Walking Dead

I’d be up for three days straight while I tried to get the world sorted out, so I was grateful for small favors. I tore out of the bathroom and flung my clothes on, then sat down and put my forehead against my knees. I was due in at eight. In the grand scheme of things, Morrison wouldn’t be any more pissed if I got in at 8:31 a.m. than at eight-thirty. Something had woken me up with a scare, and I knew by now that was a bad sign. Half a minute to figure it out wouldn’t signal the end of the world. On the other hand, not taking that half minute might. Such was my life.

The panic faded from my chest, heart rate slowing. I’d been awake barely two minutes. Two minutes was a lot of time in terms of things going wrong, so whatever’d awakened me—a guttural snort, I suddenly remembered, like a wookelar from the old Tim Conway Disney film. The wookelar had been a flesh-eating monster of some kind. It was too early to deal with flesh-eating monsters. I looked for door number two.

It opened with a bolt of sunny revelation. Heat flashed up my face, reached the top of my head, got bored and rushed back down again toward my collarbone. There was no wookelar. Furthermore, I hadn’t slept through the alarm. I’d turned it off because Mondays and Tuesdays were my days off.

And then I’d woken myself up with my own snoring.

Hands over my face, I toppled into my pillow and blushed until my head pounded. This was the sort of event that haunted a person through the years until she suddenly couldn’t take it anymore and flung herself from a building top. Darwinian embarrassment, though in my case it was too late. I’d already passed on my genetic legacy. For a rare moment I let myself dwell on that, hoping the son I’d given up for adoption was more socially adroit than his biological mother.

Of course, Godzilla was smoother than I was. I crawled out of bed and drank two glasses of water, trying to get the blood in my face to thin, and considered going back to bed. Starting all over again seemed like a better way to face the day than starting out by terrorizing myself with violent snoring.

Unfortunately for me, there was a fresh murder case and a whole series of stale ones to be dealt with. I was showered and dressed anyway. I shuffled into the kitchen to make myself a cup of coffee—just what my jumped-up heart rate and sour stomach needed—and shuffled out the door, coffee mug in hand, to walk into a big wall of a man with his hand raised to knock.

Actually, I narrowly missed walking into him. We froze a scant inch or two apart while the coffee sloshed and burned my fingers. I felt like a cartoon character, afraid to move for fear the ground would be gone from beneath my feet. I eased back onto my heels, finding the floor still nice and solid, then grinned and took a full step back into my doorway. “Gary.”

I got a gleaming white smile in reply. “Happy Halloween, doll.”

Gary Muldoon was probably the only man on earth I’d allow to call me “doll.” Or “lady” or “broad,” or any of the other gangster-era endearments he used, for that matter. He wasn’t quite old enough to use them legitimately, at least not unless he had mafia connections he’d never mentioned, but with a name like Muldoon I didn’t figure he did. On the other hand, even at seventy-three, he’d be a great piece of hired muscle: he was a bit taller than me, and still had the broad shoulders of his linebacker youth. We’d been friends since I’d jumped in his cab most of a year ago and demanded he drive me on a wild-goose chase. I’d ended up almost dead—not his fault—and the circumstances surrounding it made him decide I was interesting enough to hang with. Not that he’d used the phrase. I was just proving my street cred with it.

I lifted the hand that didn’t have a coffee mug in it and mocked thwacking his shoulder. “Happy Halloween. You didn’t come to my party!”

He took my coffee and slurped. “You shouldn’t be drinking this stuff before we do a session. Did I miss anything? This needs milk.”

I stared at my—his—coffee in dismay. “We’re not doing a session this morning. I’m going to work. There was a murder.”

Gary pushed past me in search of milk. I followed him and made another cup of coffee as I recounted the weekend’s events. By the time I had a new mug curled protectively in my hands, Gary’s craggy features had settled into an excellent approximation of a sullen child’s. “And you didn’t call me?”

“I thought you were coming to the party. And then it was four in the morning. Why didn’t you come?” I sounded as childish as he looked. We made a great pair.

