“Wow, thank you, but aren’t you betraying your vows or something?”
“My vows are to our Heavenly Father and to the Church. They’re not to a file in the Vatican’s archives labeled ‘Charlotte Jean Davidson.’”
“They know my middle name? They’re really good.”
“They know quite a bit. I actually found much of it to be a little hard to swallow.” I nodded, but he pinned me with a knowing stare. “At first.”
“Oh, so you swallow the whole thing now?”
“I do, yes. And can I just say, it’s an honor to meet you.”
“You make me sound like a saint.”
“Not a saint. More like a warrior.”
My spine lengthened. “A warrior. I like it. But what exactly did you discover that set you on this path?”
“A different kind of possession.” His face softened. “I’m kind of a specialist.”
“Okay, I’ll bite, but first, would you like some coffee?” I pointed through the adjoining door to the Bunn. The one that was residing on a counter in my office. Not the one residing a tad southeast of my belly button. Because that would have been awkward.
He brightened. “Sure.”
Cool. I could live vicariously through a Catholic priest. A thought that rarely occurred to me, for obvious reasons. I stood, crossed over to my office and poured him a cup, then asked if he liked his coffee like I liked my Death Stars: gigantic, on the Dark Side, and powerful enough to destroy a planet.
He laughed softly. “A little cream is fine.”
“One coffee high coming up,” I said through the doorway. I loved diner lingo.
My body reacted to the scent, to the act of pouring the dark elixir, like a Chihuahua when face-to-face with a pit bull – by shaking uncontrollably. It was a Pavlovian response to java anytime I went longer than an hour or two without a sip, and it had now been almost seventeen hours since my last slug of joe. I couldn’t help but note that, for one reason or another, I’d been shaking for quite a while. Hopefully, it wouldn’t become a habit.
“Can you explain the different kinds of possessions, so we’re on the same page?” I asked, coming back and handing him the cup. Reluctantly.
“Absolutely.” He took a long, sensuous draw. Either that or I was projecting again. “The first is infiltration, which is a possession of a space.”
“Like the house in Poltergeist,” I offered, swallowing back my inner Chihuahua.
“Exactly. But with a little less drama.”
“Of course,” I said, pretending to be more knowledgeable than I actually was.
“Then you have oppression, which is where a demon is focused on one person.”
“Like a stalker, only less creepy.”
He chuckled. “Why not? The third kind is the most known, and that is possession itself, where a demon occupies a person.”
I nodded. “My very favorite flavor. So, which kind brought you here?”
“That would be infiltration.”
“Really? So there’s a possessed house somewhere in Albuquerque?”
“It would seem so. I have a young family who just bought their first home and is terrified to go inside it. They end up sleeping at relatives’ houses quite often.”
“That’s awful, and I’d love to help, but what does any of this have to do with me?”
He put the envelope on the coffee table stacked with magazines in front of us and fumbled through another inside pocket for his phone. After thumbing through a couple of menus, he passed the phone over to me. “Scroll through these, then ask me that again.” He wore a mischievous grin as I took the phone.
The first picture was hard to make out. “Is this a wall?” I asked.
“Probably. But there’s more.”
“Okay.” No idea what that was about. There were scratches on the wall, but the camera didn’t pick them up clearly. So I scrolled. The next one was of a doll. One of those lifeless dolls with dead eyes so often used in horror movies. It, too, had scratches in its plastic skin, but I couldn’t decipher what they were supposed to mean. I continued to do that for a few more images. Paper. A broken toy. A Lego construction worker. Another wall. Then a pattern started emerging. I finally saw a C. Sometimes an R or a Y. I went back to the beginning and started over, zooming in when I needed to, until I realized the scratches all said the same thing: Charley Davidson. Over and over. That couldn’t be good.
“So, you think this demon is trying to send you a message?” I asked, making light of an eerie situation. ’Cause that’s how I rolled.
Father Glenn raised a thick brow. “Can’t be certain. It sure seems to like you, though. An old flame, maybe?”
