Page 18 of Hoofin’ It

“They still have you working as their maid?”

I laughed. “They have no idea I’m out of the hospital, and I hope to keep it that way. Come on in, just watch your step. Mom’ll skin you if you ruin her fur collection, and one of the bags tore.”

Dad’s fur completely covered one hallway, but with some effort, I’d be able to gather it back up.

“Bags? Fur collection?”

“Dad scared my alpaca, so I knocked him out and sheared him for his fur for Mom’s enjoyment. Someone had a temper tantrum last night for some reason and ripped open one of the bags.”

“I wonder why. Kitchen’s safe you said?”

I waved for my godfather to follow me. “I even detoxed the coffee maker. I might con someone to pick up some paint for me, as no one told my mother pancakes don’t belong on the ceiling. It turns out pancake batter will leave a stain if the pancake is stuck to the ceiling overnight.”

“You should probably take it easy on your shoulder, Shane.” Lewis pointed at my sling, which waited for me on the kitchen table. “That does you no good if you’re not wearing it.”

“It kept getting in the way.”

“That is the entire point of wearing the sling.”

“You’re over here in a godfather capacity, aren’t you?”

Chuckling, Lewis clapped his hands. “You haven’t lost your basic grasp of reality. Well done. I feel a bit sorry for that detective you routed to your parents’ partners. Once Marshal got done with him, Winston had a turn, and they grilled him for over an hour. By the time he was passed to me, he’d been rather tenderized. Nice enough fellow for a New Yorker. We got a hit on your shooter from him. Detective Steinburg recognized him from the sketch.”

“Seriously?”

“Seriously. The fellow’s name is Mark O’Conners, second-generation Irish-American who somehow found his way into an Italian mafia in New York City. The NYPD has been after him for years. The man who fell from the skyscraper had known ties with a branch of that mafia.”

Most large cities in the United States had a mafia of some form; even Lincoln had one, but it specialized in the pixie dust trade. Since the CDC turned a blind eye on them dealing the mood enhancer, the police did, too—as long as the drug didn’t become a public hazard.

Lincoln’s crime tended to involve petty theft, traffic violations, and domestic disturbances.

“How does this involve me?”

“The branch involved is the mafia’s sex trafficking operation.”

My eyebrows took a hike towards my hairline. “I’m not nearly pretty enough to be sold in a sex trafficking operation, Lewis.”

“I wouldn’t know about that. Sure, you won’t be modeling anytime soon, but that scar is actually pretty nice. Cheap bastards should have given you a better eye, though.”

“At least the color’s decent, right?”

“If you were the target of the sex trafficking operation, they would have grabbed you instead of your alpaca.”

I opened my mouth, thought about that for a few minutes, and clacked my teeth together. “That’s just wrong, Lewis. She’s an alpaca.”

“No, we have reason to believe she’s a human woman who has been transformed into an alpaca.”

I again opened my mouth but words failed me. Sally was human? “But aren’t full-scale transformative magics permanent?”

“Not if it’s done by a practitioner using a certain ritual. One of the men in the car was a practitioner known to be experimenting with transformation rituals.”

“Wait. One of the mafia’s men fell from a skyscraper onto a car containing other members of the same mafia transporting a possible sex trafficking victim?” The coincidence astounded me almost as much as the idea someone would turn a woman into an alpaca to kidnap her and sell her into the sex trade.

The sex trafficking didn’t surprise me; Chicago had a huge problem with sex trafficking, although I’d been fortunate enough to avoid being involved.

“You caught onto the gist of it pretty quick.”

I thought about Sally’s behavior since I’d adopted her, and several things made a sickening amount of sense. If she’d been kidnapped and transformed into an alpaca retaining a human’s intelligence, she wouldn’t trust anyone—especially not men.