The trainee filed past Garrity, not even brushing shoulders, and Garrity focused his attention on me. Suddenly he wasn’t Special Agent in Charge anymore. He was my friend, his eyes tight with concern.
He stepped closer. “Hey? You okay?”
I nodded, but my hands were trembling. Not from fear. From pure thwarted anger. I wanted to hurt somebody, preferably the somebody who’d shot me in the chest, and I wanted it so bad I couldn’t stop shaking. Garrity knew the difference. He saw it clearly.
“Ride it out, Tai. Breathe it down.” He folded his arms. “Whose idea was it to bring you here today, Trey’s?”
I put my elbows to my knees and breathed, trying to get the blood back to my head. “Mine. I read it in one of those books my brother gave him. He said it worked for him. I thought it might work for me.”
“Did it?”
I unclenched my fists. There were half-moon indentions where my nails had cut into my skin, and my vision was still red at the edges. “I don’t think so.”
Chapter Two
I spent the rest of my Saturday at the gun shop, cursing the decrepit air conditioner. It had one job—keep the temperature below eighty degrees in the dinky one-room floor area—and it was failing. But that was early September in the South: good-bye summer, hello more summer.
I untucked my shirt, rolled up my sleeves. Only one customer remained in the shop, a young woman with cut-off denim shorts and brittle blond hair. She wore a tee shirt with the word Moonshine emblazoned across the front. Ever since the TV series had started filming in Kennesaw, fans of the Prohibition-era werewolf drama had been showing up at my door in packs, desperate for Moonshine-themed hats and posters. I’d pegged her as one of those. But then I’d watched her leave and come back twice, both times visiting the black F150 with the tinted windows parked in front of my door, and I’d known exactly what she was up to.
She was only my fourth customer of the afternoon. Except for my reenactor clientele and their steady appetite for black powder, business had been slow for months. The Civil War’s sesquicentennial was over. All the tourists wanted was Moonshine merchandise. All the locals wanted was guns and ammo and cheap Confederate flags, the larger the better, which they could get on almost any street corner since every Tom, Dick, and Bubba in town sold them from the back of his pickup truck.
I checked the clock. Five-fifty. I locked the front counter and strolled up next to her. “Can I help you with something?”
She pointed to a Smith and Wesson .45 in the display case. “I need that one.”
“You sure? That thing’s heavy, with a trigger pull of eight pounds and a kick like a mule.”
She twisted her mouth. “I can handle it.”
I started to argue some more, but then I heard the unmistakable growl of Trey’s Ferrari. Sunshine glinted off the black metal as he pulled into his preferred parking spot next to the empty flower boxes.
The woman’s eyes jerked toward the door as Trey came inside. He’d changed out of his special ops outfit into workout pants and a tee, his staying-in clothes. He paused in the threshold, curious, wary. I shook my head. After a second’s hesitation, he nodded and went behind the counter. This was his Saturday night routine, running the register while I closed up, and I was always happy to hand off the task. But this time he didn’t start sorting receipts. This time he watched the woman, who was getting antsy.
“You gonna give me my gun or what?” she said.
I hooked my thumbs into my pockets. “Nope.”
“What?”
“You don’t like it, call the cops. I suspect they’ll be keen to know why you came in here claiming to want to buy a gun for yourself when in reality you’re buying it for your boyfriend in the parking lot.”
She blanched. “He’s helping me pick it out, that’s all.”
“From inside his truck?”
“He didn’t want to come in.”
I tsk-tsked. “Don’t blame him there. He’s probably got a felony or two under his belt, which means he can’t buy a firearm. So he sends you in here to buy it for him, which is illegal, but since I didn’t actually sell you a gun, you might only get a few years in prison.”
She directed a furious, fearful glare out the window. That was when she noticed the camera above the door. She turned her head abruptly, but then she saw the camera over the other door.
I smiled. “Yeah, your face is on the video instead of his. Every spook in Washington D.C. is running down your record as we speak. You got any secrets? Guess what? They’re not secrets anymore.”
She made like a jackrabbit for the parking lot. Her boyfriend had the truck started, so she barely had time to shut the door behind her before he was peeling out, kicking up gravel on the sidewalk. Trey watched them drive off. He now had my flashlight in hand, the giant Maglight he’d bought me for my birthday. He was holding it like a police baton.
“Did you get the license plate?” I said.
“I did.”
Not a word I’d said to her was true, of course. Well, the cameras had caught her face. And I would be downloading a still shot into my Do Not Ever Under Any Circumstances Sell A Gun To This Person file for my assistant Kenny.
I switched off the display lights. “I am sick to death of them, all of them. Cheaters. Liars. And I swear if one more person asks me if I have anything with a werewolf on it, I’m gonna commit bloody murder.”
Trey held up one hand, and I tossed him the keys. He put away the flashlight and opened the cash
