Kitty Goes to Washington kn-2 Page 2

I put my clothes in the hollow formed by a fallen tree and a boulder. The space was big enough to sleep in when I was finished. I backed away, naked, every pore tingling.

  I could do this alone. I'd be safe.

  I counted down from five—

  One came out as a wolf's howl.

  Chapter 2

  The animal, rabbit, squeals once, falls still. Blood fills mouth, burns like fire. This is life, joy, ecstasy, feeding by the silver light—

  If turning Wolf felt like being drunk, the next day definitely felt like being hungover.

  I lay in the dirt and decayed leaves, naked, missing the other wolves terribly. We always woke up together in a dog pile, so to speak. I'd always woken up with T.J. at my back. At least I remembered how I got here this time. I whined, groaned, stretched, found my clothes, brushed myself off, and got dressed. The sky was gray; the sun would rise soon. I wanted to be out of here by then.

  I got to my car just as the first hikers of the morning pulled into the trailhead parking area. I must have looked a mess: hair tangled, shirt untucked, carrying sneakers in my hand. They stared. I glared at them as I climbed into my own car and drove back to the hotel for a shower.

  At noon, I was driving on I-40 heading west. It seemed like a good place to be, for a while. I'd end up in Los Angeles, and that sounded like an adventure.

  The middle of the desert between Flagstaff and L.A. certainly wasn't anything resembling an adventure. I played just about every CD I'd brought with me while I traveled through the land of no radio reception.

  Which made it all the more surreal when my cell phone rang.

  Phone reception? Out here?

  I put the hands-free earpiece in and pushed the talk button.

  "Hello?"

  "Kitty. It's Ben."

  I groaned. Ben O'Farrell was my lawyer. Sharp as a tack and vaguely disreputable. He'd agreed to represent me, after all.

  "Happy to hear you, too."

  "Ben, it's not that I don't like you, but every time you call it's bad news."

  "You've been subpoenaed by the Senate."

  Not one to mince words was Ben.

  "Excuse me?"

  "A special oversight committee of the United States Senate requests the honor of your presence at upcoming hearings regarding the Center for the Study of Paranatural Biology. I guess they think you're some kind of expert on the subject."

  "What?"

  "You heard me."

  Yeah, I'd heard him, and as a result my brain froze.

  Senate? Subpoena? Hearings? As in Joe McCarthy and the Hollywood blacklist? As in Iran-Contra?

  "Kitty?"

  "Is this bad? I mean, how bad is it?"

  "Calm down. It isn't bad. Senate committees have hearings all the time. It's how they get information. Since they don't know anything about paranatural biology, they've called hearings."

  It made sense. He even made it sound routine. I still couldn't keep the panic out of my voice. "What am I going to do?"

  "You're going to go to Washington, D.C., and answer the nice senators' questions."

  That was on the other side of the country. How much time did I have? Could I drive it? Fly? Did I have anything I could wear to Congress? Would they tell me the questions they wanted to ask ahead of time, as if I could study for it like it was some kind of test?

  They didn't expect me to do this by myself, did they?

  "Ben? You have to come with me."

  Now he sounded panicked. "Oh, no. They're just going to ask you questions. You don't need a lawyer there."

  "Come on. Please? Think of it as a vacation. It'll all go on the expense account."

  "I don't have time—"

  "Honestly, what do you think the odds are that I can keep out of trouble once I open my mouth? Isn't there this whole 'contempt of Congress' thing that happens when I say something that pisses them off? Would you rather be there from the start or have to fly in in the middle of things to get me out of jail for mouthing off at somebody important?"

  His sigh was that of a martyr. "When you're right, you're right."

  Victory! "Thanks, Ben. I really appreciate it. When do we need to be there?"

  "We've got a couple weeks yet."

  And here I was, going the wrong way.

  "So I can drive there from Barstow in time."

  "What the hell are you doing in Barstow?"

  "Driving?"

  Ben made an annoyed huff and hung up on me.

  So. I was going to Washington, D.C.

