“Oh.” Luna gave a little shake to her head.

  “The first time is always the hardest. Good luck practicing tonight,” he told Kay.

  “Thanks,” she said with an evil grin. “I was pretty nervous. But I think I might be getting the hang of it. Hopefully, when I practice tonight, I’ll get the transition a lot smoother. Soon, I’ll be as good at shifting as you are, Tadger.”

  Tadger said, “You know you’ll never be as good at it as I am. I’ve got years of experience under my belt.”

  I knew Kay was playing with Tadger like a cat plays with a ball of yarn. I wondered how tangled this was going to get.

  11

  Wednesday, Round Two of the Speed Dating

  Okay, I was surprised.

  I hadn’t thought the cop/bunny five-minute speed dating event was going to work out the way Farrah thought it would. I thought maybe a handful of folks might show up. Some curious ladies. Some of the policing community that might be on the hunt for a good time…

  I wasn’t expecting every possible seat to be taken.

  I stood on the bar to count heads and make sure I wasn’t exceeding my capacity and getting on the bad side of the fire marshal. Dad had already slated me for a father-daughter talk, and I didn’t need to add anything to what I was sure was an ever-growing list of things he was concerned about.

  From my crouched position on the bar top, I could see out the picture windows. It looked like Farrah was keeping the men and women separated outside. I assumed it was so couples couldn’t naturally form on their own while they waited to get in, because then they’d just leave without paying her cover charge.

  The line for the officers waiting their turn for the speed dating experience rounded out the door to the left and down the sidewalk. The women wound down the block in the other direction.

  “Why?” Kay quipped. “Because the ladies are always right.” Big saucy wink.

  Yeah, Kay needed some sleep, too. She was just shy of obnoxious right now. I needed to make sure Dick didn’t give her her keys back. We needed to walk home tonight. Neither of us would be safer drivers than Sarah Elizabeth had been thanks to our lack of sleep.

  I jumped down and started a tray of drink orders. “Justice, can you take these to the correct people? I have their names on the napkins, but they keep rotating their seats.”

  She came over and reached for the tray.

  “A neuron walks into Hooch’s bar and orders a beer,” Justice said. “BJ puts the glass in front of him, and the neuron asks, ‘How much?’ BJ responds, ‘For you? No charge.’”

  I put a pile of napkins on her tray.

  “How come you can never trust an atom?” Justice asked. “Because they make everything up.”

  Nicodemus snickered into his paw.

  “Serious? No reaction?” Justice asked, picking up the tray.

  “I forgot to tell you these aren’t chemists. Farrah’s company is called Chemistry.”

  “Because?” Justice asked as Farrah sidled past us.

  “Because if you don’t have chemistry, then you’re just friends.”

  Nicodemus rolled his eyes.

  “Agreed,” Justice told him.

  Before she lifted her tray again, I put my hand on her sleeve. “Oh, and then I have a favor, please.” I leaned in to whisper in her ear. “Do you want to go through the line to figure out what Farrah is up to? I’ve been evesdropping on the questions that the participants read to each other off of prompt cards. There must be a reason behind them. They’re very specific, and they change from table to table. I just can’t put it together to make any sense.”

  “You want me to spy?” she asked.

  “Yes, please.”

  Nicodemus gave me a thumbs up, and the two of them went off to deliver the drinks.

  There was more to this than met the eye. And I wanted to know what it was.

  My bar, after all, was involved.

  Out in the lines, Luna was handing out contracts or waivers or something and gathering signatures. It was cool if you didn’t want to sign, but the bar wasn’t open to the public. No contract, no stamp. No stamp, no entry.

  I was glad Justice was willing to go through the process so she could get the full experience and report back.

  Though, I hadn’t thought that through. It had seemed like a good idea as it bubbled out of my mouth. But now, it was just me handling the service all by myself. I shifted into a higher gear.

  I was glad to see that Farrah had let Justice cut the line, and she got in the next round of speed dates.

  As usual, Justice’s cyberpunk badassery was winning her a lot of attention from the officers. I mean, what guy wouldn’t be intrigued by a woman with a service rat and high I.Q?

  Granted, her brilliant mind had a kind of evil genius tilt. Luckily, she’d found a way to use her evil for do-gooding. In her university classes, she was challenged with hacking into computers like the NSA to uncover any holes, so they could be patched over, keeping us safe. She kept the good citizen shine on her little black heart that way. Right now, her hacking earned her honors in the classroom and prize money from competitions that she spent on tuition. After she graduated, she’d get paid the big bucks to hack and expose those weaknesses.

  I caught her eye and read a definite “you owe me one” in her expression.

  She most decidedly didn’t go for police officers.

  Justice harbored no badge bunny fantasies the way the other women here did. So these officers could drool all they wanted. Poor boys.

  I walked by a table where a woman was walking her fingers up my friend Goodman’s arm, saying, “I hear you police officers are always looking for a big bust.”

  He caught me looking at her wide-eyed and sent me a wink. He was having fun.

  Farrah dinged a bell. “That concludes this round of speed dating. Please fill out the last of the questionnaires about this date on your touchpad, leave your device on the table, and we’ll get in touch with a list of your matches! Once you’ve signed out, we’ll get the next group in and seated. Thank you all for coming!”

