Urban Shaman

He didn’t take his eyes from the bill. “There’s two A-frames I can think of. One’s about five blocks from here. The other is a couple miles away.”

“Which direction? For both of them.” He told me, still watching the fifty like it was a talisman. I sighed, dropped it on the counter, and muttered, “Thanks,” as I pushed my way out of the gas station. He snatched it up, hardly believing I was really handing it over. Great. I’d just turned a kid onto the lifetime role of snitch.

Worse, I’d given away a quarter of the meager cash I had on hand, and cabs from SeaTac were damned expensive. I climbed back into the car. “East a few blocks, and if that’s not it, there’s another one to the southwest. Hurry, it’s getting light out.”

“What, you want to get your fingers in the blood while it’s still warm? You need help, lady.”

“Joanne.” Having a nosy cabby know my name had to be better than being called “lady” for another half hour. “And you’re the one hung up on corpses. I’m hoping she’s still alive.” I tugged on my seat belt, scowling again. It was starting to feel like a permanent fixture on my face.

“You always an optimist, or just dumb?”

A shock of real hurt, palpable and cold, tightened itself around my throat and heart. I fumbled the seat belt. It took effort to force the words out: “You have no right to call me dumb.” I stared out the window, seat belt in one numb hand, trying furiously to blink tears away. Gary looked at me in the rearview, then twisted around.

“Hey, hey, hey. Look, lady. Joanne. I didn’t mean nothin’ by it.”

“Sure.” My voice was harsh and tight, almost too quiet to be heard. “Just drive.” I got the seat belt on this time. Gary turned around and drove, quiet for the first time since I’d gotten in the cab.

I watched streetlights go by in the hazy gold of sunrise, trying to get myself under control. I didn’t generally cry easily and I didn’t generally get hurt by casual comments from strangers. But it had been a long day. More than a long day. A long week, a long month, a long year, nevermind that it was only the fourth of January. And the day was only going to get longer. I still had to stop by my job and get fired.

The streetlights abruptly winked out as we turned down another street, and with them, my chance to find the runner. A small voice said, “Fuck.” After a moment I realized it was me.

“That one’s still on,” Gary said, subdued. I looked up, keeping my jaw tight to deny tired, disappointed tears. A bastion of amber stood against the dawn, one single light shining on the entire street. I watched it go by without comprehension, then jerked around so fast I hurt my neck. “That’s it!”

Gary hit the brakes hard enough to make my neck crunch again. I winced, clutching at it as I pressed my nose against the window. “That’s it, that’s it!” I shrieked. “Look, there’s the church! Stop! Stop!” The car was gone from the parking lot, but there was no mistaking the vicious spire stabbing the morning air. “Holy shit, we found it!”

Gary accelerated again, grinning, and pulled into the church parking lot. “Maybe you’re not dumb. Maybe you’re lucky.”

“Yeah, well, God watches over fools and little children, right?” I tumbled out of the cab, getting my feet tangled in the floor mat and catching myself on the door just before I fell. “Well?” I demanded. “Aren’t you coming?”

His eyebrows elevated before he shrugged and swung his own door open. “Sure, what the hell. I never saw a fresh murdered body before.”

I closed my door. “Have you seen stale ones?” I decided I didn’t want to know the answer, and strode away. Gary kept up, which surprised me. He was so broad-shouldered I expected him to be short, but he stood a good two inches taller than me. In fact, he looked like a linebacker.

“You look like a linebacker.”

“College ball,” he said, disparaging enough that it was obvious he was pleased. “Before it turned into a media fest. It’s all about money and glory now.”

“It didn’t used to be?”

He flashed me his white-toothed grin. “It used to be about glory and girls.”

I laughed, stopping at the church door, fingertips dragging over the handle. They were big and brass and twice as wide as my own hands. You could pull them down together and throw the doors open in a very impressive fashion. I wasn’t sure I wanted to.

“You sure your broad is gonna be in here, lady?”

“Yeah,” I said, then wondered why that was. It made me hesitate and turn back to the parking lot. Except for Gary’s cab, it was empty. There was no reason the woman couldn’t have gotten into the car with the man with the butterfly knife, no real reason to think she’d even made it as far as the parking lot, much less the church.

“Yeah,” I said again, but trotted back down the steps. Gary stayed by the door, watching me. The car’d been on the south end of the parking lot, between the woman and the church. I jogged over there, eyes on the ground. I heard Gary come down the steps, rattling scattered gravel as he followed me.

