Thunderbird Falls twp-2

by C. E. Murphy

  The detective in charge, a knockout Southerner named Renfroe, kept saying, “Uh-huh,” and, “Huh,” and scribbling things down, including my phone number. I thought I saw her checking me out as I walked away when we were finally dismissed. I resisted the urge to call back, “It’s a snake in my pocket,” but since not even Morrison had brought up the snake, I wasn’t about to.

  Morning sunshine and heat were already swimming up off the pavement as I walked outside, escorted by Morrison. My eyes started watering and I lifted a hand to shade them, squinting down the parking lot for my car, now hidden among dozens of others in the lot. Morrison held the yellow crime scene tape up for me. I ducked under it, half-expecting him to let it fall and entangle me, like we were in grade school. I snorted at myself. As if he read my mind, Morrison snorted louder. “You’re welcome.”

  “Thanks. I wasn’t trying to be rude.” There. Politeness to a superior officer. Go me.

  “No, it just comes naturally to you.”

  A higher-ranking officer, anyway.

  No, that just wasn’t true. Morrison was a better cop than I was. It went beyond petty and right into sheer stupidity to suggest otherwise. “Is there anything I can say that would convince you I wasn’t trying to be an asshole?” There was another word that should be used somewhere in that sentence. Oh yes: “Captain?”

  “‘I quit’ would be right up there at the top of the list,” Morrison said. “You need a ride to the station?”

  For a moment I stared at him. Not up at him: we were exactly the same height, and in police-issued street stompers, neither of us had the shoe advantage.

  I’d passed the Academy with not-entirely-shameful marks and got a job for the department doing what I was good at: fixing cars. Almost a year ago I’d taken some personal leave that went on too long. I couldn’t blame Morrison for hiring somebody to replace me—well, I could and did, but that wasn’t the point—but as a woman of Native American descent, I looked too good on the roster to fire. So he’d made me a real cop, put me on the street and hoped I’d bolt.

  I’d rather have poked my eyes out with a shrimp fork than give him the satisfaction.

  My feet toughened up after a few weeks, and I admit a certain vicious pleasure in ticketing SUVs in compact car parking spaces, but I still missed being elbow deep in grease and oil. This was not how my life was supposed to go.

  The coroners wheeled the body—Cassandra Tucker, age twenty, a college junior, recently broken up with her boyfriend, mother of a little girl whose name wasn’t written on the back of her photo, and possessor of an illegal photo ID, all of which would have been helpful in the Dead Zone—past us.

  Maybe my life wasn’t so bad after all. With that in mind, I pasted on a bright smile for my captain. “No, I’ve got Petite. Want a ride?”

  The corners of Morrison’s mouth tightened. My smile got brighter. “I didn’t think so.”

  “I want to talk to you in my office when you get to work.”

  That put a hitch in my jaunty swagger away. I looked over my shoulder. Morrison’s mouth was still tight. “Yeah, all right, boss,” I said, more subdued, and went to find Petite.

  She was the root cause of the trouble between Morrison and me. There are few cars as sweet as a 1969 Mustang, but how any red-blooded American male could mistake one for a 1963 Corvette was beyond my ken. I’d been merciless in teasing him about it.

  It turned out mocking a newly promoted captain wasn’t a great idea, especially since it turned out that he was also newly assigned to the precinct I worked in, and therefore my new boss. It wasn’t the best way to start a working relationship, and it had only degenerated from there.

  The worst of it was I’d eventually learned that Morrison’s real problem with me was that he thought I was wasting my potential as a mechanic. He might’ve put me on street duty to get me to quit, but it’d backfired. I was bound and determined to prove myself to him now, a stance as contrary as any Irishman could take.

  The idea that he’d suspected I’d react that way and had reverse-psychologied me into doing what he wanted didn’t bear thinking about. I pulled out of the parking lot behind him and drove to the station at a sedate pace.

  “Where did the snake come from?” The question sounded over the click of the door; I’d already noted with trepidation that the Venetian blinds were lowered over the glass wall that faced the rest of the office. I put my palm against the door frame as if to make sure it was closed, but mostly it was to steady myself before I turned to face Morrison.

