Cherry Bomb_ A Siobhan Quinn Novel - Caitlin R. Kiernan Page 0,38
and Selwyn had worked out some sort of secret tongue-clicking Morse code.
“Regardless,” said Jodie, “you may have bigger problems than the police.”
Selwyn kissed me on the forehead. I gently swatted her away.
“How’s that?” she asked.
Jodie looked at me, and then she looked back at Selwyn. She pointed at me.
“Does she know?”
“Shit, lady.” I laughed. “I know she used to have a tail and that her mama wasn’t exactly altogether totally human.”
Selwyn nodded. “If you’re about to say what I think you’re about to say, yeah, she knows. How did he find out so fast?”
Jodie scowled.
“Dear, he’s in Boston,” she said. “Not on the moon. They do have newspapers, television, radio, and the internet in Boston.”
Selwyn did that tapping at the end of her nose thing. Maybe their secret code involved tongue clicking and nose tapping.
“Yeah, okay. Shit,” she said and tapped her nose again. I waited for Jodie to click her tongue and was disappointed when she didn’t.
“Said the girl who didn’t know poisoning a loup with wolfsbane was a terrible idea.”
Selwyn punched me in the arm.
“I wasn’t trying to poison you, you ass. Wolfsbane is supposed to guard against werewolves, not trigger their transformations.”
I think I glared at Selwyn skeptically.
“Wait,” Jodie said, and her scowl had turned into an expression of disbelief. “That’s how this happened?”
“Pretty swift, right?”
Jodie shook her head and stood up.
“Quinn, our Miss Throckmorton there, she’s resourceful. A pity she suffers these lapses in judgment.”
Selwyn flipped her off. “I need to piss,” she said.
Okay, I’m getting sick of the she said, she said blow-by-blow. I’m sure you are, too. Anyway, we lay low for a couple of days. Turned out this Jodie woman—Jodie Babineaux, and she was from Sierra Leone—was a halfway decent witch. You don’t find many of those. The wards and shit she had erected around her apartment kept us off the radar just long enough for me to get my bearings. Selwyn got her hands on a cloned phone and made a bunch of calls, sussing out her predicament and trying to keep tabs on what Isaac Snow did and didn’t know. We hardly left the building.
The Post’s headlines got weirder and weirder. They talked to a cryptozoologist at some university in New Hampshire who claimed the cougar attacks had actually been the work of a chupacabra.
Because, you know.
CHAPTER FOUR
PICKMAN’S MADONNA & GHOULS ON A TRAIN
We did go back to Selwyn’s apartment. Despite what she’d said about there being nothing important there, nothing worth the trouble and the risk to retrieve, after three days of hiding out in the witch’s safe house, Selwyn began to grow antsy, and she started to let on that there might, after all, be something worth going back for. Surely, she reasoned, the cops weren’t keeping the place under surveillance. Now, if I was an NYPD detective, and I thought I knew the starting point of the “cougar” rampage, and if that place was full of bizarre and valuable books and gewgaws, you bet your fanny I’d keep my eyeballs on it. As I have often said, people are stupid. This includes people who keep dangerous wild animals locked up in Manhattan. Stupid people do stupid, sloppy, ill-advised things, like go back to apartments the PoPo have staked out because they probably have fuck all in the way of leads.
Selwyn was in a stupid mood.
And she badgered me until I agreed to go along.
We’d slip in and slip back out before anyone had any idea we were there. In and out, quick as a flash. No, we wouldn’t use the front door. Obviously, we were smarter than that. Obviously. We’d take the fire escape.
That’s what smart people do.
Looking back, never mind how it turned out, the way that night started off is pretty damn funny. Jodie brought us black pants and black turtleneck sweaters and versatile black ski masks, just like Tom Cruise in a Mission Impossible movie. Or Sterling Archer. Because that’s what smart people would do.
When I asked Selwyn what, exactly, was so important that I was agreeing to allow her to put my ass on the line, she wouldn’t tell me.
“You’ll see,” she said.
When I demanded that she tell me or I’d let her undertake this idiotic expedition alone, she said, “You’ll see” again. So I went. Why? If Selwyn was in prison, I’d have to find someone else to fuck, and I’d also lose a willing donor of red sauce.