May23
Hi everyone! Coming to the surface once again to let you know I’m still here and still writing. My oh-so-wonderful muse has been keeping me busy. The main reason I have not had anything published in a while is that I have not submitted anything in a while. The main reason for that would be me learning how to write longer, novel-length stories. After only two short stories of the Hunt lords, the one main feed-back I heard was, “this is too short; it would have been better if it was longer.” So that’s what I endeavored to do–expand the remaining short stories in the series into full-length novels.
Unfortunately, this required some extensive re-writing, which in turn changed the main story arch. I have not been submitting anything because I didn’t want to mess everything up in order to keep publishing something–anything–every 6-9 months. The first full length story is coming along well. It’s also totally original and was written to fill a huge gap that occurred int the story arch. It’s getting close to being ready for submission. I might even have it done this week. I’m doing a last read-over to make sure it flows well and has consistent details for the over-all story line. It’s about Etienne, the rougaru alpha and how he got his mate, by the way.
All that being said, I have not been totally idle in the writing department. I’ve been post ing a short story, one nibble at a time, over on ShapeShifter Seductions, the blog I post on every Wednesday. That one’s about a hapless PI who falls on hard times, takes a job doing something she knows she should not have, and finds herself in quite the pickle with a certain sexy cop. In the interest of posting over here on my main website a little more frequently, I’ll be cross-posting the story bites over here, too. Since this is the first time I’ve posted it here, this week’s post will be all four nibbles.
So here it is, the first four parts of my original short story!
**********
The Story of the Good Cop, The Bad Girl, and The Fat Aussie Bastard
Day 1
Jenna stumbled off the steps of the Greyhound Limited, local service to Missoula, Talbots Peak, and every single piss-ant little town between the two. She’d seen much more of Montana than she ever wanted to. Curses to every client too stingy to pay expenses for a plane ticket. Or a rental car, at least.
She huffed miserably. Curses on her ex for splitting and taking her car with him. The car may be in her name, but the cops weren’t going to actively hunt him down over it, so it might as well be on the moon for all the good that title did her.
Hope was not lost, of course. After this run, she’d be flush enough to buy another car, maybe one new enough to be worth full coverage insurance this time. All she had to do was find one fat Aussie bastard, hand him “his shit”, ask if he had anything to take back to her client, then she was done.
Not for the first time, Jenna contemplated the odd phraseology her client had used to describe her mark, but as a contract runner, she’d learned to take the three monkey approach to life: hear no evil, see no evil, say nothing. Just do the job, collect her bananas and leave. Metaphorically speaking, of course—she was an American born dingo, not a monkey. But the only saying for her kind was “the dingoes ate my baby!!!” and that certainly didn’t encourage clients to trust her. Whatever was inside the sealed package Jenna carried did not concern her. She’d signed for it pre-sealed so if it caused her to get busted, it would fall on her client to pay any legal costs.
Of course, with her luck, Jenna just might end up stuck in jail, rotting because the piss-ant client ran at the first sign of cops. She signed again and then mentally shrugged. Them’s the breaks. When you are down on your luck, you sometimes have to take the odd jobs no one else wanted. Besides, after this job—assuming the client was lagit and actually paid her—she’d have enough money to buy a car. Then she could start pulling in the good runs again.
A gust of frigid wind blew her hair in her face, smelling of rain and mud and—coffee? Quickly, Jenna stuffed her hair back into her hood and sniffed. Yep, coffee. And good coffee, too; not the crappy coffee she’d choked down at the ten minute rest stop three towns back.
Jenna spun around, frantically looking for the source of this divine aroma. Not only would an extra tall latte warm her bones and make that hellish 300 mile bus trip worthwhile, a coffee shop would be a good place to start looking the “fat Aussie bastard.”
Day 2
Tom parked his patrol car in front of Java Joe’s, feeling a desperate need for a liquid pick-me-up after that last call. There wasn’t much he hated worse than drug calls except when they involved small children being beaten. Unfortunately, that last call had involved both. Goddamn druggies.
Tom opened the door and breathed deeply of the richly scented air that flooding into his patrol car. Coffee, scones, and—heroine. Shit. Tom looked around, trying to isolate the source of the foul odor.
There, he thought as his eyes tracked to a young woman walking up the street. He smiled grimly when her eyes skidded away from him and she ducked into Java Joe’s. At least he could still get his coffee while he terrorized the mule.
