Master of Wolves Page 3

  Contrary to popular belief, this was the moment when most officers got shot, which was why Faith wore a bulletproof vest under her dark-blue uniform shirt. Her entire body sang with adrenalin by the time she approached the driver’s window.

  Willie rolled down his window. His eyes were a little too wide in his thin face. “I wasn’t speeding, officer.”

  “Didn’t say you were. License and registration, please.” While he reached for his wallet, she asked pleasantly, “Did you know your tag has expired?”

  An oh-shit expression crossed his face, out of proportion to the hundred-dollar fine for the offense. “Uh, no ma’am. I’ll pay it tomorrow.” He handed her his identification.

  “Got any drugs in the car, Mr.”—she glanced at the licence and read his name—“Cruise?”

  Samuel Cruise stiffened and said the magic words. “Not to my knowledge.”

  Bingo. An innocent person would have given her a simple, surprised “No!” If there wasn’t a kilo of coke in the trunk, she’d eat Rambo’s badge.

  “You sure about that? Step out of the car, please.”

  Which was evidently Cruise’s cue to babble as he reluctantly obeyed. “I don’t have no drugs in the car. Swear on a stack of Bibles, I ain’t no drug dealer.”

  “Uh-huh.” Every cop knew the minute a Southerner started swearing on Bibles, he was guilty as hell of something. Faith smiled, sweet as a mint julep. “Then you won’t mind if I get my dog and check it out.”

  True alarm flashed over his face. “No! I mean, don’t you got to have a warrant or—”

  “A sniff is not a search, Mr. Cruise.” She started back toward the car, glancing over her shoulder in case he bolted. He looked like he was seriously considering it until she got Rambo out of the back and clipped on the big animal’s leash.

  Cruise’s eyes widened, and he went very, very still.

  Faith didn’t blame him. Most German shepherds weighed sixty or seventy pounds at most. Rambo was twice that, a hulking black beast who looked as if there was a pony somewhere in his family tree. She often joked if her Crown Vic ever broke down, she could saddle ’Bo.

  Faith led him over to the suspect, who took a wary step back. “He won’t bite,” she told him. “Unless I tell him to.”

  Cruise gave both of them a wild-eyed look.

  Rambo put his big head down and sniffed the man’s grimy running shoes, then worked his way up ripped, dirty jeans to one pocket. He promptly plopped his fuzzy butt down on the pavement and gazed up at Faith with a rumble of satisfaction. ’Bo was a passive alert dog—the sit-downand-look sequence meant he’d found something. Faith concealed a grin. Let’s hear it for puppy power. “Please brace your hands on the hood of the car, sir.”

  There it was again, that flash of raw panic. “Officer—”

  She caught him by one stringy forearm and turned him toward the car. “Hands on the hood, please. You got any needles in your pocket, Mr. Cruise?” The last thing she wanted was a needle stick from an AIDS-infected subject.

  His expression was genuinely offended as he assumed the position with the ease of long practice. “Hell, no!”

  Okay, that was sincere. She put her hand around and felt the pocket ’Bo had indicated, the dog watching with interest. A small, suspicious lump greeted her fingers, but no syringe-like tube. She reached in and pulled out a trio of dirty-brown pebbles wrapped in plastic. “Oh, Mr. Cruise, you disappoint me. You’re under arrest for possession of crack cocaine.” At least until she found whatever he was really nervous about. It wasn’t three piddling crack rocks, that was for sure.

  “That isn’t mine!”

  She looked up at him, amused. “They were in your pants.”

  His eyes shifted. “These aren’t my pants!”

  “Okay, I’ll bite. Whose pants are they?”

  “A friend’s. I was staying at his house, and—”

  “So you’re telling me these are the communal pants? Those your skivvies, or did you borrow them, too?” He opened his mouth, but she’d hit her limit for stupid. “Bzzzz! Wrong answer, dude. You’re going to jail. Do not pass go, we’ll collect your two hundred dollars in the morning.”

  Then, for the first time that night, he surprised her. “Don’t take me to the city jail. I’m begging you.” His hazel eyes went wide with panicked pleading. “Take me to the county jail.”

