“Mommy, it’s a peace captain!” I heard Ashley come tearing out of the kitchen and looked toward the door in time to see her skid to a stop about six inches from Morrison, beaming up at him. “Hullo! I’m Ashley! Ossifer Walker is going to show me her school! I mean her work.” She wrinkled up her face until her nose looked like a button at the midst of a bunch, then smoothed it out again to smile adoringly at my boss. Her mother came out of the kitchen after her, offering a smile with a hint of apology for Ashley’s enthusiasm.
Morrison couldn’t take it anymore and shot me an incredulous look through my bedroom door. Fortunately for both of us I’d at least pulled on a pair of pants and had managed to get a bra in place. “Did I come at a bad time, Walker?” Sarcasm abounded so mildly that I wasn’t sure anyone else heard it.
“No, sir.” I was standing in my own bedroom half dressed calling a man sir. It really seemed like I ought to at least get laid, if I was doing that.
Then Mark stepped into view, his jeans still falling off his hips, and I remembered that all appearances indicated I had. Dammit. “Why don’t you go ahead and make everybody else some breakfast, Mark,” I muttered. “Since everyone’s here and all. Morrison and I have to go.” I pulled a white T-shirt on because I knew it would set off my tan and went to crouch in the doorway so I could talk to Ashley.
“We’re going to have to reschedule, Ashley. This is my boss, Captain Morrison, and I have to go with him this morning.”
Disappointment flooded the kid’s face, although at the same time she shot a conniving look at Morrison. “Maybe I could come with you!” All the guile was gone from her expression by the time she started speaking, big blue eyes full of hope and charm. I choked on a laugh. Even Morrison cracked a grin, proving he wasn’t entirely immune to feminine wiles.
But his voice was very serious as he answered, “’Fraid not, Ashley.” He crouched, too, so our knees knocked together, and gave Ashley all the respect due an adult. “Officer Walker and I have to take care of some police business by ourselves. But when Officer Walker gets the chance to reschedule and bring you to the station, come by my office and I’ll see if I can’t scare up a case for you to work on, all right?”
I thought the girl was going to lift right off the floor from so much delight and pride. “Okay!” She darted back to her mother to say, “Captain Morrison’s going to make me a police ossifer, Mommy! With a case for my own! I’m going to be a peace captain when I grow up!”
“I’m sure you will be, Ashley,” Allison Hampton said with the fond patience of a parent who heard at least a half-dozen different
Morrison put his hands on his thighs and pushed himself upright, a quiet hint of a smile on his mouth. I looked up at him for a few seconds, trying to hide my own half smile.
I liked to think of Morrison as my personal bane of existence, the end-all and be-all of rigidity and things I didn’t like about cops. We shared a years-old antagonistic relationship that stemmed from me knowing a lot more about cars than he did—although honestly, I still couldn’t comprehend how someone could possibly mistake a Mustang for a Corvette—and which had developed into long-running habitual disagreement on any given topic. But the truth was I respected my captain, and he regularly pulled off little coups like the one with Ashley that made it clear to me that he deserved the captaincy he held, even if he didn’t know a damned thing about cars.
I took my gaze away from Morrison and caught Gary looking at me with the faintest smirk in the world. He wiped it off so fast I knew I’d read it correctly, making me hunch my shoulders and scowl as I straightened out of my crouch.
“I’m sorry,” I said to everybody in general, except Morrison. “I’ve got to go. Gary, I’ll call you when I’m done.”
Gary’s bushy gray eyebrows shot up. “You mean I ain’t goin’ with you?”
“No.” Morrison bristled so much I suspected Gary’d asked just to get a rise out of him. “You’re not.”
I couldn’t get the cabbie to meet my eyes and confirm his intentions, though. Instead, Gary gave Morrison a toothy white smile and asked, “Then who’s gonna drum her under?”
