Thunderbird Falls. C.E. Murphy
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