“This is serious stuff,” he said.
“Tell me about it. We have to find Mimi before they do.”
“I’ll get a hold of the local feds and let them know they have a couple of impersonators. But you should have called me when this whole thing started.”
“Well, I didn’t think I would need to, since you’re having me tailed and all.”
His jaw clamped down, totally busted. With a heavy sigh, he stepped closer, towering over me, and lifted my chin gently. “Reyes Farrow is a convicted murderer, Charley. This is for your own protection. If he contacts you, will you please let me know?”
“Will you call off the tail?” I asked in turn. When he hesitated then shook his head, I added, “Then may the best detective win.”
I strode out the door, realizing what a ridiculous statement that was, as Uncle Bob, a veteran detective for the Albuquerque Police Department, was the ace of spades when it came to investigations. I was kind of like a three of hearts.
As I walked down the block to my friend Pari’s tattoo parlor, I scanned the street for the shadow Ubie’d assigned to me, with no luck. It had to be someone good. Uncle Bob wouldn’t send a rookie to watch over me.
I stopped in front of Pari’s shop, not because I particularly needed a tattoo, but because Pari could see auras. I could see auras as well, but I figured maybe I’d missed something over the years. How could I see auras and dead people and sons of Satan and yet in all my days never see a demon? Heck, I didn’t even know demons existed until Reyes told me, much less that they would be fighting tooth and nail to get to me. To get through me. My breath caught as another realization dawned. If demons existed, heck, if Satan himself existed, then angels surely existed as well. Seriously, how could I be so out of the loop?
Hopefully, Pari knew something I didn’t, other than the correct timing for a 1970 Plymouth Duster with a supercharged 440 big block. I didn’t even know cars had timing issues — speaking of which, it was still early in tattoo parlor time, so I was surprised to see Pari’s front door open. I stepped inside.
“I need some light,” I heard her call out from the back.
“On it,” came a male voice.
Then I heard scrambling in the back room as I walked up behind Pari. She was bent under a refurbished dentist’s chair, electrical wires in a heap at her knees.
“Thanks,” she said, quietly deciphering the wires.
“What?” the guy in the back room called out.
Startled, Pari jolted upright and hit her head on the seat of the chair before turning back to me. “Charley, damn it,” she said, raising one hand to shield her eyes and the other to rub the sting from her head. “You can’t just walk up behind me. You’re like one of those floodlights shining from a cop car in the middle of the night.”
I chuckled as she fumbled for her sunglasses. “You said you needed light.”
Pari was a graphic designer who’d turned to body art to keep the bill collectors at bay. Luckily, she’d found her calling, and she did the profession proud with full sleeves of sleek lines, tiger lilies and fleur-de-lis. And a couple of skulls thrown in to impress the clientele.
She’d designed the grim reaper I now sported on my left shoulder blade. It was a tiny being with huge, innocent eyes and a fluid robe that looked like smoke. How she managed that with tattoo ink was beyond me.
She slipped her shades on, then looked back at me with a sigh. “I said I needed light, not a starburst. I swear you’re going to permanently blind me one day.” As I said, Pari could see auras; mine was just really bright.
She grabbed a bottle of water off the counter and sat on the broken dentist’s chair, propping her hiking boots onto two crates on either side of her and resting her elbows on her knees. I grabbed a water out of a small fridge and turned back to her, struggling not to crack up at her indelicate position.
“So, what’s up, Reaper?”
“I can’t find the flashlight!” the guy yelled from the back room.
“Never mind,” she called back before grinning at me. “All beauty, no brains, that one.”
I nodded. She liked beauty. Who didn’t?
“Okay, so you’re pretending to be all cool and collected,” she said, studying me with a practiced eye, “but you’re about as serene as a chicken on the chopping block. What’s going on?”
Dang, she was good. I decided to get right to the point. “Have you ever seen a demon?”
Her breathing slowed as she absorbed my question. “You mean like a hellfire and brimstone demon?”
“Yes.”
“Like a minion of hell demon?”
“Yes,” I said again.
“Like—”
“Yes,” I repeated for the third time. The subject made my stomach queasy. And the thought of one torturing Reyes … not that the little shit didn’t deserve to be tortured just a tad, but still.
“So, they’re real?”
“I’m going to take that as a no,” I said, my hopes evaporating. “It’s just, I think I have a few after me, and I was hoping you might know something I didn’t.”
“Damn.” She glanced at the floor in thought then refocused on me. At least I think she did. It was hard to tell with her shades on. “Wait, there are demons after you?”
“Sort of.”
After she stared a long time, long enough to be considered culturally insensitive, she bowed her head. “I’ve never seen one,” she said, her voice quiet, “but I know there are things out there, things that go bump in the night. And not just the prostitute next door. Scary things. Things that are impossible to forget.”
I tilted my head in question. “What do you mean?”
“When I was fourteen, a group of friends and I were having a slumber party, and like most fourteen-year-olds do eventually, we decided to have a seance.”
“Okay.” This was going nowhere good.
“So, we went down into my basement and were all seancing and chanting and conjuring a spirit from beyond when I felt something. Like a presence.”
“Like a departed?”
“No.” She shook her head, thinking back. “At least I don’t think so. They’re cold. This being was just sort of there. I felt it brush up against me like a dog.” One hand gripped the opposite arm in remembrance, a soft shiver echoing through her body. “No one else felt it, of course, until I said something.” She glanced up at me, a dire warning in her eyes. “Never tell a group of fourteen-year-old girls having a seance in a dark basement that you felt something brush up against you. For your own safety.”
I chuckled. “I promise. What happened?”
“They jumped up screaming and ran for the stairs. It freaked me out so, naturally, I ran, too.”
“Naturally.”
“I just wanted away from whatever had materialized in my basement, so I ran like I had a reason to live despite my suicidal tendencies.”
Pari had been Goth when Goth wasn’t cool. Kinda like now.
“I thought I was in the clear when I reached the top stair. Then I heard a growl, deep, guttural. Before I knew what was happening, I fell halfway down the stairs, spraining a wrist and bruising my ribs. I scrambled up and out of there without looking back. It took a while for me to realize I didn’t fall. My legs were pulled out from under me and I was dragged.” She lifted her pant leg and unzipped her knee-high boots to show me a jagged scar on her calf. It looked like claw marks. “I’ve never been so scared.”
“Holy crap, Par. What happened then?”
“When my dad found out why we were all screaming, he laughed and went down into the basement to prove to us nothing was there.”
“And?”
“Nothing was there,” she said with a shrug.
“Did you show him the wound?”
“Oh, hell no.” She shook her head like I’d just asked her if she ate children for breakfast. “They’d already filed me in the
“Holy crap, Par,” I repeated.
