Rex was pulling the hose out of the tank, tapping it on the edge to get the last drop. I got a kind of dopey look on my face.

  “Really?” he asked.

  “You make a most excellent visual,” I said as he opened the door for me and reached for the drink carrier.

  “I promise to take care of that later.”

  “Thank you.” I smiled, snagging one of the coffees and coiling back into the car.

  “What do we do now?” Kay asked as Rex climbed into the passenger seat.

  He pointed toward the corner of the lot where the high rise cast a shadow. “How about we park over there and drink our coffees. If nothing comes of this, you can drop us off at BJs apartment.”

  Kay followed his instructions.

  We sat.

  And sat.

  And sat some more.

  My coffee was gone. Now, I needed to pee.

  “There was an old guy who went to a gas station,” Kay said. “He saw a man sitting there with his dog. The dog was licking his balls. ‘I sure wish I could do that,’ the man said. ‘You could try,’ the dog owner replied. ‘But I’d make friends with him first, so he doesn’t bite you.’”

  “That was awful,” I said, unbuckling my belt. “And I have to pee,” I announced.

  “How about this one—a woman with huge boobs goes to a bar.”

  I moaned and reached for the door handle.

  “The bartender sloshes wine on her boobs, leans over and licks it off. She says, ‘Thanks!’ and continues talking to her friend. He does it again, and again, and again. This fourth time, the guy sitting next to her says to the bartender, ‘I got it this time,’ leans over and licks the cocktail from between her breasts. She screams and smacks the guy. Guy sits back on his stool, rubbing his cheek. ‘What was that for? You didn’t complain when the other guy did it.’ ‘Of course I didn’t you idiot, the bartender has a licker license.”

  “Boo, and I really have to pee.” I cracked the door and put one foot out.

  “One more?”

  “Fine one.” The light had popped on, and I closed the door again, so we’d stay in the dark.

  “A girl went on a first date. The two were getting along really well. Her guy reaches for her keys to open her door for her. She says, ‘You can tell a lot about the way a man makes love by how he opens a door.’” Kay was using her best May West imitation.

  “Oh, yeah?” Rex said. “How is that?”

  “Well, if a guy has trouble getting the key in and fumbles around with the knob, he might not have enough practice to have his bedroom skillset down. If he grabs the key, shoves it in the lock, pushes the door open and yells ‘ta-da!’ it could be that he doesn’t have the patience he needs to do a decent job.”

  “So how should he do it?” Rex asked a big old grin on his face.

  I popped open the door. I’d heard this one before. “If he gets down on his knees and licks the lock first, then he’s good to go.” I was halfway out the door, my face turned toward the convenience store. I was steps away from relief.

  “The licker’s on the move!” Kay revved the engine and slid the gear shift into first.

  I pulled my foot back in and shut the door as Kay stuttered forward. The full pressure of the extra-large coffee filling in the space under my seat belt was miserable. If Kay slammed on the brakes, things could go badly.

  “This isn’t really a stealth car,” I pointed out.

  Rex put his hand up. “She’s turning right. Hold back.”

  The licker looked over her shoulder, saw the car, and started off at a jog.

  “She spotted us.” Rex signaled Kay that she should go straight. “Go to the next block. We’ll pace parallel to her. Take a right, and let’s see if we can’t stay out of view.”

  Kay did her best. We only stalled out twice.

  It was an improvement.

  Man, I have to pee. I couldn’t care less about the potential licker. I mean, we were stalking some poor woman in leopard pants. Probably frightening her.

  “Kay, stop chasing that poor woman. Let’s go home.”

  “There she is, she has some stamina, running up that hill that way,” Kay said. “Graceful, even.”

  “She’s heading toward the cemetery,” I pointed out.

  Kay stayed in first gear. As we inched up to the crossroads, we could see her jog by. “Too bad it’s not a full moon. Then we’d have a real show for Rex,” I said under my breath.

  “What’s that?” he asked.

