Thin Skinned Read online

  That’s when I heard the Beaumonts arguing. Their voices echoed from around the corner of the building, though I couldn’t make out the actual words.

  They still hadn’t left since their appointment.

  God, you’d think they’d at least want to get into a change of clothes.

  Then again, maybe they didn’t care that much.

  I had a terrible feeling about this conversation.

  I crept up to the corner of the building, hoping to eavesdrop, but still not able to hear them.

  I glanced around furtively. The building windows all had their blinds down to keep out the worst of the Texas sun. This particular corner was shaded by some of the few trees on the lot. And no one was watching, as far as I could tell.

  I stepped into the space between the building and the trees and kicked off my shoes. I’d worn a skirt and blouse for the first day of work, so the rest of this would be easy, as long as I pulled my arms inside my shirt.

  I breathed into the change, determined for it to be as easy as possible. And honestly, it was, as usual, easier going this way than coming back into my human form.

  My vision grayed out, the colors leaching out into the world around me. As my legs and arms began to meld together, I felt a momentary flash of panic jolt through me, my human brain fearing for the loss of motor control. I knelt on the ground, preparing for the drop down to the earth, the quick slither out of the pile of clothing I left behind, hidden away where I could find it later.

  My reptile self took over almost instantly, the dissipation of my fear aided by the way my tongue changed to curl around the air, pulling it into my mouth one molecule at a time, passing it over the Jacobson’s organ on the roof of my mouth, telling me everything I needed to know about my world around me.

  The whole process took only a few minutes. And even with my diminished serpentine hearing, I could still make out the Beaumonts’ voices.

  I STAYED CLOSE TO THE edge of the building, sliding along the ground out of sight until I could hear what they were saying.

  “We should go now,” Hale snapped at Lori. “If we wait much longer, your bitch sister will get Paige.”

  “I just don’t know if this is the best idea,” Lori whined.

  “Get in the goddamn car. We’ve discussed it enough.”

  Clearly, they were planning a way to keep Paige, no matter what.

  Dammit. I missed the bulk of the conversation.

  Or, if I look at it another way, I made it in time to hitch a ride.

  The problem with relying on the reptile part of my mind to make decisions was that I didn’t always stop to consider all the repercussions of my actions.

  I waited long enough for them to get inside, then all but threw myself up under the car, looping myself up into the engine block from underneath.

  We stopped about twenty minutes away, and I peered out the grill as Lori Beaumont went inside a run-down house and came out with a toddler in her arms.

  Baby Paige.

  They were taking her and running. I was absolutely certain of it.

  I won’t let them get away with it.

  Like I said, my serpentine mind is a lot more black-and-white than my mammal self. I was running on pure instinct, and I had tied my instinct to saving that child.

  So I wasn’t going anywhere except with the Beaumonts. I settled in for a good, long ride. I moved carefully, twining myself into a position inside the engine block that I could hold for a long time. To my surprise, riding inside a car engine was actually restful.

  For a weresnake, anyway.

  We drove forever, it seemed like. Every so often, I stuck my head toward the air vents leading into the car. But the combined noise of the wind, engine, and road overcame my ability to listen to anything they might be saying inside the car.

  It was during that drive than I actually began to think about what I had done. The secretary was expecting me back at the office, though maybe she wouldn’t think much of it if I didn’t return before she left for lunch.

  In any case, I had apparently just walked out on my job. I was fairly certain that most counselors didn’t jump into cars with clients just because they were worried about them.

  That was when I really began thinking about ethics in earnest.

  I ran through everything I could remember from the Texas Counselor’s Code of Ethics. For some reason, though, at that moment I could remember only two items: a counselor must keep confidentiality, and a counselor cannot show a client his or her anus.

  I knew that the human mind under stress often threw out odd tidbits. Apparently, the weresnake mind did the same thing.

  But even when I had first read that section about a counselor not showing a client various body parts, it had occurred to me that the fact that it was included in the code at all suggested someone, somewhere, had actually done it.

  I finally gave up fell into a kind of doze, maintaining just enough awareness around myself to let me know when the car quit moving.

  We continued for what seemed like hours upon hours.

  The silence when we stopped echoed eerily around me.

  Where the hell are we now?

  Chapter 4

  Now that the engine was stopped, I could hear Hale and Lori inside the car talking.

  “I don’t know why,” Hale was saying. “Phil just said to meet him here.”

  “I’m not taking Baby Paige inside a funeral home,” Lori said. “It’s full of dead people, and I don’t want anything to do with them. We’ll wait out here. Hurry.”

  Hale cursed and slammed out of the car.

  At least our stop was planned to be short. I took the opportunity while the car was stopped to stretch various parts of my body. I was folded over on myself, coiled up and around inside the engine block. I considered trying to follow Hale either inside or at least to the door or window to try to get an idea of exactly what he was doing, but Lori and the baby really did stay in the car, waiting. The child was my concern, so I stayed with them. I was able to hear Lori muttering to herself, or maybe to the baby, while she sat inside.