  “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.” I left the door and sat down, rubbing my fingers over the scar on my cheek. Morrison’s eyebrows quirked.

  “Try me.” Arizona deserts had nothing on the dry spell in his voice.

  “My new boyfriend’s got kind of a kink about snakes,” I said, as straight-faced as I could. I liked that idea better than the truth anyway.

  A Colorado thunderstorm swept Arizona dryness from Morrison’s face. “Walker.”

  I flinched. Dammit.

  “Even,” Morrison said through his teeth, “if I thought the odds of you sharing intimate sexual details with me for any reason was within the realm of possibility, I’ve been here long enough to know that the odds of you having a boyfriend are evenless likely—”

  I felt heat burning up my jaw and into my cheekbones. “Okay,” I said tightly. “My new girlfr—”

  “Walker!”

  Apparently I was incapable of getting any from either side of the street. How incredibly depressing. I closed my eyes and slumped in my chair. “I took a quick trip into the astral realm to see if I could find out anything from Cassandra Tucker about who’d killed her. I ran into a bunch of snakes instead. That one came back with me.”

  Deadly silence filled the room. I counted to ten, then forced my eyes open. Morrison looked at me, expressionless. I counted to ten a second time, then a third, and he said, “I liked the boyfriend story better. Get back to work.”

  I stood up by degrees and nodded, my jaw clenched. “Yes, sir.” I felt like I had an iron pipe rammed up my spine as I turned away. I got the door open half an inch before he said, “Walker.”

  I waited.

  It was harder for Morrison than me. Silence stretched like hot glass, then shattered: “Did you learn anything?”

  That he even asked—well, I said he was a better cop than I was. “No, sir. Sorry.”

  A deaf man could’ve heard the relief and vindication in his voice: “Then leave the detecting to the detectives, dammit, and get back to work.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  It wasn’t a direct disobeyal of orders to drop by Detective Billy Holliday’s desk and hitch myself up onto a corner of it. I was in uniform. The door was mere yards away. Not my fault I got caught up in a bit of conversation.

  Morrison wouldn’t have bought it, either, but he was still in his office. Billy frowned up at me, displaying a big hand with his fingers wide-spread. “The truth, now. Do you think the pearlescent polish is a bit much?”

  Billy Holliday had been saddled by loving if cruel parents with one of the more unfortunate names a boy could be given. To the best of my ability to tell, part of his retaliation was growing up to be a cross-dresser. He had better dress sense than I did, and over the years the department had gotten used to him showing up at the Policeman’s Ball in drag. Even normally conservative cops could learn to take a lot in stride, although it probably didn’t hurt that his wife made Salma Hayek look like the redheaded stepchild.

  He was also, metaphysically speaking, on the far end of the spectrum from Morrison. Where I was a reluctant believer, Billy was a True Believer, and once upon a time I’d ragged him endlessly about that. It wasn’t until my own world turned upside-down that I thought to ask why he was a believer, and I’d seen enough by then to not wholly discount his claim of being able to see ghosts. Especially when he’d reported that the ghost of a dead little girl had claimed I had no past lives to haunt me, and my own spirit gu
ide had independently confirmed it. The entire idea still made me squirm with discomfort, but Billy’d been very generous in not giving me a ration of well-deserved shit over the past few months. There wasn’t much doubt that he was a far better person than I was.

  “It’s nice.” I peered at his nails. “Subtle.”

  Billy looked smug. “Thought so. Just enough to throw ‘em off.”

  Curiosity reigned. “Is that why you do it? To throw suspects off?” I’d never nerved myself up to ask before.

  “Nah,” Billy said. “But it doesn’t hurt. You’re trying to look winsome, Joanie. What do you need?”

  “To work on my winsome look, apparently.” I wrinkled my nose and Billy laughed. “Know anything about the significance of snakes on the astral plane?”

  “I love how you do that,” he said, fighting down a grin that threatened to turn into veritable beaming. “All casual-like. Nonchalant. How much does that cost you?”

  “I grind my teeth flat and featureless every night while I sleep,” I assured him. Unfortunately, it wasn’t far from true. I’d had to get a mouth guard two months ago. No wonder I couldn’t get a boyfriend. The image of me with a translucent green plastic guard was enough to setme off my feed.