  I seemed to be living my life on the phone lately. I could go for days without having a real face-to-face conversation with anyone beyond "No, I don't want fries with that." I was turning into one of those jokers who walks around with a hands-free earpiece permanently attached to one ear. Sometimes, I just forgot it was there.

  I went to L.A., did two shows, interviewed the band—no demon possessions happened in my presence, but they played a screechy death metal-sounding thing that made me wish I'd been out of my body for it. That left me a week or so to drive to the East Coast.

  I was on the road when I called Dr. Paul Flemming. Flemming headed up the Center for the Study of Paranatural Biology, the focus of the Senate hearing in question. Until a month ago it had been a confidential research organization, a secret laboratory investigating a field that no one who wasn't involved believed even existed. Then Flemming held a press conference and blew the doors wide open. He thought the time was right to make the Center's work public, to officially recognize the existence of vampires, werewolves, and a dozen other things that go bump in the night. I was sure that part of why he did it was my show. People had already started to believe, and accept.

  I'd been trying to talk to him. I had his phone number, but I only ever got through to voice mail. As long as I kept trying, he'd get so sick of my messages that he'd call me back eventually.

  Or get a restraining order.

  The phone rang. And rang. I mentally prepared another version of my message—please call back, we have to talk, I promise not to bite.

  Then someone answered. "Hello?" The car swerved; I was so surprised I almost let go of the steering wheel. "Hello? Dr. Flemming?"

  There was a pause before he answered, "Kitty Norville. How nice to hear from you."

  He sounded polite, like this was a friendly little chat, as if there wasn't any history between us. He wasn't going to get away with that.

  "I really need to talk to you. You spent six months calling me anonymously, dropping mysterious hints about your work and suggesting that you want me to help you without ever giving any details, then without any warning you go public, and I have to recognize your voice off a radio broadcast of a press conference. Then silence. You don't want to talk to me. And now I've been subpoenaed to testify before a Senate committee about this can of worms you've opened. Don't get me wrong, I think it's a great can of worms. But what exactly are you trying to accomplish?"

  He said, "I want the Center to keep its funding."

  At last, a straight answer. I could imagine what had happened: as a secret research organization, the Center's funding was off the books, or disguised under some other innocuous category. An enterprising young congressman must have seen that there was a stream of money heading into some nebulous and possibly useless avenue and started an investigation.

  Or maybe Flemming had wanted the Center to be discovered in this manner all along. Now the Senate was holding official hearings, and he'd get to show his work to the world. I just wished he'd warned me.

  "So all you have to do is make sure the Center comes off looking good."

  "Useful," he said. "It has to look useful. Good and useful aren't always the same thing. I'd heard that you'd been called to testify. For what it's worth, I'm sorry."

  "Oh, don't be," I said lightly. "It'll be fun. I'm looking forward to it. But I'd really like to meet you beforehand and get your side of the story."

  "There's nothing much to tell."

  "Then humor me.
I'm insanely curious." Wait for it, wait for it—"How about I interview you on the show? You could get the public behind you."

  "I'm not sure that's a good idea."

  Good thing I was driving across Texas—no turns and nothing to run into. Flemming had all my attention.

  "This may be your only chance to tell your side of the story, why you're doing this research and why you need funding, outside of the hearings. Never underestimate the power of public opinion."

  "You're persuasive."

  "I try." Carry them along with sheer enthusiasm. That was the trick. I felt like a commercial.

  He hesitated; I let him think about it. Then he said, "Call me again when you get to D.C."

  At this point, anything that wasn't "no" was a victory. "You promise you'll actually answer the phone and not screen me with voice mail?"

  "I'll answer."

  "Thank you."

  Mental calculation—the next show was Friday, in four days. I could reach D.C. by then. I could get Flemming on the show before the hearings started.

  Time for another call, to Matt this time. "Matt? Can you see about setting up this week's show in Washington, D.C.?"