  “Cruise, I’m a city cop. You’re going to the city jail. That’s the way it works.”

  “No!” Whirling around, he hit her square in the face.

  Stunned, Faith reeled back, wiping at the blood that had splattered into her eyes from her busted lip. Cruise took off running, Rambo in furious, barking pursuit. The little rat didn’t get far. Before Faith could even shake off the sucker punch, the dog caught the hem of his jeans and braced his forelegs. Cruise fell flat on his face.

  “Oh, you’re going to regret that!” Ignoring her swollen lip, Faith ran over and pounced. Just as she straddled his butt and grabbed his wrist, Cruise went wild. One swinging elbow caught her in the cheek. Pain detonated in the side of her face.

  “Okay, that does it!” Faith snatched her Asp baton from her belt and telescoped it to full length with a flick of her wrist. She was seriously tempted to clock him in the skull with it, but head shots were a no-no. Instead, she tried to hook one skinny arm so she could lever his wrist into position for handcuffs.

  Cruise twisted onto his side, grabbed her arm, and threw her onto her back. Face twisted in fear and desperation, he reared over her, fist drawn back.

  This time he wasn’t fast enough. Faith blocked the shot with the Asp and popped him in the nose with her left fist. His head snapped back with the force of the blow.

  Damn, she thought with a snarling grin, that felt good.

  Cruise yowled and started to scramble off her. Before he could make it all the way to his feet, Rambo reared up and smashed into his shoulders, knocking him sideways. The shepherd pounced, flattening him on the pavement.

  Thoroughly pinned under the dog’s weight, there wasn’t much he could do when Rambo planted both big forepaws on the side of his head. With a happy growl of satisfaction, ’Bo thumped his butt down on the man’s shoulder.

  The suspect could only yowl. “Get him off me!”

  “Nothing doing, jerk.” Faith rammed a knee in the small of Cruise’s spine, snatched her handcuffs from the pouch at her waist, and snapped them onto his flailing left hand. She used the cuff to drag it into position behind his back. “Give me your other hand!”

  “Ahh! Lady, get your dog off me!”

  “That’s what you get for being a dumbass—a German shepherd sitting on your face. Give me your hand!”

  “Don’t take me to the city jail! I don’t want to get my soul sucked out!”

  Fighting to control his squirming, she panted, “What the hell are you talking about, you lunatic? Are you high?”

  “Please!”

  “If you don’t give me your hand, you’re going to the hospital, because I’m going to let Rambo eat your head!”

  Right on cue, the dog began doing his Cujo imitation, barking until saliva flew. Cruise yowled even louder. “Ahhh! Get him off, get him off!”

  “Give me your hand, or I swear to God, I’ll tell Rambo you’re a Scooby snack.”

  “All right, all right!” He thrust his right hand down, and she snapped on the cuffs. “Just don’t let him eat me!”

  Fighting her laughter, she looked at Rambo, who stood with both paws mashing down on Cruise’s face. She’d never seen a dog look more thoroughly smug. “Get off the man’s head, ’Bo. What are you, a hat?”

  An hour later, she was considerably less amused as she stalked over to the police car where Cruise sat waiting. Since the backseat of her unit had been removed to make room for Rambo, she’d had to call another officer to transport her prisoner. With George Williams keeping an eye on Cruise, she and Rambo had conducted a thorough search of that rattletrap Honda.

  Now she swung the
rear door open so she could glare down at the man. “All that for three flipping crack rocks? Are you nuts? The way you were carrying on, I thought you had a kilo of coke or a body in the trunk.”

  He hunched his shoulders, pale and miserable. There were red scratches on the side of his face from Rambo’s claws, and she’d given him a black eye. Faith didn’t feel sorry for the little weasel though, because her own eye was swelling, and her uniform was ripped and bloody. Assorted scrapes and bruises had already begun to sting.

  “I just don’t wanna go to the city jail,” he whined. “People go to that jail, they come out with their soul sucked out. Some of ’em get eaten by the monster.”