“What’re you looking for? I thought you said the broad was in the church.”

I shrugged, slowing to a walk and frowning at the cement. “Yeah, but that’s probably just wishful thinking. I was wondering if there’d been a fight. If the guy with the knife was after her, she’d have had to have gotten thr—”

“What guy with a knife?” Gary’s voice rose as I crouched to squint at the ground. I looked over my shoulder at him.

“Didn’t I mention that?”

“No,” he said emphatically, “you didn’t.”

“Oh. There was a guy with a knife. He was good, too.”

“You saw this from a plane?”

I puffed out my cheeks. “You ever seen somebody who’s good with a knife? Street-good, I mean?”

“Yeah.”

“Okay. So have I. It looks a certain way. Graceful. This guy looked that way, yeah, even from a plane.”

“Lady, you better have like twenty-two-hundred vision.”

I stood up. The bubble of icky feeling in my stomach was still there, prodding at me like I hadn’t done enough to help the woman. “I wear contacts.”

Gary snorted derisively. I sighed. “I know what I saw.”

“Sure.” He didn’t say anything for another second, looking at the ground. “I know what you didn’t see.”

“What?”

He pointed, then walked forward a couple of spaces. “Somebody lost a tooth.” He bent over and poked at a shining white thing on the concrete, not quite touching it.

I walked over, bending to look at the enameled thing on the ground. It was a tooth, all right, smooth little curves and a bumpy top, complete with bloody roots. “Eww. Somebody got cut, too.” I nodded at thin splatters of blood, a few feet farther out than the tooth, that were already dry on the concrete. Gary cast his gaze to the heavens.

“The lady goes ‘eww’ at a tooth and she’s looking for a corpse.”

“I’m looking for a person,” I corrected.

“And you think she’s in the church.”

“Yeah.”

“So why the hell are we screwing around in the parking lot?”

I looked around. “The light’s better over here?” It was one of my favorite jokes, left over from my childhood. I never expected anyone else to get it, but Gary grinned, dug a hand into his pocket, and tossed me a quarter. I caught it, grinning back. “Now that we’ve got that taken care of.”

We walked back to the church together.

I was right. The doors swept open, impressively silent. I felt like I should be leading a congregation in search of the light, not a linebacker-turned-cabby in search of a corpse. I stepped through the doors, half-expecting a floorboard to creak and mar the enormous silence.

Within a few steps I was sure a floorboard wouldn’t have dared creak in this place. It wasn’t the solemn, weighty quiet of old churches or cathedrals. Those places could absorb the sound of heels clicking and children laughing with dignity and acceptance. This church simply forbade them. I wasn’t even wearing heels, and I found myself leaning forward on my toes a little so that my tennies couldn’t possibly make any excessive noise on the hardwood floors. This was a church where “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” would be performed and harkened to weekly. I noticed I was holding my breath.

It was stunning, in an austere, heartless way. The A-frame probably carried sound beautifully, but the only natural lighting was from a wall of windows behind the pulpit. I use the term natural loosely: there wasn’t much natural about the violent, grim images of Christ’s crucifixion, or Joseph and Mary being turned away from the inn, or Judas’s betrayal, or any of the other scenes I recognized, more of them jimmied into the stained glass than I would have thought possible. This was a church where you came to be terrified into obedience, not welcomed as a sinner who has found the true way.

The pews were hardwood, without cushions, and the choir books looked as though they’d never been cracked open. I guessed you’d better know your music before you came to church. It was not a friendly place.

It was also completely empty of human life other than my own and Gary’s. I looked back at him. He frowned faintly before meeting my eye. I couldn’t blame him.

“I don’t know where she is,” I said before he could ask, and lifted my voice. “Hello? Hello?” My voice bounced up to the rafters and echoed back at me. The acoustics were incredible, and I tilted my head back to look longingly at the ceiling. “Wow. I’d love to sing in here.”

“Yeah? You sing?”

I shrugged. “I don’t scare the neighbors.”

Gary bent over and looked under the pews. “Yeah, well, maybe you can sing yourself up a dame. There ain’t nobody here, Jo.”

A muscle in my shoulder blade twitched. “Y’know, nobody calls me that except my dad.”

“What, did he want a boy?”