  For years I hadn't left the town I lived in, much less driven across country. I didn't want to leave the place where I was comfortable and safe. It was easy to stay in one place and let my packmates, my alpha, take care of me. Easy to stagnate. Then the show started, and the boundaries became too narrow. What was supposed to happen—what happened among wild wolves, behavior that carried over to the lycanthropic variety—was that a young wolf moved up through the pecking order, testing boundaries until she challenged the leaders themselves, and if she won, she became the alpha.

  I couldn't do it. I challenged and couldn't lead. I left town. I'd been essentially homeless since then. Wandering, a rogue wolf.

  It wasn't so bad.

  I drank coffee, which put me on edge but kept me awake and driving. Before I left Denver I'd never done this, driven for hours by myself, until the asphalt on the highway buzzed and the land whipped by in a blur. It made me feel powerful, in a way. I didn't have to listen to anyone, I could stop when I wanted, eat where I wanted, and no one second-guessed my directions.

  I took the time to play tourist on the way. I stopped at random bronze historical markers, followed brown landmark highway signs down obscure two-lane highways, saw Civil War battlefields and giant plaster chickens. Maybe after the hearings I could set some kind of crazy goal and make it a publicity stunt: do the show from every state capital, a different city each week for a year. I could get the producers to pay for a trip to Hawaii. Oh, yeah.

  Matt set me up at an Arlington, Virginia, radio station. I got there Friday around noon. I was cutting it close; the show aired live Friday night.

  Lucky for me, Flemming had agreed to be a guest on the show.

  The station's offices and broadcast center, a low brick fifties-era building with the call letters hung outside in modernist steel, were in a suburban office park overgrown with thick, leafy trees. Inside the swinging glass doors, the place was like a dozen other public and talk radio stations I'd been to: cluttered but respectable, run by sincere people who couldn't seem to find time to water the yellowing ficus plant in the corner.

  A receptionist sat at a desk crowded with unsorted mail. She was on the phone. I approached, smiling in what I hoped was a friendly and unthreatening manner—at least I hoped that the dazed, vacuous smile I felt would pass for friendly. I could still feel the roar of the car tires in my tendons. She held her hand out in a "wait a minute" gesture.

  "—I don't care what he told you, Grace. He's cheating on you. Yes… yes. See, you already know it. Who works past eleven every night? Insurance salesmen don't have night shifts, Grace… Fine, don't listen to me, but when you find someone else's black lace panties in his glove box don't come cryin' to me."

  My life could be worse. I could be hosting a talk show on normal relationship problems.

  After hanging up the phone she turned a sugary smile on me as if nothing had happened. "What can I do for you?"

  Wadded up in my hand I had a piece of paper with the name of the station manager. "I'm here to see Liz Morgan."

  "I think she may be out to lunch, let me check a minute." She played tag with the intercom phone system, buzzing room after room with no luck. I was about to tell her not to worry about it, that I'd go take a nap in my car until she got back.

  "I don't know. I'll ask." She looked up from a rather involved conversation on one of the lines. "Can I pass along your name?"

  "Kitty Norville. I should be scheduled to do a show tonight."

  Raised brows told me she'd heard the name before.

  She didn't take her gaze off me when she passed along the answer.

  "Says she's Kitty Norville… that's right… I think so. All right, I'll send her back." She put away the handset. "Wes is the assistant manager. He said to go on back and he'll talk to you. Last door on the right." She gestured down a hallway.

  I felt her watching me the whole way. Some time ago I'd stated on the air, on live national radio, that I was a werewolf. Listeners generally took that to mean a couple different things: that I was a werewolf, or that I was crazy. Or possibly that I was involved in an outrageous publicity stunt pandering to the gullible and superstitious.

  Any one of them was stare-worthy.

  I arrived at the last door, which stood open. Two desks and two different work spaces occupied the room, which was large enough to establish an uneasy truce between them. The man at the messier of the two stood as soon as I appeared and made his way around the furniture. He left a half-played game of solitaire on his computer.

  He came at me so quickly with his hand outstretched, ready to shake, that I almost backed out of the way. He was in his twenties, with floppy hair and a grin that probably never went away. Former college cheerleader, I'd bet.

