Blood Trail

much of an answer when time was running out.

    "I'm surprised the S.W.A.T. boys haven't scooped you up." She carefully set the picture back down. It was still strange thinking of herself and the police as separate units.

    He smiled a little self-consciously. "I've been warned the moment I come back with Olympic gold, I'm theirs." The smile faded as he bent to lace his boots. "I guess I'd better check them out, hadn't I?"

    "Well, if you can find out what their best marksmen were doing on the nights of the murders, it would help."

    "Yeah." He sighed. "Pity we didn't have some big hostage crisis those nights that'd clear them."

    "Pity," Vicki agreed, and hid a totally inappropriate smile. The boy - young man - had been completely serious.

    "I just can't believe that someone'd be shooting at Colin's family. I mean," he sat up and began buttoning his shirt, fingers trembling with indignation, "they're probably the nicest people I know."

    "It doesn't bother you that these people turn into animals?" Celluci asked.

    Barry stiffened. "They don't turn into animals," he snapped. "Just because they have a fur-form doesn't make them animals. And anyway, most of the animals I've met lately have been on two legs! And besides, Colin's a great cop. Once he picks up a suspect's scent the perp's had it. You couldn't ask for a better guy to back you up in a tight situation, and what's more, the wer practically invented the concept of the team-player."

    "I only wondered if it bothered you," Celluci told him mildly.

    "No." Savagely shoving his shirttails into his pants, Barry turned faintly red. "Not anymore. I mean, once you get to know a guy, you can't hate him just because he's a werewolf."

    Words of wisdom for our time, Vicki thought. "Back to the shooting ..."

    "Yeah, I think I know someone who might be able to help. Bertie Reid. She's a real buff, you know, one of those people who can quote facts and figures at you from the last fifty years. If there's someone in the area capable of making those shots, she'll know it. Or she'll be able to find it out."

    "Does she shoot?"

    "Occasionally small arms but not the high caliber stuff anymore. She must be over seventy."

    "Do you know her address?"

    "No, I don't, and her phone number is unlisted - I heard her mention it one day at the range -
    but she's not hard to find. She drops by the Grove Road Sportsman's Club most afternoons, sits up in the clubroom, has a few cups of tea and criticizes everyone's shooting." He glanced up from the piece of paper he was writing the directions on. "She told me I kept my forward arm too tense." Flexing the arm in question, he added, "She was right."

    "Why don't you practice at the police range?" Celluci asked.

    Barry looked a little sheepish as he handed over the address of the club. "I do occasionally.
    But I always end up with an audience and, well, the targets there all look like people. I don't like that."

    "I never cared for it much myself," Vicki told him, dropping the folded piece of paper in her purse. It might be realistic, certainly anything a cop would have to shoot would be people-shaped, but the yearly weapons qualifying always left her feeling slightly ashamed of her skill.

    They accompanied Barry down to the parking lot, watched him shrug into a leather jacket -
    "I'd rather sweat than leave my elbows on the pavement." - and a helmet with a day-glow orange strip down the back, carefully pack his cap under the seat of his motorcycle, and roar away.
    Vicki sighed, carefully leaning back on the hot metal of Celluci's car. "Please tell me I was never that gung ho."

    "You weren't," Celluci snorted. "You were worse." He opened the car door and eased himself down onto the vinyl seat. There hadn't been any shade to park in, not that he would have seen it given the conversation they'd been involved in when they arrived. Swearing under his breath as his elbow brushed the heated seat-back, he unlocked Vicki's door and was busying himself with the air conditioning when she got in.

    The echoes of their fight hung in the car. Neither of them spoke, afraid it might begin again.
    Celluci had no desire to do a monologue on the dangers of making moral judgments and he knew that as far as Vicki was concerned the topic was closed. But if she thinks I'm leaving before this is over, she can think again. He didn't have to be back at work until Thursday and after that, if he had to, he'd use sick time. It was more than Henry Fitzroy now, Vicki