  “Unicorns,” I said, wondering just how rude it would be if I found a tree I could squat behind in the cemetery. Last time I’d hung out amongst the tombstones in the middle of the night, I’d managed to go home poltergeist free. I imagined, though, that desecrating holy ground with a golden shower might tick some spirit off.

  I’d hold it.

  “Unicorns?” Rex asked.

  I pulled the safety belt higher, so it wasn’t crushing my bladder. “It’s a group of hobbyists that meet every full moon.”

  “Unicorn hobbyists?” Rex twisted around in his seat so he could see my face. “Is that something like ShifterCon?”

  “Similar, I guess without the full DNA mutation.”

  “Look, the licker’s turning right, do you see that, Kay?” Rex asked.

  Kay backed up. Stalled the car. Started the car and turned right. “Where’d she go? Is she in the alley?” Kay had the car lights beaming into the dark.

  Haunting amber eyes hovered in front of us. Kay stomped the gas without using the clutch and we jerked forward then stalled as an inhuman scream filled the night.

  Rex leaped from the car.

  “Oh, god. Oh, god. Did I hit her?” Kay asked.

  There was more screaming. And Rex called out, “You’re on the lead. Don’t do anything, Kay. Let BJ drive. BJ, I need you to inch up.”

  Kay scrambled from the driver’s seat thoroughly relieved to abdicate the spot. I slid and hefted myself out of the driver’s side, not quite able to stand all the way up. Man, I needed to pee. I climbed behind the wheel. “Inch up or inch back?”

  “Either. No. Up. Inch up,” Rex called.

  “Turn the wheel?”

  “No! No, just inch up,” Rex called.

  Kay was doing a little hurry-up! dance, wringing her hands.

  I inched.

  Kay ran around to Rex’s side. “Oh!”

  I saw Rex pulling off his shirt, which was both glorious and upsetting—was he staunching a wound?

  Was it the licker?

  Kay opened the front door, and Rex climbed in. In his shirt, he’d wrapped what looked like a leopard.

  I searched around left, then right, then into the mirrors. “Where did the licker go?”

  6

  Wednesday, the Vargtimmen (the Wolf Hour)

  “There’s blood on your shirt.” I gripped the wheel. I’d had enough of Kay’s driving lesson for today. “Did you get bitten or scratched?” I asked as I pulled smoothly to the side of the road. “Cat scratch fever is no joke.”

  Kay started humming that tune from the late seventies with a nervous wobble, as she climbed into the back seat.

  “No,” Rex said, adjusting the leopard in his arms. “The blood’s not mine.”

  I flipped on the lights, and the cat screamed. “Sorry about that, kitty, but we need to look and see how badly you’re hurt.”

  “Not badly, please,” Kay said. “My checking account is very, very, very empty.”

  “I’ve got this, Kay,” Rex said as he wrapped a finger around the cat’s front legs to hold them still.

  The cat was huge. It certainly wasn’t like a house cat. Not full-on leopard escaped from the circus sized. It was more like dog-sized. It barely fit on Rex’s lap.

  “Okay, I see it’s a wound on her leg. It looks like it’s been there for a while,” I said.

  “Her?”

  I pulled the shirt away. “Yep. It’s a her. Look, the lead is attached to a tag collar. I’ve never seen a lead on a cat before. Kay, look up the closest emergency vet on your phone, would you?” I asked, looking over the seat, then I turned my attention back to the cat. I held out my hand for her to sniff. Carefully, slowly, crooning about how beautiful she was, I reached for the golden tag to check for her name. “Bella,” I cooed. “You certainly are, sweetheart. We’re going to go get you some help from the doctor.”

  “I have it,” Kay called. “You need to go up Main toward the St. Esmerelda’s Hospital.”

  “Is there a phone number on the tag, BJ?” Rex petted a hand down Bella, trapping her paws back in the cloth I had moved out of the way. “We should call her owner.”

  I flipped off the light and pulled the safety belt across my lap. “It only has the one word, Bella.” If I didn’t get to a potty soon things weren’t going to go well. We headed down the road. “I’ll bet she has a chip, and the veterinarian can scan her for the contact information. First, though, I’m going back to the gas station to pee.” I made a U-turn in the middle of the road.