  I was again thinking about the code of ethics when Hale returned to the car. I’d been wondering if I had a duty to report whatever it was the parents were about to do with Baby Paige.

  No, I’d finally decided. They still technically had custody of her, and in general, being a prick wasn’t illegal, so I couldn’t have Hale arrested on principle, no matter how much I might want to.

  He got back in, slamming the door behind himself again. I had about decided that he opened and closed all doors that way.

  “What did he say?” Lori asked.

  “He’ll take us,” Hale said shortly. “He’s sending a car to follow us.”

  “That’s not a car. That’s a hearse.” The pitch of Lori’s voice rose a full octave.

  “Deal with it.”

  Hale started the engine again, making it harder for me to hear.

  I pulled myself away from the air conditioner vents, once again giving up on listening for a while. Pulling myself along the edges of the engine block, away from anything that might hurt me, I squirmed around until I could peer out the front grill. It was difficult to see anything clearly, but I began seeing some of the surrounding landscape.

  We were in the middle of nowhere, it seemed like. As far as I could tell when I caught glimpses of the land around us, we were on a two-lane highway, surrounded by fields that stretched away into the distance.

  After about half an hour, we pulled off onto a side street that led back into a neighborhood where I wouldn’t have expected one. I realized why when Hale turned into a driveway around to the back of the house.

  This particular row of houses backed up to a private airstrip.

  I had seen a couple of these types of neighborhoods from the highway. They were secluded and expensive.

  And apparently also a refuge for druggies who want to grab their daughter and escape the legal issues facing them.

  “Get the
baby and come on,” Hale commanded Lori.

  I didn’t know how she could listen to that tone without bristling, but instead, she whined, “Will we get another fix soon?”

  “Well, fuck, I hope so,” Hale muttered.

  I heard the door creaking open on Lori’s side this time, too, so I dropped my head down, out from under the engine block, to take a look around us. Another car, presumably the hearse Lori had mentioned, pulled up behind us and I heard other car doors opening and closing.

  Lori opened the back passenger door, and I heard her getting Baby Paige out.

  All I could see were feet and ankles and wheels. The feet belonged to Lori and Hale and several people who had gotten out of the hearse. The wheels were those of our car and the hearse, and in the near distance, I also saw the wheels of what I was certain would turn out to be an airplane.

  They’re taking Baby Paige out of the country. I suddenly knew it as clearly as I had ever known anything.

  I didn’t know if Hale and Lori were themselves drug runners, but they clearly had contacts in that world, probably people who smuggled drugs into the country.

  The more I watched, the clearer it became.

  Courtney had told me her sister and brother-in-law were involved in meth. Yvette, the amicus attorney, had suggested cocaine was the culprit. I had always understood meth to be a homegrown kind of problem—or at least a home-lab-created issue. An operation that required the use of an airplane suggested something much bigger. So that pointed to the cocaine, maybe?

  Ugh. Everything I knew about drug smuggling came from TV news and network shows. I doubted either offered a nuanced image of the issue.

  As I contemplated the nature of drug smugglers—like, what did they do with the baby girls of drug-addicted parents?—several people came out of the house and began moving toward the airplane.

  I needed to get somewhere where I could see better.

  Just then, someone rolled up a gurney next to the Beaumonts’ car and several people began speaking rapidly in Spanish. My grasp of the language wasn’t strong enough for me to keep up. But I caught a few words here and there: muerte, abuela, avión—death, grandmother, airplane.

  So maybe this didn’t have anything to do with drugs at all? I slid down further, tucking myself over and around until I was hidden in the wheel well.

  “Well, open it up. Let me take a look,” came a booming voice, matched by footsteps down the steps out of the house. Whoever spoke followed up the command with some rapid-fire, heavily Texas-accented Spanish.

  I drew back into the shadow of the tire to make sure I wasn’t seen. People gathered around the gurney and I ducked out again, enough to see that the gurney held a casket.

  I had just enough time Is that what they’re going to open? before one of several young men with dark hair who looked like they could be brothers was indeed opening it.

  He stood back and gestured for another man to look inside. That man—the boss, presumably—was in his late forties, solidly built with a shock of dark hair shot through with gray and a matching beard.

  “Yep. That’ll do,” the bearded man said.

  “Is it really your grandmother?” Hale asked.

  “Yeah,” he said dryly. “My dearly departed grandma. We called her Abuela.”

  “Really?” Lori asked.

  The bearded man shot her an annoyed look. “Hell, no. But that’s as good an excuse as any to give if we get flying into the country without visas or even a flight plan.”

  “Smart move,” Hale said. I probably should not have been surprised to hear him sound like a toady.

  “Why don’t you two go ahead and take the baby on the plane. I think the casket’s the last thing we need to load.”

  Crap. They really were getting on the plane. And I had to make my decision right now about whether I was going to try to sneak on the plane with them and continue this insane plan.

  Or if I was going to let them fly away with Baby Paige.