**********
Shit shit shit! Jenna chanted as she dodged into the coffee shop. She hadn’t handled that well. In her defense, it hadn’t been the package in her purse that she’d shied away from. That cop had been H-O-T! And totally off-limits to her, so she hadn’t let herself get a second look. It wasn’t until she’d seen his humorless smile in the plate glass of the door that she realized that an on-duty cop might interpret her dodge in a different way. In a guilty way. Oh, well. What’s done is done, she thought as he slipped into the coffee house a moment or two behind her.
She ordered a double tall coffee from the menu board named Purple Fairy Dust, and amused herself by perusing the rest of the menu as she waited for the blue-haired barista to make her order. Most niche coffee houses had a theme to their drink menus. This place was no different, but Jenna wasn’t exactly sure what the theme was, other than bizarre. Besides the fairy drink, there was Cat-No-Tonic, Moon Fever, Witch Hazelnut, Yakkedy Squirrel, and Flamingo Anti-Flop. She was almost disappointed that she wouldn’t be in town long enough to try them all.
Smiling her appreciation to the barista, Jenna paid for her drink then found a table at the far end of the seating area. She deliberately face the window so she wouldn’t have to look at the sexy, suspicious cop again while she tried to think her way out of this situation. She clearly couldn’t just find the Aussie and deliver her package. She knew damn well “the shit” was drugs, though it pained her to have stooped to drug running just to make a few bucks. But she was a survivor. There had to be a way to spin this so she came out of it on top. Or at least not in jail.
**********
Tom thanked Marissa, the owner and primary barista of Java Joe’s, for the regular tall coffee—Marissa refused payment, as usual—then casually scanned the customers sitting in comfy over-stuffed chairs and old booths covered in every color of fabric and naugahyde ever made . The room should have been an eye-sore with its garish mix of furnishings, but it wasn’t. Joe’s was the kind of place that made everyone feel at-home. Apparently even drug mules.
The woman was sitting in one of Marissa’s badly upholstered chairs, which was pulled up to a sofa table that was clearly too high to actually “go” with the chair. She had her back to the room, as if she had all the time in the world. He noticed, though, that she could see everything through the murky reflections in the big bay window in front of her. He took a seat by the door and began filling out his incident report on that last stop. He hated paperwork, but was glad he had a ready-made excuse for lingering.
Almost a half hour had passed when he saw the woman get up to leave. He quickly finished up the report he was working on—the third since he’d sat down—but didn’t put anything away. He knew that she knew he was onto her. But there was a set of rule to this. If he made it too obvious he was watching her, she’d go complain to the chief or something, then he’d have to back off, leaving her free to meet up with her contact at will. If he followed her without making it obvious, she’d simply not make contact, which wouldn’t net him a bad guy, but at least it would keep this batch of drugs off the streats of Talbot’s Peak.
He froze when he saw a slip of paper drop from her hand as she walked by. That was odd. There was no way she’d simply don that by accident. Tom waited for her to push out the door, then bent over to pick up the paper
.
“I’m looking for a ‘fat Aussie bastard’ to give him a package. Any idea where I might find him?”
Tom slid the paper into his pants pocket. Yeah, he thought. He did know of a “fat Aussie bastard” in town who would want a package that smelled like heroine. The question was, why was she telling him. And why do so in a way that made it clear she wanted to make contact with a cop without looking like she was trying to make contact?
Day 3
Jenna easily swallowed her self-satisfied smirk. It was brilliant, really. There was no way she was going to get paid for this run, since Officer McSexy was bound to keep her from making contact. She certainly wasn’t going to just hang around till her return bus left and risk being searched and possibly arrested. Besides, she really didn’t like drug dealers—her ex had ended up being one. That’s what broke them up, actually, her confronting him about it. Him stealing her car was his way of getting back at her for refusing to help him cover up his “extra-legal” activities. And this run had come through one of Eddie’s old buddies, so there was a good chance she’d just picked up the kind of job she’d refused to do for Eddie in the first place.
Not getting paid in money meant making sure she got paid in satisfaction. That meant recruiting McSexy to help her tag her mark, which would allow her some small revenge and make her like a good guy. Heck, she was a good guy. She didn’t even jaywalk or double park. Granted, it had taken a vigilant cop to keep her honest this time, but that’s what cops were really for, right? Keeping honest people honest when circumstances tempted them to stray. She may be down on her luck and a bit desperate, but she could still say she was honest.
“What I’d like to know, is why you told me who you were looking for.”
Jenna spun smartly, eyes going slightly wide when she realized that Officer McSexy had been sneaking up on her while she’d been thinking about using him to climb out of the mess she’d gotten herself into.
“I mean, you’ve got to know just what it was you were smuggling,” he drawled sarcastically.
“Yeah, I knew,” Jenna agreed.