  “I weep to hear it,” Billy said, much too cheerfully. “Snakes, huh? Not a whole lot. The old gut,” which, I observed, was distinctly larger than it had been a month ago, “says betrayal, uncertainty, choices lying ahead.”

  “Billy,” I said, staring at his belly, “is Melinda pregnant again?”

  I never saw anybody blush as hard as Billy did right then, not even myself under Morrison’s gimlet eye. Not that I’d actually seen that.

  “Shit,” Billy said with embarrassed enthusiasm, “I’m not supposed to tell anybody for another month. How’d you know?”

  I cackled, then straightened up and cleared my throat, trying not to sound self-satisfied. “Sekrit Shamanic Knowledge,” I said, imbuing the words with as many capital letters as I could. Billy squinted at me. I cackled again, clapping a hand over my mouth. “You’ve put on weight,” I said behind my fingers. “Last time she was pregnant you gained forty pounds.”

  “I lost it again!”

  “How much weight didshe gain?”

  Billy’s lower lip protruded in a sulk. “About seventeen pounds. I think it’s a Jedi mind trick.”

  I grinned and clapped him on the shoulder. “I won’t tell. And congratulations. I won’t tell. But you might want to stop hitting The Missing O.”

  “Snakes,” Billy said grouchily. “Why do you want to know about snakes?”

  “I had a weird encounter this morning.”

  Billy lit up. “Yeah? We could go over to the O and you could tell me abou—”

  Morrison strode out of his office and down the hall. I scrambled to my feet. “No O for you,” I told Billy, “and streetwalking for me.” He made the obligatory snicker and I rolled my eyes. “I’ll tell you about it later, okay?”

  “I’ll try to find out about snakes,” Billy called after me, and I ducked out of the station with Morrison hot on my tail.

  CHAPTER 5

  Morrison didn’t catch up with me. He didn’t have to. I spent the rest of the morning reciting what he would’ve said in my head, anyway. It was a bad sign when I’d bawl myself out and save my boss the trouble. I found myself writing more parking tickets than were strictly necessary. There was a kind of quota about them. Too many meant I was being overzealous, but not enough meant I was slacking. Being the sympathetic sort—at least when it came to cars—I usually erred on the side of slacking, but I was taking a mean vengeance against the universe by overdoing it today. I slapped a ticket on a double-parked cab and stalked by, muttering at the Morrison in my head.

  “Lady, I cannot believe you just did that.”

  My shoulders rose toward my ears of their own accord and my face wrinkled up until it felt like a raisin around my nose.

  “I mean, after all I done for you, you go and write me a ticket? A…Christ, lady! A sixty dollar ticket?”

  The raisin of my face started to split with a grin. I peeked over my shoulder. Leaning on the cab I’d just ticketed was the most solid old man I’d ever seen. His massive gray eyebrows were lifted toward an all-white hairline, and even squinting into the sun, his gray eyes were bright as he grinned.

  “Gary,” I said, trying not to let my own smile slide into “idiotic.” “I thought you were calling me ‘copper’ these days.”

  “I just can’t get the hang of it,” the cabbie admitted. He shoved away from the cab, holding the ticket as if it were something two weeks dead, and arched his bushy eyebrows more sharply. “You ticketed me, Jo. Doncha love me anymore?”

  I snatched the ticket and stuffed it in my mouth, chewing. Two gnaws in, the flat gray taste of the paper and the sharp blue of the ink stung my tongue, and my mouth went all Mr. Magoo while I tried to figure out what to do with it now. “I didn’t know you were back,” I croaked, and spat the gooey ticket into my palm. “Don’t try that,” I advised, then grinned stupidly again. “You look good.”

  “‘Course I do,” Gary said with pleasant arrogance. He still had the build of the linebacker he’d once been, and deep-set Hemingway wrinkles assured the world he knew the score. “How’s my crazy dame?”

  “Fine,” I said automatically, considered, then nodded. “Yeah, I’m okay. You look like California was good for you. You’re tanned.”

