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It took me twenty minutes to change, and when I stepped out of the RV for the last time, I looked like someone from a SWAT team. My hair was pulled back through the adjustment band of the baseball cap. I had the dark slacks, the black overcoat, the sunglasses. The shoes were a little too big and the sports bra was still a little too tight, but walking around to the front of O’Keefe’s, I felt more comfortable than I had in days. Just before I turned the corner, I looked back. The snow was mostly melted off the RV. Its sides were scabby with sun damage. I still smelled like Midian’s cigarettes and probably would until my hair grew out.
“Thanks,” I said to the broken-down old vehicle and the vampire I’d borrowed it from.
My car was a blue SUV with the dealer’s paperwork taped to the back window. It stood out in the parking lot because of its lack of mud and wear. I walked into O’Keefe’s to find Mr. Hair Gel chatting up the underage waitress I’d had the first time I came in. He looked pleased and nervous when I sat down across from him.
“I just need a signature on a few things saying you took possession,” he said, setting a pack of legal-sized papers in front of me with neon-green sticky notes showing me where to sign. He also handed me a really nice ballpoint pen.
“Thank you,” I said, and started making all the right marks. In the corner of my eye, I saw the waitress trying not to stare at me.
“Excuse me,” Mr. Hair Gel said. “I’m sorry for asking, but are you a movie star or something?”
“Nope,” I said, putting my initials on an insurance policy for the new car.
“It’s just we don’t usually get this kind of service request. I mean, there was this one time Julia Roberts had a bunch of people out in Arroyo Seco, and—“
“I’ve never met Julia Roberts,” I said. “I think we travel in different circles. ”
“Right. I just had to ask,” he said. “You looked like you could be. ”
I glanced up. His smile was bashful and cocksure at the same time. I was being hit on. I smiled back.
“Anything else you need me to sign?” I asked. He shook his head and passed a single key on a remote control fob across the table. I picked it up, weighing it in my hands. All right, then. Time to hunt down demons. “Thanks. You do have a ride back to town, right?”
“He’ll be along shortly,” Mr. Hair Gel said, but his tone suggested that he’d be open to the offer of a lift back in my car. For half a second, I was tempted.
Once I was in the SUV, I cranked up the heater, letting the engine run. The cell phone had great reception, even here. I called my lawyer.
“Jayné!” she said, answering before it could ring. “Is everything all right, dear?”
“It’s great,” I said. “You’re a miracle worker. But I need something else. Can we get an address for a someone if I give you a license plate? I’m not sure if it’s New Mexico or Colorado plates, though. ”
“Of course, dear. Give me what you’ve got, and I’ll be right back. ”
I spelled out GODSWRK to her and waited while she repeated it all back in military code. Golf Oscar Delta. Then we dropped the line. The SUV said I had a full tank of gas, the built-in GPS was disabled and couldn’t find a signal, and it was a few degrees below freezing outside. I took a deep breath and leaned back. Jayné Heller, international demon hunter. Well, all right, then.
As I pulled out to the road, Ozzie trotted into the parking lot. I saw her dark eyes looking up at me, her tail wagging. The little chuffed bark was white in the cold. I stopped and opened the passenger’s door. She looked at me.
“You coming?”
She trotted over, hauled herself up the step, and sat in the passenger’s seat, panting through a canine smile. When I reached across her to close the door, I got a cold earful of damp nose. I took us out to the highway.
Jayné Heller, international demon hunter, and her dog.
Even better.
Chapter 16
“Hey,” I said. “Can you talk?”
“Yeah,” my little brother, Curtis, said. “They’re all out doing stuff. What are you up to?”
“Surprisingly difficult question to answer,” I said. “I just got a dog. What’s going on at home?”
For twenty miles, Curtis filled me in on the gossip at home. Our older brother, Jay, had gotten his girlfriend pregnant, and now my future sister-in-law and her whole extended family had descended to prepare for the wedding. Mom had given up all hope of keeping the bun-in-the-oven issue quiet, and was now explaining to everyone at church that the new in-laws only looked Mexican, but were really Brazilians who’d just been living in Mexico before they came to the United States. In her mind, this was apparently better. Curtis was wildly amused by the whole thing, and his schadenfreude was a little infectious.
Before he hung up, I got Ozzie to bark hello to him a couple of times.
My new cell phone had a web browser that promised me a hotel with a real shower and hot water if I drove back in toward Taos proper. My other option appeared to be heading north into the Carson National Forest and staying there until spring, so with a little trepidation, I headed south.