  There was no one out here this late.

  This early.

  Heck, people would be getting up now to get ready for work.

  I left the car idling.

  Rex had Bella snuggled into his arms like a baby in bunting.

  Kay was looking anxious.

  I ran in, and I ran out again.

  “You look more comfortable,” Kay said. “I saw your eyes before, and I thought, urine danger.”

  “Boo.”

  “So I rerouted us,” she said, “since we had a new IP address.”

  “Kay, honestly it’s too late for these.”

  “You’ll like this one.”

  “No, I won’t.”

  “Why did the cop sit on the potty?”

  I headed the car down Main and ignored her.

  “To do his doodie.” She snorted, and that made Rex laugh and that startled Bella.

  Bella looked like she might like to get out of Dodge. But there wasn’t a whole lot of Dodge to get out of in these confines of the car’s interior. “Calm.” I reached out and turned the radio to NPR. “Listen, Bella, it’s Clair de Lune.”

  We rode in silence, listening to Debussy the rest of the way, with Kay calling out directions softly as we made our way to the vet.

  After pulling into a parking space, Rex whispered, “Kay come open the door for me.”

  Rex clambered out, and we made our way to the door with its “Open twenty-four hours a day three hundred and sixty-five days a year” sign.

  Walking through the front door of the vet hospital, we didn’t find anyone at the desk. There was something bad going on in the back, though. People were calling out to each other, and something was howling.

  We sat down.

  Bella put her head under Rex’s arm then squirmed out of his shirt and around behind him where she hid between Rex and the chair back. “She’s trembling, poor thing,” Rex said, handing me her lead then pulling his shirt back on despite the bloodstain.

  A woman stuck her head out from behind the door. “Life or death emergency?” she asked.

  “A wounded cat,” Rex said.

  She nodded and went back to the howling, shrieking, calling, banging of whatever was happening behind the door.

  I looked over to Kay. “Go ahead.”

  “Go ahead and what?”

  “I bet you had another bathroom joke ready. What was it?”

  Kay smiled. “What do you find in Superman’s bathroom?”

  We heard an engine gunning into the parking lot and screaming tires as they came to a stop.

  “A super bowl,” Kay whispered.

  I got a better hold of Bella’s lead.

  “You’re all right, Bella,” Rex crooned.

  The front door banged open, and a woman rushed in looking like she was possessed by the devil himself. She looked over at the empty desk. “Help!” She pitched her head back and yelled, “Help! He’s going to die!”

  I looked from her to Rex, to Kay, back to the woman. Her fear was palpable. But I had no idea what she was talking about. She stood there alone.

  “Who?” Rex was on his feet.

  The woman turned crazy, too wide eyes on Rex. “Who?” She stood wide-legged with her knees bent and her hands out like she was ready for a tackle. Her hair was wildly sticking out. A twig caught in a snarl and dangled on the side. Mud streaked down the side of her face, to her neck, down her pink blouse.

  She looked like she’d just run out of the wilds, but there weren’t a lot of wilds around here. We were at the Jamesburg city limits. Farther up the road was farmland. Okay, there was also the state forest.

  Yeah, she looked like she’d just been chased through the state forest.

  “Where?” Rex tried as he eased toward her the same way he had eased toward Bella, like she was a wounded animal.

  I scanned over her body. She didn’t look wounded. No obvious blood pooling, anyway. I knew that didn’t mean much. She could have something internal going on like a loose screw.

  “Where?” The woman wasn’t blinking. Shock or drugs would be my guess. She spun to stare at the door and whispered under her breath, “The wolf.”

  I quietly dragged my phone from my pocket and dialed 911. “We need an ambulance.”

  The wild woman turned her gaze from Rex’s and pointed her chin to the ceiling. “Help me!” she howled. “Don’t let him die!”

  Did she say wolf?

  The door to the lobby swung open, and the vet tech emerged. She was wet and disheveled and looked like she was about to quit. “What?” Her gaze scanned the room and rested on Bella, who was now hiding behind my back. “Where?”

