“If our dates are going to include your uncle and your best friend, then yeah.”
I laughed out loud, and asked, “Okay, why are you really here?”
“Just keeping an eye on you.”
“Reyes, you can’t babysit me forever.”
“Would you like to bet on that?”
“I mean, you have a life. I have a life. We both have lives.”
He glanced toward the man in the seat beside me. It was just a glance, nothing more. But the man stood immediately, excusing himself. Reyes sat down and pulled me closer to him, leaning in like we were lovers having a flirtatious conversation. But what he said next was anything but flirtatious. “Have I explained fully what the Twelve is?”
“Yes. They’re mean, horrible beasts who want to eat me for breakfast.”
“Wrong,” he said. “I want to eat you for breakfast. They want to rip you apart and hand your soul over to my father on a silver platter.”
“I don’t get it. If your father imprisoned them, why would they want to do him any favors?”
“They’re the Twelve. There is no understanding them.”
He’d rested his hand on the bar. As I leaned toward him, he let his fingers brush across Danger’s nipple. She sprang to life, pushing against the restraint of my blouse, craving more of his touch. I couldn’t blame her.
“We have an audience.”
When his words sank in, I finally realized that we did indeed have an audience. Half the room was staring at us. I started to lean back when Reyes said, “Not them.”
He nodded toward Uncle Bob.
I turned to him. “Oh, sorry, we were just talking about how lovely this rain is.”
“I bet.” His disposition had changed. It was weird. He looked over at Cookie and her date, and instead of anger and jealousy, there was just anger. And some of it seemed directed at me.
“So, about Brinkman and his cars.”
“Yeah, it seems that his dealership is a front to launder money. He runs way more through it than he sells, but he hides that by duplicating titles.”
“And they are just finding this out? What does that mean?”
“What that means is that if they can get him for that, they may not need Emily Michaels to testify against him. Agent Carson is working toward that goal.”
“You’re working with her?”
“More like consulting. We have a plan. Maybe you could help?”
“I am so there.”
He nodded, but his anger was still present, simmering just under his curmudgeonly surface. “Are you okay, Uncle Bob?”
He looked pointedly at Cookie. “I’m fine. I have to get to a meeting.”
When he left, I turned back to Cookie and shrugged. She shrugged back at me, thanked her date, and nodded toward the back door, indicating she was headed home. I followed her out, my shoes still squishy.
“Your uncle seemed upset,” she said when I caught up to her.
“He did, didn’t he? Oddly upset, but in the wrong way.”
We passed the alley where Reyes’s muscle car had been only a little while earlier. I wondered where he was keeping her parked. Any man who would risk his paint job for the feel of a woman was a winner in my book. I decided to check on him before hitting the sack.
The next thing I remembered was Reyes smiling down at me as the sun filtered into his apartment, his hair mussed, his lids hooded with the thick remnants of sleep. I stretched as those three little words that every girl longs to hear slipped from his mouth with effortless ease. As though they did it every day. As though they didn’t mean the world to me.
With one corner of his mouth tipping sensually, he asked, “Want some coffee?”
And I fell.
I fell hard.
15
The most important thing is to not be on fire.
Ask someone who is on fire, and they will tell you
that the most important thing is to not be on fire.
— TRUE FACT
The first thing on my agenda, besides finding out who trashed my place, was to confront Captain Kangaroo. Oh, and I had to get ahold of Garrett and set up a meet with the Dealer so they could do their homework together. They were taking Vague Prophecies and Muddy Supernatural Innuendos 101, but that class didn’t really get interesting until the second semester in VPMSI 102.
Now that my mind was on the subject, I’d never managed to figure out where Garrett found the knife. He said his acquisition of the dagger wasn’t one of his finer moments. That could’ve meant anything from a museum heist to an illegal excavation of a dig in Romania to a con to swindle it out of an elderly investor.
Or maybe he stole it from a temple. Of doom! That would be cool.
His vagueness only made me all the more curious. Like he didn’t know that would happen. The butt. I wanted so very much to ask him about his family, too. Another area he’d been very vague about. According to the research Cook and I had done behind his back, his great-grandmother was a true voodoo princess, quite a renowned one. She was born in New Orleans and practiced her art openly to become one of the most famous voodoo priestesses in history.
Our research uncovered the fact that his grandmother’s gift was passed down to an aunt of Garrett’s and possibly his sister. A sister! It was hard to imagine Garrett with a sister. Still, I wondered if a little of that gift hadn’t been passed on to him. He was such a skilled tracker. His methods often went beyond the average interviews and Internet searches. He seemed to have a sixth sense where his job was concerned. Something a voodoo prince might possess, as it were.
He didn’t talk about his family much, but that didn’t stop me from finding out about them. Honestly, he couldn’t tell me something like some of his family was sensitive to otherworldly occurrences and expect me not to follow up on that. Seriously? Did he not know me at all?
When I arrived at the police station, I was told the captain was in a meeting and that I would have to wait in the lobby. Fine. I could wait him out. If I had to sit there all day, I was not leaving this station until I knew what the captain was up to.
