Release Me (Stark Trilogy, #1)(92)

She lifted her whiskey and gave it a little twirl.

“Can I buy you another drink?”

She shook her head, no.

He said something else, but she was already sliding off her stool, leaving the bar, approaching Hannah. He and his friend had their eyes on her and their pint glasses half-raised to their mouths, frozen by her approach.

“Do you mind if I sit here?” she said. “That creep won’t leave me alone.”

“By all means,” the friend said. He was older, squarer. Black polo shirt and jeans. Badge and pistol clipped to his belt.

“What did he say?” Hannah said and peered over her shoulder with a hard-eyed expression. “Do we need to teach him something about manners?”

“It’s fine,” she said. “I don’t think he’ll bother me anymore now that I’m with you two. You two look pretty tough.”

When Hannah smiled, she saw the gap between his teeth she didn’t know was there.



Two pitchers and two hours later, she is in his car, a Dodge Challenger parked under a skeletal oak tree with a few browned leaves still clinging stubbornly to its branches. She has his zipper undone and the hard muscle of his cock in her hand. In the tavern, they talked about the shit economy, about the Trail Blazers, about her cousin who died of cancer, about her job as a hairdresser—and then she asked what they did anyway.

Condensation dribbled from the pitcher and pooled at its base and Hannah dipped his finger in it and touched her on the back of the hand. “We’re cops.”

“No!”

“We are. We really are.”

“Tell me, is it like in the shows? Like that CSI?”

They laughed and shook their heads and said the shows were good fun, but real police work was a little less glamorous and she’d be surprised by how much Hollywood got wrong.

“Tell me something badass you’ve done,” she said. “Something dangerous and heroic.” She made her tone half-mocking and half-daring and Hannah wiped the foam off his mustache and grinned at his friend and said, “Oh, we’ve got some stories, don’t we, Paulie?”

“Yeah, we do.”

It wasn’t long before Hannah brought up the raid on the lycan safe house. He talked about working with the prick feds and stalking through the grass and ramming open the door and charging through the house and finding it empty except for one guy. Who turned out to be the guy, the one who wrote that banned book that pissed a bunch of people off. “Weirdest thing,” he said. “Him all alone like that. It’s like he had been left for us.”

She let her jaw drop lower and lower as he spoke and said she couldn’t believe it. “That was, like, in the news.”

“I know,” he said. “It was some seriously serious shit.”

Now, in the car, she can tell from his breathing and from the short little hip thrusts that he is close to finishing. She leans toward him and nibbles his ear and says, “Where did they take that guy? The one from the raid?”

“What?” His eyes are half-shuttered with pleasure. “What do you care?”

“Just curious.”

“Keep going. Please.”

“Where is he?” She gives him another pull and his whole body arches toward it. “Where is he?”

In a rush he tells her FDC SeaTac, he’s at FDC SeaTac.

She releases him and slaps him with the same hand and says, “What kind of woman do you think I am?” and pushes open the door and leaves him there with his mouth and his pants agape.





Chapter 39



AUGUSTUS KNOWS all about the eugenics programs. The Americans, from 1907 to 1960, sterilizing hundreds of thousands of lycans and homosexuals, the poor, the physically and mentally disabled. The Germans, during the 1930s and ’40s, trying to create an Ubermensch, a perfect Aryan, while at the same time playing God with the Jews and Gypsies and all those with what they called inferior blood, sometimes sterilizing, sometimes exterminating, sometimes experimenting—injecting patients with chemicals and diseases, exposing them to mustard gas, sewing together their bodies, immersing them in cold water, forcing them to sexually engage with dogs, striking their skulls with hammers to study head trauma.

And he knows that the ACLU and a handful of congressmen and the demonstrators outside the White House are accusing him of the same. He tries not to give interviews—he needs Chase to remain the mouthpiece—but the other month, a reporter sprang out and stuck a microphone in his face and he couldn’t stop himself. “Everyone needs to realize that what we’re talking about here comes down to public health, public safety. All medical efforts are in support of that. AIDS is not a person. Mad cow disease is not a person. Swine flu is not a person. And lobos isn’t either. It’s a dangerous pathogen.” A certain segment of the population seemed to be in denial of this, as if lobos were a dangerous truth they preferred not to believe in, like an X-ray spotted with tumors.

But he knows that he is correct. Knows without a doubt. That is one of his more upstanding qualities, he thinks. Absolute certainty. This certainty enabled him to muscle private and corporate donors into his corner, convinced the University of Oregon to risk the lawsuits they knew would come and then fast-tracked their endorsement of Neal Desai’s search for a vaccine and allowed him to manifest a research team in a semester’s time and named him the director of the Center for Lobos Studies.