In a Badger Way (Honey Badger Chronicles #2) - Shelly Laurenston Page 0,96
he was meeting Al Capone to do a business deal. Like he felt that although he had to work with them, he didn’t have to trust them.
Dunn and his siblings moved in behind the sisters and Shen pushed Kyle behind him. But the kid was a good three inches taller now, so he just watched the action over Shen’s head, unable to keep his nose out of anything that appeared remotely interesting.
“If you see a gun,” Shen warned him, “run for the church.”
“Can’t I just hide behind your giant, round, panda head?”
Shen briefly thought about tossing the kid into moving traffic, but Max suddenly jerked forward—for no apparent reason!—and then there were all these people reaching for their weapons. In front of a church . . . in the middle of Manhattan. . . in the middle of the day.
Before Shen could grab her, Stevie jumped between the two groups, arms outstretched.
“No, no, no, no, no!” she begged. “Please. Everybody. Just calm down. Charlie?” she prompted. “Max?”
Charlie gripped a Sig Sauer behind her back, finger on the trigger. Max had blades in both hands, her arms resting against her sides. Casual, but no one was fooled. Not by Max.
“Stevie,” Charlie said through gritted teeth, “get your ass back over here.”
“Not until everybody calms down.” When no one moved . . . “I’m getting very angry.”
“Da,” one of the male badgers warned.
“We’re just here for a funeral,” Will stated to Charlie while he slowly moved his hand away from his gun.
The other male badgers followed suit, all standing down.
Sadly, Charlie and Max weren’t in the mood to take the same route.
Stevie faced her sisters. “Put them away.” Neither sister moved, but Charlie’s gaze was still locked on the male badgers while Max’s was on Stevie. “Do what I tell you.”
“Or what?” Max asked with a little laugh.
Stevie’s mouth twisted to the side, her annoyance clear. “I’ll start coughing up hair balls all over the place!”
Now Charlie was staring at her baby sister. “You promised you would never to do that again.”
“Because it’s disgusting,” Max added.
“At least I don’t go around threatening people with my anal glands.”
“At least that’s normal. You know . . . for me. But you’re not a house cat.”
Stevie’s response was to lean over at the waist and start hacking.
“Okay, okay!” Charlie held her hands up, revealing that she no longer held her Sig Sauer. She’d tucked it back into the holster under her light black sweater.
“See?” Charlie asked. “Everybody’s letting it go.”
Stevie pointedly stared at Max, knowing the middle sister hadn’t let anything go.
Blades still gripped in her hand, Max asked, “What?”
“Put them away,” Charlie said. “And I mean now.”
Max flicked up her black skirt and returned the weapons to the holsters strapped to her legs.
Stevie faced the male badgers. “Hello, Uncle Will.”
“Little Stevie. It’s good to see you again. Despite the circumstances.”
As the older badger passed them, he touched his hand to his forehead like he was tipping a hat, and Max’s response to that was to raise her middle finger.
Stevie slapped Max in the back of the head, which quickly led to a headlock that had Stevie squealing and Max telling her to, “Go to sleep. Just go to sleep.”
Charlie grabbed hold of her sisters’ hair and had just yanked them in opposite directions when a female voice came from the top of the church stairs. “Charlie MacKilligan. There’s a pew for you and your sisters and your extremely large friends. Can’t hold that space forever, though. So you better get in here.”
“Coming, Aunt Bernice,” Charlie called back, pushing her sisters to the stairs. “Inside!” she ordered her siblings.
With a snarl, Max went up the steps; Charlie and the Dunns followed right behind her. Stevie came over to stand by Shen and Kyle while she attempted to comb her blond hair into something a little less . . . attacked.
“You have the best family,” Kyle said, laughing. But when Stevie didn’t look at him, Shen knew she wasn’t in the mood to joke about the MacKilligans.
“Go inside,” he told the kid.
“Aren’t you supposed to go with me? You know . . . my big protector?”
Annoyed, Shen snapped, “No one is after your ass. Get into the fucking church.”
“Okay, okay.”
Shen waited until Kyle disappeared inside before asking Stevie, “Are you all right?”
“I’m fine.”
“You’re lying, aren’t you?”
She peeked up at him in that way she had. “Yeah. A little.”
“Why? Because Max had you in that headlock?”
Stevie waved that away. “She always has me in a headlock. She