I dived into my bag and fished out my phone so I could at least do something semi-productive while I waited. After I found my favorite icon, I waited for Bejeweled to load and proceeded to kick some sparkling ass.
A voice filtered toward me through my mesmerizing grid of jewels.
“Your aura is very bright.”
I glanced up at the woman sitting across from me. She looked normal enough, with short blond hair and sensible shoes, but most people who mentioned auras weren’t that normal.
“Thanks,” I said, going back to my game.
“I’ve never seen anything like it,” she continued, despite my super big hint that would suggest she not.
“Really? That’s weird.”
“Actually,” she said, “I know who you are. We’re a lot alike. I’m here to help them with a case, too.”
I nodded.
“What I mean to say is, I know you’re psychic.”
I finally paused the game and asked, “Are you punking me?”
“No, that’s what I’m trying to tell you. I’m psychic, too.”
“Is Pari punking me?”
She pulled her bag closer to her chest. “No.”
“Is Cookie punking me? It’s not in her nature to punk, but I find everyone has a little bit of punk buried deep down inside them.”
“No.”
“Is Swopes punking me?”
“No, I actually am a psychic.”
“Is —?”
“No!” she said, her voice echoing throughout the room A nice couple who looked like they’d done one too many hits of methamphetamines looked over at us. She lowered her voice to a hissy whisper. “Nobody’s punking you!”
“Gah, testy.”
She loosened her hold on her bag and smoothed her pants with one hand. “I just thought maybe we could work together sometime. We both provide a service for law enforcement. Like the cas
e they called me in for. We could team up and solve it together.”
I decided to fess up, to give her a chance to come clean or suffer the consequences. “Look, I know who you are, too, Ms. Jakes. I’ve seen your show.” Wynona Jakes was getting very rich off her abilities, and it made my skin crawl every time I thought about it.
“You’ve seen my show?” she asked, brightening.
“Sure have. You’re what I like to call a con artist, a person with a natural talent for reading people coupled with some fairly good acting skills.”
“Well,” she said, straightening in her seat to show me how appalled she was, “I thought you of all people would understand what it’s like to be accused of deception when our gifts are very real.”
“I know exactly. And I’m certain you don’t. I’ve seen what happens when your ‘predictions’ —” I added air quotes to emphasize the euphemism. “— don’t pan out. I saw a young couple lose their home because they believed you when you told them to invest everything they had in their crazy uncle’s pilot project.”
“That was hardly —”
“And I saw a mother praise you because you said her son, who’d been in a motorcycle accident and was in a coma at the hospital, was going to pull through.” I leaned forward and looked her square in the eye. “He died while she was at the studio listening to your garbage. Do you know what that did to her? The guilt she felt? The shame and devastation?”
She turned away from me, the remnants of her outrage rolling out of her like a summer heat.
“Look,” I said, trying not to feel guilty for calling her on what boiled down to fraud, “I get it. You’re looking for a book deal. To each his own. I’d be angrier if you were legit and using your gifts immorally, but in answer to your question, no, I won’t team – Wait. Did you say they called you in to help on a case?”
“Yes.” She raised her chin and smirked. “A Detective Davidson called me. He said he saw my show and wanted to consult with me on a missing persons case.”
“Detective Dav —?”
“Ms. Jakes?” the desk sergeant said before I could sputter out the rest of Uncle Bob’s title.
She rose. “Yes.”
“Detective Davidson will see you now.”
My jaw dropped to the floor. The desk clerk pointed the way to Ubie’s office just as my backstabbing uncle stepped out to wait for her. He shook her hand when she got to him, then placed his other hand at the small of her back and led her inside.
I was jealous for me and for Cookie. Mostly for Cookie. He was always too nervous or too reserved to do something like that to her. And he’d called this woman in on a case? A charlatan?
Not on my watch. I stood to go prove to Uncle Bob she was nothing more than a fraud when the captain stepped out of the conference room and saw me. He motioned me to his office. After a longing glance toward Ubie, I swallowed hard and followed the captain into his man cave. And what a manly man cave it was. Awards and certifications littered his walls and counterspace, along with files and stacks of paperwork.
“Are you feeling better?” he asked.
“Not so much.”
“That’s too bad.” He sat behind his desk. “Because you are about to feel a lot worse.”
He gestured for me to sit in the vinyl chair across from him. I didn’t. “I want to know why you are having me followed, who those people were, and what you plan to do with those pictures.”
A grimness thinned his lips, like he was about to deliver some very bad news. He stood, retrieved an envelope from his top file drawer, pulled out a stack of photos, and tossed one onto his desk for my inspection.
It was a candid shot of me making what looked like a drug deal outside my apartment building. The photographer made sure to capture the vagrant looking over his shoulder as though watching for a cop as he handed me over something unidentifiable. At the same time, I handed him a few bills, which was very identifiable.
