Hunter's Trail (A Scarlett Bernard Novel) (11 page)

Chapter 15

After Jesse had helped destroy Kathryn Wong’s body, he’d steered his car away from Will’s house only to pull over on Temescal Canyon Road, unsure of where he even wanted to go. He was reluctant to head home when he knew he wouldn’t be able to sleep any time soon. His apartment was a tiny bunker that functioned as half sleeping place, half storage compartment; it had zero appeal for him when he was this keyed up.

He turned the engine off, staring out the windshield. The nova may have killed Kathryn Wong, but it was Jesse and Scarlett who’d erased her. She had been a full person, with her own thoughts and parents and probably a hold list at the public library. And they’d jus
t . . .
wiped her off the board. And no one would ever know.

Jesse rubbed his eyes with the heel of his hands. “You gotta get your shit together,” he said aloud. On top of his agreement with Dashiell and Kathryn Wong’s body, he was worried about the fact that he would soon be questioning Old World suspects without Scarlett around as a safe zone. Only a day earlier he wouldn’t have found that to be quite so daunting, but after Dashiell had pressed Jesse’s mind, he was reluctant to be vulnerable around any Old World creatures.

The problem
,
he thought,
is that I don’t have any weapons I can use against werewolves.

Unfortunately, the only person he knew who sold silver weapons was a dead serial killer—Jared Hess, who’d made silver handcuffs, silver chains, and presumably other silver weapons as well. But all of Hess’s stuff had been seized by the police, and Jesse wasn’t about to break into a police evidence locker to steal it.

Then an idea struck him—
Noah is in town.
He checked his phone’s calendar to make sure he had the dates right. Yes. A plan began to clink together in Jesse’s mind, as he started his sedan and headed for Los Feliz.

Jesse’s older brother, Noah, was a stuntman, currently working full-time on a network action-adventure show about an FBI agent who could speak telepathically to his guardian angel. He usually shot on a soundstage in Vancouver, but he’d left Jesse a voicemail a few days earlier saying that he was doing exteriors in LA for the next two weeks. Jesse dialed with his phone’s Bluetooth. Noah often filmed his show at night, so he was likely to still be awake, and maybe even up for a minor adventure.

His brother picked up on the second ring. “Hey, Ugly,” Noah said cheerfully, by way of hello. Jesse grinned as he drove.

“Hey, Meathead. Whatcha doing?”

“Throwing a tennis ball. Max and I are having an endurance contest.” Max was their parents’ energetic pit bull mix. Noah had an apartment in Vancouver, but stayed with their parents when he was in LA.

“Getting your ass kicked?” Jesse asked.

“Yes, I am,” Noah said airily. “What’s up with you?”

“Well, it’s after eleven on a weeknight, so I was just wondering if you wanted to go out and do something stupid.”

“Come pick me up,” Noah said immediately.

Jesse arrived at his parents’ home in Los Feliz fifteen minutes later. The cheerfully over-decorated house had been tiny when Rob Astin and Carmen Cruz had bought it, long before Noah was born. Since then, they had added a new addition every few years until the house had mutated into a stubby maze, with his father’s three-room mixing studio fixed to the back of the building, and his mother’s kitchen nearly twice its original size. Amidst the clutter, mementos, and family warmth, it was starting to look like a place where hobbits might live, but Jesse was fond of it.

When he pulled up, Noah was sitting outside on the front steps with their parents’ dog, Max, who was a strange combination of pit bull and greyhound. Noah let go of Max’s collar when Jesse stepped out of his car, and the big dog bolted toward Jesse’s knees, jumping up to lick his face. “Whoa, buddy,” Jesse said, darting to one side to keep the dog’s paws off his chest.

“Max, off,” Noah called from the stoop. “Come.” The dog immediately abandoned his greeting ritual and trotted back to Noah’s side. He sat patiently next to Noah while he and Jesse embraced.

Jesse shook his head in amazement. “He only listens like that to you,” he marveled to his brother. “Everybody else has to yell four times just to get his attention.”

“That’s because he knows I’m the alpha here,” Noah said casually. The word set off alarms in Jesse’s brain, and it took a moment for him to remember that his brother meant nothing by it.

