Page 51 of Bears Behaving Badly
“Quit it!” Dev smacked Pat’s hand away from the fresh bandage on his upper arm. “It won’t get better if you pick at it.”
“Oh, thatdid notjust happen,” Pat growled, hazel eyes taking on a yellowish gleam for a few seconds.
“If this was a regular case”—David paused while they all snorted—“we could run their DNA. But even then, I’m not sure these guys would show up in the system.”
“Well, t’ain’t a regular case, is it?” Pat declared. “So what do we do?”
“We?”
“Don’t say ‘we, derp,’ like you’re flabbergasted at the notion of me getting involved. I’vebeeninvolved. You want to see my fucking bite marks again? Worse, they shot up my kitchen. Mykitchen, David!”
“Hey! They also tried to kill me. Well, maybe. All right, I was probably gonna be collateral damage, but they came to kill Caro for sure!” Dev insisted, poking his friend for emphasis.
“My fruit bowl was decimated! Shards of ceramic and kiwi and grapefruit fucking everywhere, and youknowthat shit will dry all sticky and gross and cleanup will be a bitch!”
David held his hands up.Please let me be several miles away before Pat finds out what they did to his herb garden.“Okay, Pat. Got it. I just… I know Annette wants to keep you safe is all. I don’t doubt you’ve got balls to spare.”
“And I’d also like us to go one entire day without a discussion about my balls.”
Annette covered Dev’s ears so quickly the kit let out a surprised yelp. “Inappropriate!”
“But,” David continued doggedly, “a sensible person would be halfway to the Manitoba woodlands by now, and maybe you should think abou—”
“Don’t youeverimply I’m sensible again,” Pat replied shortly, flicking his hair back and (inadvertently?) showing his scar for a second. David took that to mean the discussion was closed. “Besides, Annette wants to keep everybody safe all the time.”
“Then she’s in the wrong line of work,” David replied.
“You two recall that I’m in the room, yes?”
Roomwas an exaggeration. They were in Pat’s studio, a small structure about half a mile from the main house, one you couldn’t see from ground level until you were right on top of it. After everyone had cleaned up, they’d followed Pat down the back hill, hooked a left by the river, and found the small gray dwelling shaped like a grain silo. No, wait…itwasa grain silo.
They’d abandoned the corpses.
“Look, we’re not going to be rogues forever. It’s probably just through the weekend. We’re pro-tem rogues. We’ve done nothing wrong, it was clearly self-defense. But it’ll look worse for us if we try to hide the bodies or undertake any cleanup.”
“I’m not getting you. At all.”
“Pat, we’ll eventually be able to tell the authorities everything.”
David saw Caro flinch a bit at “authorities.”
“Killing warwolves to keep Caro and Dev safe will fly,” Annette continued, “and not calling the cops tonight will fly—the higher-ups won’t like it, but they’ll get it. But not if we try to cover it up.”
“Good point. I can hear it now: ‘If you were so sure you did nothing wrong, then why did you try to cover up your heinous gross crime, you disgusting reprobates?’ ‘But it wasn’t a crime, it was self-defense.’ ‘Objection!’ ‘Sustained. I find the scumbag defendants guilty and sentence them to a hot date with a chamber full of nitrogen gas.’”
“Thanks for the trial recap,” she replied dryly. “All right, so…we need a new plan. Once we found Caro—”
“That’s some beaucoup bullshit right there.” Pat waved a piece of paper in her face. “Caro said she sat on David’s car and waited for you, and after an eternity—”
“Less than an hour, actually.”
“—you stumbled over her. In broad daylight. Because she was waiting for you. In broad daylight.”
“Oh, so Pat gets notes, too?” Annette threw up her hands. “I’m feeling somewhat excluded here, Caro.”
Caro gave her a sucks-to-be-you shrug in response. David had to admit, the kid had the most expressive shrugs he’d ever seen. She could probably write a thesis with those shoulders.
To get into the repurposed grain silo, Pat had to key in a code and a thumbprint, and that only gave them access to part of the building. There were more security measures to go underground. David had been on air force bases that weren’t as stringent about security. “Whoa.”
