Chapter Three

Chapter Three

MARLOW LANDED HARD. It knocked the air out of him and made his ribs—bruised but not broken—cramp painfully. He ignored it as he rolled to the left, and Bennett’s knee bounced off the padded mat instead of his gut.

It would have popped Marlow’s kneecap off like the cap off a beer bottle. Bennett just grunted and managed to lurch back to her feet. She hobbled backward, favoring her jarred leg, and brought her fists up to guard her face. Hanks of dark hair had been pulled loose from her tight braid, and her lip was split and puffy. She dabbed it with her tongue.

“Slippery little bastard,” she said without any malice in her voice. “Living up to your name, Kitty-boy.”

Marlow was too winded to jibe back at her. His ribs ached dully with each breath he forced in, and she’d wrenched his arm when she threw him. He just grinned at her and edged around the outside of the ring, weight balanced on the balls of his feet. Bennett moved counterclockwise ahead of him, her full weight back on her right leg.

Neither of them wanted to commit to an offensive. Marlow knew that Bennett would break first. She didn’t have the patience to wait him out, not in front of half the Night Shift. They both knew that. So Marlow made his move first.

He took two long steps forward and threw a jab at Bennett’s face. She caught it on her forearms, already mottled with bruises, and Marlow feinted a low kick at her leg. If it connected, he could take her already tender knee out from under her. Bennett jerked her knee up to block with her shin, and Marlow shifted his weight fluidly to his forward leg.

Hung over the ropes on the far side of the ring, arms dangled over the top one, Franklin saw it coming and yelped, “Watch out.”

It was too late. Marlow’s low sweep kick skimmed under Bennett’s raised foot and caught her behind the knee with just enough pressure to make it fold. She started to go down, and Marlow grabbed her by the shirt, spandex thin and sweaty between his fingers, and helped her on her way.

Bennett hit the mat harder than he had, and Marlow followed her down. He got one knee planted on her chest, his full weight on it, and punched the heel of his hand down toward her nose. It didn’t connect—Marlow pulled the strike with plenty of time. But it would have smashed her nose if he’d connected—and he would have.

“And out!” the ref called it as he slapped his hand against the mat. “He takes the match. That’s one each. We’ve got a draw.”

Franklin groaned and threw himself backward, held up by the bowed rope he had a grip on. “Fuck sake!” he said. “You had him, Bennett!”

Bennett gave Marlow a wry look from her prone position. She hadn’t. Not that time. They both knew that. Even if she had, there wasn’t a lot of status to be earned beating up the guy just back from medical leave. A draw wasn’t worth getting bent out of shape about.

“Nice throw,” she said. “You’ll have to show me sometime.”

“And lose the advantage?”

Marlow pushed himself off her and hopped to his feet. He stuck his hand out to help her up. She grabbed it and, for a second, the muscles in her arms tightened as if she was going to try and throw him. In the end, she just let him yank her up, taking the weight she was wary of putting on her jarred knee.

Franklin ducked under the ropes and jogged over with a bottle of water. His eyebrow was split and one finger splinted after his sparring match with the rookie earlier. The kid wasn’t half bad.

He handed the bottle to Bennett. She took a swig and fended Franklin’s offered shoulder off as she cocked an eyebrow at Marlow. “What do you say? Best two out of three?”

Marlow shrugged and stepped back, ready to agree. Before he could, O’Hara stepped in through the door of the gym and looked around.

“Captain,” Bennett said. She loped over to the corner of the ring and leaned out. Unless someone was close enough to see the tension in her jaw, they’d not know she was in pain. “Down here to show us lot that you’ve still got it?”

O’Hara gave her a dry look. “Trust me, Bennett,” he said, “I don’t, and I don’t miss it. The day I was promoted high enough I’d never have to run again? Best day of my life.”

She leaned folded arms on top of the padded post and grinned at him. “I don’t know if I’ll appreciate being off the streets as much,” she said. “I’ll let you know one day.”

O’Hara just shook his head and then looked past her. “Franklin. Marlow.” He jerked his thumb over his shoulder for them to follow him. “With me. Now.”

