were telling me I needed an oil change.
“Excuse me?” I demanded, frowning all the while.
“It means you’re attracted to me,” he explained as a huge, self-impressed smile broke across his face. “My pheromones must be calling to you and your body is definitely answering.”
“They most certainly are not and it most certainly is not!” I nearly yelled at him.
“No, I mean it. I really can detect that sort of thing.”
“Well, your detector must be broken because I’m not attracted to you at all,” I insisted and stubbornly held up my chin.
“You’re lying.”
“No, I’m not.”
“Yes.”
“No.”
“Yes, you are. Don’t fight it.”
“Oh, my God!” I threw my hands up in frustration as heat stained my cheeks. “Back to the point and finish your story! I didn’t bring you here to subject myself to this bullshit!”
“Whatever you say, Chief,” Alex said with a little laugh. Then he paused for a few seconds as he just smiled at me, his expression saying he knew something I didn’t. “Where was I?” he asked finally. “Oh, yeah… So once we rejected Donovan from our reservation, he fell in with this rival gang.”
“Okay, why were you talking to him about lines of demarcation then?”
“Our tribe had created a treaty with this neighboring tribe centuries ago, whereby we delineated property lines and agreed not to cross into their lands if they agreed not to cross into ours.”
“Why?”
“What do you mean: why?”
I shrugged, figuring my question was easy enough to answer. “Why would you and your neighbors be so un-neighborly?”
It was his turn to shrug. “You’ll find that the law of the wilderness is much more uncivilized than the laws of the city.”
“Please, Hope is hardly a city,” I answered with a laugh. “It’s a town… maybe even an outpost.”
“It’s the city compared to the place I come from,” he responded. “And sometimes, you find yourself with neighbors who aren’t exactly what you’d hope for.”
“So you and your neighbors made this treaty, but Donovan broke it?”
“Yes, he was high on drugs and decided to break the agreement by raiding our village and stealing from us. Two of our own were hurt in the process.”
“Where does your ex-girlfriend fit into all of this?”
Alex shrugged. “Apparently, she was more interested in my brother’s antics than she was in me and decided to go where the excitement was.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means that not only did Donovan steal from us, he also made off with my ex.”
“But you told me earlier that she still lived in the same house with you?” I argued, narrowing my eyes at him because his story wasn’t adding up. And when stories didn’t add up, it was usually because they were crocks of shit.
“It’s not a crock of shit,” Alex said with a quick grin to my frown. “You have a good memory. Have you ever considered becoming a cop?”
“Not in the mood for jokes.”
“Sorry,” he grumbled. “So the quick of it is that my ex came back. I figure it must have been sometime shortly after Donovan was stabbed. I guess she didn’t like living with people she didn’t know so she came back to our reservation and they voted to allow her to stay.”
“They voted?”
“Yep.”
“Who are they?”
“My people.”
I figured I needed to be more to the point. “You said they, not we.”
He shrugged. “I didn’t want her to stay, but I was overruled.”
“Interesting.” I was fairly good at reading lies and I had to admit that Alex wasn’t showing any of the signs of lying. That could just mean he was delusional and believed everything he was saying, even if it wasn’t the truth. Maybe he was just completely crazy.
“I’m not crazy.”
“Ugh, will you stop?” I asked as I shook my head and decided to return to the topic at hand. “Going back to the question of who stabbed Donovan, do you think someone from your village stabbed him in retaliation for the raid?”
“No,” Alex answered immediately. “I don’t believe it was done by one of our own.”
“Then who else would it have been?”
It made sense that Alex would be the number-one suspect in Donovan’s murder, given that he had a motive, that motive being the ex-girlfriend. Well, that is, if I bought into the idea that it really was a murder and not an elaborate hoax. And, while I could admit that I hadn’t given up on the hoax idea, I was starting to entertain other explanations. That meant Alex could still be considered a murderer and, as such, dangerous. But he was a licensed