Otterly Scorched Read online

  “How’s the burned dick? Is it branded with coffee beans now? Heard Detective Blake really scorched the shit out of it.” David, one of my detective friends, laughs as I pass by his desk.

  “Ahhh, it was just a flesh wound. He’ll be ready to go tonight at McCallahan’s for my going away party, so make sure you’ve got your wingman muscles flexed,” I joke with him, honestly in no fucking mood for a going away party now after getting shot down and verbally kicked in the face. “I was recently told I’m going to turn into a little bitch one of these days. Maybe you’ll get lucky and it will happen tonight.”

  David throws his head back and laughs. “The day Dax Trevino turns into a little bitch is the day we’ll all need to start preparing for the end of the world.”

  “Seriously.” I laugh with him, moving on down the hall.

  I’ve got friends to save from imminent death, a bright future as a badass detective, and several counties of uncomplicated women with way less attitude to share my sparkling personality and good looks with. I don’t need Harley Blake for anything.

  CHAPTER 1

  My Babies!

  Five years later…

  Official 911 Transcript

  Operator: “911, what is your emergency?”

  Female Caller: “My babies! Oh my God, someone took my babies!” *Crying, loud screaming, wailing incoherently*

  Operator: “I’m going to need you to—”

  Female Caller: “They’re gone! Oh, God, they’re gone!”

  *More crying, more loud screaming, more wailing incoherently*

  Operator: “Ma’am, I’m going to need you to calm—”

  Female Male Caller: “Who in the fuck are you calling ma’am?”

  Operator: “Wow! Oh my. I’m…. Wow. I’m really sorry, sir. It’s just… you were really high-pitched there for a minute.”

  Male Caller: “Christ—”

  Operator: “And there was a lot of screaming.”

  Male Caller: “For fuck’s sake, this is an emergency. Can you just do your damn job?”

  Operator: “I’m incredibly sorry, sir. You said your babies are missing? Can you give me the names and ages of the missing individuals, as well as their last known location?”

  Male Caller: “I don’t have time for this shit. You need to send all available units to the location that popped up on your fucking computer screen. I’m gonna need search and rescue, K9 units, an Amber Alert Request for Activation Intake Form, broadcast to all available patrols, and establish tactical perimeter posts until a field command exists.”

  Operator: “Sir, I understand you’re worried and upset, but the more information you can give me about the missing, the faster we can help you.”

  Male Caller: “Fucking hell. Fine. Uhhh… L-l-l-lincoln is two, and ummm… shit… we’ll call him Chris. Yeah, Chris. Chris is three. Wait, no, I think he might be four. I’ll need to check my records.”

  Operator: “You don’t know their names or ages?”

  Male Caller: “Of course I know their fucking names and ages. I was trying to make it easier on you. Their full names are… a mouthful. Chris is definitely four, because I just remembered we celebrated his birthday last week with an extra helping of salmon.”

  Operator: “Um, okaaay. When was the last time you saw Lincoln and Chris?”

  Male Caller: “Last night, when I said goodnight to them and left to go home.”

  Operator: “You left them?”

  Male Caller: “Of course I left them! I’m not that obsessed with them. It’s not like I can bring them home with me every night. If I bring two home, I have to bring them all home.”

  Operator: “Exactly how many do you have?”

  Male Caller: “Seven. Wait, no, eight. I just got a new ten-month-old in the other day. I’ve had to keep her quarantined. Won’t stop hissing and biting everyone.”

  Operator: “So you’re telling me you have eight babies that you just… leave alone every night?”

  Male Caller: “Do you have any idea how much time you’re fucking wasting right now? Believe me, they need their alone time. Otherwise, they get crabby. They stay in their cages at night just like they always do, and I go back to let them out and have breakfast with them in the morning. This morning, two of them weren’t in their cages.”

  Operator: “Sir, I’m going to need you to not move from your location. If you have any weapons on you, I would advise you to remove them from your person and put them at a safe distance away from you. Put your hands in the air and do not make any sudden movements when the officers arrive.”