“Not exactly.” That seemed like enough information to volunteer.

Gary unbent a little, hooking his arm over the top of a pew as he looked at me. Enough time passed to let me know that he was politely not asking about my dad before he asked, “Then what do they call you?”

“Joanie, or Joanne, usually. Sometimes Anne, Annie.”

Gary straightened up, hands in the small of his back. “My wife was named Anne. You don’t look like an Anne to me.”

I smiled. “What’d she look like?”

“’Bout four eleven, blond hair, brown eyes, petite. You gotta be at least a foot taller than she was.”

“Yeah.” It came out sounding like a laugh, and I smiled again. “So call me Jo, then.”

“You sure? I don’t think you get along with your old man.”

“I don’t not get along with him.” How had I ended up in a church looking for a body and discussing my home life? “It’s okay. I don’t mind Jo.” I waited for the muscle in my shoulder blade to spasm again. It always did when I was tense. This time it didn’t. Maybe I really didn’t mind being called Jo. Who knew?

“There’s nobody in here, Jo,” Gary repeated. I tried to stuff my hands in my pockets, only to discover I didn’t have any. The thing I’d learned about traveling was that it was slightly less miserable if I wore stretch pants with an elastic waistband. The ones I was wearing were black and comfy and had nice straight legs, but no pockets. I hooked my thumbs into the strap of my fanny pack, instead. I hated the things, but I never learned to carry a purse, and a fanny pack is at least attached to me. Makes it harder to forget.

“C’mon, let’s go. Nobody here.”

“No, wait.”

Gary sighed, exasperated, and leaned against a pew, arms folded across his chest. Seventy-three or not, he made a pretty impressive wall of a man. “Then do your thing and find the broad.”

I looked at him. “My thing?”

“You got some kinda thing going on here, lady. Normal people don’t stick their heads out a plane window and see dames that need rescuing. So do your thing and rescue her. My meter’s still running.”

Oh, God. It probably was, too. “Hope you take credit cards.” I walked to the front of the church and around the pulpit.

I really, honest-to-God, expected to see the woman cowering in the back side of the pulpit. That she wasn’t came as a shock. “Well, shit.”

“What? You find your body after all?” Gary shoved off his pew and came long-legging it up to the front.

“No, you ghoul. There’s nobody here. I really thought she would be.”

“I’ll cut you a break and won’t expect a tip, just for the satisfaction of being right.” He leaned on the pulpit, grinning whitely at me. I had the sudden urge to pop him in those nice straight clean teeth. It must have shown in my face, because his grin got even wider. “You wanna try it?”

“No,” I said sourly. “I think you’d break me in half.”

“Only a little bit.”

“Gee. Thanks.” I backed up a couple steps and leaned on the edge of the…hell if I know what it’s called. Looked like an altar to me. All gilded and dour. It had probably never been introduced to a woman’s behind in its whole existence. Or maybe it had been. You always heard stories about the priest who’s a pillar of the community but turns out to be having affairs with half the congregation. Seemed to me if you’re going to sin, you might as well do it right. On the altar would be a nice big sin. “I thought she’d be here.”

“Why?”

I shrugged. “I don’t know. Churches are supposed to be sanctuary, or something. I thought she’d be safe in here. Consecrated ground.”

“What century are you living in, lady?”

“The wrong one, I guess.” I thumped on the edge of the altar, annoyed.

The top slipped.

I leaped off it like it had bitten me. Gary’s bushy eyebrows went up. We both stared at the inch-wide crack at the edge of the box where the lid had pushed back. “You don’t believe in vampires, do you, Gary?”

“God damn it,” he said, “I was trying real hard not to think that way.”

“Kind of fits, though, doesn’t it? Scary-looking church, big old crypt in the middle, the living dead ris—”

“It’s past dawn,” Gary said hastily. “No vampires after dawn. Right?”

“There’s no such thing as vampires, Gary.”

He stared at me dubiously. I stared at the crypt dubiously. Funny how a second ago it had been an altar and now it was a crypt. “Well?” he demanded. “Are you gonna look in it?”

“Yeah.”

“When?”

“As soon as I get up the nerve.”

He prodded me in the small of my back, pushing me forward. I admired the resistance in my body. I felt like he was trying to move a me-shaped lead weight. I expected to hear my feet scraping along with the sound of metal ripping up hardwood. Instead, I stumbled half a step forward, then glared over my shoulder at Gary. “You’re a big strong man. Aren’t you supposed to be plunging into danger before me?”

