Half-Off Ragnarok
Page 21

Well, I’d figure something out. That was part of my job, after all.
Something rustled in the bushes to my left. I tensed, my hand tightening around the mirror in my coat pocket, and prepared to spring . . . only to see one of the zoo’s endless supply of Canada geese waddle into the open. It looked at me disinterestedly before waddling on, feet slapping against the brick pavement, and vanishing into the bushes on the other side of the path. I let out a breath, feeling some of the tension slip out of my shoulders.
“Little on edge, aren’t you, sweetheart?” asked Shelby, directly behind me.
I jumped as I whirled to face her, and only years of training prevented me from pulling one of the knives I had hidden inside my coat. Heart pounding, I forced my hands to unclench as I offered her my best sheepish “oh, it’s nothing” smile. “I was just thinking,” I said. “Are you finished with the police?”
“A bit ago, yeah,” she said. My obvious distress must have leavened my smile into something she could believe this soon after the death of one of my coworkers, because she put her hand on my elbow, a sympathetic look on her face. “I came looking for you, but Dee said you’d already gone. She was pretty shaken up, the poor dear.”
“I think we all are at the reptile house.” I didn’t know if that was true—I hadn’t spoken to Kim or Nelson before racing out of there and starting my search of the grounds. I pulled my hand out of my pocket, wishing there was a way I could keep hold of the mirror without being obvious about it. “How are you holding up?”
“Not thrilled about the situation, obviously, but I didn’t know him as well as you did.” She left her hand on my elbow. I stifled the situationally inappropriate urge to put my arms around her. “I’m assuming you left for your walk before the police got there to chat with Dee?”
I nodded. “I didn’t think they’d appreciate my presence, given the whole ‘maybe we suspect you’ vibe that they were giving off during my interview.”
“Aw, pish, that’s just their job,” said Shelby, waving my concern away. “Look, though, that means you didn’t hear that we’re closed.”
“What?” I blinked at her.
“The zoo. We’re closed. Everyone’s going home, since there’s just been a death in the family, as it were.” Now it was Shelby’s turn to smile, a trifle wryly. “Don’t tell me you were thinking so hard that you didn’t notice there was no one else about.”
“Um . . .” I rubbed the back of my neck with one hand. I didn’t have to work to look sheepish. “Like I said, I was thinking. You know how I get.”
“Yeah, it’s a good thing you’re not Australian. You’d have been eaten by a bunyip by now.”
“Probably not, since I don’t usually hang out near the edges of billabongs smelling like fish,” I said automatically, and winced when I saw the look on Shelby’s face. “Er, a bunyip is a kind of crocodile, right?”
“Not quite, but nice try.” She looped her arm through mine and started walking, pulling me along in an odd two-person Wizard of Oz formation. “So our working day has just ended several hours early, with the tragic loss of a peer. There are two ways we can deal with this.”
“Those being?” I asked cautiously.
“Option one, we go out to a local pub and get righteously smashed before stumbling to our beds. We wake up tomorrow with hangovers the size of Queensland, and a feeling of satisfaction over a death well-mourned.”
“Uh-huh,” I said. “And option two?”
“We go back to my place, order in a pizza, and have a more private wake for poor Andrew.”
Given what I knew about ghosts, there was a more than reasonable chance that “poor Andrew” would show up and haunt her apartment looking for a show if we did that. “I can’t,” I said. “I wish I could, but . . .”
“Whatever plans you have tonight, I’m sure whoever they involve would understand you needing to spend a little time with your girlfriend in the wake of a coworker’s death, Alex,” said Shelby. The way she stressed the word “girlfriend” made it clear she’d heard me talking to the police. “Unless you’re ashamed of me for some reason?”
“God, Shelby, no. I am . . . believe me, I am anything but ashamed of my hot, brilliant, capable, uh, girlfriend.” I was going to pay for that label later. I could see it in her eyes. “But I’m supposed to look after Sarah tonight. I promised my grandparents I’d stay home with her.” I realized guiltily that I wasn’t lying. This was supposed to be their date night, and I was about to ruin it by coming home and telling them that we had a petrifactor loose at the zoo. “They’ve had these theater tickets for weeks. I can’t back out on them, and Sarah won’t tolerate a sitter she doesn’t know.”
Shelby sighed. “Your dedication to your family is one of the things I love about you. Maybe if I keep reminding myself of that, my needing to go home and spend the night sitting alone in my apartment, right after I’ve seen a dead man . . . well, maybe it won’t sting as much.”
It was a statement calculated to make me feel bad. It was sincere enough that I didn’t mind. She had every right to fling that particular arrow at me: if I was supposed to be her boyfriend, I was doing a shitty job of it. “I’m really sorry,” I said. “Look—I’ll call, okay? I’ll get Sarah settled with a video or something, and I’ll call.”
“If you don’t, I shall hunt you down tomorrow in the parking lot and remove your kidneys with a spoon,” she said blithely.
“Deal.” I kissed her cheek. Anything else would have required us to stop walking, and I wanted to get to my . . . I stopped in my tracks, hauling Shelby to a stop along with me. “Oh, hell. Shelby, I’m sorry, I forgot something back at the reptile house. I gotta go.” Whatever had rustled in the bushes would be long gone by now, if it had ever been there in the first place. My imagination was playing tricks, and I wasn’t properly equipped to do this on my own.
She blinked at me. “That’s all right, I’ll walk with you.”
“No!”
She blinked again, eyes widening. Then they narrowed into a stubbornly murderous expression that I knew all too well, since I’d been seeing it from most of the women in my life since I was born. “No? What did you forget, Alex, your pet monster?”