“And you know that I can’t legally stop and search you,” he added, a hint of steel edging his drawl. Jenna nodded. This was the United States of America and despite the efforts of Homeland Security, ordinary cops still needed a search warrant. Telling the judge he smelled dope on her when the dope was triple sealed would not have washed, even in a shifter town like this. “So why?” he asked, throwing his hands to his side.
“You tell me,” she said with a shrug. “I’m a down-on-her-luck PI. I get offered a job running a sealed package for a client. I realize its drugs but I don’t have an actual name for my contact or my employer. If I refuse the job, they find someone else with fewer scruples. If I take the stash to the cops in Seattle…”
“They’d arrest you without asking questions,” Officer McSexy finished, a sarcastic twist to his lickable mouth.
“Or I bring the ‘package’ to its intended destination and try to make contact with the local cops,” she finished.
“Why?” he asked again.
“Because I figured you would have some clue who this ’fat Aussie bastard’ I was told to look for was. And you’d be more inclined to nail him and not be content to just get a half kilo of shit off your streets.”
“And?” McSexy asked leadingly.
“And that’s all I’m giving you ‘til I know if you want to play ball.”
“What’s in it for you?” he asked point blank. Jenna shot him a slightly belittling half-smile and said nothing. He shifted from one foot to the other, agitated but clearly thinking it over. “I gotta take this up with my chief,” he finally said.
“Fine with me, but don’t take too long. I’ll drag out trying to find this asshole as long as I can, but I can only stretch it so far in a town this small.”
“How do I get ahold of you again?” he asked, sounding suspicious of her agreeable response.
“I’ll leave that up to you, sweet cheeks. This is your town; you’ll know better than me how and when to contact me without the mark figuring out he’s being set-up.”
Day 4
That was one highly unusual female, Tom mused as he walked back to his patrol car. On the up-side, at least he had something positive to get the images from his last call out of his mind. Just when he thought he had he figured out, she did something that chewed his profiling efforts up and spit them back in his face. First, she was a drug smuggler. But not a willing one. Then maybe she was a willing one, but wasn’t trying to profit from it? That just didn’t make sense to his cop-trained mind. She had to be doing this for profit of some kind. He just needed to figure out what her goal was.
While his cop mind was confused, his canid mind was not the least bit conflicted. He was a stud dog at heart and she was a bitch in heat. Literally. He wanted her.
Tom shook his head as he carefully back into traffic and turned towards the station. Yeah, she was a shifter and if his nose was right—it usually was in these things—she was also a dog. But what kind, he had no real clue. Most of the canids he knew fell into two groups, canis lupis and canis lupis familiaris. This female defied classification even in this. She was not a classic wolf, not of any sup-class he knew, anyway. But she wasn’t familiaris—one of the ‘domestic’ breeds—either. It was like she was a bit of both but at the same time, not a cross breed between them.
Well, why not, he thought, chuckling. She was a drug mule who didn’t act like one. Why not be a non-hybrid wolf-dog, as well. One thing was for certain. The next few days were going to be interesting as he tried to figure her out, catch the ‘fat Aussie bastard’ of hers, and keep his pants safely over his butt. He may not know what she was, but with her heading into heat, if he didn’t she’d be having some German Shepard in her.
**********
Get in, get the job done, get paid, get a new car, get out. That was how she’d planned it. Instead, she was shaking with need. Yeah, she knew before she headed out that she was beginning her heat cycle, but that should not have been a big deal. How was she supposed to know the first person she’d run into would be a dog shifter? Crap! And he was a cop. Double crap! She really didn’t need this right now.
The good part about being a dingo was that very few males could make her want to back up to them when she was in heat, so coming to Shifter Town USA should not have been a problem. This was Montana, so any canid shifters should have been timber wolves, gray wolves, or coyotes. Dingos were native to Australia, for all that she’d never been there. Her kind had evolved isolated from other wolves, so usually it had to be another dingo to get an in-heat female in the mood. Unless there was a large breed familiaris-type shifter around. Dingos, both normal and lycanthropic, would cross-mate with one if the need arose.
Well, the need was rising in her now that she’d gotten a good wiff of Officer McSexy. German Shepard, if her nose was reading his scent correctly—and it usually did. They were not a rare breed on any continent, after all. Just not what she was expecting here in Montana. Nothing to do but brazen it out, she thought as she began ‘searching’ for her mark. Play it cool, keep her butt covered and maybe drop by the drug store for some clove oil to mask her scent. As much as her traitorous body may want it, she didn’t need the complication of a litter of cop-pups at this point in her life. Not that life cared what she had planned, of course…
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