by K. J. Emrick
“Okay, no more funny stuff,” I promise him. “You’ve got more work than you can handle right now. That’s perfect timing, because that’s actually why I’m calling. How about you hire me on one of your cases as a police consultant? I can do the grunt work, and you guys can get all the credit.”
“As long as you get a paycheck?”
“Aw, you know me so well.”
Over on the couch, Harry kicks his feet up on the coffee table, and flips through several of the channels. Guess he lost interest in his soap opera.
Chris is silent on the phone, taking a moment to think about my offer. That’s more than I usually get out of him. Then he clears his throat and I can almost hear him thinking. “You know what? I can probably use your help on one of these cases. Nothing too intense. Just some basic stakeout and surveillance but having somebody do that for us would be a big help. Yeah, I can convince the lieutenant to swing that. Standard rate?”
“Yes. You still have my consultant paperwork on file?”
“Of course. I always keep it close.”
“How romantic.”
In the living room, Harry turns up the TV volume on a bird documentary.
I down the rest of my coffee to keep from saying too much and sounding too excited. Chris came through for me, and now I had a job lined up. It’s good to have friends in all the right places, I guess. Back when I was in the Marines my unit was a family. We might not have liked each other but we always had each other’s back. When one of us needed something, one of the others made it happen. That’s the way we were. That’s the way it should be.
There’s a reason a lot of military people have a hard time adjusting to things after they leave active service. Losing that feeling of camaraderie is just one of them. Out here in the real world, as they call it, I can count on one hand the number of people in my life who are like that. Chris is definitely one of them.
“Thanks, Chris. I appreciate this. I’ll owe you—”
“Don’t tell me you’ll owe me one, Sid. You already owe me like twenty. Besides. The city of Detroit is going to pay you for your services. You don’t owe me for doing an honest day’s work.”
I grin, even though he can’t see it. He really does understand me. How’d I luck out to have a guy like him for a friend?
“Come down to the precinct tomorrow,” he tells me. “In the morning. I should be free around ten. I can show you what I need you to do.”
“Sure. Just don’t lose my number.”
“No chance of that, the way you keep calling me.” He snickers at his own joke, and I guess I’ve made his day a little easier after all. “Besides, I know where you live.”
“I know where you work,” I tell him in return, finishing our usual refrain.
When I hang up, Harry is sitting in the chair across the table from me.
“Geez, dude! Don’t sneak up on me like that!” I swear, I didn’t jump. My phone slipped in my hand and I had to grab for it. That’s all. I did not jump. “You’re going to give me a heart attack if you keep doing things like that.”
He did it on purpose. He knows full well that he messes with my future-sense and he loves catching me off guard. Leaning his heavy elbows on the table he reaches over and takes my empty coffee cup.
“Hmm,” he murmurs, examining the flecks of coffee grind scattered across the bottom of the white ceramic.
Then he looks up at me with those puffy lips pinched into a frown.
My fortune’s the same, he’s telling me.
I’m going to die.
“Well, you’re just a ray of sunshine,” I tell him. “If I die, it’s going to be from you trying to scare me to death! You could at least cough or something to give me a heads-up that you’re there.”
“This is not a joke, my lady.”
“You just read my fortune in a coffee cup, Harry. That’s one of those things I get to make fun of. Like fanny packs. Or pleather.”
“The future does not lie, Sidney Stone. Your future… concerns me.”
“Don’t tell me about the future, Harry. Me and the future are best of friends, at least the next three seconds of it. Except when I’m around you. I can’t see anything you’re about to do. And why is that, exactly?”
He shrugs one heavy shoulder. “Magic has a tendency to cancel magic. It’s a universal law.”
“Oh good,” I sigh dramatically. “More rules. I’ll add that to the list along with how you can’t kill people and you can’t make people fall in love and you can’t create world peace.”
His thick eyebrows slant upward. “You made up that last one.”
“Sure, but the way you keep adding different no-no’s to your list of rules, I’m sure we would have gotten there eventually. Or are you telling me you actually could create peace on Earth if I wished for it?”
He doesn’t exactly answer. Just rolls his head to one side and gives me a wink.
“Hold on, you could create world peace?”
“Are you making a wish, my lady?”
For a moment I just stare at him, wondering if he’s serious… and then decide he must be joking. If it was that easy, somebody would have done it a long time ago.
Wouldn’t they?
“Harry, look. What I can do with my future-sense isn’t magic. It’s just something I was born with. Like my dazzling blue eyes.”
“As you say, my lady,” he shrugs. “But magic recognizes magic. Trust me. I have had a few years to learn such things, as you recall.”
And by a few, he means hundreds and hundreds of years. I pat his hand as I get up from the table. “Okay. Whatever you say, big guy. You keep your rules to yourself and keep looking at my empty coffee cups… hey, wait a minute. That’s not why you keep making me that amazing coffee, is it? Are you waiting to see if the grinds change their story?”
“Perhaps,” he says, with another rolling shrug.
“So, I could change my future, then. Is that what you’re saying?”