  “Male Caller: “Perfect. Send everyone. This is serious shit, and you need to get on this while the trail is still hot. And while we’re waiting, their full names are Otterham Lincoln, and Christotterpher Columbus. Do you need me to spell that?”

  CHAPTER 2

  Dead Squirrel Beach

  Harley

  “Look, Brad, I’m just really busy—”

  “It’s Brent,” the man on the other end of my current phone call corrects me in a quietly annoyed voice.

  Shit!

  “See how busy I am? I have a client named Brad, and I just got off the phone with him when you called!”

  I wince as the lie flies out of my mouth while I hold my phone between my chin and shoulder. Balancing a tray of takeout coffees in one hand, I pull open the side door to my dad’s garage-slash-home office with the other, continuing with this stupid conversation so I can get it over with faster.

  I tell guys all the time that I am not girlfriend material, but they just don’t listen. They’re happily bopping along, thinking we’re in a relationship, while I’m kind of, sort of… forgetting they even exist. And then they get super pissed about it, like they weren’t warned from the get-go. Like I didn’t introduce myself and say, “Hi, my name’s Harley Blake. I’m thirty-eight and have never had a serious relationship, because I don’t have time for that shit. Here’s a pen, paper, and the rest of my red flags.”

  “Claws and Effect Pet Detectives is busier than ever. You know that. I’m sorry I just can’t give you what you need right now. I’m sorry I didn’t reply to your texts. Or your voicemails. Or acknowledge the three—” I pause as my dad leans over to the garbage can next to him, pulling out a dozen long-stemmed red roses wrapped with a white ribbon, and waves them around a few times before chucking them back into the can. “—sorry, four, flower deliveries. I’m really sorry…”

  Brent, my dad mouths when I pause for entirely too long.

  “Brent!” I finish excitedly, my happy body-shimmy coming to an abrupt halt when I hear a sad sigh on the other end of the line.

  “Do you think maybe you just need a few days to think about things? I can call back in—”

  “Okay, good talk, Brett. You take care now.”

  I quickly end the call and let out the longest, most satisfying moan.

  “You said his name wrong there again at the end,” Dad points out, ruining my two seconds of bliss. He doesn’t even bother looking up from what he’s working on at his desk, his Tom Selleck mustache twitching as he tries to hide his smile.

  “Shut up,” I grumble as my older brother, Davidson, walks in from the connecting door to the kitchen.

  My dad’s favorite joke is making people ask him where his kids were conceived. Then he’ll turn to me and my brother and say, “I don’t know. Harley, Davidson, where were you guys conceived?”

  “What are we talking about? Did you tell Harley she’s got a new case?” Davidson asks, waving around the file folder he’s holding in his hand before flopping down on the old, beat-up leather couch sitting against the far wall.

  “Haven’t gotten around to it yet. I was too busy listening to her kick another poor, sad soul to the curb.” My dad chuckles.

  “She broke up with Brent? Awww, I liked him,” Davidson complains, pulling off his socks and tossing them to the other end of the couch before kicking his stinky, bare feet up on the coffee table.

  “Get
your disgusting feet off the table. This is a place of business,” I scold, pulling my coffee out of the cardboard tray and taking a much needed gulp of caffeine so I can continue dealing with my annoying family. “And you met the guy once. He was entirely too needy. He had to go.”

  “He asked you to go to dinner once in the last month. And you forgot to show up,” Dad kindly reminds me with another laugh.

  “Because it was Super Bowl Sunday. Who the hell goes on a dinner date on Super Bowl Sunday?” I complain.

  I really have no right to be this annoyed with the teasing. Brent is not the first guy I’ve… forgotten about. I was once in a relationship with a guy for eight months and didn’t even know it. I thought every time he sent me a text he was just being nice. I thought we were trying out the whole being friends thing with someone you went to dinner with once and sat through one boring documentary on Netflix who you let clumsily touch your boobs out of pity.

  “I’m just not meant to be in a relationship.”