He turned on his heel and left. Marlow stared after him for a moment and then traded a baffled glance with Franklin.

“Who have you pissed off lately?” Marlow asked Franklin as he headed over to jump down from the ring.

He went between the ropes and hopped down from there. Franklin vaulted over the top of them and landed easily on the other side. He reached up on the way past to trade a fist bump with Bennett.

“Not Richie Rich and his pals up in the Reserve,” Franklin said as he dropped his arm back to his side. He strode toward the door as he tossed back over his shoulder, “So I’m one up on you.”

He wasn’t wrong. Marlow looked up at Bennett. She had her split lip folded between her teeth as she worried at the raw skin.

“They’re not going to promote anyone before Harrison announces his retirement,” Marlow said.

Bennett pulled her attention away from the door and looked down at him. “Really?” she drawled in a voice ripe with sarcasm. “Wow, that’s a relief. I really thought they were going to make you and Franklin co-lieutenants because of your great working dynamic.”

“Try and be nice, see what it gets you,” Marlow said to the passing rookie, who looked like he’d rather not get dragged into this. “Go and ice your knee, Bennett.”

Bennett tossed the half-drunk bottle of water down to him. “Go soak your head,” she advised as she pushed herself off the post. “And watch your back. You’re the one that someone tried to kill recently, remember?”

She limped away back to the corner she’d left her gear in. Marlow wiped the top of the bottle on his T-shirt before he took a swig. The label said the water was lemon-flavored, but after knocking around the gym all day, it just tasted flat and tepid.

“I’m not likely to forget,” he said quietly.

Around him, a dozen other Night Shift officers sparred, worked out, or hung out by the juice bar. The long, low-ceilinged room was full of the sounds of knuckles on flesh and the rattle of weights. Some of them were friends, more or less, some of them he had never much liked, but he knew them all one way or another.

Any of them could have been the mystery driver who left him to die.

O’Hara tossed two folders onto the desk.

In a rare moment of agreement, Marlow and Franklin both eyed the apparently innocuous paperwork with suspicion. It wasn’t like Night Shift only worked three days a month. The rest of the time, they were deployed along with the rest of TAC to deal with hostage situations or warrants.

That meant they worked as a team. They didn’t get cases handed to them individually. Even Day Shift TAC didn’t get their own cases. Any deviation from standard operating procedure was not a good thing.

“Pick one,” O’Hara said as he pulled his chair back from the desk and sat down. It creaked as he leaned back in it. When neither of them jumped to do what they’d been told, he sighed and reached over the desk to push the folders toward them. “One each. Or I just hand them to you.”

Marlow glanced sidelong at Franklin, who squinted dubiously back at him.

After a moment, Marlow shrugged and reached for the nearest file. Franklin grabbed it before he could touch it. Of course. Marlow resisted the urge to roll his eyes and took the other folder instead.

“Days requested Night Shift’s help on both of those,” O’Hara said. “I’m tapping you two to provide it.”

“Why?” Franklin asked.

“Because medical hasn’t cleared Marlow for operational readiness yet, so he’s on restricted duties,” O’Hara said. “And you called Homicide a bunch of ‘over-hyped morgue techs’ yesterday, and now I have to deal with their hurt feelings.”

Franklin snorted. “They call us worse.”

“Not to your face,” O’Hara pointed out. “And you don’t get an appeal here. Just do it. Now.”

The edge to his voice cut off any hope of negotiation. Franklin stuck the file under his arm and groused his way out of the office. He slammed the door behind him. Marlow let him go and then turned back to O’Hara. He tapped the file on the edge of the table.

“Any updates on my case?” he asked.

O’Hara sighed and rubbed his thumb over his temple. “You know better than to ask that,” he said. “All I’m going to say is that we’re still investigating.”

“If I could just—”

“Internal Affairs took over the case,” O’Hara reminded him. “And you’re the victim in this one, not a cop. They’ll let you know when there’s something to know, but you can’t be involved in the investigation. You have a case. Focus on that.”