“Of course. Isn’t that exactly what you do, every single day?”
I open my mouth to argue with him but then I stop, because… he’s right. The thing about seeing ahead three seconds is that I know if the milk’s gone sour before I taste it, so I don’t drink it. I know if I’m about to step on a thumbtack, so I move my foot. I know the ending of every novel I’m reading two paragraphs before I get there, if I concentrate, and I can’t tell you how many times I’ve thrown a book across the room because the ending sucks. I hate books like that. I want the story to surprise me, you know?
And like today, when I saw me and that nice old woman getting murdered by a reckless driver. I changed that future. I saved our lives.
So, yeah. Harry’s not wrong. If you know the future, you can change it.
I guess that’s the silver lining to the dark cloud, right? I’m going to die, says the coffee grinds.
But maybe not, says me.
Well, either way I’ve got to go take a shower. The smell from that dumpster’s still in my nose. Then I have a goldfish in my room named Spot who needs to be fed. See, I don’t just need jobs to make money for myself. I’m supporting a goldfish, and a genie with a peanut butter milkshake habit.
My life is full.
Chapter Two
Of course, I could just make a wish and have Harry create a job for me, I suppose. I mean, that’s the whole point to having a genie living with you, isn’t it? If you need something, you just wish for it and poof there it is. Of course, people don’t need private investigators until something goes wrong. So basically, I’d be wishing for someone to have a very bad day. I don’t think I could do that.
Anyway, me and Harry have a deal. He helps me with five cases, and after that I set him free with my last wish. Apparently, masters have that power with their genies. Who knew?
For each case, I get three wishes. So fifteen wishes in total, basically, but I have to use them up three at a time. That doesn’t give me any room to be frivolous or stupid with what I ask Harry f
or. Even so, I don’t regret that deal with him in the least. Especially since it saved Chris’s life.
I don’t consider myself Harry’s master, either. Just his friend. It’s going to be my pleasure to free him from his life as a genie. I’d do it now except, truth be told, he kind of likes helping me with my investigations. Using his magic to do things I can’t. His previous masters really didn’t let him have a life of his own, from what I can tell but after seeing how good we work together I can’t imagine why not. We’ve only done the one case so far—and used up three of my wishes—but during the whole thing he was like a kid in an amusement park just enjoying the ride. I enjoyed having a sort of silent partner, too. So for now, this whole thing works for us. I actually think he’d be sad if I freed him early.
So like I said, I’m not wasting any of my wishes on things I can do for myself. Like finding work. Especially since my good friend Detective Christian Caine is going to give me a temporary job assisting the Detroit Police this morning.
The Seventh Precinct doesn’t look anything like a police department from the outside. It’s a metal and glass and brick building hulking close to the curb along M-85. It’s one of those places that all the locals know is there, but if you’re a tourist to our fair city you’re going to need Google Maps to find it. Even with “Southwest Public Safety Center” spelled out along the curb you’ll drive by it twice before you realize it.
I don’t need a map. After feeding Spot, I drove right here, no problem. I’ve been here lots of times. Once, I even got to see it from behind the bars of the holding cells in the back. That’s a long story. One that’s funnier when told over beer but alas, I didn’t bring any beer with me to the police station. The officers don’t find that sort of thing funny.
The desk sergeant stationed at the front on this sunny weekday morning knows me by sight, and I know him, but that doesn’t mean we like each other. I may have busted his brother on one of those worker’s comp claims that I was talking about earlier. The guy said he sprained a wrist due to a repetitive motion injury sustained at his job at one of GM’s assembly plants in Flint. Except, I found him shooting pool at a Midtown bar. The video of him winning three out of five games and then giving everyone an enthusiastic high-five kind of sank his comp claim. Sergeant Iwan here holds a grudge.
Whatever he thinks of me, he motions me through the lobby and over to the elevators. Chris must have left word that I was coming so that I wouldn’t have to go through the process of getting a visitor’s badge. I wave to Iwan on my way by. The glare he gives me is a definite improvement from what I got the last time I was here. That time, he told me to do something very inappropriate and physically impossible. At least, for me. A woman can do almost anything a man can do. Just not that.
Up on the second floor is a cramped area of desks and cubicle walls and filing cabinets. This is where the detectives and the supervisors assigned to the Seventh Precinct do their work. Chris has the corner desk, right by the window. I like to tease him that it means he’s important.
Over in his corner, sectioned off with two portable walls, I see him sitting behind his desk with a very patient look on his face. It’s not a natural expression for him and it kind of makes his dark skin look darker. Meaner. Sexier, if you want the truth. He’s a very attractive man to begin with, and any woman I know will tell you so. Athletically muscular. Pale hazel eyes. This way of filling out the ass of his trousers that draws a woman’s attention. It sure draws mine. If we weren’t friends, I would have asked him on a date a long time ago.
Right now, he’s loosening his striped tie, while he points at a piece of paper on his desk, and then points at the man sitting across from him, slunk so low in his chair that I hadn’t even noticed him at first. Scraggly blonde hair hangs down to the shoulders of his dirty blue hoodie. His jeans looked like my throw-away ones from the dumpster. His face was pinched and narrow and reminded me of a hatchet, and if his skin was any paler, I probably could have seen right through him.
