"I'm not. I'm…" He let out another long breath. "He's so cute! You should see him."
She hung up.
Her partner was adoofus . With an affinity for the canine population. Call the SPCA and give the man a medal.
She looked down at the piece of paper.
It was a letter dated eight years ago from somebody named Malcolm Price and addressed to Quinn's father. It rambled on for a couple of paragraphs about hunter business. The last paragraph had every fifth word highlighted, including the word "Eye," some numbers, and the words "garden" and "cross."
She raised an eyebrow at Quinn. "You know,sudoku is a fun game to play, too."
"It's not a game."
"Then what is it?"
"Directions."
"To the Eye?"
"Janie, you're blond, but you aren't dumb. What do you think?"
"I think I'm going to stake you and leave your body for the coyotes to have for dinner. But that's plan B."
"They're coordinates. ToGoodlaw . Where we're standing right now. And the words… it's a game
Malcolm and me used to play. He was like an uncle to me. He'd send me letters when he was on tour with the other hunters. My father read all of my mail, and Malcolm wanted to see if we could get anything past him."
"Did it work?"
"Yes. Sometimes I think that my father never even read my mail and just opened it to remind me of who was in charge. I think Malcolm sent this letter to my father knowing that I'd see it and decode it. It's a message for me."
"Where's this Malcolm guy now?"
"He's dead."
She nodded, trying to push away the distracting moment of empathy she was having for Quinn. Then she looked around at emptiness for miles around. "I see. What great clues he's given you, too. Definitely narrows down the search. Why don't I start looking over by that big anthill over there, and you get to work on that lovely thatch of cacti?"
He crossed his arms. "You know, I was thinking Peter was the bad apple in your family, but I think I was wrong. The wordscross andgarden are less help than I'd hoped. I thought there might be a—"
"Cross or a garden?" she finished. "Aren't you afraid of crosses? The whole undead animated corpse thing never goes over with the religious sect very well."
"I'm not undead."
"If you say so."
"Let's go into town and ask around. Maybe somebody can help us."
She stared at him blankly for a moment. Nothing was easy. Officially.
"Fine."
She could have sworn the temperature in the truck had gone down ten degrees when they drove the short distance to the center ofGoodlaw —such as it was—and it wasn't because the air conditioner was turned up. It didn't even work.
Janie was going to do it, Quinn thought. She was going to tell Lenny to hurt Barkley. Just like that. Just to get her hands on something that she knew nothing about.
Why was he surprised? He'd met his share ofMercs in his career as a hunter. They weren't driven by trying to do the right thing and make the world a better place—which actuallywas Quinn's philosophy back when he hunted vampires. As deluded as it was, he thought he was being the good guy. And sometimes he was. Usually he wasn't.
Mercsdidn't have that same work ethic. Greedy and deceptive and lacking a caring soul, they were driven by one thing and one thing only: money.
Why it bothered him to know that Janie had turned out that way he wasn't sure. Why he wanted to believe that she was different than the rest he didn't know, either. Was it because she was attractive?
He'd met his share of beautiful women in his day. A respectable number of them had even been interested in him. So it took more than a pretty face and a nice body to turn his head.
Besides, he didn't want to get involved with any women any time soon. He'd been burned lately. He'd thought he was in love with a fledgling vampire named Sarah Dearly. When he first met her a couple months ago inToronto , he'd been traveling with his father and a group of other hunters. Despite his attraction to her, the moment he found out that Sarah was a vampire, he'd tried to kill her. A couple of times. Luckily he'd failed. When he'd been turned into a vamp and left for dead, she'd helped him when everyone else turned their backs on him. Sarah was cute, sweet, caring, and all-around wonderful.
But she didn't love him. She was in love with a jackass six-hundred-year-old master vamp named
Thierry who liked to wear black and sulk around in the shadows. Nursing a broken heart and a bruised ego, Quinn had leftToronto at the first opportunity he had—driving Barkley back toArizona .
Only now could he look at the situation objectively and see that she wasn't the right girl for him. His feelings had grown out of gratitude for her help when he was in a bad place. It was all an illusion. At least that's what he had been trying to convince himself of.
After that, he'd sworn no more women. They were a distraction and gave unneeded angst to his already angst-filled life. He'd felt very confident with his decision.
That hadn't even been two weeks ago.
Janie might be cute, but she wasn't sweet or caring like Sarah. One out of three didn't cut it for him. Not anymore.
He'd find the Eye. Then he'd knock her out.
There was no other choice in the matter.
The car rolled into town, which appeared to consist of only one gas station. He drove up to a pump and cranked down his window.
An old woman with coarse gray hair sticking out from under her Arizona Sun Devils baseball cap slowly approached. She didn't even say anything and instead just started to fill up the tank. Then she started back for the station.
Quinn looked at Janie.
"Go get her, big boy," she said.
He snatched Malcolm's letter out of her hand and got out of the car without another word.
He caught up to the woman outside the door of the small station. "Excuse me," he said. "Can you help me?"
"That depends." She looked him up and down. "What needs helping?"
This is going to sound really stupid. "Do the wordsgarden orcross mean anything to you?"