“You’re forty-seven years younger than me, lady,” he pointed out. “And almost as tall as I am. And you’re in my weight class. And it’s your vampire in the coffin.”

“I am not in your weight class,” I said, offended. “You’ve got to outweigh me by at least forty pounds.” I edged a quarter of a step closer to the crypt. “And it’s not a vampire.”

“How much do you weigh?”

“Isn’t it rude to ask a woman how much she weighs?”

“Nah, it’s rude to ask how old she is, and I already know.”

Oh. Damn. I stepped forward, holding my breath. The crypt didn’t do anything. “I weigh one seventy-two.”

“No shit?”

“I’m almost six feet tall, Gary, what do you want me to weigh, a hundred and thirty? I’d be dead.” I peeked into the little hole the lid made where it had slid over. If there was a vampire in there, it was a very small, very hidden vampire. Or maybe it blended with shadows well. Vampires were supposed to do that, weren’t they?

I was scaring myself. “Give me a hand with this.”

Gary crept forward. “I outweigh you by sixty pounds.”

“That’s why you’re a linebacker, and I’m not. Push on three. One, two, three!”

I underestimated how much push we could provide. The lid shot off the box, crashing to the floor with a thud that rattled the rafters. I fell forward, shrieking, with visions of being sucked dry by vampires supplied by my too-vivid imagination.

Halfway into the crypt, I was met by another shrieking woman on her way out.

CHAPTER THREE

My head hit the floor with a crack only slightly less impressive than the crypt lid had made. My vision swam to black, and my tailbone decompressed like a series of firecrackers. I wouldn’t need to visit the chiropractor after all.

Vision returned in time to see something bright and glittery arching down at me. I flung my hand up, barely deflecting the fall of a knife. My wrist hit the woman’s with the solid thunk that meant a week from now, after I’d forgotten this had happened, a bone bruise would color half my arm. The woman’s grip loosened and the knife glanced off my cheekbone instead of driving into my throat. I hit her again, and the knife skittered away, bouncing across the hardwood floor.

The woman shrieked again—or maybe she hadn’t stopped—and scrambled after the knife. I tackled her, flinging my arms around her. Her white blouse suddenly stained red where my cheek pressed against it.

Gary pulled her out from under me and to her feet, pushing her elbows in against her waist and holding her still. His hands looked bizarrely large in proportion to her waist. She winced and hissed, her head down as I got up unsteadily and touched my face. Blood skimmed over my fingertips and into my palm, coloring in the lifeline. I watched vacantly as it trailed all the way around the side of my hand and down my wrist. My face didn’t hurt. It seemed like it should.

“You got lucky,” Gary said. “She was gonna cut your throat right out. What should I do with her?”

I looked up, startled and vacant. “Oh, fer Chrissakes,” he said, “You’re shocky, or somethin’. Get something to stop the bleeding.”

That seemed like a pretty good idea. I looked around, silver catching my eye again. The knife she’d cut me with lay against the foot of a pew, a nice heavy butterfly knife. I picked it up and cut a piece off the altar banner, holding it to my face while Gary asked again what to do with the woman.

“Um,” I said, and then my face started to hurt. For a minute I was too busy blinking back tears to give a damn what Gary did. I croaked, “Hold her for a minute,” and tried increasing the pressure on my cut to see if it helped the pain any. It didn’t. I looked up through teary eyes. It had to be the same woman. She had hip-length dark brown hair with just enough curl to make me covet it. “You’re the one I saw from the airplane.”

She lifted her head to look at me, eyes wide. I dropped my hand from my face and the makeshift bandage fell to the floor as I gawked at her.

She was beautiful. Not your garden-variety pretty girl, not your movie-star kind of beautiful. She was the sort of beautiful that Troy had gone to war over. High, fragile cheekbones, delicate pointed chin, absolutely unblemished pale skin. Long-lashed blue eyes, thin straight eyebrows. A rosebud mouth, for God’s sake. There were very fine lines of pain around the corners of her mouth and eyes, and the nostrils of her perfectly straight nose were flared a little, none of which detracted from her beauty.

“Jesus.” I suddenly had a very good idea of why she’d been chased.