  “Monster? Oh, give me a break.” She’d thought she’d at least get a decent bust out of this. Instead she’d ripped the knee out of her brand-new uniform pants. “You’ll be out on bond before I finish writing the police report. You’ve got one simple possession prior. You wouldn’t even get time, except I’m going to add assaulting a police officer to the charges. Public defender’ll have a hell of a time getting you out of that.”

  Cruise moaned like a condemned man. “I’m gonna die. I just know it! I don’t deserve to die for no crack rocks!”

  Faith looked up at her fellow officer. “Do you know what this idiot is talking about?”

  Williams shrugged his broad bull shoulders. “Bet you ten bucks he huffs on top of the crack. His brain probably has more holes than a chunk of deli Swiss.” Huffers—people who inhaled paint—were notorious for brain damage.

  “I don’t huff!” Cruise looked offended. “Everybody knows you go to that jail, the witch gets you. And I don’t wanna die!”

  “Witch?” Faith straightened, disgusted. “Ah, shit. Yeah, he’s high. I sure didn’t hit him that hard.”

  “Told you. A huffer. I can always spot ’em.” Williams rolled his eyes and closed the door on his prisoner. “I’ll take him in.”

  “Do that. I’ll start the paperwork.” Disgusted, she stomped back to her own unit, where Rambo waited patiently in the back. “Witches. The gene pool in this town is in serious need of a dose of Clorox.”

  Biting back a groan of pain as her sore muscles protested, Faith peeled off her uniform shirt. She dropped it and sat gingerly on the edge of the bed to work on her slacks. The pants knee that wasn’t ripped stuck to her skin. She cursed drug addicted weasels everywhere, knowing she must have skinned it.

  The wound stung enthusiastically as Faith pulled the fabric free. Tossing the bloodied pants on top of her shirt, she got up and hobbled to the full-length mirror on the back of her closet door.

  With a groan of effort as stiff muscles protested, Faith pulled her sore body upright and assessed the damages. A constellation of scrapes and darkening bruises marked her skin, half of which she couldn’t remember getting.

  God, she hated wrestling idiots on pavement. Depending on the idiot, asphalt could do more damage than swinging fists.

  In this case, though, Cruise had definitely gotten the worst of the encounter. She grinned, remembering the way he’d looked with Rambo standing on his face. Where the hell had the dog learned that trick?

  But then, Faith had realized weeks ago that Rambo was not your average pooch, even among K-9s. He was the most intelligent dog she’d ever worked with, including her beloved Sherlock. She never had to give him a command twice, and when she talked to him, he acted as if he understood what she was saying.

  Which was more than she could say for her ex-husband.

  “I just wanted to be with a woman for once.”

  She flinched at the memory of Ron’s snarl the night she’d caught him with the dispatcher. The girl had been a good six inches shorter than Faith, a perky, curvy blonde no more than twenty-two. A marked contrast to Ron Pettit’s dark, smouldering masculinity.

  The betrayal had wrecked Faith, especially coming less than a week after Sherlock had been shot by a drug dealer. She and the dog had worked together for five years, and his loss had been personally and professionally devastating.

  To make matters worse, Faith soon realized she was the only person on the Atlanta police force who hadn’t known Ron was running around on her.

  Under the circumstances, there was no way she could remain with the APD, so she started looking for another job.

  She found it when she learned Clarkston Police Chief George Ayers wanted to add a K-9 officer to his roster. Though Clarkston didn’t have a dog yet, Ayers was working on it, and Faith wasn’t in a position to quibble. She turned her back on Atlanta and moved to South Carolina.

  Unfortunately, Clarkston’s highly conservative city council was reluctant to pay for a dog. It took more than a year before an anonymous benefactor and a Greenville K-9 trainer donated Rambo to the department. The shepherd had a fantastic nose and a great work ethic, and with his help, she’d started making major drug cases. Last night’s big coke bust was only the latest in the string.

  Her leg stung fiercely. Looking down, Faith realized blood ran down her shin. With a grumbled curse, she headed for the bathroom to clean up.

  Then she grinned despite the pain, remembering the way Rambo had looked sitting on Cruise’s head.

  Who had taught him that trick?

  An hour later, Faith sat on the long leather couch in her living room, a glass of white zin in her hand and Rambo’s big head on her knee. She stroked him absently between the ears and sipped her wine, frowning.

