Night Broken (Mercy Thompson #8)(34)

“Yes,” said Hank. “And much joy he’s ever gotten from it. Gets him into trouble and never out, he says. You think he saw something and broke out?”

“I don’t know him well enough to say that,” I said. “He had a couple of visions while we were there. Mostly a bunch of nonsense—” But he’d known Honey’s name. “Something to the effect of Coyote’s”—I remembered that odd pronunciation—“somebody’s children … breaking the night with their cries. I don’t know anyone else besides the two of us who qualify. Maybe he saw something that made his escape necessary.”

“And maybe Coyote’s kin don’t do well in lockup,” Hank said. “No more than does anyone, but Coyote was always good at getting out of places he didn’t want to be. Anyway, you can expect to see police sometime. They’ll talk to everyone on his visitors list, and there are about four of us up in the Yakama Nation and you. He’s not big-time, but breaking out might make him more important to them. They don’t like being thwarted.” “They,” I knew, referred to the authorities of whatever flavor. Hank didn’t like people who could tell him what to do—and he avoided them by being a very law-abiding citizen.

“Thank you for the heads-up,” I said.

“Probably he’s just gone walkabout. Show up with another name in ten or twenty years. He does that.”

“Walkabout?” I said doubtfully. “Isn’t that an Aussie Aboriginal term?”

“An Indian is an Indian, Mercy, no matter what continent they come from,” he said with a grin in his voice. Before I could disagree, he disconnected.

So I wasn’t surprised when the police showed up in the afternoon.

“Mercy.”

“Tony?” I looked up from the Passat I was working on. There was something wrong with the injectors, but it was intermittent, and I was afraid that meant it was electronic—and probably something to do with the computer. And that would explain why the car’s computer hadn’t been able to tell me what was going on.

“Mercy, I need you to clean up and come talk to me.”

I blinked at the tightness in his voice and focused on his face. Trouble, that expression said, and in response, I backed out of the job, pulling bolts and pieces out of my pockets and putting them on the car where they wouldn’t be lost. I peeled off the latex gloves and tossed them.

“Tad?” I said.

The sound of the crawler’s hard wheels on pavement signaled his emergence from under the Vanagon he was repairing.

“I’m headed off with Tony for a bit. Don’t burn down the garage or run off the customers while I’m gone.”

Tad glanced from Tony’s face to mine, and said mildly, “Is it okay if I call in a few strippers to put on a show and charge it to the garage? I’ve been thinking it might pull in some more customers.”

“Sure,” I said as I stepped out of my overalls: in the interest of time, I didn’t bother to retreat to the bathroom. I was wearing a full set of clothes underneath anyway. “Just make sure Christy makes it over in time for the show so she can tell the pack what kind of place I run here. Oh, and tell her I took off with a hot-looking man.”

He grimaced. “Yeah, sorry about that.”

She’d called yesterday, and, knowing how I felt about her, Tad had told her that I’d gone out for a run. Tad doesn’t usually lie, though since he is only half-fae, he can, and he is a fair hand at misdirection. I had been in the garage bay, and he’d answered my cell in the office, where I’d left it.

Next thing I know, I was getting a call from Adam, who was mad because he thought that I had been running without protection. Grocery stores and other public places were unlikely spots for kidnapping the Alpha’s wife. Running I had to do with company for safety’s sake. I regretted it, but I understood the necessity.

I’d explained that Tad had been mistaken when he talked to Christy. I took the blame for it—thus putting myself firmly in the wrong. The pack figuratively—maybe literally, for all I know—patted Christy on the head for being so worried about my well-being.

“Not your fault,” I told Tad—Christy would have found something else to make me look bad anyway. “Though this time you might mention that the handsome man is an armed police officer who will keep me safe as a fox in a henhouse.”

Tad gave me a mock salute while I followed Tony out.

“Trouble?” Tony asked.

“Adam’s ex-wife has a stalker, so she is living with us until we can figure out what to do about him,” I told him as matter-of-factly as I could manage.

He stopped and looked at me, and finally lost the odd distance I’d sensed—as if I’d been a stranger he’d been sent to fetch. Maybe he was worried that I had had a hand in Gary Laughingdog’s escape.

“Adam’s ex-wife is living with you?” he asked incredulously.

“Her stalker is dangerous,” I told him. “We are pretty sure he killed a man and burned down the building her condo was in. Until someone can find him and arrest him, Christy is staying with us because even a violent man might hesitate to face off with a pack of werewolves.”

I had added the “arrest him” part because it sounded good. I was pretty sure at this point that any arrest would be postmortem. Maybe it had been a mistake because something in the last sentence put the distance right back between us.