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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
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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.
"What's wrong?" Dolph asked.
"Shapeshifters get killed, and its poaching. Normal people get killed, and it's murder."
"You sympathizing with the monsters now, Anita?" he asked. His voice was even quieter, so still you
might have mistaken it for calm, but it wasn't. He was pissed.
"You're mad about something other than the body count," I said.
"You're involved with the Master of the City. Is that how you keep getting all that inside info on the
monsters?"
I took a deep breath and let it out. "Sometimes."
"You should have told me, Anita."
"Since when is my personal life police business?"
He just looked at me.
I looked down into my coffee mug, staring at my hands. I finally looked back up. It was hard meeting his
eyes, harder than I wanted it to be. "What do you want me to say, Dolph? That I find it embarrassing that
one of the monsters is my boyfriend? I do."
"Then drop him."
"If it were that easy, trust me, I'd do it."
"How can I trust you to do your job, Anita? You're sleeping with the enemy."
"Why does everyone assume I'm sleeping with him? Doesn't anybody but me date people and not have
sex?"
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