“Could be. I dated some doozies.” I handed his phone back. “Never took any of them for demons, though. Can you send those to me?”
“Sure.” He put his coffee cup on the coffee table and took one of my business cards to get my e-mail address off it.
I cringed. I’d recently run out of my current business cards and had to set out an older stash of them: my very first attempt at professionalism. Thankfully, when I’d hired Cookie, she talked me into getting new cards. But the one Father Glenn had just picked up said, CHARLEY DAVIDSON, PRIVATE INVESTIGATOR, BECAUSE NO ONE IS BETTER AT INVESTIGATING YOUR PRIVATES.
Yeah.
He arched that brow again but didn’t look up as he typed my address into his phone. In the meantime, my attention wandered to the Bunn of steel. So inviting. So seductive. The aroma wafting off it lured me like a caffeinated Casanova. Like Romeo below the balcony. Coffee by any other name —
“Ms. Davidson?”
I snapped back to the father.
“Are you okay?”
“I’m fine!” I yelled. No idea why.
He eased away from me.
I cleared my throat and tried again. “I’m fine. I just – I’m trying to quit caffeine.” When he raised that same brow, only this time questioningly, I explained. “Bun in the oven.”
“Ah.” He nodded. “Last time I had a bun in the oven, I had to give up whiskey. Worst twelve minutes of my life. Thank goodness those brown-and-serve rolls bake fast.”
I chuckled and stood as he pocketed his phone and rose to leave.
“When would be a good time for you to meet our guest?”
“I’m pretty open and very intrigued.”
“How about Friday morning. Around nine?”
“Perfect.” I wrote the appointment in my calendar, but only so I could rip the page out and tell Cookie not to let me forget.
He shook my hand, then started to leave.
“Oh, you left your envelope,” I said, picking it up to hand to him.
“No, that’s for you. Consider it a down payment.”
“Works for me.”
I opened it after he left. The thick envelope held about ten photocopied pages of what amounted to the file the Vatican had on me. They had pictures, dates of strange occurrences with which I’d been involved, a short description of what part the investigator believed I’d played in those strange occurrences, and his final thoughts, which always read, “‘Further investigation recommended.’”
Now, wasn’t that interesting.
5
Of course I’m an organ donor.
Who wouldn’t want a piece of this?
— T-SHIRT
I set Cookie to finding out everything she could on the missing suicide-note victims. There had to be a connection between them somewhere in their pasts. In the meantime, I would go talk to their closests, but first I needed to know if the victims were still alive. If they’d been abducted, this would quickly become a much different case. We would probably have to get the FBI involved, if they weren’t on to it already.
Reyes was still working, so I decided to cut out alone. I knew he’d freak. He wasn’t about to leave me alone for long, and neither would he put up with my running off without him, so I decided to pick up a passenger. Well, another passenger. The one I had at the moment would b
e of no help in a fight against hounds from hell, should they spot me in a crowd.
Jessica was harping again, this time about how her friends were at the restaurant, fawning over Reyes as though she had never died. She’d called dibs the moment she saw him, and they seemed almost relieved she was out of the way. I refrained from reminding her that (1) I’d had dibs long before that, and (2) she was as dead as the Twizzler I was gnawing on in an attempt to forget about my extreme caffeine depletion. Poor little Twizzler.
“She said that!” Jessica shouted. “Like, she said it. Right to Reyes’s face.”
“Wait, what?” I almost slammed on the brakes, then realized my foot was already on the brake, as we were idling at a stoplight. “Who said what to Reyes’s face?”
“Oh… my god. Have you heard a word I’ve said?”
“Not especially. Who said what?”
“She said she’d do anything, any… thing, for an interview.”
I turned to her. “Are you telling me you heard what Reyes and Jolene – I mean, that hooch – were talking about?”
“Duh. I was so upset with Joanie and the girls that I started to walk out when that – that ho practically assaulted our man.”