“What?” Gary demanded. I just kept ogling the woman. She had a perfect throat. She had great collarbones. She had Mae West curves, too, a real hourglass figure. She was at least eight inches shorter and fifty pounds lighter than I was. It said something for her momentum that she’d knocked me flat on my ass. I didn’t think I could have knocked Gary over, if I’d been her and he’d been me.

I hated her.

I was so busy staring and hating her it took a while to notice there was drying blood on her shirt, not just the new stuff I’d put there, but sticky, half-dried brown spots. “Shit. Let her go, Gary.”

“What?”

“Let her go. Her arms are all cut up. You’re hurting her.”

Gary let go like his hands were on fire. The woman made a small sound and folded her arms under her breasts, shallow gashes leaking blood onto her shirt again. I expected her voice to be musical, dulcet tones, with an exotic accent. Instead she was an alto who sounded like she was from Nowhere In Particular, U.S.A. “You saw me from an airplane?”

People kept saying that. I took a breath to respond and realized I didn’t feel like I needed to throw up anymore. The twist of sickness in my belly had disipated. My shoulders dropped and I let the breath go in a sigh. I wasn’t a fan of my innards guiding my actions. Now all I had to do was explain myself so I could go get fired and go home to sleep. “At about seven this morning. I was flying in from Dublin.” As if that had anything to do with anything. “I saw you running, and something was after you. Dogs, or something. And a guy with a knife.” I looked at the knife I was still holding. “This knife? How’d you get past him? How’d you get away from the dogs?”

“I ran away from the dogs,” the woman said, “and I kicked the guy with the knife in the head.”

Gary and I both stared at her. She smiled a little bit. A little bit of a smile from her was like spending a little bit of time with Marilyn Monroe. It went a long way. “I guess I don’t look like a kickboxer,” she said.

“That’s for damned sure,” Gary mumbled. He looked even more awed than I felt. I guessed it was nice to know some things didn’t change even when you hit your eighth decade. “So how’d you get all cut up?” he asked.

She shrugged a little. “I had to get close enough to kick him.”

“That his tooth out there?”

Her whole face lit up. “I knocked a tooth loose?” She looked like a little kid who’d just gotten her very own Red Ryder BB gun for Christmas. I almost laughed.

“You knew him? Why was he chasing you?” Even as I asked, I knew the question was idiotic. Men have hunted people down for much less attractive prizes. I liked being tall. Next to this woman I felt as ungainly as a giraffe.

“Why did you come to save me if you don’t know who he is?” she asked at almost the same time. We stared at each other.

“Let’s start again,” I said after a long moment of silence. Then I had no idea where to start with someone who’d been attacked and who just tried to cut my throat out. Names seemed like a good place. “I’m Joanne Walkingstick.”

It’s physically impossible to look at your own mouth in astonishment. I gave it a good shot. I hadn’t called myself by that name in at least five years. More like ten. Gary raised his bushy eyebrows at me curiously.

“You don’t look like an Indian,” he said, which really meant, “How the hell did you end up with a last name like Walkingstick?” I’d heard it for the first twelve years of my life.

“I know.” I hadn’t known that a practiced tone of controlled patience could lie in wait for the next time it was needed, but there it was. It hadn’t been needed for years. It meant I wasn’t going to say anything else, and if you wanted to make a big deal of it, you’d end up in a fistfight.

I was good at brawling.

Gary, the linebacker, let the tone blow right over him and stayed there with his arms folded and eyebrows lifted. The woman studied me through drawn-down eyebrows. It made a wrinkle in the middle of her forehead. On me, that wrinkle was scary. On her, it was cute. I hated her some more.

Gary was wrong, anyway. I did look Indian. My coloring was wrong, but in black-and-white photos I looked like I didn’t have a drop of Irish blood in me. I’d changed my last name to Walker when I turned eighteen and graduated from high school. Nowhere official. I just filled out every piece of paperwork, even the diploma application, with Walker. My birth certificate was the only piece of paper I owned that had Walkingstick as my official last name.

“My name is Marie D’Ambra,” the woman said.

“You don’t look Italia—” I nearly bit my tongue off.

“Adopted,” she replied, amusement sparkling in her eyes.

Oh. “My mother was black Irish,” I said after a moment. “I got her coloring.” It seemed like a fair exchange of information. “Why was that guy after you? What was chasing you? It didn’t look like a dog pack. Exactly.”