Private Eye: A Tiger’s Eye Mystery (7 page)

I smiled so brightly at Jack that he blinked, but the sadness that had clung to him since the incident at Beau’s dropped away, and I was glad.

Leona’s phone shrilled on the table between us, startling us all. She looked at the display and started to shake.

“It’s Everett again. He won’t stop calling.”

Ned pulled Leona up and into a hug. “Don’t answer it. We’ll get you a different phone.”

Jack grabbed the phone. “Oh, I think we need to have a chat with old Everett.”

He answered the call, put it on speaker, and nodded at me.

“Hello,” I said, trying to sound like Leona.

“It’s about time you answered my call, you nasty bitch. I know where you are and I’m coming for you,” a man screamed. “You took my father away from me and my mom. You hideous monster. Now I’m going to take everything from you. I know you’re in Dead End, and I’m coming for you.”

I started to shake, too, from the sheer level of toxic hate. Jack’s expression turned deadly, and he leaned forward to speak directly into the phone.

“We’ll be waiting, asshole.”

Everett was still sputtering when I hung up on him.

W
e left
Leona and Ned packing for an overnight trip to Orlando, since Jack wanted them out of the line of fire, so to speak. Then he went to find the commando currently watching them and have a quick word. While he did that, I caught up with Uncle Mike and warned him to be on the lookout for strangers. Then I left voicemail messages for Susan and Alejandro, letting them know about the impending arrival of Everett.

“What else can I do?”

Jack grinned at me. “You can go grocery shopping. The boys are coming over to hunt killers on the dark web for us.”

I thought about how much Jack, with his tiger metabolism, could eat, and I sighed. “Good thing I’m rich this week.”

“I have Atlantean gold, remember?”

“I forget, what
is
the exchange rate for that at Super Target?”

He laughed, but then glanced over at me. “Not scared of me anymore?”

“Nope. But remember, no capes.”

He was silent for a full beat, and then he shook his head.

“Tess, I might never understand you.”

“So few do,” I told him, turning on the radio. “What are you in the mood to hear?”

He winced. “Not including your singing, right?”

Just to punish him, I played pop music all the way to the store.

I
filled
a cart with everything I thought I’d need, and Jack filled a second cart with beer and meat. We were almost to the checkout line when I remembered I was out of potatoes and told Jack I’d be right back. He nodded and started unloading groceries. Even
he
had to realize that nobody was going to shoot me at Super Target. I trotted back to produce and started piling bags of spuds in my cart.

“Hello, Tess,” a man’s voice said from behind me.

It was Oskar Wildenhammer, buying a cart full of sweet potatoes.

“Hi, Oskar. How are you?”

He looked tired. I knew he wasn’t anywhere close to forty, but he looked years older, and much thinner than I remembered, stooped over the handle of his cart. Caring for his dad must be taking a lot out of him. His dirty blond hair was receding from his forehead, and the hems of his pants were frayed, which I immediately felt ashamed for noticing.

“Not so good, actually. Dad’s not doing well at all,” he admitted wearily. “I can’t get him to eat anything but chicken broth and sweet potato casserole. The hospice nurse said it might be soon.”

“Oh, Oskar, I’m so sorry. I didn’t know.” I stopped short of touching his skin, but I put a hand on his sleeve, feeling a wave of sadness for Mr. Wildenhammer, who’d always been so kind to the kids who came to visit his magical toy shop. “It will be such a loss for the world to be deprived of his toys.”

He closed his eyes and bowed his head, and I felt terrible. I’d probably said exactly the wrong thing. “Is there anything I can do? I know Aunt Ruby will want to make him a pie—”

“No, no. He’s beyond pie. He just wants to live out his remaining hours in peace,” Oskar said. “I’d better be getting back.”

“Of course. Please call me if there’s anything I can do. Anything at all.” I watched him walk off and felt so useless. When it was really the end, there was nothing for the family to do but wait.

I’d text Aunt Ruby, though. I was sure that we should start some kind of dinner brigade. Poor Oskar must be living on broth and casserole, too, while he took care of his dad.