Marlow just looked down at his folder and stood there for a second. How the hell, he wanted to ask, did they expect him to just do his job like nothing had changed? Except, he supposed, nothing had. He’d known that the purge might not have cleared out all of Piper’s crew; he’d just… gotten used to it.

“Anything else?” O’Hara asked.

Have you heard from Cade? The question itched on the tip of Marlow’s tongue, but he didn’t know if he wanted to know for professional or personal reasons. It was stupid. Every null knew better than to put any faith in what was said during the honeymoon period when the wolf was still hot in the blood. Yet here Marlow was, hurt that a known asshole had ghosted him once the prospect of a dinner date was on the table.

“No,” Marlow said after a pause. “Nothing.”

He turned to go. The sound of O’Hara clearing his throat stopped him in the doorway.

“Internal Affairs will find out what happened,” he said. “Do like Deacon; stay out of it and let them do their job.”

Marlow glanced at O’Hara’s dim reflection in the glass of the door. It hadn’t occurred to him that O’Hara might believe that had worked. Since no one had asked him, though, he guessed it wasn’t his business.

“Sir,” he said and left.

You could always tell when it was a null household that made a call. The coffee was good. Strong, in this case, since Victor Clemons had no creamer in the house, but good.

Marlow took a polite sip from the mug and leaned forward to set it down on the kitchen table.

“Unfortunately—”

“I have a restraining order,” Victor blurted out before Marlow could finish. “He’s not allowed to come anywhere near me.”

“He didn’t.”

Victor shoved himself to his feet. The legs of his chair scraped over the tiled floor as he pushed it out of the way. He stalked across the room and grabbed a folder from the top of the microwave. His hands were shaking as he pulled out grainy printouts of security stills and dealt them out in front of Marlow like cards.

“Tell me he wasn’t here now?” Victor demanded. He slapped one picture down in front of Marlow and jabbed his finger against it hard enough to tear the paper. “That’s him. That’s Barney. Every. Fucking. Night this month.”

Marlow gently slid the photos out from under Victor’s hand and paged through them. He’d seen the grooves in the stucco on the side of the house when he arrived. Now he saw how they had gotten there. A lanky graphite-gray wolf tore at the wall, pissed on a tree, and threw itself against the heavy metal shutter over the door.

“That’s a wolf, Mr. Clemons,” Marlow said gently. “You can’t put a restraining order on a wolf. I don’t see Mr. Lyons in any of these pictures. Unless you saw him in the vicinity of the house last night—”

Victor kicked his chair in frustration and knocked it over.

“It doesn’t matter where he is!” He slammed both hands down on the table and glared at Marlow. “As soon as the moon is up, the wolf comes here. To my house. To find me. Every month. Every night. I can’t live like this.”

Then he shouldn’t have dated a wolf. Marlow flicked through the images to check the time stamp and date. Dumped in a pile, the wolf’s attentions looked overwhelming, but it worked out to something like fifteen minutes a night over the three nights.

“When did you break up?” Marlow asked.

“Not soon enough?” Victor said tartly, in a brittle voice. He raked his fingers through his dark chin-length hair and took Marlow’s mug as if he’d finished it. The coffee went down the sink, and Victor flicked the tap on to rinse it. “Two months. Three months?”

“How long were you together?”

Victor half turned to frown at him. “What has that got to do with anything?”

Marlow sat back and hooked his arm over the chair. He watched Victor as the man turned to the sink and rinsed the cups with impatient, jerky movements.

“It influences our profile of the wolf’s behavior,” he said. “What we can predict.”

Victor’s shoulders stayed tense for a second and then relaxed reluctantly. He flicked the tap off and dried his hands on his trousers.

“We dated for three months,” he said. “Three and a half. I cheated on him with my boss at work. He acted like a jilted housewife instead of little more than a hook-up and threw a tantrum at my job. Got us both fired and then came back here to trash my stuff. He left, I got a restraining order, and I thought it was over—until he came back at the end of the month and pissed on my car. So, is that enough information, or do you want to know how our sex life was?”