  “You’re not meant to be in a relationship with someone who bores the hell out of you so easily that you forget about them,” my dad corrects. “Take Bartholomew Squirrelington and his wife, Beatrice. Bart keeps the spark alive and the excitement in his marriage by taking Bea salsa dancing every Friday night.”

  My dad leans back in his chair from the shadowbox he’s been hunched over working on at his desk with a satisfied smile as he points to the two taxidermy squirrels nestled down in the box. One of them is wearing a tiny, red, Latin-inspired, frilly salsa dress with a miniature fake rose in her lifeless mouth, and the other is wearing a tiny tuxedo, complete with a top hat. They have been frozen forever into a seductive dance pose, with their furry limbs intertwined.

  This could possibly be the other reason I repel relationships.

  “Dad, you can’t work on your horror boxes out here where we take clients. How many times do I have to tell you this?” I sigh, taking a seat in the chair on the other side of his desk as I sip my coffee and he puts a few more finishing touches on Bart and Bea.

  “And how many times do I have to tell you they’re called party boxes. We’ve gone over this, Harley.”

  Davidson snorts over from his spot on the couch, and we both share an eye roll. My brother is a forty-year-old loser who lives in our dad’s basement and only helps me out here at work when his wireless PlayStation controller dies. But at least we agree on one thing—retirement from the police force ten years ago made our dad go just a tad crazy. Not mentally unwell, or needing a therapist or a padded room or anything. Just bored as hell and pissed off that society decided he was too old to be a cop anymore.

  Which was why a week after he retired, after single-handedly tracking down a neighbor’s ex-husband who stole their yellow lab from the ex-wife’s home in the middle of the night and fled the state, he decided to open Claws and Effect Pet Detectives.

  It’s not as completely ridiculous of a business as the Jim Carrey movie leads you to believe. Yes, we have our share of bored, rich housewives who misplaced their yapping little ankle-biters, and we deal with a lot of nasty custody battles and angry spouses who steal their own animals, and we did have a case a few months ago where an NFL team had their mascot stolen, but we do a lot of meaningful work as well. We not only find animals who have wandered off, but we also help track down animals that are in the process of being sold to individuals or organizations with horrible plans for them, and we rescue wild animals that are not meant to be house pets. We help acclimate them back into the wild or find them a loving place to live forever by working closely with rescues and sanctuaries. It’s an exhausting, sometimes depressing job, but it’s one I’m happy and proud to do.

  After the years went by, old age started to kick in even more, and my dad’s memory and reflexes stopped being as sharp as they once were. That’s when I came in a year ago and made him take retirement a little more seriously. He wasn’t happy I quit the police force to take over the family business, but when your father falls off a ladder trying to get a five-thousand-dollar, prized Bengal cat off a roof, breaks his wrist, and cracks his head open on the sidewalk, you don’t really give a shit how unhappy he is.

  Somewhere around that time, he became slightly obsessed with making “party boxes” of dead animals. It keeps him off ladders, so that’s all I can really ask for. The good news is, when I wake up in the morning and leave my house to go to work, I go to my dad’s house. The bad news is, when I wake up in the morning and leave my house to go to work, I go to my dad’s house.

  “Shirley and Mildred’s beach party still needs another hour before the beach balls in their hands are dry. I’m using your desk, since mine is full,” Dad tells me, leaning forward with a paint brush to wipe something off Bart’s creepy, beady, glass eye that I swear is looking over at me like, “Bruh… make him stop.”

  “Well, you’re going to have to hide Shirley and Mildred, and Bart and Bea, because I have a new client stopping by in forty-five minutes,” I tell him, looking over longingly at my unusable desk, currently inhabited by Dead Squirrel Beach.

  “Negative. I rescheduled your client, because you have a much more pressing case,” Davidson announces excitedly, scrambling up from the couch faster than I’ve seen him move… since the last time his weed dealer told him he was getting ready to go on vacation for two weeks.