Noah stretched lazily with a gracefulness that belied his size. Although their faces were different and only Noah could pass for fully Caucasian, the two brothers had almost the exact same frame: same height, same shoulder width, even the same shoe size. But while Jesse had some honest muscle on him, Noah was enormous, the result of spending twelve hours a week at the gym to keep his body up to the same standards as the actor he doubled. For Jesse, looking at his brother was always eerie, like being half of a before-and-after ad for steroids.

“So,” Noah drawled, “what are we doing tonight, little brother?”

Jesse plopped down on the stoop next to his brother. “Do you still hang out with that crazy girl?” he replied. “The one who works at the twenty-four-hour pawnshop?”

Noah Cruz had been a stuntman in LA for a decade before he’d gotten the gig in Vancouver, and he had long ago tapped into the industry’s network of semi-employed actors, stunt people, prop houses, makeup artists, and so on. Noah called this crowd the Hollywood Peripheral, and he stayed in contact with them even when he was in Canada.

“She
owns
the pawnshop,” Noah corrected amiably. “And yes, Tommy and I are stil
l . . .
friendly.” He grinned. Jesse’s brother considered casual hookups to be the best part of his semitransient lifestyle. One of Noah’s companions was Tomorrow “Tommy” Vrapman, a former stuntwoman who considered Amy Winehouse to be her personal style maven. Noah’s smile faded just a little bit. “At least, I think we are.”

“Well,” Jesse suggested, “let’s go find out.”

“What are you pawning, little brother?” Noah asked, eyebrows raised. “Because there are like three pawn shops in between here and there.”

“I’m not pawning; I’m buying,” Jesse replied. “Come on. What else are you doing?”

Noah shrugged amiably and went to put the dog inside.

Noah directed him toward All That Glitters, the pawnshop that Tommy had purchased with settlement money after an accident on the set of a B-rate action flick. The store was housed in a strip mall in Venice, five blocks from the canals. Against all economic odds, the shop thrived. The building had never been nice, but against the devil-may-care backdrop of Venice Beach, its careworn shabbiness had somehow transformed into grungy chic. A fresh coat of paint on the building would have been ruinous for business, as would fixing the neon sign out front, where the
s
in
Glitters
had long since burned out. Jesse had occasionally wondered if the pawnshop got much business from misguided glitter fanatics.

He had met Tommy only once, at Noah’s going-away-to-Vancouver party, and he’d come away glad that the pawnshop was out of his jurisdiction. Tommy flounced around with a devilish “I’m getting away with something, copper” attitude that Jesse figured was intentional—and possibly also accurate. Bad if she lived in your jurisdiction, but potentially good if you needed something only marginally legal. “She still wearing the eye patch?” Jesse asked idly as they searched for parking.

Noah grinned widely. “She goes back and forth between that and the glass eye. There, right there!” He pointed at a space, and Jesse parked in a side alley a stone’s throw away from the Venice Canals.

Instead of a bell, a chime played the first two bars of “You Know I’m No Good” as Jesse and Noah went in. Jesse was surprised at how clean and bright the shop was—he’d been expecting something seedy, with a thin layer of grime on each surface, but for a pawnshop the place was surprisingl
y . . .
perky. The main room consisted of smaller goods—china sets, hardcover books, electronics—and a long glass counter against the back wall. There was a wide doorway to Jesse’s left that led to a room of what looked like musical instruments. A doorway to the right led to a room of bigger items like suitcases and vacuum cleaners.

Tommy herself stood behind the counter, arguing pleasantly with a man in his fifties who looked just this side of homeless. “Be right with you guys,” she called, giving Noah a little wave. The older man glanced at them briefly, then did a slow, cautious double take at Jesse, who gave him a hard stare, just for fun. The guy mumbled something to Tommy, scooped a handful of necklaces off the counter, and jammed them in the pocket of his dirty army jacket. Without meeting anyone’s eyes, he skulked past Jesse and Noah and out the door.

“Wow,” Noah said, eyeing Jesse with new appreciation. “I had no idea you carried such a stench of bacon.”

Jesse held up a middle finger to his brother. “Forget about it,” Tommy said, circling the counter to approach them. She was in her mid-thirties, like Noah, with long lean limbs, dark-red lipstick, and what looked like two compacts’ worth of blue eye shadow on her lids. She was wearing the glass eye today, and Jesse was impressed at how natural it looked next to her remaining blue eye. Her hair, on the other hand, looked anything but natural: it appeared to have been teased up high with an eggbeater and then shellacked in place with black varnish. She wore skintight jeans and a ribbed tank top that showed off what had to be thousands of dollars’ worth of intricate, colorful tattoos. No bra.

