Coyote Dreams

CHAPTER 14

I wish I could say I went boldly forth with a plan in mind, but what I really did was go to the locker room and change into my regular clothes. I wasn’t going to be doing police work, and although the heat wave had broken, it was still in the eighties. Jeans and a T-shirt sounded a lot more pleasant for tromping around in than my uniform. I went out into the July morning with my head down and my eyes squinted against sunlight bouncing off the asphalt. Such diligent concentration on my feet led me over to Petite, and to a bright, semifamiliar voice saying, “Officer Walker. You don’t look like you’re on shift.”

I felt distinctly deer-in-headlights as I looked up to see Laura Corvallis perched in the open sliding door of her news van, a gotcha smile pasted across her face. It took everything I had not to break into a panicked run back toward the precinct building. “Ms. Corvallis. I thought you’d be at the studio getting your tape ready.”

“Oh, we don’t air until six. I’m looking for some human interest sides of the Blue Flu story. Captain Morrison’s got a real knack for looking handsome and not answering questions.”

I let out a little breath of laughter. “Yeah.” Crap. That was a bad confession to make. I didn’t want to build any sort of camaraderie with a news reporter. I bit my tongue so I couldn’t say anything else, unbit it and added, “That’s his job,” which I hoped would mitigate my agreement that my boss was handsome, and dug Petite’s keys out of my pocket.

“So I thought you had to go to work,” Corvallis said. “Don’t tell me you’ve got the day off, with a quarter of the workforce out.” Her voice was full of polite curiosity, but I glanced up through my eyebrows as I unlocked Petite’s door, and saw the dark glitter of a hungry hunter in her gaze.

“Ms. Corvallis, that sounds like a good idea. I won’t tell you anything.” I smiled, winked and got into Petite before she had time for a rebuttal. Cranking the engine made a satisfying lot of noise that drowned out any chance of me hearing her follow-up, and I pulled out of the parking lot feeling like I’d gotten a reprieve. Morrison had given me rope to hang myself with. I wasn’t eager to use it explaining why I’d ended up on the evening news babbling about Laura Corvallis’s poorly named Blue Flu.

About three blocks farther on I realized the news van was following me.

I pulled into a drive-thru, mostly to waste a few minutes and see if the van was actually following me. I emerged from the other side with a burger I didn’t really want and a bag of fries that would kick off a month-long craving for more if I gave into their evil seductive ways. The Channel Two van was waiting in the parking lot, so I pulled up alongside it and rolled down my window. “Want a burger?”

Corvallis was in the passenger seat, grinning at me. “No, thanks.”

“Hey! Yeah, if you’re giving it up!” The cameraman-cum-driver leaned across her, looking eager. I handed the food over, figuring the best way to a man’s heart was through his stomach, and I might need a friend on the news team if Corvallis was going to insist on following me.

I was trying not to think too hard about a reporter following me. I barely had any idea what I was going to do even without a monkey wrench in the works, and the only thing I could think of that would make it worse was broadcasting my bizarre talents on local TV. In the best-case scenario, nobody would believe her. In the worst, they would, and I’d be like Christ in the temple.

Which was not to say I was Christ-like in any way. Gah. I put on the nicest smile I could, trying to rid myself of the thought. “Are you following me, Ms. Corvallis?”

“As a matter of fact, I am.”

Outright honesty had not been the response I was expecting. I blinked up at the woman. “Why?”

“It strikes me you’ve been involved in some interesting events the past few months.” She smiled at me. I didn’t like it, and did my best blank expression. It usually worked to irritate and distract Morrison.

It didn’t work on Laurie Corvallis. “An officer—not a detective, just an officer—at the Blanchet High murder scene. Immediately after that you were on the list of approved visitors for Henrietta Potter. Mrs. Potter died quite violently, didn’t she?”

A bolt of cold loss shot right through the flutter of power behind my breastbone, making bile rise up in my stomach. For an instant I was desperately grateful I hadn’t eaten the food I’d bought, or I’d be revisiting Erik’s early-morning sickness right there in my car. The smell of vomit lingered in leather forever, too. I shuddered the feeling away, knowing Corvallis was watching my reaction with professional interest. I’d barely known Henrietta Potter, but I’d liked her enormously. Her sudden, violent death had shocked me to the core. “Yeah,” I managed. “She did.”

“Then your name came up during the police investigation of Faye Kirkland’s death,” Corvallis went on conversationally. I inhaled through my nose, long slow breath.

“That was weeks ago. Why are you following me now?”

