Two days later Alex drove down from the vineyard and pulled into the Center parking lot just after dawn. He slid his car into the spot next to Jackie’s beat-up Toyota. But spotting a fresh dent on her driver’s side door had him reconsidering. He backed up and parked at the end of the row.
He leaned into the steering wheel and stretched his shoulder down toward the dash, pulling on the muscles until he felt them relax. He rotated his wrist and gave a nod to the heavens that it felt better than it had in a week. He grabbed his mug of coffee, tipped it to his lips, and then realized he’d already gulped it down. Damn. It would take more than caffeine to dissolve the fatigue that circled in his bones.
The pens bustled with activity. It wasn’t yet six thirty but the volunteer crew was already in full motion, feeding fish to animals well enough to chase them down in the pools and tube-feeding those not yet ready. The crew supervisor saw him get out of his car and waved.
He grabbed his set of yellow slickers from the back seat, tucked them under his arm and ambled toward the pens. What had he been thinking, signing up to volunteer? He couldn’t afford the energy and time it took, or the distraction. He knew he shouldn’t keep it up, couldn’t.
He’d do his shift at the Center today and then throw in the towel.
Volunteering would have to wait for the off-season.
He didn’t like backing out, but he’d miscalculated the time and energy it took to do the job well. He also didn’t like miscalculating. And try as he might, he couldn’t decipher the powerful desire that kept drawing him back to the Center.
“Hey, Alex!” Gage called to him from across the lot. “You’re just in time. How about giving us a hand with this baby?”
It was no baby. A full-size male sea lion bucked against the walls of the extra-large dog kennel he’d been herded into. It took four of them to carry it to the pen Gage indicated. When they put the kennel down and opened the front gate, the animal reared and swung around, teeth snapping. Gage dodged out of the way and motioned for Alex and the other volunteers to back out of the pen. He clanged the gate shut, then leaned against it, his breath heaving.
“The diatom that’s taking these guys down is making them crazy aggressive.” Gage nodded to the volunteers. “Go get yourselves some coffee. I made it, so it should be good.” He caught Alex’s eye and pointed to two unmoving harbor seals in the next pen. “That’ll make four more dead since yesterday if you count the two we brought in last night.”
Alex stared at the dead seals. “Any clue as to what’s taking them out?”
“Jackie has a pretty good idea, but she’s waiting for more test results.” He opened the pen and motioned Alex into it. “Give me a hand getting this big one to the necropsy lab.”
Alex hefted the tail of the animal onto the wheeled gurney and steadied it as they rolled it up the ramp and into the squat building. A sign over the door said “So That Others May Live.”
“Not much of a lab,” he said, looking around.
The steel lockers looked like they’d been pried out of a high school gym, the walls were discolored and one of the windows had a full-length crack. Two rivulets of rusty water had stained their way down to a drain in the center of the room. The massive steel table along one side was the one quality item in the building.
“Don’t tell Jackie that—she spent her salary converting this shed,” Gage said as Alex helped him lift the lifeless animal onto the steel table, positioning it next to two others already there.
Alex glanced out the lab window and watched Jackie march across the parking lot, clutching a stack of papers to her chest, dodging potholes and cursing as coffee spilled down the front of her sweater. She breezed in the door and plunked the mug on the steel table, dropping several of the papers.
“Good morning,” she said as she bent down to retrieve the fallen papers. “There’s no food in sight,” she said with a wavering smile as she stood, “so I cannot imagine what you might have that’s holding Gage’s attention.”
The sound of crumbling wood drowned out Gage’s reply, and Jackie tottered as her right foot sank through the floor. She flung out her arm and the papers she still held flew from her grasp. Alex lunged for her. He caught her under the arms, but not before her leg had sunk knee-deep through the flooring.
“Easy,” Alex said as he steadied her. “Hold still.”
Ignoring him, she tried to pull her foot free, but a sharp splinter of wood pierced through her slickers. She winced and Alex fell to his knees.
“Don’t take suggestions very well, do you?” He steadied her with one arm and pressed against the rotted board with the other. “Can you relax your leg?”
“Sure. And I’ll just sip a martini and pretend that the USDA isn’t coming in less than five hours.” She waved at the papers. “No problem.” She looked up at Gage. “Surprise visit, just what we needed. I was coming to tell you.”
Learning what had her riled didn’t make Alex breathe any easier.
