Guilty by Association (Judah Black Novels) Read Free

his cereal before switching the channel over to The New Adventures of Scooby Doo . “Better?”
    “What? I didn't say anything.”
    He stuck his tongue out at me. “I saw your face.” I went back into the kitchen and started moving some dishes around in the sink. “How come you didn't get the laundry done?” he asked with a mouthful of cereal.
    “Don't talk with your mouth full. And I couldn't. Place was closed.”
    “I thought you said it was a twenty-four-hour laundromat?” I shrugged. “You smell like death. Someone died?”
    He paused, waiting for an answer as I scribbled down a list of rules. Don't touch the stove. Don't open the windows. Check the caller ID before answering the phone. Don't give anyone your real name. I still wasn't comfortable with the idea of leaving him home alone while I worked, but I didn't have much of a choice. Even back in Ohio, he'd given every sitter I hired a run for their money. Hunter insisted that he was old enough to look after himself, but I wasn't sure. He was only eleven for Christ's sake. Leaving him alone seemed more harrowing than dealing with a dead werewolf.
    “Mom?” I looked up to see him standing in the doorway, arms crossed over his skinny, white chest. “Are you going to go to work?”
    I swallowed and looked down at the dishes instead of directly at him. “You know I don't have a choice. These people need the law as much as everyone else.”
    “Why couldn't we stay in Ohio?”
    Finally, I looked up and met his eyes with a stern glare. “You know why, Hunter.”
    “Is it because of that fight I got into at school? Because I told you, Chad started it.”
    That made my heart sink into my toes. I went to my son and hugged him. “Hunter, this has nothing to do with you. It's...” I stumbled. How do you explain to an eleven-year-old boy that doing the right thing got me blacklisted from just about every major police force in the country? I'd had to pull quite a few strings to keep from getting fired altogether. After what I did, not even L.A. wanted me and that was saying something. L.A. was desperate for agents. “It's complicated, kiddo. We got dealt a crap hand but we're going to play it out. I promise things will get better.”
    “That's what you said in Chicago and Philadelphia, too. And Cleveland.” I patted him on the back and he sighed. “I guess there's no further down to go once you hit rock bottom, huh?”
    I gave him a playful shove back toward the TV. “Go watch your cartoons.”
    I finished my list of rules, jotted down some emergency phone numbers and checked the locks on the windows one more time. Then I went and kissed my boy on the top of the head and told him I was going to work. “Take care of the place while I'm gone. And I'm going to call to check in randomly. But don't feel the need to wait on me. Call me if you need anything.”
    Hunter gave me a shove out of the way so he could see the TV better. “Uh-huh. Yeah. See you later, mom.” Kids these days.
    I grabbed my keys, checked the window locks and the emergency numbers one more time and then left to meet a detective about a werewolf autopsy.
     

CHAPTER TWO
     
     
     
    My car can put Frankenstein's monster to shame. It's officially a sixty-eight Firebird but it has parts in it from every major car on the road because it's constantly breaking down. The body is black and the doors are red. The bumper is a dented up strip of silver and the clutch is a bit touchy but it works most of the time. She breaks down on occasion only to start just fine the next day. While I could probably afford something better, there is a certain appeal to me in being able to say that I drive a classic car, even if it looked like it'd been through a war zone.
    I can only change radio stations if I bust out a Phillips head screwdriver and pull some wires out of the dash but I've never bothered. The AM station it's stuck on was just static in all the other places I lived but there, on the reservation, it