Comforted by the thought of at least doing
something
, I grabbed one last bag of potatoes and headed for the checkout, where I found Jack explaining the art of barbecue to an overly fascinated teen girl who was staring at him in awe.

When she saw me, she gave me a conspiratorial smile. “Isn’t he just so
interesting
?”

“Totally,” I said, plopping the potatoes on the checkout counter. “Leave. Now.”

She left.

Jack’s eyes widened. “Tess—”

“Oh, shut up.” He didn’t even realize why girls and women alike fawned over him all the time, which was just annoying. “That’s a lot of meat. How many of the guys are coming over? I might need more side dishes,” I said, starting to worry.

“Two.”

“Two? For all that? How much are you planning to eat?”

He grinned at me and added three candy bars to the pile. “I’m a tiger. I plan to eat as much as I want.”

T
he scariest thing
about hosting two former Army Rangers and a tiger shifter was how fast they could lay waste to fifteen pounds of barbecued meat.

I surveyed the carnage in my kitchen and sighed. Aunt Ruby would have been shocked, but I was ready to order my guests to clean up their own darn mess. Unfortunately—or fortunately, depending on how I chose to look at it, Dallas and Austin Fox were also computer geniuses, and they were currently huddled over their fancy, shiny laptops with Jack, investigating the Darken. I wandered into my living room to see what progress they’d made (and, let’s face it, to escape the kitchen).

“I think I found something,” one of the twins said. “I wouldn’t have noticed it, because it’s hidden very, very well, but this pathway is labeled LGF, and those are our sister’s initials, so it caught my eye.”

I decided the kitchen could wait, and I plopped down on my couch next to the twins. Jack made a weird rumbling sound, but I ignored him.

“You have a sister? Is she older or younger? What’s her name? No, wait. Let me guess. Dallas and Austin, so she must be El Paso, but with the initial, so L Paso.”

Even with blank looks on their faces, the Fox brothers were pure eye candy. They had enormous muscles, high cheekbones that belonged on super models, and skin so dark it gleamed. Put that together with the crisp white shirts and khakis, and it was a wonder every woman for miles around wasn’t lining up at my door.

“No, ma’am,” Austin—or Dallas—said. “Her name is—”

“Lubbockina? It has to be a Texas city name, right?”

Dallas—or Austin—sighed. (Really, when twins were
this
identical, they should wear name tags all the time. It’s only fair to the rest of us, right?)

“Louise. Her name is Louise.”

Jack cleared his throat. “You were saying? Did you find something about the banshee murders?”

“No. Unfortunately, nobody is talking about those, even in the Darken. I thought we had a shot, because sometimes the psychos like to brag about their kills, but no joy.”

“Well, thanks for trying, Dallas,” Jack said.

So the one closest to me was Dallas. Got it. Although how Jack could tell was beyond me, unless it was some mysterious shifter thing.

Austin tapped a finger on his screen. “I did find a lot of buzz about a new assassin, which might have been what those Russians were talking about. But why they were here, I still don’t understand.”

I jumped up off the couch. “Russians? The bad guys we confronted at Beau’s were talking about Russians. This is it. A clue, at last!”

Dallas and Austin both gave me wary looks, but Jack knew what I was talking about. He grinned at me, but then Lou leapt at him and he had to focus so he could catch her. When he started to scratch behind her ears, my heart did a squooshy gurgle at the sight of the big, tough man cuddling my sweet little cat.

I told my heart to shut up.

“I agree. I think it just might be a clue,” Jack said, oblivious to all squooshy heart dilemmas. “Where did you guys see Russians?”

“At the Pit Stop, when we were getting gas,” Austin said. “They were talking about how
piss
—
annoyed
they were at having to come to such a, um,
rural
town to look for such a high-level assassin.”

“Ha. Like we care what a bunch of killers think of our town,” I scoffed, but inside I was miffed. Hometown pride, and all. “But how did you know they were Russian?”