  "Kitty Norville? You're Kitty Norville? I'm a big fan! Hi, I'm Wes Brady, it's great to have you here!"

  "Hi," I said, letting him pump my hand. "So, um. Thanks for letting me set up shop here on such short notice."

  "No problem. Looking forward to it. Come in, have a seat."

  What I really wanted was to have a look at their studio, meet the engineer who'd be running the board for me, then find a hotel, shower, and supper. Wes wanted to chat. He pointed me to a chair in the corner and pulled the one from his desk over.

  He said, "So. I've always wanted to ask, and now that you're here, well—"

  I prepared for the interrogation.

  "Where do you come up with this stuff?"

  "Excuse me?"

  "On your show. I mean, do you coach callers? Are they actors? Do you have plants? How scripted is it? How many writers do you have? At first I thought it was a gag, we all did. But you've kept it up for a year now, and it's great! I gotta know how you do it."

  I might as well hit my head against a brick wall.

  Conspiratorially, I leaned forward over the plastic arm of the retro office chair. He bent toward me, his eyes wide. Because of course I'd give away trade secrets to anyone who asked.

  "Why don't you stick around tonight and find out?"

  "Come on, not even a little hint?"

  "Now where's the fun in that?" I stood. "Hey, it's been great meeting you, but I really should get going."

  "Oh—but you just got here. I could show you around. I could—"

  "Is he bothering you?"

  A woman in a rumpled navy-blue suit a few years out-of-date, her black hair short and moussed, stood in the doorway, her arms crossed.

  "You must be Liz Morgan," I said, hoping I sounded enthusiastic rather than relieved. "I'm Kitty Norville. My colleague should have been in touch with you."

  "Yes. Nice to meet you." Thankfully, her handshake was perfectly sedate and functional. "Wes, you have that marketing report for me yet?"

  "Um, no. Not yet. Just getting to it now. Be ready in an hour. Yes, ma'am." Wes
bounded to his desk and closed the solitaire game.

  Liz gave me exactly the tour I wanted and answered all my questions. Even, "That Wes is a bit excitable, isn't he?"

  "You should see him without his medication."

  She saw me to the door and recommended a good motel nearby.

  "Thanks again," I said. "It's always kind of a crap shoot finding a station that'll even touch my show."

  She shook her head, and her smile seemed long-suffering. "Kitty, we're five miles from Washington, D.C. There's nothing you can throw at us that'll compare with what I've seen come out of there."

  I couldn't say I believed her. Because if she was right, I was about to get into things way over my head.

  I returned to the station a couple of hours early and waited to meet Dr. Paul Flemming. I fidgeted. Ivy, the receptionist, told me all kinds of horror stories about traffic in the D.C. area, the Beltway, the unreliability of the Metro, all of it giving me hundreds of reasons to think that Flemming couldn't possibly arrive in time for the show. It was okay, I tried to convince myself. This sort of thing had happened before. I'd had guests miss their slot entirely. It was one of the joys of live radio. I just had to ad-lib. That was why the phone lines were so great.

  Somebody was always willing to make an ass out of themselves on the air.

  Ivy went home for the evening, so at least the horror stories stopped. Liz and Wes stuck around to watch the show. I paced in the lobby, back and forth. A bad habit. The Wolf's bad habit. I let her have it—it gave her something to do and kept her quiet. Anxiety tended to make her antsy.

  Me. Made me antsy.

  Fifteen minutes before start time, a man opened the glass door a foot and peered inside. I stopped. "Dr. Flemming?"

  Straightening, he entered the lobby and nodded.

  A weight lifted. "I'm Kitty, thanks for coming."

  Flemming wasn't what I expected. From his voice and the way he carried on, I expected someone cool and polished, slickly governmental, with a respectable suit and regulation haircut. A player. Instead, he looked like a squirrelly academic. He wore a corduroy jacket, brown slacks, and his light brown hair looked about a month overdue for a cut. His long face was pale, except for the shadows under his eyes. He was probably in his mid-forties.