Every hair on my body stood up, until I felt like a spooked cat. Morrison’s expression went tight, as if he’d been caught out. I thought he probably had been. Gary’s smile stayed toothy. I found myself staring at the floor, feeling like looking at one or the other would be playing favorites in some kind of weird male rivalry thing that I didn’t understand.
“I will,” Morrison said. He didn’t sound happy about it, and cold lay down all over my arms and spine. I started to say, “I’m not sure that’s a good idea, Captain,” but he fixed me with a gimlet glare.
“It’ll be fine, Walker. Where’s your drum?”
I was pretty sure being drummed under by somebody with Morrison’s temperament and opinion about my abilities—which were pretty much on par with my own—wasn’t really fine, but Allison was looking at me curiously, and I very much didn’t want to get into it with her there. I jerked a thumb over my shoulder. “In there. On the dresser.”
Morrison walked into my bedroom like he’d done it a hundred times, while I gave Ashley and Allison another apologetic smile. “Monday and Tuesdays are my days off. We could reschedule for next we-eek?” My voice broke on the last word as I
He held the drum like it was valuable, which it was. An elder in Qualla Boundary had made it for me, the only thing I’d even been given in my life that was unique and for me alone. It had a raven dyed into the soft deer leather, its wings sheltering a rattlesnake and a wolf. The stick that went with it had a knotted leather end and a rabbit-fur end that was dyed raspberry red. It meant more to me than any other possession I’d ever owned. Gary usually drummed for me, when I needed its music to go into a healing trance.
Gary picking up my drum had never given me a visceral thrill that made me consider locking myself in my bedroom with him. I swallowed on a surprisingly dry throat and Morrison looked up, expression so mild it was neutral. Either he wasn’t getting the same kind of thrill I was from him handling the drum, or he was hiding it very well. I bet on the former and swallowed again, turning back to Ashley and Allison. “Would that be okay?” My voice croaked, but no one seemed to notice.
Allison nodded and Ashley bounced up and down in enthusiastic agreement. That in hand, I looked beyond them at Mark. I had no idea what to say to Mark. I desperately didn’t want Mark to still be here when I came home. I’d be happier if Mark had never been there at all, but unless I could turn back time, that didn’t seem a likely scenario. I had a horror of going near him, for fear he’d try something unforgivably intimate, like kissing me goodbye. I’d have to break his lovely nose.
“Make sure the door’s locked when you leave,” I said after a few seconds. It seemed to cover all bases: it said I expected him to be gone, and I thought it didn’t leave room for Morrison to infer that Mark had a key to my apartment, which “Lock the door when you leave” might have.
Not that I cared what Morrison thought of my love life.
I slid a pair of sandals on and went out the door before anybody could say anything else.
Morrison followed on my heels, his gaze making the skin between my shoulder blades itch. He didn’t say anything, which was worse by far than questions. Even, “You had a party and didn’t invite me?” would have been nice. Something I could snap back at and therefore restore my shattered equilibrium. But Morrison wasn’t obliging me, no doubt on the warped logic that my personal life wasn’t his business. Never mind that if he said one word, that’s exactly what I’d tell him. That wasn’t the point, dammit.
“Mel asked for me?” I asked again, as much to shut my thoughts up as to break the silence. We cornered at a landing—I lived on the fifth floor in the same apartment building I’d been in since college—and I shot a cautious glance over my shoulder at the captain. He looked like he’d bitten into a sour grapefruit, not, once I thought about it, that I’d ever encountered a genuinely sweet one.
“No.”
“So what’re you doing here?” Somewhere in the midst of the sentence I figured it out and wished I hadn’t asked, because it meant Morrison had to answer.
“You’re supposed to have a knack for fixing this kind of problem,” he growled, and I wished some more I hadn’t asked. It hadn’t been all that long ago that Morrison and I had shared a healthy disrespect for the whole concept of other worlds and mystical healing and things like magic. That it was all malarkey had been the one thing we agreed on.
Empirical evidence had changed my stance, even if I’d spent most of the time since then resisting it with