I’d just taken a sip of water, because Cookie had told me water would be good for the bun. Who would’ve guessed? I sucked in a quick gulp of air, sending water down the wrong pipe, at which point I sputtered and coughed until the car behind me honked. I honked back, then put the pedal to the custom Bugs Bunny floor mat and booked it to my on-ramp.
“First of all,” I said, my voice sounding like Dobby’s from Harry Potter, “you actually have a friend named Joanie?”
Ignoring me, she crossed her arms over her chest to pout.
“And second – ‘our’ man? Really?”
She shrugged one noncommittal shoulder. “I think he likes me.”
“It’s amazing you’re still single.”
“Right? I just have so much love to give. If I were still alive, Reyes would see that.”
“Yeah,” I said with a snort and another light bout of coughs, “and then he’d run in the opposite direction.”
“That’s so uncalled for.”
“Do you even remember how you treated me in high school? How you’ve treated me since? Why are you here? Why don’t you just… go… away?”
“You are the worst greeter in the history of greeters ever. In the history. Of time. And greeters.”
“Okay, what?”
“You heard me.” She turned to pout out the window this time.
“Greeter? You think I’m a greeter?” Talk about a demotion.
“Yes. To the other side?” She pointed up.
I whizzed around a little red Corvette to make my exit sometime this century, wondering why nobody paid me to drive professionally, because I kind of rocked at it.
“Dude, calling me a greeter is like calling Saint Peter a ticket taker.”
“Whatever. Where are we going?” she asked.
“Well, if you must know, I need to talk to a guy I know who may or may not be a demon.” I could ask my intended for the information I needed, but he was currently on my list of persons resembling and/or wallowing in fecal matter.
“I knew it!” she said, glaring at me. “You’re in league with the devil.”
“Duh. I’m affianced to him. Or, well, his son. I guess that makes me ‘in league’ with him, but you can’t judge people by their in-laws. In-laws are all crazy. Everyone knows that.”
She shrugged. “That’s true. My sister’s in-laws wrote the book on crazy.”
“Willa? Really? Who did she marry?”
“Oh, no you don’t.”
“What?” I said, taking an extremely sharp right just off the exit.
“You don’t get to change the subject like that. And you never even liked Willa.”
“Sure I did.” Where Jessica got the idea that I didn’t like her sister, I’d never know.
“You spit on her.”
Oh. Yeah. I did. Kind of. “I didn’t actually spit on her,” I said, taking another extremely sharp right followed by a left, just as sharp. It was odd how sharp those suckers got the faster I drove.
“You’re going to flip us over,” Jessica said in protest.
“Please, I so have this. And I spit on the ground in front of her. It was a gesture.”
“Of what? Hatred?”
“More like contempt, but yeah, at the time it was a little of both.”
“Why?”
I did the deadpan thing. “You have a very selective memory.” The last thing I was going to do was remind my ex-BFF that I’d spit at her sister’s feet only after I dragged said sister off her when Willa had attacked like a berserker craving the taste of blood. And all over a pair of socks Jessica borrowed without asking.
Lesson learned: Never borrow socks. From anyone. Ever.
We were almost at our destination when I began to get worried about Reyes. If he didn’t detect me out and about, he’d never know I left the place without him. As far as he was concerned, I was up in my office, eating.
In an act of desperation, I summoned Angel – a thirteen-year-old gang kid who’d died in the ’90s – my best investigator. But he’d been AWOL for a couple of weeks. Ever since I found out he wasn’t exactly who he said he was. From the first time we’d met, he told me all about his family, how his mother was a hairdresser and had a shop with his aunt. He told me about his nieces and nephews, his uncles and cousins. And it had all been a lie. He’d been posing as his best friend, the one who’d died the same fateful night he did, and pretending his friend’s mother, along with her entire family, was his.
Who could blame him? He’d come from nothing. Grew up with nothing. Unfortunately, he thought that just being Angel – the precious boy I’d grown to love the way someone who’s grown numb to the pain of tattoos learns to love them – wasn’t enough. As though he could ever fall short in my eyes. He could be a royal pain in my donk, but he was family.