“Hold steady,” he said. He felt her hand against his shoulder, felt her lean into him. He pulled the board away from her leg and held the splintered flooring back. He wrapped his other hand around her calf, freed her ankle and then eased her foot up and out of the hole.
She teetered and her fingers dug into his shoulders. She steadied herself and then pulled away. Her slickers were shredded, and under them the leg of her jeans was shoved up to her knee. Red lines of blood streaked down her shin.
He reached toward her. “Your leg—”
“It’s not my blood,” she said in the gentlest tone he’d heard from her. She nodded to the harbor seal bodies arranged on the table. “It’s theirs. It was in the floor drain.” She turned to Gage. “Since we gave Tony the week off to visit his fiancée, we’ll just have to deal. Get a board—anything—we’ve got to fix this. They’ll condemn us if they see it.”
Gage didn’t move, just stared at the gaping hole.
“Now.” She let out a breath. “Now would be good, Gage.”
She rolled her pant leg down and then lifted her instrument tray out of a cabinet. “I’ll just get these samples fixed and ready to send and then I’ll help. We’ve got four hours max.”
“We’ll handle it, boss,” Gage said, nodding at Alex to follow him.
“You sure you’re okay?” Alex asked as he turned to leave.
She glanced up from her scalpels. “I have to be.”
Before she looked away, he noted the bluish, dark circles under her eyes. She looked as tired as he felt. But beyond tiredness, the tautness in her shoulders indicated anxiety and strain, a strain he suspected had a deeper cause than the impending USDA inspection and a busted floor. He felt the urge to soothe her, but one glance at her profile and the set of her jaw told him to let her be.
Alex helped Gage choose a board from a pile of wood behind the fish kitchen; it was the only useable piece they could find. They shouldered it into the lab.
Jackie was bent over her work and didn’t look up. She’d donned a vinyl apron, but one glance wouldn’t tell anyone what color it had been just minutes before.
“Be easier if you moved,” Gage growled when she didn’t move away from the necropsy table.
“I have to get these samples to UC Davis.”
Gage shook his head. “I’ll grab some nails. Jackie has the best saw in here.” He walked toward the cabinets.
“You are not using my necropsy saw for wood. Don’t even consider it.”
“A jigsaw would work,” Alex said. Gage gave him a high sign, then handed him a hammer that had been resting on the window ledge and went out the door.
Alex crouched on his haunches and inspected the floor.
“We could cut a patch and recut the drain hole,” he said, framing the area with his arms. “Then it might be possible to pull this piece of flooring over it.” He ran his hand along the floor, tapping his knuckles against it. The hollow sound indicated dry rot, not a good sign. “I wouldn’t count on it holding for
long though,” he said as he stood. “You’d be better off pulling the whole thing up and replacing it.”
“Yeah, we could do that. And then not finish off the feeding tanks out front.”
She stared out the window and across the parking lot. He hadn’t studied her up close in the daylight, but he did now. She hadn’t rubbed in her sunscreen. The white streaks made her look like she was painted for a Norwegian tribal battle. And the face those streaks covered was that of a goddess. Hers was not a beauty that shouted to be noticed. Her quiet elegance spoke through the mud, the blood-stained slickers, the worry and the weariness and called to him as strongly as if it had been the most finely tuned siren. It was damn unnerving. She turned and caught him staring. The lines around her eyes softened for the briefest instant. Then she shot an assessing glance at the gaping hole.
“A quick fix for the visit from the authorities will have to do,” she said. “We’ll just have to deal with the long term later.”
He raised a brow. Fixing things later always carried a bigger price, but she wasn’t in any mood for carpentry wisdom, certainly not from him. He knelt and began to wedge out the worst of the rotten sections with the claw of the hammer.
“Gage told me to be nice to you,” she said over the squeaking of the hammer against the floorboards. She said it with a tone that was almost an apology.
Alex whistled and squinted. “This is you being nice?” he teased.
To his surprise, she blushed and fiddled with a couple of slides. “I need to finish up with these samples,” she said.
“Then you should move,” he suggested, bending down to pull up more of the floor near her feet.
“Just because you have money and privilege doesn’t mean you can come in here and start telling us what to do.”
The resignation in her tone hurt more than her clipped words.
“You should still move.” He made sure she could hear the humor in his voice. He knew the feeling of being pushed around by people with money. The owners tried it on him every season. And he also knew too well the frustration of trying to do more than seemed possible with the resources you had. Hell, trying to achieve the near impossible made everybody cranky.
She huffed a breath, grabbed her instrument tray and some slides, and stomped out.