Page 12 of Race With The Devil

CHAPTER FIVE

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We practiced leash walking around the downtown area. It gave me the chance to get to know Unity.

The first thing she asked me was, “Why do you never look me directly in the eye?”

We came to a sudden stop when Wolf and Beetle did ahead of us. Wolf was teaching Beetle to “hold” at a curb before galloping across the street. Good.

I still didn’t look at her, though the urge to take her hand was overwhelming. “Capture myopathy.”

“Capture what?”

“Okay!” I said brightly, reminding Wolf of the “release command.” He and Beetle stepped off the curb to cross the street. We were heading toward A Likely Story. It sounded like a bookstore, the place I’d been yearning to go since deciding to spend a few more days in P and E. But training was of the utmost importance right now.

“Capture myopathy,” I repeated. “Cornered animals might have a sudden surge of adrenaline which can contaminate their muscles. In the heart, the flood of stress hormones might injure the chambers, rendering them feeble, unable to pump. Capture myopathy can kill prey animals like deer, rodents, small primates—“

“Are you calling me a little monkey?”

“I was getting to that.” I allowed myself the luxury of pausing for a few split seconds before the bookstore window while Wolf and Beetle traipsed ahead. The bestselling neurology book I wanted was displayed. For such a small store, they had a good spread. “With your history, you’re a prime candidate for capture myopathy.”

“Why’s that?”

I knew she’d ask that. “Well, your, ah, history with Gary Gregario.”

“Being raped?”

“Yes, makes you ten times more reactive to being pinned down. You must be hell in a makeout session.”

“How’d you know?”

“Just experience. In prison I worked with Puppies Behind Bars. A few were abused, and more than one died of a sudden heart attack when trainers insisted they look them in the eyes. They thought they were being nice, that they were bonding.” I hoped to hell the word “prison” didn’t prompt the usual next question. Especially given her background, unless I took half an hour to explain, Unity wouldn’t want anything more to do with me.

But despite her iconoclastic style, she was just like everyone else. “Why were you in prison?”

I was ready with the answer, I’d recited it so many times. “False charge. I know everyone says they’re innocent, but I was. Do you read?”

“I do!” She seemed to welcome the change of subject. Relief poured from both of us, and we finally faced each other, although I looked at her ear. “I enjoy those romance novels, but lately they’ve been getting very vivid and gritty, too much like real life for me. So I’m sticking with the cozier ones, where no one gets raped.”

“I can understand that. You want to escape, not remember.”

“Exactly. What do you read? You seem very well-read.”

I had to grin. “I read a lot as a teenager, but I really hit the books in prison, speaking of wanting to escape reality. I read horror books ‘cause I knew they weren’t real. In prison my dad would bring me six books a week, and by the next week I’d have read them all.”

Her grin only lifted one corner of her mouth. It was, frankly, adorable. With those diamond studs accentuating her dimples and her brown-lensed Oakleys shading her eyes, she was a glamorous, different animal. “Real dad? As opposed to the one I was stuck with?”

“Right. Hard to tell sometimes which ones are worse, no?”

“Exactly. My ‘real’ dad vanished when I was six months old, so Beverly tells me. Christmas Day, he went out to get a pack of cigs and never came back. She heard through the grapevine he wound up in Ft. Lauderdale teaching high school ceramics, married with three kids.”

That was a strange coincidence. “Mine vanished when I was six months old, too. Must be a thing. Only he came back and tried to make up for it when I was a teen. Didn’t work very well.”

“But you said he brought you books, right? That’s something.”

“I suppose.”

“Do you still read horror?”