Page 11 of Lime Gelatin and Other Monsters
“Don’t encourage him. He’ll start in with everyone else if you do.” Kyle waved a hand. “Go on, Edgar. Get!”
Edgar spread his wings and snapped at Kyle’s hand. “Your dick fits in a toothpaste tube!”
“Well—” Kyle sputtered on a mouthful of wing as Edgar took off for his perch. “Yours is smaller!”
“Good one,” Vikash murmured around an overly civilized bite.
“Oh, shut up. Do birds even have dicks?”
“Not like yours…um, ours.”
Kyle jerked his head to the side to see around the screens to find Vikash frowning at his sandwich, carefully rearranging bits of onion. No way he was blushing. That had to be a trick of the light. He was so intent on Vikash, Kyle missed the presence behind his partner until a soft whine came from that side of the desk.
One hand loosening his uniform tie, Wolf stood just behind Vikash. At noon, his five o’clock shadow was already coming in, a bit of drool hanging from a too-sharp canine, and combined with the intense voracity in his eyes, he might have appeared threatening if he hadn’t been so single-mindedly focused on Vikash’s cheesesteak.
“Wolf?” Vikash’s expression had gone entirely blank.
“That smells…so good,” Wolf rasped, his voice halfway between a snarl and a whine.
Slowly, without taking his eyes off Wolf, Vikash broke off a quarter of his sandwich and handed it to Wolf with exaggerated care, along with a napkin from a ridiculously neat stack of them in his top desk drawer. For his part, Wolf accepted the offering with an almost spiritual reverence, then devoured it with unholy glee. Kyle had concerns over the napkin’s chances, but it survived the assault.
He was just about to tell Vikash what a bad idea feeding fellow officers was and to tell Wolf off for begging when Krisk stomped by on his way in from the break room. He seized the back of Wolf’s collar in one scaled fist and yanked him along as Wolf yelped and scrabbled backward. When they reached their own pair of desks, Krisk slammed his tail on the floor and pointed to Wolf’s side of the desk. Chastised, Wolf hung his head and slumped in his chair with a whimper.
Kyle waited to see if Krisk would produce a rolled-up newspaper to smack Wolf on the nose. He realized he was staring when Vikash’s next muttered words startled him.
“Peanut butter.”
“What?” Kyle wrenched his attention back to his own corner of the squad room.
“I should stick to peanut butter if we eat at our desks.”
“Hmm, nope.” Kyle reached for his ringing phone. “Wolf loves peanut butter, too… Seventy-seventh. Officer Monroe.”
“Get yourself out to the Waterworks, Monroe,” Lieutenant Dunfee growled in his ear. “Just got a report of a suspicious person from one of the staff.”
“Any connection to the Schuykill murderer, ma’am?”
“That’s the kind of thing I pay you to find out. Get your freckled white butt moving.”
Telling the lieutenant that the city paid them, or asking how she knew his ass had freckles, both seemed like suicidally bad ideas. “Yes, ma’am.”
“Lead?” Vikash asked, his lunch remnants already stowed and his various containers neatly stashed away.
“Possibly. We have to see someone about a suspicious person.”
The silence on the drive over to the Waterworks was definitely a processing one, so Kyle waited. Vikash didn’t disappoint.
“So Wolf and Krisk?”
Kyle let out a sharp laugh. “There’san image I didn’t need. I don’t think so? But hell, who knows. I’ve never seen Wolf out with anyone. And I’ve never seen Krisk outside of work, now that I think about it.”
“Interesting,” Vikash murmured, though his expression was back to inscrutable.
The old Waterworks gleamed in white neoclassical splendor as they pulled into the closest parking spot. When the sun hit the buildings just right, they were near blinding. Not always the case. Kyle remembered when the buildings were sad, crumbling piles, but the partial restoration had been miraculous, and while the old pumps no longer provided the city’s water, they were pretty damn cool as a historic site.
Their contact was one of the security guards for the facility, an older woman whose duties were probably more along the lines of opening doors and directing school groups, but her sharp eyes snapped volumes at them before she said a word.
“All the experienced officers busy or something?”