Guilt slid across Gary’s face. “I was busy.”

“Too busy to come to the first party I’ve ever hosted in my entire life? What’d you have, a hot date?”

Gary’s ears turned a deep, rich red, making a brilliant contrast against white hair. I gasped, very ingenue- like, and set my coffee mug down so I could point at him accusingly. “You did have a date! You had a date and you didn’t even tell me! Garrison Matthew Muldoon! How could you?! Who is she? Do you like her? How did it go? Are you going to see her again? Why didn’t you bring her to the party? When do I get to meet her?” I was worse than somebody’s mother, but I couldn’t shut up. Curious glee had my tongue and was trying for my feet. It was all I could do not to jump up and caper around.

Gary’s ears turned redder. I’d never seen him blush. I hadn’t known he could. He’d been the most rock- steady thing in my life the past year, and rocks weren’t known for their ability to get embarrassed. Delight got the better of me and I did get up and dance around, waving my hands and cackling. As far as I was concerned, he deserved every chance at happiness the world could offer.

I got ahold of myself and sat back down. My cheeks hurt from laughing, and poor Gary looked discomfited. I was utterly unaccustomed to seeing him anything but ruggedly suave, and relished the change enough to reach across and pat his hand. “Never mind the third degree. You’re forgiven for not coming to the party.” My eyebrows waggled, entirely of their own accord. “And maybe you didn’t want me calling you at four in the morning anyway. I’d hate to interrupt.”

Gary hid a not-very-convincing scowl in his coffee. “I don’t give you this kinda trouble over your love life.”

My eyebrows, still acting on their own, shot toward my hairline. “Excuse me? Mr. I-rescued-the-phone- number-you-threw-out Muldoon doesn’t mess with my love life? You must have you confused with somebody else.”

He gave me another unconvincing glower. “So when’re we doing your next session?”

“Way to subtly change the subject, Gar.” I picked up my coffee again, studying it like it might have answers. “Probably not tomorrow, unless this thing wraps up before then. Next week, I guess.”

My “sessions” had been going on for months. A couple mornings a week, Gary came over to drum me under, letting me explore the astral plane and the Middle World through shamanic eyes. I was a hell of a lot more confident in my ability to See and to heal than I’d been, and I’d scared up a lot of memories that had been buried in dreams. My spirit guide, Coyote, who turned out to be not so spirity after all, had impressed on a much younger me that one of the essential aspects of shamanism was change. It made sense; healing was a fundamental change, from illness to wellness. At the height of my power, when both myself and my patient fully believed in what I could do, my will alone should be able to affect a healing pretty much instantaneously. I hadn’t pulled out that particular big gun since I’d finally come to understand it, but on a fundamental level, I knew I could.

The trouble was, healing was a one-shot kind of deal. It wasn’t so much good against ghosts or black cauldrons. I had other rabbits in my hat: I’d learned to fight in the real world, and had armor that could travel with me to other worlds, psychic protection against battles that didn’t take place on the physical plane. I could bend light around me so I became much harder to see, but even that came down on the side of parlor tricks when I was going up against ghosts.

I said, “You know,” idly, half forgetting Gary was even there to answer. He grunted curiously in response and I focused on him, a little surprised. “Nothing, really. I’m just rolling around in irony. I step up, and I find out I’m still behind the eight ball. I’ve learned a lot, but I’m starting to think it’s never going to be enough. Once, just once, I’d like to go in basically knowing what I was dealing with.”

“Darlin’, wouldn’t we all.” He stood up and leaned across the table to kiss my forehead. Coffee breath spilled down. I wrinkled my nose, but it turned into a smile as he straightened. “I’ll get out of your hair so you can get to work, but you need me for anything, Jo, you call. Arright?”

“I will.” I got up to hug him, and we walked down to the parking lot in companionable silence.

Billy looked as if he hadn’t gotten enough sleep. I retreated from the precinct building to the Missing O, got coffee and doughnuts, and brought them over in hopes of perking him up. He took a doughnut, managing to be