“Well, the third time’s the charm, Officer Walker. I see you going into the precinct building, saying you’re on your way to work on a day when a quarter of the North Precinct police force has been admitted to the hospital, and half an hour later you’re walking out, still in civilian clothes and getting in your—” she broke off to consider Petite briefly, then gave me a quick grin “—shiny Mustang.” The smile faded into something more predatory. “And I start putting all these little strange things together, and I start to think maybe I have a story here.”

Nausea kept burning in my belly, churning up until it felt as if it was encouraging my heartbeat to rattle too fast. My fingertips were cold and my cheeks were hot, physical reactions to what I thought was best referred to as blind, screaming panic. I wanted Laurie Corvallis to go away, far away, from my weird little life, and to never come near me again.

Saying that, of course, would pretty much guarantee she’d be on my back like black on night. I gave her a rueful little smile that I hoped hid the ninety-mile-an-hour pulse in my throat, and managed to keep my voice steady as I said, “Ms. Corvallis, if you really want to investigate me, I can’t stop you, but you’re going to be disappointed. I’m not a very interesting person. As for being at work, I have some personal things to take care of today. I just needed to stop by the station to talk to a couple of people.” I wasn’t a very good liar, and hoped that was close enough to the truth to hide it.

Interest glittered in the reporter’s eyes. “And you weren’t pressed into service, given the situation?”

I tipped my chin down and looked up at her through my eyebrows. “A lot of people are out on sick leave, Ms. Corvallis, but we usually do get paid for sick leave. The department doesn’t have a lot of money for overtime. Sorry to disappoint you.”

Corvallis pursed her lips, looking as though she was in fact disappointed. “You’re lying to me, Officer Walker. You said you had to get to work, when we spoke in the parking lot.”

I stared at her. First, how she remembered exactly what I said was beyond me. Second, “Do people typically say, ’Please excuse me, but I’ve got to run inside and talk to a couple of people before I leave and go about my day’ to you when they’re heading into their work building, Ms. Corvallis?” Sure, I was lying now, but now I had a moral high horse that made it easier.

“People often find being very specific in what they say to a news reporter is a good idea.”

“I’ll keep that in mind,” I said in genuine, pointed incredulity. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, Ms. Corvallis, I’ve got some personal business to take care of.” I clipped the words off and she smiled at me.

“I hope you’re telling me the truth, Officer Walker. I’ll find out if you’re not.”

“I’m sure you will.” I bared my teeth at her, which was as close as I could get to a smile, waved goodbye at the driver, who lifted the half-eaten burger in salutation, and backed out of the parking lot to drive home with shaking hands.

Wednesday, July 6, 2:20 p.m.

By the time I got there I at least had a plan. I had no illusions that it was a good plan, but at least it was a plan, and that was better than sitting around with fast-food coffee going sour in my stomach, worrying about Billy and Mel and a whole lot of other friends. I turned my computer on and prayed the gods of the Internet would have some answers for me.

They didn’t. Mystical sleeping sicknesses and the Net turned out to have little in common, although I did learn more than I ever wanted to know about African trypanosomiasis. The only references that covered both sleeping sicknesses and mysticism were stories about African evil spirits who’d turned into the mosquitoes that carried the disease. It was a long shot, especially since there just weren’t that many mosquitoes in downtown Seattle parks. On the other hand, these evil spirits were evidently sensitive to topaz, so if I got really desperate I could always start collecting topaz and hand it out to people.

Actually, that didn’t sound like a bad idea, which in and of itself made me wince. I hoped I wasn’t going to turn into one of those New Agers with the frizzy hair and the gypsy skirts. I punched in a search on topaz’s inherent qualities and came up with an Indian—the subcontinent, not the Native Americans—belief that it helped bring good dreams and peaceful sleep. Between that and the evil spirits, handing out chunks of it sounded like an actively good idea. I couldn’t believe I’d fallen so far, and at the same time I was incredibly relieved to come across something that might help.

I took a deep breath, accepted my doom and Googled “magic sleep,” which turned out to be just the ticket for a Dungeons & Dragons cleric in search of spell statistics. I put my forehead down on the keyboard, depressing keys until they started a long painful beep.

The sound was enough to send me shoving away from my desk purposefully, gripped with the determination to do something, even if it was stupid. I drove Petite down to East Asian Imports, the incense-filled shop I’d met Faye Kirkland at only three weeks earlier, and bought every piece of topaz they had. Half an hour later, my pockets full of rocks, I marched into the precinct building, a woman on a mission.

Morrison was the first stop on my mission, and he wasn’t there. That took the wind out of my ambition and I stood there staring at his desk for a while, relief warring with disappointment. He was the hardest person to talk to, so I wanted to get it over with. On the other hand, more sympathetic ears might make it easier to work my way up to him. I went back to Missing Persons, a flawed piece of stone clutched in my hand.