Dallas stopped peering at his computer screen and glanced up at me, his forehead furrowing. “They were speaking Russian.”

“Oh. Right.”

I sometimes forgot that people who could get out of Dead End and see the world might know more than one language. I gave myself exactly three seconds for self-indulgent wallowing and then moved on. “So if everybody is looking for some high-tech assassin who they think is based around here…”

“And the banshee killer’s last known victim’s phone ended up here…” Jack continued.

“Then we might have one killer doing two different things,” I said. “Killing strangers for profit, but killing banshees out of some twisted personal agenda.”

Dallas and Austin were following our conversation by turning their heads back and forth like they were at a tennis match. “But why Dead End?”

I threw my hands in the air. “Who cares? What matters now is catching him. Is there a way to put out a fake call for a hit man on the Darken, and see if we can catch this guy in a cyber trap? I mean, I don’t know anything about any of this, but—”

Jack put Lou back on her perch and grabbed my hands. “Tess, that’s brilliant.”

“No problem,” Dallas said, his fingers already dancing across the keyboard. “We need an amount that will make him take notice.”

“Five million,” Jack asked.

“You’ll need proof of deposit,” Austin said. “Trust me, anybody at this level will check your bank accounts first.”

“I have it,” Jack said grimly, leaving me wondering exactly how much Atlantean gold he really had.

“Done,” Dallas said, hitting the ENTER key with a flourish. “At that amount, we should hear back in
seconds.”

Seconds passed. Then minutes.

An hour later, we still hadn’t heard anything.

“Maybe he’s too careful for this kind of trick,” I said, dropping my head into my hands. “Maybe we’ll never find him.”

“We’ll find him, Tess. But for now you should get some sleep.”

He stood up and ushered Dallas and Austin—I could never think of them as the boys again—out to their truck, where they stood talking for a while. By the time Jack walked back inside, I was three-quarters of the way asleep on the couch, dirty dishes or not. I didn’t even open my eyes when I felt the dream-soft sensation of Jack carrying me to my room. I just drifted on a cloud of exhaustion into a peaceful sleep.

Until the roar of a tiger in my room yanked me into instant, terrified, wakefulness.

J
ack
!

I switched on my bedside lamp and immediately wished I hadn’t. Jack roared again and knocked the lamp—and the table—clear across the room. Then he leapt on top of the bed—on top of me—and breathed hot tiger breath in my face.

I was too scared to move, but Lou didn’t have that problem. She hissed furiously and shot out of the bed and out of the room.

Jack flinched as if struck by something sharp and painful, and then he roared again and leapt off my bed and took off down the hallway after Lou.

I lay there, still frozen in shock for an instant, and then I broke free of my paralysis and ran after him, shouting, “Don’t you eat my cat, or I’ll kill you.”

Jack ran right past Lou and gathered himself for a giant leap. I saw where he was headed and I screamed.

“Jack. No! You’ll hurt yourself!”

He roared, clearly enraged. Definitely beyond listening to me.

And then he hurtled his giant body straight through the giant bay window in my living room in an explosion of shattered glass and spattered blood.

I watched in complete disbelief as Jack ran down the road at top speed. I’d never seen him move that fast. He was beautiful, and he was terrifying; a primal force of nature.

If I didn’t get my butt into gear I’d lose him.

I grabbed a long jacket from the bench near the door, stuffed my feet into a pair of sneakers so I didn’t shred them in all that glass, snatched up my keys and phone, and ran out the door. I took a second to worry about Lou, but she was way too smart to walk in glass.

By the time I got the car started and turned around, Jack was gone.

Luckily, it wasn’t very hard to follow the sound of an enraged tiger in the stillness of…what time was it? Oh, wow. Three in the morning.

I rolled down all my widows and followed the roaring sound of an apex predator on a rampage, and I prayed that none of my gun-happy, fellow Dead Enders would shoot him. I was so busy listening and following and praying that it took me longer than it should have to realize that Jack was headed to the RV Park.

Oh, no.

