The Golden Lily (Bloodlines, #2)(58)

"I thought you'd stopped those too."

He gave me a sidelong glance. "Nearly did. But then I remembered I'd convinced some girl that if she gave me a chance and got me into those classes, I'd follow through on them.

That'll teach me."

I smiled and pulled into traffic.

I'd left a little early so that Adrian and I had time to take care of our registration. When I'd called the Wolfe School of Defense earlier today, an agitated man had told me to just show up with the money since we were down to the last minute. The address was outside of downtown, in a residence set on sprawling grounds that had made no attempts to go green and thwart the climate. The desert still held claim here, giving the house a dismal, forlorn look. If not for WOLFE printed on the mailbox, I would've thought we had the wrong place. We pulled up into the gravel drive - no other cars were there - and stared.

"This is the kind of place you see in movies," said Adrian. "Where careless people run into serial killers."

"At least it's still light out," I said. Ever since the alley, darkness had taken on a whole new menace for me. "Can't be that bad."

Adrian opened the car door. "Let's find out."

We rang the doorbell and were immediately met with the sounds of barking and scampering feet. I stepped back uneasily. "I hate poorly trained dogs," I muttered to Adrian. "They need to behave and be kept in line."

"Just like the people in your life, huh?" asked Adrian.

The door opened, and we were met by a fifty-something man with a grizzled blond beard.

He was wearing Bermuda shorts and a Lynyrd Skynyrd T-shirt. Also, he had an eye patch.

"This is incredible," I heard Adrian murmur. "Beyond my wildest dreams." I was taken aback. The eye patch made me think of Keith's glass eye, which in turn made me think of my role in him acquiring it. It wasn't a memory I liked being reminded of, and I wondered at the odds of running into another one-eyed man. This guy nudged the herd of dogs aside - which appeared to be some sort of Chihuahua mix - and barely managed to step outside without them following before he shut the door.

"Yeah?" he asked.

"We're, uh, here for the class. The self-defense class." I felt the need to clarify, in case he also taught about dog breeding or riding the high seas. "I'm Sydney, this is Adrian. I called this morning?"

"Ah, right, right." He scratched his beard. "You got the money? Cash only." I produced one hundred and fifty dollars and handed it over. Out of habit, I nearly asked for a receipt, but then thought better of it. He stuffed the cash into the pocket of his shorts.

"Okay," he said. "You're in. Go ahead and wait in the garage until the others show up. The side door's unlocked." He gestured to a large, industrial looking building - twice the size of the house - over on the far side of the lot. Without waiting around to see if we'd comply, he slipped back inside to the barking dogs.

The garage's interior, I was relieved to see, was the first thing here that looked like it had some semblance of legitimacy. There were clean mats on the floor and mirrors on some of the walls. A TV and VHS player sat on a cart, along with some defense-related tapes covered in dust. Slightly more disconcerting was some of the decor, like a pair of nunchucks hanging on the wall.

"Don't touch those!" I warned, seeing Adrian head toward them. "That's not the kind of guy whose stuff you want to mess with."

Adrian stayed hands-off. "Do you think we'll get to learn to use these?"

"Weapons weren't in the class description. It's about basic self-defense and hand-tohand."

"Why bother then?" Adrian strolled over to a glass case displaying several types of brass knuckles. "That's the kind of stuff Castile does all day. He could have showed us."

"I wanted someone a little more approachable," I explained.

"What, like Captain McTropicalShorts back there? Where on earth did you find him anyway?"

"Just did an Internet search." Feeling a need to defend my research, I added, "He comes highly recommended."

"By who? Long John Silver?" Despite myself, I laughed.

Over the next half hour, the rest of our class trickled in. One was a woman who looked to be about seventy. Another was a mother who'd just had her fourth child and decided she needed to "learn to protect them." The last two women in the class were in their mid-twenties and wore T-shirts with angry girl-power catchphrases. Adrian and I were the youngest in the group. He was the only man, not counting our instructor, who asked that we simply refer to him as Wolfe.

I was beginning to get a bad feeling about all of this, particularly as class started. The six of us sat on the floor while Wolfe leaned against one of the mirrors and looked down upon us.

"If you're here," he began. "You probably want to learn to use those right away." He pointed at the nunchucks.

I caught sight of Adrian's face in the mirror. His expression said, Yes, that is exactly what I want to learn.

"Well, too bad," said Wolfe. "You aren't ever going to use them. Not in this class, anyway.

Oh, they've got their uses, believe me. Saved my ass more than once when I was out bowhunting in Alaska a few years ago. But if you pay attention to what I'm going to tell you, you won't ever need to pick those up, seeing as we don't have a rabid moose problem here in Palm Springs."