I didn’t like the Missing Persons office. It always seemed cold, even in July, and the door stuck, making a draft that riffled all tidy rows of photographs and vital statistics that lined the walls. I thought it sounded like the lost whispering for help, and found it overwhelmingly depressing. Homicide was bad, with all its raw violence floating at the surface, but Missing Persons was worse. It had the tang of hope sullied by desolation, the knowledge that every day a case wasn’t closed meant it was that much less likely there would ever be a happy ending. Murder was concrete; it made an end to things. Hope could hang on like a bitch.

“You always get that look when you come in here.” Jen Gonzales, the woman I was in search of, came out from one of the inner offices, offering her hand to shake. I put mine in it automatically, her fingers startlingly warm in the perceived chill of the office.

“Hi, Jen. What look?”

“Makes your eyes sad, and no offense, Joanie, but a lot of the time you don’t have the happiest eyes, anyway.” Jen had a faint Spanish accent and always shook hands when people came into her office. It’d finally struck me that doing so might give her a better sense of the people she was meeting, and their emotional state, than anything else could. The one time I’d asked she’d brushed it off.

But she’d been one of the people who had known how to focus her energy and offer it up like she’d been trained in it when I’d faced down Cernunnos in the precinct’s garage. I rubbed my thumb over the topaz, watching it more than her. “This sleeping thing,” I said after a minute. “It’s not a virus or anything. It’s…” I gritted my teeth and scowled at Jen’s knees, working myself up to what I needed to say. “You’ve got the same kind of talent Billy does, the ability to focus your energy.”

I dared a glance through my eyebrows to find Jen ghosting a smile at me. My shoulders relaxed marginally and I sighed. “Yeah. This thing hit Billy first, and then Mel before it started spreading like wildfire. I don’t know what this morning’s explosion’s about, but I think it might be a good idea for people who’ve linked up with me to keep their heads down, if they’re still awake.” I presented the piece of topaz, my hand palm-up. “The only thing I’ve been able to find so far that might help is topaz. It’s supposed to be protection against non-viral sleeping sicknesses.”

That was playing fast and loose with the truth on a lot of levels, but Jen probably didn’t need to know about the evil African spirits, and it was a lot easier to say “non-viral” than “mystical.” Even as I said it I felt like I was trying to cheat my way out of admitting what was going on. I wondered if it’d ever be easy for me to admit, “Yeah, it’s magical in origin,” and didn’t know if it’d be better or worse if it was easy. I lifted my hand a little, offering Jen the topaz. “I don’t know if it’ll help, but you might want to hang on to this.”

Jen picked the stone up without touching my skin, lifting it to examine its clarity. There wasn’t much; smoke and scars filled the golden stone, which was the only reason I’d been able to afford a box of the stuff. As far as semiprecious jewels went, topaz wasn’t expensive, but gem-quality rocks would’ve put me back more credit than I had. Just watching her fold it into her pocket made me feel a little better. The stones had only been in my possession a few minutes, but I really wanted them to offer some protection, and maybe that in itself would do some good. So, I thought, would the bearer believing in its power.

The bearer. God. All the people I’d mocked for getting weird with language when they got into otherworldly stuff deserved an apology. It really did do something to the brain, because now I was doing it.

“Let me know if I can help at all,” Jen said. Her hand was still in her pocket, making a bump in her pants where her fingers were curled around the stone. I ducked my head in a nod and backed toward the door, then stopped in it to look at her.

“Look, Jen, if this thing starts sniffing around you, don’t throw anything at it, okay? It siphons off life force. Just make yourself as quiet as you can.”

Jen gave me a quick smile. “You’re getting good at this, Joanie. That sounded like you knew what you were talking about.” She lifted her chin, ushering me out. “Get going. You’re letting the draft in.”

Almost nobody was as cool with my little weird gifts of topaz as Jen had been. I found myself saying things like, “I thought this might make a cool good-luck stone for you,” to almost everybody who’d helped me back in January. I don’t think most of them wanted to know why I was handing out good-luck stones. People preferred to forget the bizarre things I’d done. On the other hand, with a noticeable number of coworkers out of the office, nobody said no. They just didn’t quite look at me when I handed over the stones. I couldn’t exactly blame them, but I was starting to have an inkling of what it would feel like when I was actually good at being a shaman, and the rest of the world refused to see what was going on around them.

I plodded down to the garage, not really wanting to enter what I’d once considered my haven in the station. I’d seen the roster. I knew how many people from the shop were out sick. I came around the corner at the base of the stairs watching my feet, and nearly crashed into Thor. For once I darted to the left and he held still, so it didn’t turn into a dance of trying to circumvent each other. I even managed a faint smile, then blurted, “Hey, Thor, uh, I mean, dammit, Ed. Edward!” to his shoulders as he started up the stairs.