  “Play the call for her,” he orders Dad, chuckling to himself as he races across the room, his nasty bare feet slapping against the floor as he goes.

  Davidson hovers over the back of Dad’s chair, and they spend a few minutes arguing over where to click and how many times to click it, until Davidson finally pushes Dad’s hand out of the way and takes control of the mouse.

  “No matter how many times I listen to this shit, it never stops being funny.” Davidson keeps laughing as I close my eyes, sip my coffee, and remember back fondly to that time fifteen minutes ago when I was alone in my car, pretending like I was an orphan.

  My parents got a divorce right after I graduated from high school. I found out a few years after the divorce that my mom had been unhappy for a while, but she wanted to wait until both me and my brother were gone, so it wouldn’t disrupt our lives. Quickly realizing Davidson would probably never move out of the house, she hit the road the same day I left for college. It wasn’t an ugly divorce, and there were never any fights or demands to pick sides. My parents were, and still are, very good friends. My dad and Davidson are just a lot alike, and my mom couldn’t handle being married to someone who never really wanted to grow up, who she constantly had to take care of. My dad understood that and loved her enough to let her go and find what she wanted elsewhere. It’s all very PC, and everyone thinks it’s weird that my dad goes on fishing trips with my stepdad and we all get together for every holiday and birthday, but it’s completely normal to me, in a sort of fucked-up way. I’m really close to my mom and talk to her all the time, but she lives over an hour away. Which means I’m the one stuck cleaning up the messes, and making sure my dad and brother don’t kill themselves or anyone around them.

  “Make sure the volume is turned down this time,” my dad complains. “I can’t handle all that screaming again. My ears are still ringing.”

  As my brother finally clicks on the right file, and it takes a few minutes to load, my dad uses the time to quickly explain that I’ll be working with The Backyard. I let out a sigh of relief as I continue enjoying my coffee. The Backyard Animal Sanctuary has been around since before I was born, and I have a lot of memories of visiting the animals there when I was little. We even adopted a few of our family pets from them.

  Over the years, they lost funding, and it became really rundown, with very few animals and only a small handful of employees. About three months ago, an anonymous donor put a hefty amount of money into it, and word on the street is, they are making some big improvements and changes. I’ve worked with the people there a lot over the last year when we come across animals that need a temporary place to live,
and they are all really wonderful and very easy to work with. I haven’t stopped by since the remodeling started, so it will be nice to check in with everyone and take a look around.

  A piece of cake case with zero drama is exactly what I need right now. For the first time in a long time, I actually don’t feel stressed.

  “Make sure you pay attention to all the sniffling in between the screams. Kills me every time.” Davidson laughs with a shake of his head.

  CHAPTER 3

  Why Does Crazy Have to be so Hot?

  Harley

  “Pull your head out of your ass and do your goddamn job!”

  Davidson snorts as we start moving at a faster pace down the main walkway of The Backyard, when we continue to hear shouting. We’ve been hearing this same commotion coming from up by the farmhouse that now serves as a visitor center for The Backyard, since we got out of the car in the parking lot out front a few minutes ago.

  “Whatever happens, just make sure you don’t get in front of my shot. This is gonna be Instagram gold,” Davidson states as I glance over at him when we get to the side of the farmhouse to see him holding his phone up in front of him as we walk.

  “I only agreed to let you come with me, because you promised you would help if this guy gets out of hand. Not to become Insta-famous with your two followers.”

  Reaching over, I smack Davidson’s hands so hard his phone goes flying out of them. He juggles it up in the air a few times before finally getting a hold of it then shoots me the finger.

  When 9-1-1 realized this wasn’t the child endangerment case they initially thought it was and found out it was just some guy at The Backyard who supposedly lost his otters, that’s when they forwarded the recording to us to see if we could help. I haven’t heard of The Backyard adding otters to their sanctuary recently, but I also haven’t been here in a while. It still needs to be treated as a legitimate case for now. The police sent a cruiser over ahead of us to make sure the situation was under control before we got here, but going by the shouting, it’s still not under control.