He asked the last question in an intense, chirpy tone, then grimaced and looked away. The muscles in his jaw were tight, visible under his tanned skin and faint stubble.

“No. That should be enough,” Marlow said. He stood up and tucked his notebook into his belt. It was a grudge, and maybe some leftover lust, not love. That was more volatile but also more likely to pass. “I’ll speak to your ex—”

Victor made a disgruntled sound in the back of his throat and shook his head. “Of course you will,” he said. “And this time, that will make all the difference. I don’t want you to talk to him; I want you to stop him. Make sure he doesn’t come here again.”

“That’s what the restraining order is for. If he breaches it—”

“He breaches it every month!”

“Unless he deliberately leads the wolf here, he isn’t responsible for what it does,” Marlow said. “I’ll talk to him, but if it happens again, you might want to consider leaving town over the full moon. It could break the compulsion.”

Victor sneered. He was a good-looking man, pretty rather than handsome, but not with that expression on his face.

“Why should I have to do that?” he asked. “Why should I have to be the one to leave? He’s the one tormenting me.”

Victor had a point. The problem was, wolves didn’t listen to reason or restraining orders, and they couldn’t make Barney Lyons do anything he didn’t want to do until he did something wrong.

“Just a suggestion,” Marlow said. “Hopefully, it won’t be necessary.”

The cleaver slashed and embedded itself in the bloody chopping board. A freshly severed fish head wobbled in place and stared at Marlow with blind black eyes. Barney scooped it up and tossed it in the pot with the rest.

“I’m well rid of Victor.” Barney wiped his hand on his apron and then grabbed the fish to butcher it. The knife sliced along its underbelly from tail to gills, and he scooped out the innards with hooked fingers. “Did he tell you what he did to me?”

“He did.”

Barney snorted and swung the cleaver again, this time to sever the fish’s tail. The flicker of light on the razor edge made the back of Marlow’s neck itch. It was a reasonable conversation so far, but his instincts twinged each time Barney’s arm tensed.

“Bet he didn’t,” Barney grunted. “Not all of it, anyhow. As far as I’m concerned, I’m lucky that I only wasted a few months.”

“Three, wasn’t it?”

“I suppose.” Barney scraped the cleaver over the board and flicked the tail into the trash by his foot. “Better than three years.”

Marlow leaned against the counter, just out of arm’s reach. The din of the kitchen eddied around him: the splash of running water, hiss of gas, and sizzle of fat on a skillet. Waiters delivered orders through the pass-through in rapid-fire shorthand that the chef then chopped up into brusque, barked orders.

“The wolf doesn’t seem to agree,” Marlow pointed out. “Mr. Clemons thinks you’re doing it deliberately.”

Barney smacked the cleaver down on the cutting board and turned to face Marlow. He wiped his hands on his apron, pink blood and scales smeared over the gray-white fabric.

“You know why he thinks that? Because everything is about Victor in his world,” he said, an acidic bite of sour humor to his voice. “That house? That’s my house. My garden. My neighborhood. I lived there first; he was my roommate. That’s why the wolf goes back there. It’s nothing to do with him.”

He pointed a finger at Marlow’s face to underline his point and then went back to work. Two quick strokes of the cleaver filleted the fish into neat steaks, and he started on the next.

“It might be an idea to go away next full moon,” Marlow suggested. “Out of town. Break the habit.”

Barney snorted. “Why should I do anything?” he asked. “It’s his problem. Get him to go away somewhere.”

The sullen resistance in his voice was familiar. Marlow bit his tongue. It was the easiest, proven way to avoid problems with a passive compulsion—one that neither side was encouraging—but if neither party would budge, he couldn’t make them. There was a legal difference between being okay with the idea your ex might get eaten and taking steps to make it happen.

“Just a suggestion,” Marlow said. He stepped to the side to let one of the porters reach through and grab the pot of fish heads. “However, if you do consciously use the wolf to break the restraining order, then that is a serious offense.”

“Yeah?” Barney slapped the fillets down on a metal tray and grabbed a bottle to drizzle lemon-tinted oil over them. “Prove it.”