He turned and looked back at me with a curious expression. “You weren’t in my dream,” I said, more to myself than to him, and his eyes went even more curious. “Guess you wouldn’t have been,” I mumbled. “I mean, it was my job.” I was making sense to me, anyway. “Never mind.” I followed him up the stairs a couple of steps and offered a piece of topaz. “Hang on to this, would you? It’s kind of a…” To my surprise, I found I didn’t want to prevaricate. “A protective charm.”

His golden eyebrows rose. “You serious?”

“Yeah.” I managed another little smile. “I don’t know how good it is, but there’s some kind of weird stuff going on, and it might be a good idea to have it.”

He shifted his shoulders uncomfortably. “You and weird go together like beer and pizza, you know that?”

My smile faltered, not that it was very good to begin with. “You noticed, huh?”

“Yeah. Kinda hard to miss, really. The guys down here—” He broke off with the look of someone realizing he was about to betray ranks. I turned my face away, mouth twisting.

“Yeah. I know. Good old Joanie used to be awesome. The Girl Mechanic, kind of like the garage mascot, until she got screwy in the head. Trust me, I know what they say, and I know how half of them don’t like talking to me anymore, and—” It was my turn to break off and take a deep breath. “It doesn’t matter. Anyway, you want this or not?” I hefted the little stone, looking back at my big blond nemesis. I’d just decided he was going to say no and was thinking about putting it in his locker when he reached out and plucked it from my hand.

“What the hell. Anybody who can drink as much whiskey as you did the other day and look as good a night later is okay in my book.” He lifted the piece of topaz with a quick smile and stuck it in his pocket as he turned away and went upstairs.

Not that Morrison had any reason to avoid me, but a fruitless search of the station didn’t turn him up, and I left feeling vaguely out of sorts. I was supposed to avoid him, not the other way around. It was the whole pulling-rank thing. I’d ended up leaving one of the pieces of topaz on his desk with a note that said, “Put this in your pocket” and no signature. I couldn’t decide if my name on it would have made him more or less likely to do as I asked.

Okay, ordered. No wonder I didn’t date much. I had the social skills of a laboratory gorilla.

My next stop was the Ravenna area east of the university. Scraping up my nerve to get out of the car at the ranch-style house I pulled up at was harder than I wanted to admit to. Giving Morrison a topaz talisman face-to-face would’ve been easier than knocking on the door. The house emanated sorrow, old grief mixed with fresh. It didn’t take any particular skill to pick that up. I’d been there barely ten days earlier for the gathering after a funeral.

The young man who opened the door had lost weight since I’d seen him last, his sandy hair grown a little too long and flopping into his eyes. He wasn’t surprised to see me, but he wasn’t happy, either. He leaned heavily on the doorknob, making it clear he was a barrier between me and entering the house. “Joanne.”

“Garth.” I offered a little smile, then pulled my lower lip into my mouth. “How’re you doing?”

His gaze skittered away from me, the shoulder his weight wasn’t on twitching upward in a shrug that was supposed to be dismissive. “Okay. Dunno if Dad said thanks for coming to the funeral, so…” Another twitched shrug. “Thanks.”

“He did.” My voice was hardly a whisper, the smile I tried for weak and unhappy. “It was the least I could do.”

Garth’s gaze flickered back to me, and I saw him swallow the words: yeah. It was. His brother had died because of mistakes I’d made, and I deserved the rejoinder. That he didn’t make it was a lot more than I’d earned. “So what do you want?”

“I don’t know if you’re still part of the coven,” I began. Garth cut me off with a slice of his hand and a harsh sound.

“Yeah, you know, what with everything that went down, between Colin and Faye, the coven kind of decided to take a step back. I’m out of it. That kind of shit doesn’t do anybody any good.” Bile filled his words, the bitterness of a true believer who’d seen his god’s feet of clay. While I would have shared his sentiment not very long ago, it left me with a hollow feeling where I was accustomed to my power being settled.

“I’m sorry to hear that.” My throat had gone all scratchy and my eyes stung with disappointment that struck me as inexplicable, even if it wasn’t really. “You had some real power. Look, I just came by to offer you this.” I took one of the topaz stones from my pocket and held it out. “It’s kind of a good-luck charm. I thought maybe…”

“No. Thanks.” The second word was perfunctory, thrust at me like a weapon. “I don’t want anything else to do with magic or spells or any of that crap.” Garth moved out of the door as he spoke, retreating and rejecting. “Maybe I’ll see you around.”

I let the topaz fall from my fingers into the lawn as I walked away, a host of regrets at my back.