Thunderbird Falls

CHAPTER FOUR

A meaty hand, warm and callused, clamped onto my shoulder. My eyes popped open and I looked blankly at the cream-colored tiles above the dead girl. This was not what I imagined the inside of a snake to look like.

“Walker?”

I twisted my head up. The warm hand on my shoulder was attached to the wrist, arm, shoulder, and ultimately, beefy body of my immediate supervisor, Captain Michael Morrison of the Seattle Police Department, North Precinct.

Morrison always made me think of a superhero starting to go to seed: late thirties, graying hair, sharp blue eyes, a bit too much weight on the bones. I’d never been so glad to see a seedy superhero in my life, and said the first grateful words that came to mind: “This isn’t your jurisdiction.”

“And that sure as hell isn’t your uniform.” Morrison smirked and took his hand off my shoulder.

Goose bumps shot up all over my body and I clutched my arms around my towel. This was not the outfit I’d have chosen to summon the police in. And if I’d been out long enough for the cops to get here, time had gone funny in a way I wasn’t used to. I took refuge in defensiveness, staring up at Morrison. “What the hell are you doing here?”

“I was on my way into work when the call came across the scanner. I just couldn’t resist the words ‘Officer Joanne Walker’ and ‘10-55’ in the same sentence.”

“Yeah. You might’ve gotten lucky and the dead body might’ve been mine.” If he’d put his hand on my shoulder half a second later, it would’ve been. I didn’t like to think about the implications of that. “What happened?”

“You were in a trance, or something,” Phoebe blurted from somewhere behind Morrison. “I thought you were following me, but you didn’t, so I came back to look and you wouldn’t wake up when I shook you, so I called the cops. You woke up as soon as he touched you.”

I didn’t like to think about the implications of that, either. I climbed to my feet instead. Cold water trailed down my shins in rivulets. Something even colder slid down the back of my towel and hit the water with a plop.

“Jesus Christ! What the hell is that?” Morrison all but levitated away, moving back across the other side of the curb with a smooth bound that did the aging superhero look proud. My neck stiffened, preventing me from looking at what had fallen.

“It’s a snake,” I said in a small voice, then checked to be sure I was right.

Sometimes I hate it when I’m right.

The first time I visited the astral plane, I came home with a leaf that shimmered blue and white in the darkness. I thought that was a much nicer souvenir than a dead albino garter snake.

I crouched and picked it up. “Put that down!” Morrison barked. “It’s part of the crime scene.”

“It is not. It’s contaminating the crime scene.” I scowled at him from my crouch. “Unless you think I did it.”

“Did you?” he snapped.

I groaned. “No.”

“Fine. Then tell me why the hell you’re carrying a snake in your tow—”

Look, in his shoes, I wouldn’t have been able to make it through that sentence, either. Morrison broke off, choked, then guffawed, while I put my elbow on my knee and my forehead against my hand and waited for him to laugh it out. Phoebe, the traitor, giggled, too, although she tried to hide it by clapping both hands over her mouth.

It took a long time for them to stop laughing.

“Get dressed,” Morrison said eventually, still grinning. “That’s no way for the department to be represented when members of other forces are on their way.”

There was nothing I could say that wouldn’t sound like fishing for a compliment, so I bit my tongue, took my snake, and got dressed.

Answering questions about the body I’d found turned out to be a lot less unpleasant when I was wearing a police officer’s uniform than it had been when I’d been wearing jeans and a sweater. For one thing, the university police didn’t seem to think I’d done it, which was a huge improvement. There was a bit of quel coincidance that a cop had found her, but hey, those things happened. Phoebe and I took turns answering questions, neither of us any more helpful than I’d been with Coyote in the Dead Zone.

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 even less 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 guide 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 set me 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 did she 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 FIVE

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.”