Quincy took up position about ten feet out and raised the rifle again.
“Don’t you dare,” Sun said, glaring at him as she ran past. She hiked up the stairs, ducked another swipe from Wanda’s net, and slid to a stop beside her mother, her gaze darting about.
“Son of a bitch,” Quincy said with more whine than all of southern France. “He got away.”
“And whose fault would that be?” she asked him over her shoulder. She turned back to the maniac who’d birthed her. “Mom, it’s okay. We’ve got this.” When Elaine didn’t move, Sun put a hand on her arm. “Mom?”
Her mother stood frozen, staring up into a darkened corner of the porch. Sun pivoted slowly and came face-to-face with a very angry raccoon, their noses only inches apart.
It sat hunchbacked on a high windowsill, a slow hiss leaking from between its exposed teeth, as it gazed at her with wide, feral eyes. Eyes that glowed like they belonged to a creature possessed by a powerful evil. One so ancient, so primordial, it predated human language.
Then she realized she was still wearing the goggles and the ominous metaphor lost its ardor. Much like Sun’s hopes to go her entire life without wrestling a raccoon in the dark with a gang of bookworms cheering her on. But stranger things had happened.
Before she could react, she heard the thud of compressed air. Quincy had taken a shot with her barely inches from the terrified animal. What the actual hell?
He’d just moved up a notch on her hit list, overtaking Ryan Spalding, a boy who’d claimed she’d given him a hand job under the bleachers in high school, when she realized it was a misfire. The gun. Not the hand job. She’d never touched Ryan’s penis, much to his chagrin.
Quincy let loose a dozen expletives followed by a sheepishly meek, “Misfire.”
She wanted to roll her eyes but didn’t dare take them off the rodent. They were locked in a stare-down of legendary proportions. “Zee,” she said softly into her comm set, staying as still as she possibly could, “you wanna help me out here?”
Zee’s smooth voice came back to her. “Will do, boss.” Her calm tone spoke volumes. Like elevator music. Or an acid trip. She was already in the zone and probably had the creature in her cross-hairs. “One inch to the left.”
Sun eased to her left a microsecond before a dart whizzed past her ear.
It hit home just as the raccoon catapulted off the sill and onto her goggle-covered face. She screamed and sank her fingers in its fur to rip it off, but it held on for dear life, anchoring its razor-sharp claws in her scalp. She stumbled back and tripped on something hard and short. Probably her own indignation.
Her mother screamed but it barely registered before Sun found herself falling. No. Not just falling. Tumbling, suddenly weightless. She’d done a backflip over the wooden porch railing and seemed to be plummeting headfirst toward certain death.
A familiar set of arms caught her in midair before all three—the owner of said arms, the facehugger, and Sun herself—slammed onto the rocky earth beneath them. Air whooshed out of her lungs and, even with the insulation of her rescuer, the hard landing sent a jolt of pain through body parts that, until that moment, she was unaware existed.
It also dislodged the raccoon. The furball shot into the darkness and landed a few feet away with a soft thud.
She rolled off her rescuer and lay on her back, gazing up at the stars and gasping to force air into lungs that had seized up, when her mother’s head popped into her line of sight.
“Honey, are you okay?” she asked, concern lining her pretty, upside-down face.
“Peachy, Mom,” Sun said, her voice strained. “Thanks for asking.” Her gaze slid past the woman who birthed her and back up to the stars again, hoping for a glimpse of the Little Dipper, wishing she could pluck it from the heavens and beat her chief deputy with it. “Deputy Cooper?”
“Yeah, boss?” he replied, panting close by.
“Are you conscious?”
“Yes.”
“Can you give me one good reason why I shouldn’t beat you to death with a feather duster?”
“I made you bacon the other day.”
Damn it.
2
If you don’t talk to your cat about catnip, who will?
—SIGN AT DEL SOL VETERINARY CLINIC
“You know this is all your fault.”
Sun gaped at her chief deputy as he followed her through the bullpen toward her office at the station, caged raccoon in hand.
“If you would’ve just let me shoot him …”
Sun knew better than that. If anything, she’d saved him weeks of guilt. He didn’t have the stomach for such things. She waved a hand at him. “I know, Quince, but there was no need to kill the little guy,” she said to let him off the hook. “We’ll get him checked out, then take him out to Dover Pass and release him.”
He stopped and the look he gave her would’ve broke her heart if it weren’t so funny. “We’re just going to dump him? Leave him out there all alone and defenseless?”
“He’s a wild animal. Completely untamed. And possibly rabid.”
He lifted the cage onto her desk and studied the hapless creature snoozing away. “That never stopped your parents from caring for you.”
Ouch. “Touché. But that doesn’t take away from the fact that you can’t keep him.”
His shoulders deflated. They’d dealt with wildlife before, but Quincy had clearly grown attached to the menace and their catand-mouse game of tag over the last few weeks.
Sun opened a cabinet and looked at herself in the mirror. Only minor cuts and a tiny bruise on her jaw. Not bad. Her hair, however … She combed through it with her fingers, then gave up, closed the door, and popped a coffee pod into the maker. “I was having such a great hair day.”
Quince chuckled. “Sometimes I forget you’re a girl.”
“Please. Like you don’t have bad hair days.”
“True. Remember our senior pictures?”
She stopped and stared dreamily into the vast oblivion. “How could I forget the greatest memory of my life?”
“And it’s forever commemorated in our yearbook.”
“I’m a little disappointed no one calls you SpongeBob anymore.”
He stuck his fingers through the cage and petted their unconscious guest. “If we did keep him—”
“Quincy,” she warned.
“—and I’m not saying we will, but if we did—”
“Quince.” She knew he would do this.
“—he could be our mascot.” He raised a hopeful gaze. “I’ve always wanted a raccoon to assist me with petty crimes.”
Sun struggled to hide her amusement and joined him in admiring the fluffy furball. “He is adorable.”
“Right?”
She looked at Quince, then back at the raccoon. “He’s kind of like your spirit animal.”
“What if he has rabies, though?”
“Then he would be exactly like your spirit animal.”
Sun’s newest recruit walked in then, Poetry Rojas, freshly graduated from the police academy and looking spiffy in his pressed black uniform.