Badger to the Bone (Honey Badger Chronicles #3) - Shelly Laurenston Page 0,53

smell like Dutch anymore. I told you he smelled like Dutch!”

“I don’t mind Dutch’s funk. Unless he’s gone to a wolf party. All that tequila does not come through his pores well.”

“No. But Dutch might as well be your brother. He’s not someone you’ve ever had a thing for. And Zé was covered in that brotherly funk. But now he’s in clothes that only reek of this horrible place, which allows you to drill down to his natural musk.” She grinned, crinkling up her nose and nodding her head. “Musk.”

“Did you have to say that twice?”

“I totally did.”

* * *

They took a ferry over to Staten Island, stopping at a diner that was apparently within walking distance of what both Max and Nelle kept calling “the old sports center.” Zé had no idea what that meant but he didn’t care enough to bother asking any more questions. Especially when the answers he got were . . . off-putting.

For instance, the diner they stopped at seemed to be manned by very large women with a less-than-friendly attitude toward Nelle and Max, even though they were both being very nice. When Zé asked about it, he was told, “Well . . . they’re bears. What did you expect?”

He expected people in a service business to know how to treat their customers! Growing up in New York as a Puerto Rican from the South Bronx, he was used to being treated in a less-than-friendly manner by some. But if service people wanted a good tip or his return business, they hid the bullshit. Not these people, though. They let their bigotry hang out there for the world to see. It wasn’t color or religion they reacted to, though. It was species and breed.

According to Max, wolves didn’t like dogs; dogs and wolves didn’t like cats; bears didn’t like dogs, wolves, or cats; and absolutely nobody liked honey badgers.

“And none of that covers the internal bigotry.”

“Internal bigotry?”

“Tigers think very little of lions, lions think very little of jaguars and leopards, grizzlies tend to slap around black bears, jackals find African wild dogs really annoying . . . the list goes on and on.” Max took another bite of a burger that was nearly the size of her head before muttering, “It’s endless. Just do what we do . . .” “Which is?”

“Which is?”

“Ignore it,” the two women said together.

After finishing a meal so large it would kill most people, they made their way down the street to the “old sports center.”

“You can wait in there. We’ve gotta hit the locker room.” Max gazed up at him. “Need anything else?”

Wondering why she was looking at him like that, Zé replied, “No. You can go away now.”

She chuckled and headed off.

Okay, there was one thing that Zé did really like about being around his “own kind,” as Max called them. Their reaction to him. Specifically, their reaction to his attitude.

Since childhood, everyone around him had made it very clear they didn’t like it. There were comments on his report cards, his grandfather heard about it in parent-teacher conferences, his commanding officers told him often “you have to work on your attitude, Vargas.” He’d heard it so much for so long, he’d gotten used to it. But here, among these people . . . ? His attitude didn’t seem to faze any of them. He enjoyed that.

Zé made his way into the basketball arena. Women were already practicing on the well-worn court, and none of them were what Zé had been expecting. They represented a broad swath of humanity, including different sizes, different races, different hair colors. So many hair colors, in fact, sometimes on one head alone! And along with the usual array of tattoos came scars. Lots of scars. As if several had been attacked by dogs at some point in their lives.

Hell, maybe they had.

No, this wasn’t like the WNBA at all. He knew that when he saw one player who was so tall—well over seven feet—she simply stood under the hoop so that when one of her teammates passed her the ball, she simply tossed it into the basket. Zé sensed that was her only purpose.

Then Max and her friends walked out, all in bright yellow team sweat suits. They were the smallest women there, even though Mads, the tallest of the five, was at least five-eight. In fact, they appeared so tiny next to the rest of their teammates that Zé wondered why they’d be chosen for the team. They were like