In my business I’ve learned not to be judgmental, or at least not too judgmental, but this guy looks like a drug addict. He’s definitely living on the street. Now that I’m closer, I can hear him talking with the same kind of nervous rush that drug addicts generally use, too. Like they’ve got too much to say for their brain to hold it all.
“I’m telling you, Detective Caine, I’m telling you. I can’t take the pressure no more. I just can’t. I’m telling you what I did. You won’t get no trouble from me, I just want to be punished. I just want, you know, the truth to be out there so those poor families can find some peace. That’s what I’m telling you. I’ll sign whatever you want me to. I’m just telling you.”
Chris sees me out of the corner of his eye, and gives me the barest shake of his head, telling me to hang back. That makes me curious. If this guy was a real bad guy, Chris would be interviewing him in one of the special rooms with the two-way mirrors. And yet, he’s confessing to a crime, apparently a serious one if I heard him right. Those poor families need to find peace, he said. That’s how you talk about the family of someone who died.
Is this guy a murderer?
“Listen, Clancy,” Chris says to the guy, in a voice that’s just as patient as the expression on his face. It’s the voice of a man who honestly cares about the person he’s talking to. “We’ve got your statement, okay? We’ll look into it. If there’s any truth to what you’re saying, then we’ll make sure you get what’s coming to you. Are you still in the same place?”
“Yes, Detective. Yes, I am. The Genesis House. They know how to find me if I’m not there. I’d tell you if I moved somewhere. You know I would.”
“Okay.”
Chris shuffles the one-page statement into a manila folder that has his strong handwriting on the front. I thought that was going to be the end of it but then he folded his hands together and leaned in closer and my future-sense plays out the conversation before they say anything.
Tell me one more thing, Clancy.
“Tell me one more thing, Clancy.”
Sure, Detective…
“Sure, Detective. Sure. Anything.”
…you still taking the medication…
“Are you still taking the medication that the doctor prescribed?”
Clancy actually looks hurt at the question. “You know I am. I always do. The pills keep me regular. They keep me even, is what I’m saying. That’s why I know I’m not lying in that statement. It’s all true. I can promise you that.”
“I know, Clancy. You always do. Give us a day to look into it, okay? We’re really busy here but tomorrow we can meet for some coffee and talk about it some more.”
The guy—Clancy with the scraggly hair and grimy clothes—smiled like he’d just been promised a prime rib dinner. He reached across the desk and held out his hand to Chris. To tell you the truth I’m not sure I would have shaken it, considering the streaks of dirt on his skin. At least I hope that’s dirt. Chris took it without hesitation though and shook it like they were good friends.
That’s Chris. Everyone’s equal in his eyes. It wouldn’t have mattered to him if it was Detroit’s mayor sitting there, or the head of the Insane Clown Posse. He would have shown him the same sort of respect he just showed Clancy.
He doesn’t even notice me as he walks away, through the doors, down to the elevators. I made sure not to stare at him as he went. I’m still not sure what he was doing here, and I don’t want to get called as a witness later on.
Chris waves me over but before I sit down I take the pump bottle of hand lotion from the corner of his desk and a couple of Kleenex from the square box next to it, and I sanitize the seat and the arms and just for good measure, the legs too.
“Good call,” he tells me. “Clancy’s got a limited view on personal hygiene.”
“Why was he here?” I ask, dropping the wad of used Kleenex into the little round garbage can next to his desk.
The answer surprises me, three seconds before he says it.
“He was confessing to a murder.”
I stop halfway into the seat, my backside hanging in the air, because I’m not sure I heard that right. “Murder? He confessed to a murder, and you just let him walk out of here? Should we go and get him?”
Chris laughs, which is not the response anybody should have when watching a confessed murderer walking out of a police precinct house.
“Mind letting me in on the joke?” I ask him, plopping my rear end in the chair.
“Sure. Do you remember yesterday when I said I had two suspects for the same crime?”
“Yeah, you said one of them was already confessing.”
“Yup. That was Clancy.”
“So he confessed to this yesterday, too, and you just let him go? Chris, what’s wrong with your head?”
“Oh, no. He wasn’t confessing to this yesterday. It was something else yesterday.”
So I heard all that, both as a flash in the future and from Chris’s own lips, and let me tell you that hearing it twice didn’t help. “Uh… I don’t get it.” I really don’t. Multiple crimes, and he’s walking out the door?
Lifting a finger to ask me to wait, Chris picks up the same folder where he put Clancy’s statement, and puts it on top of another stack of folders, and then pushes the whole stack over to me. “All of these folders are on statements made to us by Clancy Whitaker. Every single one of them a confession, and our department has run down each of those confessions and every lead. That’s a lot of manpower. A lot of hours spent on just one guy.”
The folders were all thin, but there sure was a lot of them. “The guy must be a career criminal. Do you think he’s dangerous?”
“Hardly.”