“That’s Chris Levine, a known associate of a man they call Chewbacca, one of the biggest meth dealers in the city.” He tossed another picture down. In it, I was in Misery passing a homeless man a couple of dollars through the window. He was the one who’d handed me the old plastic flower, but that wasn’t in the shot. Naturally. “And that’s Oscar Fuentes. His arrest record is as long as my left leg and reads like a pulp fiction novel. He owed me a favor.” He tossed another one. In this one, I was just getting out of Misery and, once again, handing a man a few bills. I try to be nice, and look what happens. “That’s —”
“I get it,” I said, holding up my hand to stop the tour. “I’ve never bought drugs in my life, and you know it.”
“Sure you have.” A smile that reminded me of sloe gin spread across his face. “And I have the evidence to prove it. Who do you think they’ll believe?”
“All they have to do is test me. I’ll test Pine-Sol clean, bitch.” I was being backed into a corner and did not like it there.
The edges of his mouth twitched. “Oh, I’m very aware of your drug-free existence. I just need insurance.”
“For what?”
“Your silence.”
“You couldn’t just ask? You have to blackmail me?”
“For this I do.”
“That’s so very wrong.”
“True, but just remember what I have on you when I explain my… situation. If I go to prison, you go to prison. I’m just making sure we both have a very good reason to keep quiet.”
“You have my complete attention, Captain,” I said, a cautious anger simmering beneath the surface. “What do you want?”
“I’m not a good person,” he said, seeming to regret that fact.
“Ya think?”
“When I was a kid, my oldest sister was raped by a boy from her school. She was intellectually challenged and he took advantage of that. He was a popular kid, very well liked, from an affluent family. All the things that would allow him to get away scot-free.”
“So he got away with it.”
“For a while. But I’ll get to that. After she accused him of sexually assaulting her, it became a big thing in my hometown. I was from a small suburb near Chicago. Nobody believed her, because why would a kid like that need to rape a handicapped girl? When he could have anyone? The town turned against us. The school turned against her, and what was a little teasing here and there became full-on everyday bullying.”
I could feel the heartache that caused him. I didn’t want to. I didn’t want to have an ounce of empathy for a man who would set me up so frivolously, so I fought it. I buried it under a mountain of resentment.
“A few weeks later, she couldn’t take the bullying anymore and killed herself.”
That time, a wave of guilt hit me. It had a smooth, pure texture. Zero conflict. Zero doubt. He felt responsible for his sister’s death. In a word, he hated himself, and I realized that had been the odd emotion I felt every time I met him. I just figured he hated me. I got that a lot. But his feelings were directed solely toward himself. That was new. In general, people can’t handle guilt. Their minds won’t let them for very long. So they make up excuses. Excuses work like a salve, allaying the guilt, letting you forget the real problem. For example, every time an abusive husband says something like, “You made me hit you,” he’s twisting the guilt – she didn’t have dinner on the table, so hitting her was surely his wife’s fault.
“It tore my family apart,” he continued, standing to stare out his window. “My parents split up. My mother sank into a depression. I rarely saw my dad. Within six months, my world had been turned inside out.”
“I’m so sorry, Captain.”
He turned back to me. “It gets better. And this is the part you need to keep very, very quiet.”
“Or you’ll burn me.”
“I’ll bury you. You will spend years behind bars.”
Just when I was beginning to sympathize with him. “How about you stop with the threats and get on with this?”
He walked over and le
aned against the desk in front of me, towering over me, making sure I knew he was top dog. After studying my face – my perturbed face – a solid minute, he said, “I was seven when I hunted that kid down and killed him.”
I stilled. He was confessing a murder to me. That was there in the back of my mind, but even more salient was the fact that he was only seven when he did it.
“Did you know that they rarely suspect a seven-year-old of murder? I wasn’t even questioned.”
The shock I felt surely showed on my face. As I’d demonstrated many times in my life, my poker face was virtually nonexistent. But my fight-or-flight response was top notch. He’d just confessed to murder. I wasn’t going to make it out of that room alive. I couldn’t help a glance toward the door.
“No one’s stopping you,” he said, nodding toward my escape route. He didn’t seem particularly concerned. Of course he wouldn’t be. He had evidence of me buying drugs all over town. My accusations would be in retaliation after his attempt to arrest me. He’d really thought this through.
Then again, would he risk someone knowing his deep dark secret? That paltry evidence wasn’t enough. Any good lawyer could get the charges dropped. He had to know that.
“Is this the part where you kill me?” I asked him.
Of course this was the part where he killed me. He would never let me leave here with that information. Would he say that I went for his gun? That we fought and the gun went off? That’s what I’d do.
“No. As I told you, I have enough evidence on you to put you away for a very long time.”
“That evidence is all circumstantial. You’d need testimonies. Eyewitnesses,” I argued. Why was I arguing this? Making the case for him to just kill me and get it over with. Perhaps it was because when I did leave here – if I did leave here – I didn’t want to have to worry about him changing his mind. Would I get a bullet to the back of my head when I least expected it? I didn’t want this hanging over my head for the rest of my life. “You’d need credible witnesses,” I added before pointing to the photographs. “Not that crap you sent me in the streets.”