“Noah Cruz, as I live and breathe,” Tommy drawled, throwing her arms around Jesse’s brother. She gave him a long hug, squealing with delight as Noah leaned back to lift her briefly off the ground. “And Jesse ‘the Cop’ Cruz, I remember you,” she added, giving Jesse one of those half handshake, half hugs he mostly expected from other men.

“Hi, Tommy,” Jesse said.

“Hey, Toms, did you get new, you kno
w . . .
” Noah pointed to his own chest. Jesse backhanded his brother lightly on the arm. “What?” he protested. “I’m asking professionally. As an
actor
.”

“It’s cool,” Tommy said happily. She clutched a breast in each hand, looking down at them fondly. “They were my birthday present last year. To myself. They’re good, right?”

“There’s only one way to be sure,” Noah said glibly, stepping toward her with a hand outstretched.

“Not why we’re here,
hermano
,” Jesse said, intercepting his brother and steering him away with Noah’s own momentum.

“Right,” Tommy said, dropping her hands. “You looking for something? Besides a glance at my fabulous new tits?”

“He is,” Noah said, pointing a thumb at Jesse. “I’m good with the glance.”

Tommy treated him to a flirtatious smile and a wink of the glass eye, and then she turned to Jesse, leaning in a little. “You’ve got my attention,” she said in a low confidential voice.

“I’ve got a friend,” Jesse began, “who’s doing a student film. He’s really into authenticity—”

Tommy waved a hand. “I don’t need the particulars,” she said dismissively. “It’s LA, baby. This week alone I sold a wax ear and a big-ass box of used dental floss. Nothing surprises me, and I don’t need backstory.”

Jesse nodded. “Weapons,” he said shortly. “I’m looking for a silver blade. And a boot knife.” Noah’s mouth dropped open a little, but Jesse ignored it.

Tommy’s expression grew cagey. She folded her arms across her ample chest and cocked out a hip. “All of our blades are in the glass case on the counter.”

“I saw them. They’re glorified pocketknives.”

“But they’re all
legal
,” she said solicitously.

Jesse felt his expression harden. His voice too. “Cut the shit, Tommy. I’m not suggesting you’re a secret arms dealer. But you must have stuff you keep off the sales floor.”

“Jesse, man,” Noah said under his breath, “what are you doing?”

Jesse ignored his brother and kept his eyes on Tommy Vrapman, who shook her head, her expression a little smug. “Sorry, officer.”

“Detective, now. And you’re way out of my jurisdiction,” Jesse said coolly. “As long as you’re not handing out live grenades with every purchase, I couldn’t care less what you do.”

Tommy just shrugged, still smiling. Jesse took a step closer.
Fuck it
,
he thought. The anger was building again, and he didn’t have time for this crap. “I have friends in the West bureau, though,” he said softly. “Young cops, like me. Always looking to make an impression with their supervisors, you know? Looking for a bust?”

Tommy’s eyes widened a little. “Hey!” Noah said sharply, and it reminded him of Scarlett, the way she’d sounded shocked when he’d talked to Will. He was sick of both of them trying to rein him in when he was doing his job. The job Dashiell had more or less forced on him.

“Stay out of it,
hermano
,” Jesse said coolly. “Tommy gets where I’m coming from, don’t you, Tommy?”

Her expression was flat. “Oh, I know exactly where you’re coming from. You think you’re the first cop to come in here?”

“No,” Jesse replied, his voice hard. “But I can promise you that I’m the most motivated. And the least charmed by your punk princess bullshit. You’re a little girl playing dress up, and I’d bet money that you’re doing something stupid just for the thrill of it.” Tommy flinched away from him and then squared her shoulders, annoyed that he’d seen her react.

“Jesse!” Noah yelped, but neither Jesse nor Tommy looked at him.

Tommy glared for a long moment, and then her expression softened. “Noah used to say you were the sweet one, you know,” she said quietly.

Jesse shrugged. “Things change.”

Tommy nodded curtly, her face closed now. She stalked over to the front door and flipped the dead bolt, pulling a chain cord that turned off the neon
Open
sign. Then she looked back at Noah and Jesse and jerked her head. “Noah, wait here.
Detective
Cruz, follow me.”

Noah opened his mouth to object again, but Jesse shook his head sharply. He was working now.