I shook my head. "If I knew that, I might know who put the hit out on me."
"And if you find out who put the money up, what will you do?" he asked.
I stared at him. Off the record or not, Dolph was still the ultimate cop. He took his job very seriously. "I'll turn the name over to you."
"I wish I believed that, Anita, I really do."
I gave him my best wide-eyed, innocent look. "What do you mean?"
"Can the little girl routine, Anita. I know you too well."
"Fine, but you and I both know that as long as the money is out there, hitters will keep coming. I'm good, Dolph, but no one's that good. Eventually, I'll lose. Unless the money goes away. No contract, no more hitters."
We stared at each other. "We can put you in protective custody," Dolph said.
"For how long? Forever?" I shook my head. "Besides, the next hitter might use a bomb. You want to risk your people? I don't."
"So you'll hunt the money man down and kill him."
"I didn't say that, Dolph."
"But that's what you're planning," he said.
"Don't keep asking the question, Dolph. The answer won't change."
He stood, hands gripping the back of the chair. "Don't cross the line with me, Anita. We're friends, but I'm a cop first."
"I value our friendship, Dolph, but I value my life and yours more."
"You think I can't handle myself?"
"I think you're a cop, and that means you have to play by the rules. Dealing with professional hitters, that can get you killed."
There was a knock on the door. "Enter," Dolph said.
Rizzo came in with a round tray and three slender black china mugs. There were little red coffee stirrers in each one. Rizzo glanced from Dolph to me. He stared at my uncuffed hands but didn't say anything. He sat the tray on the desk far enough from me that I couldn't have grabbed him. Officer Rizzo looked like a twenty-year man, and he was still treating me like a very dangerous person. I doubted that he'd have turned his back on Anabelle. If she hadn't grabbed my purse, she could have shot me in the back. Oh, I'd have seen it in the mirror, but I'd have never gotten my gun out in time. I'd never have let a man, no matter how friendly or how helpful, come up behind me like that. I'd made the same mistake with Anabelle that people made with me. I'd seen a small, pretty woman and underestimated her. I was a female chauvinist piglet. It had nearly been a fatal flaw.
Dolph handed me the mug that held the lightest-colored coffee. It was too much to hope that the cream would be real, but either way it looked wonderful. I'd never met coffee that wasn't wonderful. It was just a matter of how wonderful it was. I took a hesitant sip of the steaming liquid and made appreciative 'mmm' sounds. It was real coffee and real cream.
"Glad you like it," Rizzo said.
I looked up at him. "Thank you, Officer."
He grunted and moved away from us to lean against the other wall.
"I talked to Ted Forrester, your pet bounty hunter. The gun in your purse is registered to him." Dolph sat back down, blowing on his coffee.
Ted Forrester was one of Edward's aliases. It had stood up to police scrutiny once before when we ended up with bodies on the ground. He was, as far as the police knew, a bounty hunter specializing in preternatural creatures. Most bounty hunters stayed in the Western states where there were still substantial bounties on shapeshifters. Not all of them were particularly careful that the shapeshifter they killed was really a danger to anyone. The only criteria some states had was that after death, the body was medically certified as a lycanthrope. A blood test was sufficient in most cases. Wyoming was thinking of changing its laws because of three wrongful death suits that had made it all the way to their state supreme court.
"I needed a gun small enough to fit in the purse but with stopping power," I said.
"I don't like bounty hunters, Anita. They abuse the law."
I sipped coffee and stayed quiet. If he knew just how much Edward abused the law, he'd have locked him up for a very long time.
"If he's a good enough friend to bail your ass out of this kind of trouble, why haven't you mentioned him before? I didn't know he existed until that last trouble you had with those shapeshifter poachers."
"Poachers," I said and shook my head.