Dad flashed him a warning glare, and my muscles tensed. When those two fought, it wasn’t pretty. A little humorous, perhaps, but I doubted anyone was in the mood to laugh. Besides me. Laughing was like Jell-O. There was always room for Jell-O.
“Great, I’d like to get out of the cold, anyway,” I said, narrowly averting World War III.
“You can ride with me,” Uncle Bob said after a moment. What did Dad expect him to do? He knew the rules. We’d have to go to the station eventually anyway. May as well get it over with.
Then Uncle Bob looked over at Garrett. “You can ride with me as well.”
Dad looked at him in surprise then gratitude when Uncle Bob winked at him. As Dad walked me to Uncle Bob’s SUV, he leaned down and whispered, “You two have to get your stories straight on the way. In your statement, just say that when you opened the door, there were two men there. They were fighting, the gun went off, and the other guy fled down the fire escape.”
He patted my back and offered me a reassuring smile before closing the door. A haze of worry surrounded him, and I suddenly felt guilty for all the things I’d put him through growing up. He’d carried a lot for me. Made up excuses, found ways to put men behind bars without involving me directly, and now he had to trust in Uncle Bob to do the same thing.
“How did you do that?” Garrett asked before Ubie got into the car. “That guy must have weighed over two hundred pounds.”
We were both sitting in the backseat. “I didn’t.”
He stared at me hard, trying to understand. “One of your dead guys?”
“No,” I said, watching Dad and Uncle Bob talk. They seemed okay. “No, this was something else.”
I heard Garrett lean back in his seat, scrub his face with his fingers. “So, there’s more than just dead people walking around? Like what? Demons? Poltergeists?”
“Poltergeists are just pissed-off dead people. It’s really not that mysterious,” I said. But I was lying. Reyes was about as mysterious as it got.
It didn’t matter what I did, I could not stop thinking about him. I wondered about his tattoos, trying to unearth their meaning from the jumble of chaos in my mind. If only I didn’t have so many useless facts floating around in there. Damn my pursuit of trivia.
I wondered other things as well. Was he carbon based? Was he really thirty years old or thirty billion? Was he an innie or an outie? I knew enough not to question his planetary origins. He wasn’t extraterrestrial. The fourth dimension, the other side, didn’t work that way. There were no planets or countries or landmarks to distinguish its borders. It spanned the universe and beyond. It simply was. Everywhere at once. Like God, I figured.
“Okay,” Uncle Bob said after buckling his seat belt. “I have to think really hard on the way to the station. I probably won’t hear a thing you guys say to each other.” He glanced at me from the rearview mirror and winked again.
By the time we arrived at the station, there had miraculously been two men in the hallway when I opened the door. The other man had dirty blond hair and a beard, nondescript dark clothes, and no distinguishing marks, making him almost impossible to identify. Darn it. Frankly, I was a little surprised Garrett was going along with it.
“Like I want to be locked in a padded cell,” he said as we strolled inside the station. He was beginning to see my side of it, why I never told people what I was.
The first pair of eyes I met in the station belonged to a still-seething Officer Taft. He stood reading an open file at his desk and glared at me as we walked past. So did Strawberry Shortcake. At least she didn’t attack me. That was a plus.
Still, I couldn’t stop myself. I whipped out my best smirk for Taft, and said while barely slowing my stride, “When you figure out what’s really going on and you need help, don’t come to me.”
“I’m not the one who needs help,” he shot back.
Uncle Bob quickened his step to catch up with me. “What was that about?” he asked, clearly intrigued.
“The Hell Spawn of Satan, remember? She’s making her presence known, and he can’t deal — so he’s mad at me.”
He turned back with a thoughtful expression. “I could send him on a doughnut run to cool his jets.”
Sounded like a plan. After we finished giving our statements, which were remarkably similarly worded, we all grabbed a bite; then Uncle Bob and I dropped off Garrett and headed to Yucca High. Like a kid being left at home on a Saturday night, Garrett begged to go. Even whined a little.
“Please,” he’d said.
“No means no.” He had to learn that sometime.
Yucca High sat deep in the southern heart of Albuquerque, an old school with a sordid past and an excellent reputation. We drove up during a late-afternoon class change. Kids were taking advantage of the five minutes they had by talking and flirting and roughhousing the freshmen. Before we arrived, I hadn’t particularly missed high school. When we got there, I still didn’t particularly miss it.
The aftereffects of the morning still weighted down my limbs. Things weren’t moving at a normal speed. Everything felt slow, lethargic as I swam through the reality that the world did not come to a screeching halt after a near-death experience. It remained in motion, a never-ending cycle of those episodic adventures called life. The minutes pressed forward. The sun slid across the sky. The heel of my boot had a tack in it.
We walked into the Yucca High School office and found a frazzled administrative assistant. There were no fewer than seven people vying for her attention. Two wanted tardy passes. One had a note from his dad saying that if the school didn’t let his child take his medicine to school, he was going to sue the fancy new uniforms off their athletes’ backs. Another was a teacher who’d had her keys stolen off her desk during lunch. Two were office aides waiting for instructions. And the last was a beautiful young girl with a dark ponytail, cat-eye glasses, and bobby socks, who looked to have passed away in the fifties.
She sat in a corner with her books clutched to her breast and her ankles crossed. I sat down beside her and waited for the chaos to filter down. Uncle Bob took the opportunity to step out and make a call. As always. Bobby Socks kept staring at me, so I did my cell phone trick and looked directly at her as I talked.
“Hi,” I said.
Her eyes widened before she batted her lashes in surprise, wondering if I was talking to her.
“Come here often?” I asked, chuckling at my astounding sense of humor.
“Me?” she asked at last.
“You,” I said.
“You can see me?”
I never figured out why they always asked me that when I was looking directly at them. “Sure can.” Her mouth slid open a notch, so I explained. “I’m a grim reaper, but in a good, nongrouchy kind of way. You can cross through me if you’d like.”
“You’re beautiful,” she said, gazing at me in awe. I did that to people. “You’re like a swimming pool on a sunny day.”
Wow, that was different. A quick glance told me the crowd was thinning. “How long have you been here?”
“About two years, I think.” When my brows creased in doubt, she said, “Oh, my clothes. Homecoming week. Fifties Day.”
“Oh,” I said. “Well you certainly look the part.”
She bowed her head bashfully. “Thanks.”
Only one tardy kid to go. Apparently the principal was dealing with the lawsuit threat, and maintenance was dealing with the stolen keys.
“Why haven’t you crossed?” I asked.
Another kid walking down the hall called out to his friend. “Hey, Westfield, you gonna get spanked again?”
The boy waiting for the tardy pass, clearly a jock, flipped him off behind his back, incognito style. I tried really hard not to giggle.
The girl next to me shrugged, then indicated the administrative assistant with a nod of her head. “That’s my grandma. She got really upset when I died.”
I looked up at the woman. He name tag read MS. TARPLEY. She had stylishly messy hair, dark with red