  Neither option sounded great. The letting them fly away idea was a self-serving move, designed to save my own skin.

  It was exactly the kind of cold-blooded behavior one would expect from a snake.

  And it a kind of behavior I had spent my entire life training myself to avoid.

  No. I need to go with them.

  I just needed to figure out how.

  Chapter 5

  Okay. They were taking Paige and fleeing the country entirely. If I didn’t go with them, they would almost certainly disappear forever.

  They were taking a casket with a dead body—and who knew what else—using it as an excuse of some sort to bypass normal entry ports? Something about getting past customs, anyway.

  Everyone had moved away from the casket, but the top lid was still open.

  A shudder rippled down my entire body at the thought of what I was about to do next. The irony didn’t escape me, either. Many people, if not most, would shudder at the thought of sharing an enclosed space with a snake. Still, I had enough human socialization to be anxious about getting stuck in a casket with a dead woman.

  That’s when I figured out why the casket was open in the first place.

  “Hey, Ron,” I heard Phil call out. “You have your package ready for Abuela?”

  They were going to use her to smuggle something.

  Okay. Then they definitely would be opening the casket again.

  I had one chance.

  First taking a quick glance out from behind the wheel well to make sure no one was watching, I practically launched myself over to the gurney, muscling my way up into the casket. I pulled my back half up behind me as quickly as I could, working to ignore the fact that I was sliding down the dead body of a woman who was probably someone’s Abuela, even if she wasn’t Phil’s.

  The inside of the coffin smelled of death and chemicals. And something else I couldn’t quite place.

  When I heard footsteps approaching, I stopped trying to figure it out and went back to getting to a good hiding spot.

  I had just enough time to get all the way to the bottom of the casket and coil up as tightly as I could, shoving most of my body under the satin coverings, when a shadow passed over the open top half.

  “Hey, boss. I’m tucking this under her, okay? Right here at the top.”

  “That’s fine,” Phil answered.

  A hand dropped down into the casket holding a brown-paper-wrapped package. Lifting up Abuela’s shoulders, he placed the package beneath the body, then tucked her back down into place.

  Drugs? I wondered.

  Maybe, though it seemed like kind of a small package for going out in a flight. Not necessarily the amount they would need to tuck away into a dead body.

  Under a dead body, I reminded myself sternly. Under.

  Then the lid was closing, and I was encased in darkness.

  God, I hope there is a way out of here once it’s all closed up.

  Soon enough, the gurney was rolling again, and I had another fear to replace that one.

  What if they put me in an unpressurized cargo hold?

  Couldn’t that cause problems in animals?

  I really had not thought this through. I definitely needed to spend more time thinking and much less time acting. If I didn’t, I would never survive my career as a counselor.

  For that matter, I needed to be very careful right now, or I wouldn’t survive my first week as a fully licensed counselor.

  I needn’t have worried about the cargo hold, though, as I soon heard people talking outside the casket.

  “Why is he bringing that in here?” Lori asked.

  “Boss doesn’t like having his merchandise out of his sight if he can help it,” Ron replied. “Makes him nervous. And believe me, none of us want to see him get twitchy.”

  It sounded to me like he stressed the word twitchy as if he were making a subtle commentary on Lori’s state. But if he was, I guessed Lori missed it. It didn’t seem to me that a woman who peed herself and went on to board an
international flight was the kind of person who really focused on the details.

  At about the same time I had that thought, I realized there was some light filtering in through the cracks around the edges of the casket.

  Looks like Boss Phil cheaped out on the casket, too. Maybe he’s worried about leaving it alone in the cargo hold to fall apart and spill his merchandise.

  At least if it fell to pieces up here among the passengers, there would be plenty of people to retrieve the goods for him. Immediately.

  Lori grumbled a little more, but soon the roaring of the engine drowned her out. Then we were taking off, the swoop of the aircraft into the air leaving me for several seconds with a rolling stomach and head.

  I should have settled down for the flight, however long it was likely to take. But I couldn’t quit thinking about the fact that I’d be settling in with a human corpse. Oddly enough, I’d been more comfortable in a running engine.

  To distract myself, I decided to try to figure out what was inside that package Ron had hidden away beneath Abuela.

  Of course, that would mean actually getting under Abuela’s body to figure out what was going on. It wasn’t ideal—but I had gotten bored with hiding out and tagging along while the Beaumonts ran from...well, from me, essentially—at least, their interview with me was the impetus for their flight from the country in the first place. The irony of that wasn’t lost on me, either.

  I worked not to touch her dead flesh as I slid up beside her, choosing to cross up and over her torso as opposed to feeling her hands touching me as I moved beside them. The whole thing was more than a little terrifying.

  About halfway across her, I smelled that strange, almost musty smell again. Death, yes, and some kind of embalming chemicals—but there was more, too. Something else. Something familiar.

  I flicked my tongue out and back in, tasting the air around me, separating out the molecules to identify, categorize, and catalog them.

  And suddenly, as surely as I knew that I was in a casket with a dead body, I also know something very important about that body.