  The wild woman reached into her jacket, and for a split second, I thought she was pulling out a gun.

  Instead, she pulled out a dead squirrel.

  I’d swear he was dead.

  He sure looked dead.

  Bella, who had taken the hysterics and screaming in stride, suddenly became very interested. She hunkered down and stilled.

  “Did you run him over?” The vet tech sidled closer. “We can call wildlife rehabilitators. We don’t work on wildlife here.”

  The woman started shaking like she was sopping wet in a too air-conditioned room. “The wolf. There was a wolf in the road. It was chasing my car.” She turned and looked out the glass door. I suppose to make sure that it hadn’t chased her in here. “It was right behind me for mile after mile, and then it zipped around me. It was the fastest wolf I’ve ever seen in my life. I must have been going almost eighty miles an hour. Fast. I mean fast. And then when it got in front of me—its long tail floating in the wind—I was so scared that its pack was surrounding me. I’ve never been so scared. Until the banging.”

  The woman stood there with the dead squirrel in her hand. The shaking had turned into a vibration like she had a wet finger in an electrical socket.

  Teeth chattering.

  Face splotchy from crying.

  The tech looked down at the squirrel that lay belly up on the woman’s hand with no obvious sign of trauma or life for that matter. It could have been a toy. Or a taxidermy project.

  “The screeching, banging horror of it. I thought, my god! I hit something. So I got out of my car, and when I rounded to the front, I found this squirrel. I don’t know how he could have done so much damage to my car. He can’t be dead. I can’t have killed it. I’m a vegetarian. I don’t kill animals.”

  Over the phone, the forgotten 911 operator was asking, “Ma’am, can you hear me? Are you there? What is the nature of your emergency?”

  I whispered, “I’m not sure what’s going on. This might be a woman in shock. She might be on drugs. She may have mental health issues. She needs medical attention, though.”

  The woman thrust the squirrel toward the tech and screeched, “Help him!”

  The vet tech wasn’t ready for that to happen. It was pure reflex when she batted the distraught woman’s hand away.

  Who wouldn’t?

  When she did, the squirrel launched into the air and came down on top of the vet techs head, where it scrambled around looking for an escape path.

  Very much not dead.

  The vet tech screeched and ducked, swatting at her hair like it was on fire.

  The squirrel launched right toward my face. I spread my knees and ducked my head down low, still clinging to the phone, still trying to get help to come.

  What I didn’t do was keep a good grasp on Bella.

  Bella sprang after the squirrel who was up on the shelves with the colorful display of pet foods.

  As Bella tried to get a paw hold, she was scratching at the bags. The bags were bursting at the seams. Kibble was flying.

  Rex dove for Bella’s lead. The lead didn’t hold. He picked up the end and examined it. The clasp had been damaged, I guessed when Kay had run over it earlier.

  The squirrel was making a circuit of the waiting room, Bella’s jaws chomping right behind the broad brush of the squirrel’s tail.

  I had never seen squirrel terror before.

  A head stuck around the swinging door. “What the—?” As the squirrel made his way toward the opening, they let the door swing back shut before he got there.

  I could hear an approaching siren.

  The 911 operator was still on the line. “Is that the woman screaming like that? Can you describe the situation?”

  Describe? “Uhm, a circus? Bedlam?”

  I was already crouching on the ground. I was worried about the flying furballs, so I just lowered to all fours and scrambled toward the front door. If I could crack the door open, the squirrel would run out. The kibble was hard under my knees and palms. The squirrel got the idea. It ran underneath me, between my knees, panting.

  Bella leaped on my back. I hunkered over to protect the squirrel.

  “Don’t let him bite you!” Kay screamed. “Stay still. I’m pushing your butt toward the door.”

  And sure enough, Kay’s hands landed on each of my jean’s back pockets.

  She pushed.

  I slid.

  Bella rode with her claws kneading into my shirt.

  “Almost there,” Kay said.

  The squirrel was thoroughly confused. He had a tiny paw on each of my thighs and was kind of dancing forward on his back legs as if it was both relieved and terrified about what was happening.