old. I sat down on the love seat and pulled a sock on. “Are we going to be late for Marie’s?”
“Nah.” Gary looked over the edge of the magazine. “She doesn’t live too far from here. Hey, you don’t clean up so bad.”
It took a minute to work my way through that. “Thanks. I think.”
“Sure,” he said, and went back to the magazine. I got my socks on straight and went looking for shoes. All my favorite pairs were in my luggage, at the airport. I snagged a pair of boots that weren’t too reprehensible, went back into the bedroom, got a pair of skinnier socks that would fit better under the boots, and left the ones I’d had on in the middle of the floor. Such are the joys of living alone. No one can yell at you for doing things like that. “Okay, I’m ready when you are.”
“Just a sec.” Gary didn’t look up from the magazine.
“You can borrow it.” I grinned and went into the kitchen for a drink of water. When I came back Gary was on his feet, waiting.
“Damn,” he said, and looked at my feet. So did I. The boots had heels, nice thick sturdy ones. Cludgy, in fact, but I like cludgy boots. I have big feet and can’t wear sexy skinny little shoes, so I always went for the opposite extreme. In those shoes I was every bit as tall as Gary was, maybe a little taller. I grinned at him.
“Lady, you scare me,” he said, and opened the door for me. I went out feeling pretty good about myself.
* * *
Marie lived barely ten minutes from me. My all-day nap had evidently made a dent, or at least I’d caught another wind, because I took the stairs up to her condo two at a time, leaving Gary behind. “She said it’d be open,” he called as I looked both ways down the hall. “Number one twenty-one.” I took an arbitrary left as Gary caught up, found Marie’s door and did a staccato rap before pushing it open.
“Hey, Marie, it’s us.” The entryway was a short hall with a longer hall to my right and a kitchen to my left. At the end of the entryway, in front of us, was a Nene Thomas print, a woman surrounded by ravens. “I like the print,” I called, and went past the kitchen, past the print and around a corner into the living room, still smiling.
Marie’s very dead body lay sprawled across her living room floor.
CHAPTER 8
I backed up and crashed into Gary, elbowing him in the gut. He grunted, offended. “What the hell was that for?”
“She’s dead,” I whispered.
“Pretty sure.” I swallowed. Gary did the same, right behind my ear.
Marie lay on her back on the floor, one arm flung above her head, a classic faint. Except it wasn’t a faint. A hole had been torn through her midriff, starting just to the left of her breastbone. It rose up at an angle, and it didn’t take much imagination to envision the heart muscle cut neatly in half beneath the crimson blood. There were no superficial wounds that I could see. It looked like someone had walked in, jerked a knife up through her chest without warning, and walked out again. I rubbed my chest where Cernunnos had stabbed me, nervously. “Where’s that sword?”
“In the trunk of my cab,” Gary whispered back.
“Are you sure?”
“Yeah.”
“I wonder if that’s good or bad.”
We stood there staring at Marie’s body. “Maybe we should call the cops,” Gary suggested.
I pulled my glasses off and rubbed my eyes, then put them back on. Marie was still lying there, dead. “Shit,” I said after a while. “I
We were still standing there twenty-five minutes later when the real cops showed up. They bustled us down to the station in separate cars. I thought if we were really criminals, we’d have either abandoned the place or worked out our story while we were waiting for the cops, but no one wanted to listen to my point of view.
Gary had an all-day alibi; he’d been at work until two, then at a senior’s poker game until he came to wake me up. I had no alibi at all. A cop I didn’t know questioned me for over an hour. He kept getting hung up on the fact that I’d seen Marie from a plane in the first place. Everybody was having trouble with that idea. I made a mental note not to play Rescue Chick from the air again.
He let me go after verifying I really was a cop. Gary was waiting on the station stairs for me. We stood there watching splats of rain hit the sidewalk.
“You think it was Cernunnos?” Gary asked after a while.
“I don’t think his horse would fit in that apartment.” I sat down hard on the steps. Gary looked down at me in surprise. I smiled up at him weakly. “I haven’t eaten this week.” I didn’t think I was even exaggerating.
“You could eat?” he asked in horror.
“Either that or I could pass out.” I gave him my hand to pull me up. He did, and put a steadying hand at my waist when I wobbled. I smiled dizzily at him. “You know, Gary, if you were forty years younger I could get to like you.”
“Yeah,” he said. “That’s what all the girls say. Where we going? My cab’s at Marie’s.”
“There’s a Denny’s right around the corner.”
“No doughnut shop?”
I grinned a little. “Down the street. But I need real food.”
“You could eat,” he said again, sort of admiringly. I nodded and teetered down the street.
A plate of mozza sticks, a grilled chicken-with-cheese-and-bacon sandwich, a copious number of fries and a chocolate milkshake later I could think again. Gary watched me eat with silent fascination and didn’t so much as steal a fry. When I ordered a hot-fudge brownie sundae and sat back to wait for it, Gary judged it safe to speak again. “So
I pulled my glasses off and chewed on the earpiece. “I don’t know. Do ancient Celtic gods go around murdering people in their apartments?”
“Dunno. Never met any before. Don’t know why they wouldn’t.”
I looked up and squinted, trying to resolve his fuzzy edges into something more solid. My vision wasn’t that bad—I could drive without my contacts, if I had to—but I’m nearsighted and things more than about three feet away took on the Christmas tree-light effect. “I think maybe we should start with something a little less esoteric.”
“Sure,” Gary said, “like a jealous rival in the anthropology department.” He stared at me until I wrinkled my nose and put my glasses back on.
“It could happen,” I mumbled.
“Could,” Gary agreed. “You think it did?”
“No,” I said reluctantly. “I think Marie was into something weirder than that.”
Gary nodded, satisfied. The waitress came back with my sundae and I poked at it with a fork, no longer hungry enough to eat it. “It was too clean to be Cernunnos.”
“Whaddaya mean, too clean? Didn’t you
“Yeah, but.” I waved the fork around. “Think about his host. Dogs and birds and guys on horses. Do you think he goes around killing people all by himself? What if it was that other guy?”
“What other guy?”
“The one with the knife. She said it wasn’t Cernunnos, but she’d thought it was up until the diner this morning.” I frowned at my brownie, and took a bite. It was pretty good. I took another bite.
“The human guy?”
