Third Grave Dead Ahead

“I see.” The detective took out his notepad and jotted down a few notes right as a U.S. Marshal came through the door. “Does he still have your car?”

With a mental sigh, I realized this could take a while.

Annnnnnnnnnnd it did.

Two hours later, I sat in the back of Owen Vaughn’s patrol car waiting for Uncle Bob to pick me up. I’d been checked out by an EMT and harassed by a rascally officer named Bud. After that, I figured it was time to get the heck outta Dodge, so I called for backup in the form of my favorite uncle to convince Albuquerque’s finest to let me go. The black eye helped. Holy cow, Reyes packed a punch. And I doubted he was even trying. Which, thank God.

I looked into the rearview mirror at Vaughn. He was sitting in the driver’s seat, which was cool, since it was his car. “Are you ever going to tell me what I did?” I asked, hoping he wouldn’t pop a cap in my ass for the asking.

“Are you ever going to die screaming?”

That would be a big fat hopefully not. Man, he hated me, and I’d never found out why. I decided to try to humanize myself so he’d be less likely to kill me if ever the opportunity arose. I’d read that if you say a victim’s name repeatedly to, say, a kidnapper, then the kidnapper forms a mental attachment to the person they’re holding hostage.

“Charley Davidson is a fair person. I’m sure if you just told Charley what she did, she’d be more than willing to fix it.”

He stilled, then eased around to me, slowly, as though I’d mortified him. “If you ever talk about yourself in third person again, I’ll kill you where you stand.”

Okay, he was clearly sensitive about narrative forms. I wasn’t sure it was legal for a police officer to threaten a civilian like that, but since he had a gun and I didn’t, I decided not to question him on it.

I learned two things about Owen Vaughn as we sat there waiting for Ubie: First, he had the uncanny ability to stare a person down in a rearview mirror without blinking for like five minutes. I wished I’d had eye drops to offer him. And second, he had some kind of nasal deformity that made him squeak a little when he breathed.

* * *

Not long after my nerve-racking stretch in hell — otherwise known as Owen Vaughn’s patrol car — a very grumpy man named Uncle Bob gave me a ride to my apartment.

“So, Farrow carjacked you?” Ubie asked as we pulled into the parking lot, unconcerned with his bed head.

“Yes, he carjacked me.”

“And why were you at a convenience store in the middle of nowhere in the middle of the night in the middle of a flash flood warning?”

“Because I got a text from … Oh! Gemma!”

I dug my phone out of my bag, which Reyes was nice enough to leave on the nightstand, and called hers. Still off. So I tried her home phone.

“Gemma Davidson,” she answered, her voice as groggy as I felt.

“Where are you?” I asked.

“Who is this?”

“Elvis.”

“What time is it?”

“Hammer time?”

“Charley.”

“Did you text me? Did your car break down?”

“No and no. Why are you doing this to me?” She was funny.

“Check your cell.”

I heard a loud, sleepy sigh, some rustling of sheets, then, “It won’t come on.”

“Not at all?”

“No. What did you do to it?”

“I ate it for breakfast. Check the battery compartment.”

“Where the hell is that?”

“Um, behind the battery door.”

“Are you punking me?” I heard her fumbling with the phone.

“Gem, if I was going to punk you, I wouldn’t simply turn off your phone. I would pour honey in your hair while you slept. Or, you know, something like that.”

“That was you?” she asked, appalled.

She’d totally fallen for the open-window technique of throwing the victim off the trail of the true assailant. She thought Cindy Verdean did it for years. I was going to tell her the truth eventually, but after what she did to Cindy in retaliation, I changed my mind. Cindy’s eyelashes were never the same.

“Wait,” she said, “my battery’s gone. Did you take it?”

“Yes. Did you go out this evening?”

After another loud sigh, she said, “No. Yes. I went out for drinks with a colleague.”

“Did anyone bump into you? Drop something in front of—”

“Yes! Oh, my gosh, this man bumped into me, apologized, then about five minutes later, personally brought over a bottle of wine to make up for it. It was nothing. I mean, he barely touched me.”

“He took your phone, texted me from it, stole the battery, then put it back when he brought the wine over.” With Reyes’s circle of friends, I was hardly surprised a pickpocket was among them.

“I feel so violated.”

“About the phone or the honey?”

“You know that whole payback’s-a-bitch thing. Hey, you never called me back after your meeting with Reyes. How’d it go?”

“Oh, it went super.” I looked over at Uncle Bob, who sat waiting for a report. “Well, that explains that,” I said as I closed my phone midsentence.

“Charley, I’ve said this before, but I’m going to say it again. The man is a convicted murderer. If you’d seen what he did to his father…” He trailed off, shaking his bed head.

I decided to confide in him despite the state of his hair. “Uncle Bob, is it possible that the man in that trunk wasn’t Earl Walker?”

His brows slid together. “Is that what Farrow told you?”

“Is it possible?” I asked again.

Ubie lowered his head and turned the engine off to his SUV. “He’s like you, isn’t he?”

His question surprised me, and I wasn’t sure what to say, but I should have been expecting it. He’d seen Reyes’s body after the demons got a hold of him. He’d seen how fast he healed. The doctors were calling the fact that Reyes survived at all a miracle. And two weeks later, he’s walking around in gen-pop at the prison like nothing happened. I would have bet a large mocha Frappuccino Ubie was keeping tabs on Reyes. I would’ve been after what I saw.

“You have this uncanny ability to live through the most impossible situations,” he continued. “You heal faster than anyone I’ve ever seen. You move differently sometimes, almost like you’re not human.”

He’d been keeping track.

“I have to ask you something, and I want you to be totally honest.”

“Okay,” I said, a little worried. I was not at my best. I hadn’t had caffeine in like three hours. And he was definitely putting two and two together.

“Are you an angel?”

And coming up with twelve. “No,” I said with a chuckle. “Let’s just say, if I ended up in the lost-and-found bin at the airport, I don’t think the Big Guy upstairs would come down to claim me.”

“But you are different,” he said, his tone matter-of-fact.

“I am. And … yes, so is Reyes.”

A long sigh slipped through his lips. “He didn’t kill his father, did he?”

“First, Earl Walker is not his real father.”