He used the tray to jostle Marlow out of the way as he headed for the ovens. Marlow let him pass and dropped his hand to his belt, fingers looped through the clip of zip-cuffs attached to the leather.

If he wanted to be difficult, that was close enough to a confession, and he could pull Barney in over it. The charge wouldn’t stick, not when Barney could claim he had just talked big, but it might scare the man enough he’d actually take Marlow’s advice.

Probably not, though. Not with a couple of weeks between the lesson and the full moon. The blue full moon.

Marlow made a mental note to tag the neighborhood as a place of interest next month. He didn’t believe in moon madness, but he wasn’t the problem. People that wanted to do something stupid would jump at the first excuse they got to justify doing it. If Barney broke the restraining order, they could grab him before the wolf turned a crime into a tragedy.

He flicked a stray scale off his sleeve and headed out of the kitchen. One of the porters caught him at the door and pressed a package of what smelled like fresh fish cakes into his hands.

“For your service,” the woman said.

Marlow juggled the waxed paper parcel—they were hot fresh fish cakes--and tried to give them back, along with an awkwardly grateful refusal, but the woman put her hands behind her back.

“Night Shift saved my neighbor’s life,” she said. “What’s a fish cake to that?”

She turned on her heel and went back to work. Marlow looked around to see if anyone else looked like they’d take the food off his hands. He got an apologetic shrug from the dishwasher, elbow-deep in the sink, but that was it.

Department policy was to accept unsolicited gifts under twenty bucks—it was a cultural thing in a lot of places, and refusal could offend—and then fill in the requisite forms in triplicate back in the office.

Well, at least he wouldn’t have to stop for lunch.

Marlow offered a clumsy “Thank you” to the kitchen and ducked out. He held the parcel in one hand as he cut through the tables in the restaurant. The bells over the door rattled as he let himself out into the muggy, salt-sharp air on the street.

He unwrapped the fish cakes and took a bite out of one as he walked back to where he’d parked the car. Halfway there, mouth full of cheese, potato, and fish, someone strode out of a building and directly into his path.

Marlow tried to dodge back out of the way and stepped on the man’s foot instead. He overcorrected and stumbled.

“Christ,” the man growled as he grabbed Marlow’s arm. “Watch where you’re going—”

Cade broke off mid-sentence and narrowed his eyes as he stared at Marlow. His eyes were still wolf-bright, the color of clear amber, even nearly a week after the wolf was out.

“What do you want?” he asked, his voice abruptly cold instead of rough.

Marlow abruptly, unexpectedly, wanted to say the right thing. It wouldn’t even be that hard. People knew he was laconic, and Cade wouldn’t expect poetry. It just had to make the corner of Cade’s mouth twitch with reluctant appreciation and remind him that, despite what he liked to believe, Marlow wasn’t an idiot.

Unfortunately, his mouth was full of fish cake and grease. He had a feeling that the ‘‘right thing to say” didn’t include flaked haddock.

Marlow chewed twice and then swallowed hard to force the food down his throat.

“Lunch?” he said.

Cade chuckled humorlessly. “Of course, what else?” he asked, the mockery dry on the edge of his words.

The tone put Marlow’s back up. Cade was the one with the problem; why should Marlow do the legwork to find out what was wrong? So he just shrugged his agreement with Cade and took another bite of his fish cake.

Cade stared at him for a moment and then snorted softly as he shook his head.

“Well,” he drawled, then tightened his grip on Marlow’s arm, “while you’re here, you might as well make yourself useful. I need some information. About Piper.”

The smart answer was “no.” It might sting to have been ghosted, but that didn’t mean it had been a bad decision. Never mind that Captain O’Hara had just told Marlow not to interfere in the case.

Instead, Marlow caved to the temptation of a little more time with Cade. It was stupid—Cade was an abrasive jerk at his best—but he felt like home. Somewhere—someone—that made your shoulders relax from being up around your ears.

“I’m on duty,” he said as he wrapped the rest of his free lunch up. “But I can give you a few minutes.”

“Lucky me,” Cade said, sarcasm thick as butter on the words, as he gestured toward his office door.