  “Hey, officer,” the woman in the blue sundress leaned across her table. “If you catch me being a bad girl, are you going to slap on the cuffs and ask me to come quietly?” Her speed date was Seymour Wang. He turned a funny color of pink when he saw me standing there behind her. Seymour was a good time. And he liked a good play on words. But that one was so old, I rolled my eyes.

  Yes, my eye sockets were getting a heavy work out this evening.

  Even so, I bet Seymore would leave some good comments on his survey about his five minutes with this date.

  I moved down the line of tables ready to gather glasses and swab the tops as soon as the occupants cleared.

  There was another badge bunny in the making, batting her lashes and delivering her final line of their flash date, she was surreptitiously passing him her number (which was supposed to be against the rules). “You can come to my place if you want to do some undercover work.”

  He grinned as they walked out together.

  I stopped when I reached Justice. “How’d it go? Meet any fun people?”

  “Is your computer in your office?” Justice asked. “I thought I might take my break now.”

  “Sure.”

  Justice wanting to jet off like that meant she had something she needed to nail down—and I was antsy for her to tell me just what it was.

  Done. Thank goodness.

  The last of the speed daters were out the door.

  I’d give a whoop if I had the energy.

  Of course, the sound of ka-ching at the register was making me happy.

  I was at the computer tallying the alcohol tab for Farrah. It was steep. It made sense to ply folks with alcohol. Farrah said she used the alcohol to lower the speed-daters inhibitions. There just wasn’t time in their five-minute rounds for nerves if she wanted to get anything accomplished. Lowered inhibitions, she’d explained, allowed for better chemistry. “And better chemistry leads to better biology.”

  This portion of the business was where she took her losses. She’d make up for it when she put the couples together for their special events.

  “Special events,” is that what they called a hook up these days?

  After the event was over, and the bar tabs belonged to the drinker, things cleared out.

  It was a workday.

  I was down to a handful of folks, the way I normally was this time on a Wednesday night.

  Farrah had finished up and said her good-byes. She’d left behind a stack of fliers for tomorrow’s ShifterCon. If you presented the flier not only could you get in for free, but if you stopped by the Chemistry booth, you’d get a complimentary VIP bag of goodies.

  I could only imagine what would be in them.

  “Wanna go?” I waggled the flier toward Kay.

  “As if you could keep me away!” She turned to Luna. “Are you going to be running the booth?”

  “Farrah and me. We’ll take turns.”

  “Another long day. Are you going home to get some sleep?”

  “I will soon. I’m waiting for Tadger.”

  I looked around the almost empty room, realizing that Justice hadn’t reported back yet. As a matter of fact, Justice was still in my office behind the closed door.

  “Hey, Kay, can you hold down the fort for me?’ I asked. “I’m going to check on Justice.”

  Kay sent worried eyes in that direction. “Sure,” she said as I made my way back.

  Justice used Nicodemus as her service rat because he could warn her before she had a seizure. This gave her enough time to find a safe place to lie down and ride it out. Here at the bar, Justice’s safe space was my office, where I had piled up a mountain of squishy pillows to protect her. Normally, if she was having trouble, once she got down on the ground, Nicodemus would run out of the office to come tell me there was a problem. But the door was shut.

  I tapped at the closed door.

  “Who is it?” Justice called back.

  Relief flooded my system. “It’s BJ.”

  “Yup, come in.”

  I squeaked the door open, careful lest Nicodemus was in the way. “Just checking.”

  She waggled her finger toward me, and I went in to sit on the chair beside her and look at my computer screen.

  “Don’t worry,” she said. “No one can track what I’m doing back to you.”

  She must have seen my face when I saw all that code. “Huh, okay. Thanks. What are you doing?”

  “I hacked into the Chemistry computer system. It’s quite the data center Farrah has going on here.”

  I slid forward, my focus on the screen, not understanding what I was seeing. “Yeah? Tell me about it.” I turned to face Justice.

  “So, in line to get into the speed dating, Luna was handing out contracts. The contracts had the normal vital stats—name, age, address, phone numbers what have you. Then we had to agree to be audiotaped. And we also had to agree that they could contact us with offers.”

  “Tape you? What kind of offers?”

  “One thing at a time. First, taping. So it turned out that the little handheld computers where we filled out the questionnaires had built-in recording systems and wireless microphones.”

  “That seems illegal.” My brows rose toward my hairline. “No one knew, did they?”

  “Neither Luna nor Farrah announced it. But I knew from the fine print on the contract that they had to have something out.”

  “No one else was looking for microphones.” I would have seen that. And probably acted on it. Announced that they were being taped or some such thing.

  “No one else was reading the contract either.”

  “Huh. Bunch of cops, you’d think…” I let that sentence trail off. “Why were they taping?”

  “Right, that’s the interesting thing. You saw that each table had a stack of cards. We were supposed to read the question on the card and answer it as succinctly as we could.”

  “Right. I overheard them. I thought some were pretty benign and others were very personal and some may be a bit intrusive, sexually speaking. Fantasies and what have you.”