  Gary’s expression closed down, some of the brightness dying from gray eyes. “First time I’d been since Annie died.”

  A cord of loss knotted around my heart, for all that I’d never met his wife. Gary’d walked into my life—or I’d climbed into his cab, more accurately—six months ago, the day everything went to hell. Somehow he’d become the most real thing in my life since then. “Was it tough?”

  “Yeah. Sometimes. But she woulda hated the thought of me sittin’ around until I was rotted enough to die, so I figured I better get off my duff and go see some of the world again.”

  I exhaled a snort. “Gary,I’m going to rot before you do.”

  He squinted up at the sky. “In this heat, you’re prob’ly right. If I’d known it was gonna be ninety by noon, I mighta stayed in San Diego. At least the girls there wear bikinis.”

  I put on my best indignant look. “Are you cheating on me, Gary? Running around with bikini-clad bimbos?”

  “Yeah,” he said, good humor restored. “Blond ones.”

  “You’re breaking my heart.” I smiled so I’d fool myself into thinking I wasn’t just a little bit jealous of a seventy-three-year-old’s romantic notions.

  “Guess I better invite you over for dinner, then,” Gary said with aplomb.

  “It’s a date,” I said instantly. “Wait. You’re not cooking, are you?”

  He let out a shout of laughter. “Like you can complain about my cooking. I know what you live on.”

  “Hey, you’ve got me eating frozen Italian dinners instead of mac and cheese. All your nagging did some good.”

  “I don’t nag.”

  “You do too. Italian dinners have vegetables in them. I haven’t eaten vegetables without nagging in my whole twenty-seven years.”

  “Arright, if you say so, Jo.” He gave me a good-natured grin, like he knew he was humoring me.

  Actually, it was true. I’d started eating better—frozen entreesdid qualify as better than an endless diet of macaroni and cheese—in part becauseI wanted to look as good as he did at seventy-three. Hell, I’d be glad to look as good as he did at twenty-eight. “I get off work at seven, barring disaster.”

  Gary’s bushy eyebrows drew together. “Been any lately?”

  I hesitated, then brushed the answer away with a wave of my hand. “I’ll tell you at dinner.”

  “Arright.” Gary beamed at me. “Look, I gotta take off, there’s this crazy lady cop who wants to ticket my cab. Call when you’re on the way over. Dinner at seven-thirty.”

  “It�
�s a date,” I repeated. “See you tonight.”

  Gary gave me a broad wink and climbed into his cab. I stood on the sidewalk, smiling stupidly as I watched him drive away.

  Gary being back in town lifted my spirits despite the oppressive heat. With a dinner date to look forward to, I stopped writing so many tickets and grabbed a doughnut for lunch. I wanted to drop into the astral realm to apologize to Coyote, and a real meal would take too long. Besides, I was on street beat, which I told myself gave me license to eat anything I wanted because I’d walk it off. So far I believed me.

  Doughnut in hand, I scurried down to the garage, my favorite place in the station. The smell of gasoline and motor oil soothed the savage beast, or at least the savage Joanne.

  Not everyone down there would meet my eye. I still hadn’t gotten used to that, especially from Nick, who’d been my supervisor and a pretty good friend not all that long ago. His greeting was made up of shoving his hands in his pockets and lifting his shoulders as he dropped his chin, turning him into a no-neck wonder. He kept his gaze fixed firmly on the wall as I gave him a tentative smile. Tentative didn’t used to be in my vocabulary around the boys in the garage. We’d worked together for three years, and I’d thought I was just one of the guys. But in January I’d invited the Wild Hunt into the garage’s office, and two months later I’d collapsed on the stairs, bleeding from the ears. Since then things had been a little touchy when I came down to visit. I hoped if I just kept it cool everybody would relax again, but so far it hadn’t worked.

  Still, hope sprang eternal. I strengthened my smile for Nick and said, “Hi,” as normally as I could. My voice squeaked and broke, which at least made him look at me. I cleared my throat and smiled again, wishing it didn’t feel plastic. “I was wondering if I could hang out in the office for a little bit.”

  Nick’s gaze snapped back to the wall and he shrugged his shoulders higher. “Sure. Whatever.”