Right. Time to change the subject. I wanted to hear about the silver rush and Virginia City during the frontier days. I couldn’t picture Rick in a cowboy hat.
“So, you want to be a guest on the show and tell some stories about the Old West?”
He smirked. “Arturo would kill me.”
The trouble with this crowd was, you didn’t know when that was a joke.
About a week later I came home from work and found Cormac leaning against the outside wall of my apartment building. It was well after dark. He had his arms crossed and stood at the edge of the glow cast by the light over the door. I stared for a good minute before I could say anything.
“You know where I live.”
“Wasn’t hard to find out,” he said.
“Am I going to have to move now?”
He shrugged. “The place is kind of a dump. I thought you’d be making better money than this.”
He didn’t have to know about Carl’s payoff. “Maybe I like it here. What do you want?”
My neck was tingling. I needed to get the hell out of here. But he wasn’t armed tonight. At least not that I could see. Without all the guns he looked less like a hit man and more like a good-guy biker.
“You remember that cop? Hardin? She got in touch with me about those murders.”
Just like that, the anxiety went away. The big picture took over. Being pissed off that someone was going behind my back took over. “Really? She told me she didn’t trust you enough to talk to you about it.”
“She seems to have the idea that you’re too loyal to your ‘kind’ to be any help.”
“Just because I wouldn’t name names.”
“Do you have a name?”
“No. Geez, it’s like thinking that because someone’s—I don’t know, an auto mechanic—that they know every other auto mechanic in town.”
“Werewolves are a little less common than mechanics.”
I changed the subject. “Why
are you helping her? Last time I talked to her, she wanted to prosecute you for stalking and attempted murder.”
“She offered to keep off my back if I helped catch this guy.”
Hardin knew how to be everyone’s friend. “Convenient.”
“I thought so.” He paced a couple of steps toward me. “Listen. You have information about this killer that I can’t get—the scent. Is there something you’re not telling the cops?”
I huffed. “I didn’t recognize the scent. It’s not one of ours. At least, I don’t think it is.”
“Okay. I’m not the cops. I’m not territorial about information. We can get closer to catching this guy if we pool what we know.”
“What do you know?”
“How to kill werewolves.”
“Is that supposed to make me feel better?”
“No.”
Defeated, I let out a sigh. “What do you want me to do?”