So, I understood why he did what he did. Deep down, he knew that – but he was embarrassed nonetheless and hadn’t come around for a while. I was trying not to force the issue, but I needed advice. And grim reaper info.
He popped into the backseat, one foot on the hump thing in the middle of the floorboard, an elbow propped onto his knee as he, too, stared out the window to pout. I had a lot of pouters today. I really wanted to say, A pouter’s a doubter, but couldn’t think of how it applied to this situation.
“Hey, mister,” I said, hoping to brighten the somber mood.
“Who’s the babe?” he asked without looking at me or Jessica.
She turned around, fuming with a spark of indignity until she spotted him. He had his usual bandanna headband worn low over his brow with a smattering of peach fuzz along his young jaw. He’d been on the verge of becoming a man. No, he’d become a man the night he stopped his best friend from firing into the house of a rival gang member by crashing the car they were in and killing them both.
Jessica chilled instantly. “That’s rude,” she said, facing front again.
“Sorry.”
“You haven’t been around much,” I said, looking at him in the rearview. “No complaints about how you were in the middle of one of your nieces’ birthday parties or at a quinceañera when I summoned you?”
“You know they aren’t my family.”
I pulled Misery over, even though we were only a couple of blocks from our destination. Turning in my seat, I nailed him with my best nurturing glower. “Angel, you heard what Mrs. Garza said. You were like a son to her, and she welcomed you into her life with open arms.”
And she had. Mrs. Garza, who’d been hoping the presence she was feeling was her son, was not terribly disappointed when it turned out to be her son’s best friend. She’d loved Angel. I could tell. But getting him to face that fact now could be difficult. Stubborn little shit.
He scoffed softly, pulled in his lower lip, and studied the pattern
on Misery’s seat cushion.
I reached back and took his chin into my hand. “Angel.”
“That’s not my real name.”
“Yes, sweetheart, it is. It’s your middle name and the name you went by before you passed away.” I was stroking the fuzz around his mouth with my thumb. “Look at me,” I said softly.
He did, but quite reluctantly, his deep brown gaze settling on mine.
“This changes nothing. I still adore you. You’re still the best investigator I have.”
“I’m the only investigator you have.”
“That doesn’t lessen your importance.”
“Can I see you naked, then?” he asked, his gaze traveling south of the border, aka my neckline.
“Up here, buddy,” I said, pointing two fingers at my face. “And no.”
“It would make me feel better.”
“Is he always this frisky?” Jessica asked.
His gaze found hers again. He gestured a greeting with a nod and a saucy wink. I tried not to giggle.
“I summoned you for a reason, you know,” I said, drawing him back to me.
“Okay, who am I following now?”
“I just need information. Can I block Reyes from feeling my emotions?”
“I keep telling you, pendeja, you can do anything you want to.” He glanced back at Jessica. “She’s loca, yeah?”
I fought my eyes’ natural urge to roll back into my head. “Yes, but how? How do I do something like that?”
“You just speak it. Remember when you bound Rey’aziel to his body so he couldn’t leave it and, like, float around and shit?”
“Yeah, but that was, I don’t know, in the heat of the moment. I was desperate.”
“Then get desperate. Just do it.”
“Just do it.” I nodded and shut my lids to concentrate. “Okay. Just do it.”
“Just say the word.”
That was easy for him to say. Which word? I had several thousand to choose from. But what exactly did I want to accomplish? I wanted to hide my feelings. My emotions. At the moment, I didn’t want Reyes to know I’d left without him. But it was more than that. I didn’t want him to feel it every time my insides turned to mush around him. Or every time I felt a streak of jealousy slice through the chambers and antechambers of my heart – a very new sensation for me. I’d never been the jealous type, but today with that newswoman, I bordered on stalker with a heaping side of lunatic. And that made me weak. I didn’t want Reyes to see me as weak. I could be strong. I could take anything he threw at me.