The sky was enormous, the horizon seemed to fly out before me snow-white and earth-brown and the gray-green of piñons. Clouds draped the overwhelming blue like lace pulled to breaking, and the air smelled of cold and smoke and pine. For all my moving around the world, I’d spent very little time driving, and almost none by myself. I found myself humming, and then singing. Ozzie didn’t object.
There were a few cars and trucks on the highway, zooming along regardless of the ice on the pavement. I passed the turnoff to San Esteban with a little shudder. I kept waiting for Ex’s little black sports car to zoom up alongside and force me off the road. Once I got in close enough that there was traffic and an almost urban concentration of buildings, I actually started feeling better. I had cover and the anonymity of the crowd.
I made it to a little hotel just after three. It was two stories, with low scrub pine around the perimeter and a gravel parking lot mostly buried under ice and snow. We were a long way from the ski valley, and even so, there was only one vacancy. The guy at the desk balked at Ozzie until I gave him an extra hundred. The room was on the second floor, and it would have been physically impossible to do a hundred dollars’ worth of damage to it. The carpet was damp and stank of mildew. The bed sagged visibly in the center. The windows had scallops of dust running down them. At that moment, the honeymoon suite at the Bellagio wouldn’t have been better. I took a hot shower, washing my hair three times to get the last of the cigarette stink out. When I toweled off, my toes were pale and prune-wrinkled.
The scabs and cuts that cross-hatched the soles of my feet burned, the waer loosening the clots, but I didn’t start bleeding again. When I probed my rib, it still hurt, sure enough. In the mirror, my skin was bright pink from the hot water where it wasn’t white with old scars: my arm, my side. I stretched out, and the vertebrae between my shoulder blades cracked pleasantly.
Ozzie had curled up on the bed and wagged heavily as I got dressed again. I was going to need a place to use as my base of operations. This wasn’t the little condo halfway up to the ski valley. It didn’t have the gas fire heater or the hot tub or the little kitchen. If I wanted food, I’d have to head out to the convenience store or a tiny diner a few blocks down the road. In the next room, two women were shouting at each other over the yammering of their television cranked to eleven.
“Okay,” I said. “I know it’s not the best accommodations in the world, but it’s what I’ve got for now. Just don’t take off running down the road with me like last time, okay?”
My rider didn’t reply, but Ozzie sighed and let her head loll down on the bedspread. So I figured that made two out of three in favor with one abstention. Not great, but until I had better, it’d do. I put my few belongings in the closet and bathroom counter, pulled my hair back into a ponytail,
and went out for supplies. The convenience store was called Allsup’s, and it was entirely covered in Christmas decorations—tinsel icicles, printed cardboard reindeer, even blinking colored lights strung around the cash register. A weak version of “Little Drummer Boy” was leaking out of the radio, reminding me that I wanted my own music back. But they had dog food for Ozzie and some snacks for me. I bought enough granola bars, sunflower seeds, and Diet Coke to keep body and soul together for a couple of days. Ozzie stayed in the car. As I walked out, flimsy plastic bag on my wrist, my new phone rang, a chiming tritone.
“Hello?” I said, fumbling to get the SUV’s back door open and talk on the phone at the same time.
“Jayné, dear? I have the information on that license plate you wanted me to look for,” my lawyer said.
“Spiffy. Give me just a second, and I’ll … Okay. Got a pen. Go ahead. ”
The car was registered to Eduardo Garcia with an address in Questa, New Mexico. I was reasonably sure that none of the women I’d seen sitting around Chapin’s table had been named Eduardo, but apparently someone knew him well enough to borrow his car. It was a start.
“Also I had a call from our friend Ex,” she said. “He seemed a bit upset. ”
I closed the rear door and leaned against the SUV. An ancient-looking station wagon pulled up to the gas pumps, an old man at the wheel and three young children mashed close together in the backseat. A fire truck cruised by, slow and stately as a sailboat.
“Dear?”
“What did he say?”
“He seems to think you’ve had a psychological crisis of some sort. Run off in the night. He wanted me to look into getting you an evaluation. Against your will if necessary. ”
“Great. ”
I waited for the next comment, certain sheosedsk what was really going on and unsure what I’d say.
“Are you certain you want to keep him on the payroll?” she asked.
I smiled.
“Yeah, for now. He’s overreacting to some disagreements we had. We’ll figure it out. ”
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