Leona
.

She and Ned had gone to Orlando for the night, though. They had reservations at the Hilton, were going out to dinner and a show—anything to get a respite from the horror of the banshee deaths. Leona was safe.

So why was Jack going to the RV park?

Then the screaming started, and I realized that
why
didn’t matter, and I floored it.

When I careened around the corner into the park entrance, the first thing I saw was the tiger crouched over a dead body on the road, and the next was a screaming woman, huddled by a tree.

I slammed my foot on the brakes and yanked the wheel to the left, barely missing them. Then I shoved the car into park and jumped out of the truck, wearing Donald Duck pajamas in the face of danger.

They could put that on my tombstone:
Here lies Tess. She wore her duck jammies to confront a tiger
.

“Calm down, Tess, you’re losing it. This is Jack, he won’t hurt you, he won’t hurt you,” I told myself in a litany of attempted reassurance.

It wasn’t working, so I called out to the stupid screaming woman, instead. “Call 9-1-1.”

Jack snarled at me and then the familiar magical tingling sensation started up again, but it was somehow wrong. Twisted. Instead of instantly becoming his human self, Jack rolled over and over in the road, fighting the change, hurting and wanting to hurt. I wasn’t even sure how I knew that, but I did. Since he’d abandoned the body (his prey? Oh, please, no), I ran over to it, and discovered it was Lucky.

And he was alive.

Unconscious, but alive. On second glance, though, I didn’t know why he was unconscious. He didn’t have a mark on him. Certainly not any claw marks, for which I was so freaking thankful.

Drugged? A blow to the head that I just couldn’t see since it was so dark outside?

“It’s magic, Tess,” Jack said hoarsely. “He’s been taken down by magic, probably the same spell they hit me with.”

I slowly turned to face him. He was dressed in only a pair of jeans, bent double, gasping for breath. I wanted to hurl myself into his arms, but I cautiously stayed where I was. I wasn’t sure which Jack I was talking to.

Jack turned hot amber eyes to me. “The assassin. It must be him. He’s killing from a distance with magic. That’s how he does it. Only my own magical protections kept him from killing me.”

“Jack, I’m so glad you’re okay, or at least mostly okay. But why is Lucky here at the park, when Leona and Ned are in Orlando?”

The realization hit both of us at the same instant, and we started running.

I pounded on the side of RVs and trailers while we ran, screaming at the occupants to wake up, call 9-1-1, and go help Lucky. I was so afraid for Leona that I was all but incoherent, but at least people started stumbling out of vehicles.

Some of them were carrying weapons, but that might be a good idea tonight.

Jack made it to Ned’s RV way before I did, and I saw him plow right in through the hanging-open door.

Oh,
no
. No, no, no, no. I put on a burst of speed, for all the good it did. Jack was coming out of the RV, carrying Ned’s limp form, by the time I got there. I skidded to a stop, and then dropped to my knees—out of breath, out of energy, out of hope—because I knew in my deepest heart that if Leona had been in there, Jack would have carried her out first.

Jack gently put Ned down on top of the picnic table, but shook his head at me when I managed to stand up and started for the trailer. “She’s gone, Tess, and you don’t want to see that. There’s blood everywhere.”

I froze. “
Gone
, gone, or—”

“Damn, I’m sorry. Missing gone, not dead gone,” he said, still panting in reaction to the magical attack.

When I could breathe again. I nodded.

“Is it her blood?” I was whispering, and I didn’t know why. “Is Ned—”

“He’s not dead, but he’s badly hurt. Somebody hit him in the head pretty hard,” Jack said grimly. “I probably shouldn’t have moved him, but I didn’t want to leave him in there for one more second.”

“How much blood?” I wanted to throw up. I wanted to run home to Aunt Ruby and Uncle Mike and let them make it better.

I wanted to be strong more than I wanted those other things, though, so I ordered myself to stop crying and asked again. “How much blood?”

Jack shook his head again and then pulled me into a very tight hug. “Too much, Tess. Too much.”