  “Exactly. They were apparently psychologically developed to understand each person’s sexual needs. I answered mine basically as a psycho-perv. I wanted to know if they flagged me as a deviant. The data for this night hasn’t been entered yet. But interestingly, Tadger Merrymaker’s in the system.”

  “Tadger is? How did you find that out?”

  Justice reached out to tap a key.

  I covered my eyes. “Blech! I don’t want to know.”

  “Yeah, you do,” she said with a chuckle. “Because he was paired.”

  “With whom? Let me guess. With Luna?”

  “Bingo. Now, he wasn’t here for the speed dating event, so I don’t know when he went through this process. But he must have because his file is filled out. From what I can figure out from tonight, at each table you announce your name and your number, you answer private preference questionnaires, you answer questions posed by the speed date. They enter all of the data that they compiled. The information is put through a pretty complex algorithm. Then the computer finds matches by kink and geography.”

  “Did you say kink?”

  “Well, you know Farrah’s trying to line up people who have like fantasies.”

  “Right,” I said. “Farrah explained that she was trying to match up cops with badge bunnies.”

  “Ah, but that would be the badge bunnies’ kink.”

  “Not kink. Proclivity,” I said emphatically.

  “Whatever. But what about the cops? They can find badge bunnies. What if they wanted to be a pirate and save a fair maiden? What if they just wanted to touch someone’s feet?”

  I held up both hands. Nah, I didn’t want the details.

  “So guess what Luna wants?”

  I shook my head.

  “She’s listed under Roleplay. Scene. And in the notes, it says she wants to be with a shifter and be marked and/or claimed as his.”

  “Huh.” I couldn’t really imagine Tadger being the kind of guy who would fulfill someone’s fantasy.

  “And guess what Tadger wants?”

  “To mark someone as his?”

  “Close enough. It says Alpha role-non-dom.” She glanced over at me. “Any idea what that means?”

  I shrugged. “I’d be guessing. I don’t know anything about that kind of thing.”

  “Anyway, the algorithm put them together. And in the referral section, Farrah noted that she would approach Tadger about doing a scene.”

  “And so, in conclusion, after your highly dramatic participation, Farrah will be looking for a sex psycho for you to have for your very own.” I stood up. “Good luck with that.”

  12

  Thursday Morning

  Delight banged on my door.

  Rex, dressed only in a pair of gym shorts, opened the door wide, his phone pressed to his ear with a business call.

  Delight was dressed in a pink hooded unitard with a pink boa sewn around the face opening. She made clawing, growling motions at Rex.

  A grin as wide as the Texas skyline spread across his face as he turned to go stand in the corner of my living room with his finger stuck into his other ear saying, “Did they read the contract, though? It’s laid out in simple English.”

  Delight swung a black plastic garbage bag in her hand, and I had a bad feeling.

  “Look at here,” she said power walking into my bedroom. “My muse woke me up last night, banging on my head saying, ‘I have some ideas’.”

  “Oh?” I had just stepped out of the shower. I was wrapped in a towel and my hair hung in wet strands down my back.

  “Yes, well. You know when you do a thing. You should really do a thing. Now, I’m not really one to get up in a costume per se. But I know that these folks who go to these cons are pretty creative.”

  There was another knock on my door, and I heard Rex’s heavy footsteps moving over to open it.

  “Hey, Rex.” Kay’s voice floated toward the bedroom. “I brought breakfast sandwiches and coffee. BJ usually runs out of food supplies.”

  He must have given her a thumbs up. Because he answered with, “Listen, I don’t really care whether they want to do it, or they don’t want to do it. They signed the contract and now that point is moot.”

  Kay showed up in my room with a coffee tray in her hands. “I bring salvation!”

  “Amen to that. Yup, that’s just what I need.” I gestured her in. “How’s Twinkles?” I asked. Rex had showed up to escort us home last night and when we got to Kay’s place, Twinkles was curled up on the sofa hugging Bella and didn’t want to leave her. Fine with me that he had a sleep over with his new best friend. Too bad that this would be short lived as the police searched for Bella’s owner.

  “He didn’t want to come home. I fed them both cat food for breakfast, and they’re watching cartoons. My neighbor, Peg, said she’d take Twinkles out for a walk at lunch.”

  “That’s good. Tell Peg to stop by Hooch’s, and I’ll by her a beer by way of thank you. I’d like to catch up with her, anyway,” I said, cocking my head to the side. “What is it you’re wearing?”

  It was very un-Kay-like to go out in anything too form-fitting, but here she was in a black leotard and a pair of cut off shorts she usually wore on cleaning day because they didn’t get in her way when she was scrubbing the bathroom. “Delight told me to wear this.” She laughed. “She said she was going to do my makeup.”

  “She’s a pussy,” Delight said. “Well, she’s gonna be a pussy.” Delight opened a bag and pulled out a set of black fur ears and a belt with an attached tail. “Look at that tail. That’s the kind of tail that will catch attention.”

  “Uh-huh.” I saw the bag was still full. The sense of foreboding that had washed over me when she walked in, now magnified.