  It was two o’clock in the morning, but she was far too wound up to sleep. She couldn’t get the brawl with Cruise out of her mind.

  “Everybody knows you go to that jail, the witch gets you.”

  Witch. Yeah, right.

  Except the fear in his eyes had seemed genuine.

  “He was higher than a kite, ’Bo,” she told the dog, who shifted to look up at her. “He was paranoid and cracked up.”

  And yet…

  “…the witch gets you.”

  Something about the way he’d said it made her remember Tony Shay.

  Shay had been a big, strapping redhead with a charming, smartass grin. Faith would have found him handsome if she hadn’t been so busy trying to wrestle him to the ground.

  The nearest they’d been able to figure out later, Shay was just passing through Clarkston when he stopped at the Silver Bullet for a beer and a ham sandwich. Somebody who’d had a little too much to drink decided to start a fight, and Shay elected to finish it.

  Unfortunately for Shay, the drunk in question had a lot of friends. Before long, everybody in the bar was trying to kick the stranger’s ass. That had proven a lot harder than it looked. Shay knew how to use those ham-sized fists, and he had enough muscle packed on his six-two frame to back up his skill.

  Faith had been one of the six cops called to the bar to try to break up the fight. Four of them ended up wrestling with Shay, who by then was royally pissed off. They’d been losing the fight until Faith gave him a face full of Capstun. Some people were barely affected by the pepper spray, but it had put Shay down hard, choking and blinded.

  While her fellow officers hauled the big man off to jail, Faith got a call about a domestic dispute. An hour later, she was escorting the offending husband to a cell when she spotted a woman she didn’t recognize.

  The city jail was housed at the police department, in a back section not designated for visitors. Yet there the woman stood in the hallway, leaning seductively against the bars of Shay’s cell, flirting with him. He stood a little back from the door, watching her with a smart-ass grin and wary eyes.

  It was hard to see a reason for the wariness. The woman certainly didn’t look dangerous, being a full head shorter than the brawny prisoner. Slim and willowy, she was dressed in tight leather pants and a red sweater that displayed her lush body to advantage. Her hair tumbled halfway to her butt, its crow black a stark contrast to her creamy skin. Her lipstick matched the sweater, a deep crimson that looked even more theatrical against her pale, heart-shaped face.

  Faith would h
ave questioned her about what she was doing in that part of the jail, but the idiot wife beater suddenly decided he wasn’t going into his cell. By the time she’d wrestled him inside and locked him up, the woman was gone.

  The next day, a bartender found Tony Shay’s body behind the Bullet. Apparently he’d been ambushed when he’d returned to pick up his car after making bail.

  Whoever it was had cut out his heart with what the coroner had described as “surgical precision.” The local weekly newspaper had a field day with that little detail. The article they’d run two days later speculated about Satanism and black magic rites in breathless terms, based on no evidence whatsoever.

  Except they never did find that heart.

  Faith, meanwhile, described the woman she’d seen to the detective investigating the case. He blew her off.

  “You saying a chick did all that to that guy? Not likely. It was somebody from the bar fight.” Gordon Taylor’s beefy middle-aged face had gone closed and chill. “I doubt we’ll ever solve it.”

  “Everybody knows you go to that jail, the witch gets you.”

  Faith felt the hair stand up along her arms. “Bullshit,” she told Rambo. “And on that note, I’m going to bed.”

  TWO

  Jim waited an hour to make sure Faith had dropped off. Lifting his muzzle off his paws, he rose from the rug beside her bed to peer over the edge of the mattress.

  She was deeply asleep, moonlight spilling across the side of her face. Even with the bruises, he saw elegance in the rise of her high cheekbones and sensuality in her lush, full lips.

  God, he’d love to kiss that mouth.

  Sighing in regret, Jim sat back on his haunches and let the magic spill. It rolled over his skin, ruffling the black fur with waves of raw, tingling power. He suppressed a whine of pain as his muscles twisted around his distorting bones. The magic pulled him onto his back legs, stretching him upward as his body flowed like wax.

  When the magic winked out, Jim rolled his shoulders to loosen them. It was good to be human again.