hands. “I gotta go.”
“I thought your shift was over,” Paige protested.
“It is, but I’m in uniform and they need backup, so…can you find your way without me?”
The Half Breed was already loaded into Paige’s trunk and the Cav was parked outside, so she nodded. “Sure. I’ll get back to you about that check.”
“Great. Nice meeting you. Same with you, Cole. Tell whoever’s at the counter that I sent you and you should get a free dog.”
Cole waved at Stanze, who was already climbing into his cruiser. “Bribing cops now?” Cole muttered.
“Not that sort of check,” Paige replied. “He’s a good guy.”
“Let’s hope he knows his lunch spots. I’m hungry.”
Chi Town Hot Dogz looked as if it had once been a fast food burger joint. Cole recognized the layout of the drink dispensers as well as the proportion of booths to tables. Looking over to Paige, he recognized the sour expression upon her face. “What’s the matter? You look like you’ve already got a complaint for the manager.”
Rather than answer that question, she stepped up to the counter with one of her own. “What kind of hot dogs are these?”
The guy behind the register kept his smile intact despite her tone. “Grade A, Chicago style,” he assured her.
“No. Are they Vienna Beef? I don’t see a Vienna Beef sign.”
“You mean like that one?” the cashier asked as he hooked a thumb toward a plastic sign that was partially hidden by a Cubs pennant. It was the official yellow, blue, and red logo that Paige had been looking for, so she nodded and moved on.
“What about the buns?” she asked.
“They’re fresh.”
She pulled in a deep breath and let it out with a sigh. “The buns need to be poppy seed. The dog needs to be Vienna Beef, topped with pickle spears, tomatoes, peppers, relish, mustard—does any of this sound familiar?”
Unlike most of the food service employees Paige pulled through the wringer, this one kept his spirits up. “Sure. Check the menu and see for yourself.”
Everything Paige had demanded was listed under the heading, #1 DOGZ.
“All right,” she said. “I’ll take one of those.”
“You want any ketchup on that?”
Paige wheeled around and stomped for the door. “We’re leaving.”
They wound up eating lunch at a round metal table, sitting on metal seats that felt as if they’d soaked up the heat from a sun that had gone supernova ten minutes before they arrived. Since he’d passed about sixty-three signs advertising REAL KANSAS CITY BAR-B-Q, Cole dragged Paige to the closest one of those places and wouldn’t accept any other suggestions. As always, once she had some food in her stomach along with some on her face and T-shirt, she was much better company.
“So what did you and Officer Stanze do while I was out crawling through the dirt?” he asked.
“He took me around to the spots where people were killed and others were supposed to have been dragged away or attacked by dogs.”
“Fun date.”
Pausing while in the middle of sopping up some greasy sauce with a hunk of white bread, she replied, “I bet he is.”
“Well, I found some Half Breed dens,” Cole announced before she could follow her previous train of thought too far. “Three, as a matter of fact. One in Penn Valley Park and two in North Terrace Park.”
“Did you get a look inside or did you just spot a few holes and call it a day?”
Anticipating that reaction, Cole had a speech prepared. The three dens were pretty similar, so it didn’t take long to fill her in.
When he was done with his presentation, Paige asked, “What about that Alvin guy? Did you find him?”
“Sure did. He’s a Nymar, and a loopy one at that. He didn’t even know there were any others like him.”
Paige shrugged and grabbed the short corn on the cob that had accompanied her lunch. “There hasn’t been a big Nymar presence here for years. Even in places like Chicago it’s not unusual to hear about some Nymar living their whole lives thinking they’re the only ones. Just proves they don’t have their shit together half as much as they say they do.”
“Otherwise, they’d have a better welcome package,” Cole said.
Paige bit into her corn, accidentally squirted Cole in the face with it and said, “Exactly!”
“Alvin said the Half Breeds got there a few days ago.”
“Good. That means they’ll still be resting up from their first transformation. It takes them a couple days to recuperate.”
“What about that thing in the trunk?” Cole asked. “Did you feed Officer Stanze a story or just swear him to secrecy?”
Paige shrugged and finished off her last piece of beef. “With all the Half Breeds running around this town already, there’s probably hundreds of grainy pictures being taken by dozens of cameras. He’s a cop so he’s in on all the weird calls that have been coming in. He seemed like he’s already seen and heard a lot worse than a screwed- up hunk of road kill.”
“Learn anything on your drive?”
“We drove to those spots, but I only felt an itch at a few of them. We’ll check those out after lunch. Everything he said makes it pretty obvious that the Half Breeds were out hunting and sniffing out their territory over the last few days.”
“That doesn’t sound good.”
“Not good, not bad,” Paige replied. “But it could be worse.” Falling into the tone she used when teaching Cole a new attack, she explained, “Half Breeds are made when someone survives a really bad werewolf attack. You knew that much already. The first time they shift into that new shape, pretty much every bone in their body is broken. Muscles and tendons hold them together, but it kills the person in a bad way. All that’s left is the wolf.
“They’re pretty useless for the first day or two after they’re turned, but the first thing a wolf in pain wants to do is crawl away somewhere until it feels better. Once it feels better, it gets hungry.” Paige picked up a napkin and began the meticulous process of cleaning her face, hands, and clothes from the assault of barbecue sauce she’d endured. “Once the muscles harden around their broken bones, they can walk. Once they figure out they can walk, they’re off. After that, they eat, run, eat, kill, and eat some more until they die. Those Half Breeds you found sounded pretty fresh, so they may be a little ways off from becoming a real problem.”
“Their skin was still damp and there wasn’t a lot of muscle around the ribs or legs.” As he said that, Cole remembered the sight of those things in the hole. The smell came right along with that memory, and after that hit him, he grimaced and pushed away the rest of his lunch. “So do you think the ones from North Terrace Park attacked that girl from the university?” he asked.
“Actually, I think the one in the trunk
“How could you know that?” Cole asked.
“Well, to begin with, it’s a female. They have shorter front legs and longer ones in the back. That makes them just a bit faster. The males are the other way around.”
After pitching their garbage into a huge metal barrel, they went back to the car. Rather than start the Cav’s engine, Paige walked around to the trunk and opened it. The stench rolled out like a kick from an invisible pair of hiking boots, but she ignored it as she peeled open the garbage bag and reached down to poke the dead creature inside. “Look for yourself,” she said.
Once Cole’s eyes stopped watering, he was able to point out a few things. “This carcass is pretty small. The descriptions of Lisa Wilson being run on the news say she was only five-five or five-six, so I guess this is about the right size,” he pointed out. “And its fur is thick. Actually, the fur covers most of its body. I usually don’t see that in the ones that are standing still.”
Paige grinned and gave his arm a playful swat. “Very good, young one. This was killed while it was in full wolf form and on the prowl. Stanze said he hit it with his car and then shot it. Looks to me like he unloaded a whole clip into her. He was probably so freaked out that it wasn’t dead from the crash, he just kept on firing. But look closer. Right…there.”
