He looked at the ribs. “Not hungrrry anymorre.”
“It’s okay,” I told him. “Don’t let it go to waste.”
He bit into the rib. “Did you ever go back?”
I smiled at him. “What do you think?”
He blinked.
“Funny thing about that pack,” I said. “A few years ago someone went over there and wiped them out. Must’ve been some sort of marksman, because most of them had been shot from a distance. Very clean shots, with silver bullets.” I leaned over and touched a spot at the base of his skull about half an inch below his earlobe. “Apricot. Also known as medulla oblongata. It’s an area of the brain that controls involuntary functions: breathing, heart rate, digestion. It is the only place in the shapeshifter body that guarantees instant death when hit by a silver bullet. Very small target.” I held my fingers a little over an inch apart. “Tiny. Takes a lot of practice.”
Ascanio’s eyes were huge on his bouda face.
Not everyone got a clean death. Some were more up close and personal. Not everyone died either. There were four children—all boys—and three adolescents—two girls and a boy—in chains. The next generation, new victims of Clarissa’s tender love and care. They made it.
“What happened to yourrr dad?”
“He died about two years after we ran away. He was a hyena and they only live about twelve years or so in the wild. He probably lived twice that. If you’re done eating, we need to get a move on.”
He hopped off the wall.
We wiped our faces with the towel from the Jeep, returned the pan, and drove out.
“Whereee to now?” Ascanio asked.
“Garcia Construction.” I highly doubted that we would even be allowed to enter Anapa’s HQ in our current shapes.
Garcia Construction had an address on the east side of the city, in the tangle of newly renamed streets, and it took us a good hour and a half to find it. The building sat in the back of a lot behind a chain-link fence, but the gate stood wide open. We parked on the street and breezed right in. Gravel crunched under my paw-feet. I really hated gravel. It was sharp, it got stuck between your toes, and it didn’t exactly provide a stable surface.
Random dirt and refuse littered the gravel lot before the structure. The building itself was nothing special: built post-Shift, with magic in mind. Just a brick box, with barred dusty windows and a barred door, a standard house for a world where monsters spawned out of thin air and tried to break into your house to eat you. Another chain-link gate, on the right of the building and also wide open, led to the back lot.
The place smelled abandoned: squirrels, the musk of a tomcat on the prowl, dog excrement decomposing in the sun, tree rats. No human odors. Odd.
I ran my fingers along the wooden board nailed tight across the double door. Dirt.
“They arrrre closshed,” Ascanio observed.
“It looks that way. Either the Heron building was supposed to be their big comeback and they didn’t rehire anyone until they got a contract, or…”
“Orrr?”
“Or someone hired them specifically to reclaim the Heron Building and when the deal fell through, the client abandoned them. Come on, we’re going to dig in their garbage.”
“Oh boy!”
Smartass.
The Dumpster by the fence didn’t yield any new information. It wasn’t exactly empty either. The moment we lifted the lid, a very upset mama skunk aimed her butt at us, and we dropped the lid pronto. Stupid May, everybody was having babies.
I went to check the mailbox, while Ascanio trotted off to the back.
The metal box was empty. No mail. Hmm.
“I found shomeshing!” Ascanio called.
I made my way to the back. The narrow space between the building and the fence opened into an enormous back lot, filled with random metal junk. Tiny creatures, fuzzy and quick, with long chinchilla tails, skittered over the refuse. The gravel lay unevenly. It looked like something had been dragged out.
Ascanio greeted me in the back, holding up a flat tire, with a jagged chunk of metal embedded in it. He stuck the tire under my nose. The scent of automotive lubricant wafted up. Fresh. Car grease changed its scent in the open. This was a recent blowout.
Someone had driven into this lot probably during the last week, no more than ten days ago for sure. I held up the tire. It wasn’t just flat, it must’ve exploded. The vehicle to which that tire belonged couldn’t have gotten very far. I looked back at the drag marks. Someone had been towed out. That was the most likely explanation.
The dirt on the board blocking the door was months old. Magic had killed most of the cell phones—if you had a working one, you were likely in the military. So how did this person get themselves out of their blown tire predicament?
I jogged to the street, with Ascanio at my heels. Two hundred yards down the road, a tall sign announced Downs Motor Care. Aha.
I pointed at the sign. “This would be a clue.”
Ascanio chortled next to me. It sounded like something out of a nightmare.
We walked to Downs Motor Care, which consisted of a parking lot littered with car parts and filled with random clunkers of both the mechanical and the magical persuasion. A large metal garage sat in the back. Two of the garage’s four doors were open. In the first door, a man dug under the hood of a Dodge truck.
“Afternoon!” I called out.
The man spun about, saw us, and hit his head on the Dodge’s hood. He was young, in good shape, with a face that looked like something had chewed on the left side of it and spat him out.
The mechanic yanked a large wrench from the nearby table. “What do you want?”
I held up twenty bucks. Six months ago I would’ve flashed my Order ID. He would have instantly been put at ease and I would have gotten my information. But in the past couple of months of working with Kate I had learned that the private sector paid for the answers to their questions. It chafed me, but I needed to find the killer.
“Looking for some information, sir,” I said.
Ascanio showed him the tire.