Thunderbird Falls

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—”