realizing only as Beane pointed it out what pronoun he’d been using. “Hope I don’t see you soon.”
“Sure thing,” Beane said, and he hung up.
There was only one more thing to do right then. Levi steeled himself for it as he switched the burner in his hand for his pocket knife. Being a werewolf had many advantages, among them rapid healing. Unfortunately, that particular skill had developed—or had been designed, depending on who you talked to—without regard to the realities of modern weapons.
His skin had healed almost immediately upon the bullet entering it. And as the muscles beneath had knit back together, they had pushed the bullet upward, until it lay uncomfortably just beneath the surface with no way out.
There was only one way to get rid of it now. He flicked the knife open with his thumb and looked over at Harper, who was leaning against the door of the car, watching him.
Yeah. This was another thing he wasn’t going to be explaining to her. He turned away just long enough to pull the neck of his gray t-shirt to the side, using two fingers on either side of the bullet to pin it in place and stretch the skin over it. Setting his jaw, he sliced along it in a single, quick motion. The bullet popped out, falling to the dirt floor of the barn. The skin knit back together almost instantly, and Levi rolled his shoulder. There was a lingering ghost of pain from nerves that still protested against being severed, but it already felt better.
He wiped the blood from the blade onto his motorcycle leathers, then shoved it back in his pocket as he turned back toward the car and the woman there.
Except she wasn’t there anymore.
