by C. E. Murphy
I gave a shaky laugh. “I look like hell? Anybody shown you a mirror, Gary?”
“They don’t need to. I’m feelin’ like the old gray ghost.”
“Yeah, well.” I tightened my fingers around his. “No giving up that ghost, okay? Not for a while yet.”
Gary snorted. “You kidding? You’ve only just gotten started. I’m not plannin’ on checking out for a while yet. I want grandkids,” he said with a wink and a sudden grin. My heart lurched.
“That’s why you’re hanging around, huh? Nice to finally find out there’s a reason.” My attempt at levity fell flat, but Gary smiled anyway, then let his eyes close, which told me as much as anything how tired he was. I’d never met a more open-eyed kind of guy than Gary. We stayed like that for a few minutes, me trying to memorize him while he breathed, then I closed my own eyes, hoping I wouldn’t cry.
“Lissen, Jo.”
My eyes popped open again. Gary was wearing his serious face. His really serious face, so serious I’d never seen it before. Nerves twisted in my stomach. “Yeah?”
“The grandkids, y’know I’m joking. But—”
“God, Gary, don’t. Okay? Don’t get all maudlin on me.” I managed a feeble smile. “At least wait until you’re sitting up again, okay?” I made the smile brighter, even though tears stung my eyes, and I bent over his hand. “Anyway, I know, okay?” My voice squeaked. “I know. Me, too, huh? Okay? Me, too.” I blinked back tears, keeping my head lowered over his hand. Gary reached over himself with his left hand, clonking my head with the oxygen sensor on his middle finger as he ruffled my hair. “Ow.”
He chuckled. “Sorry. Okay. Arright, Jo. Now you gotta keep me up to date on what’s goin’ on out there, all right? I hate missin’ things.”
I sat up laughing and brushed my hand over my eyes. “I know. I will, I promise. Like, here, you’ll like this. I was talking to Virissong, the spirit guy the coven wants to bring across, when the hospital called.”
Gary’s eyebrows retained their bushiness even when the rest of him looked smaller. “What’s he like?”
“He seems okay. I guess I’m going to do this.”
“Man,” Gary said, “I gotta get out of here. I’m gonna miss all the good stuff.”
“Only you think it’s the good stuff.” I gave him a watery smile. “When’re they letting you out?”
“I donno. A cute blond nurse says I gotta go to physical therapy. Me, physical therapy. I’m seventy-three years old. What kinda crap is that?”
“The kind that’s going to make sure you live to see seventy-four,” I said sternly. Gary’s eyes brightened, as if chastisement was better for him than sympathy. It probably was.
“You’re gonna keep me in line, aren’t you,” he grumbled, without disguising the note of pleasure in his voice.
“Damn straight.” I took a deep breath. “And I’m going to do a little laying on of hands, and then I’m going to ask a power animal to keep an eye on you.”
If somebody’d said that to me, it would’ve made me even crabbier. Gary lit up again. “Yeah? What animal?”
“I’ll know when it comes. Tomorrow morning.” The part of me that knew I wouldn’t really turn my back on shamanism stung me with cold guilt. If I’d studied maybe I could’ve seen this coming and done something to prevent it. Preemptive healing.
“Stop it,” Gary said. I twitched and blinked at him. “You’re lookin’ all guilty,” he said. “Knock it off. I’m an old man, Jo. I ain’t gonna last forever, and there’s nothing you or anybody else can do about that. But I’m not checkin’ out just yet, so just stop it, you hear? You want to find this old dog a little spiritual support to shore him up, I’ll appreciate it, but don’t go thinkin’ you can stop nature in its tracks. You hear me?”
“I hear you.” I smiled a little. “I’m just not sure I’m ready to listen.”
He squeezed my hand. “Fair ‘nuff. Women always take their own sweet time makin’ up their minds to see sense.”
I nodded, then straightened my spine. “Hey!”
Gary cackled, breathier than usual, but still his own laugh. “There’s my girl,” he said again, and let himself slip back into resting. I waited until he slept, then dug down inside me for the power that lay behind my breastbone.
It flickered and murmured, responding sluggishly. I wasn’t too sure how to go about repairing a broken heart. Cosmetic changes, like visualizing a new paint job, seemed inadequate, and the patch replacement that I’d used to fix the hole in my own lung struck me as somehow dangerous. I’d been dying at the time. Screwing up would have only finished the job. If I messed up now, Gary, who wasn’t dying, might. My car analogy was turning out to have limitations I didn’t like.
In the end the best I could do was to share my own essence, the way Billy had done with me back in March. I thought it would help, just by giving him more than his own depleted energy to draw from as he healed. It took a while to formulate, but I slipped a small, delicate ball of silver rainbows inside Gary’s chest, and wished it Godspeed and good luck.
Then I stayed until a nurse came to usher me out, and went back to my apartment to sob in the shower.
Routine brought gratifying numbness. I wrote tickets and walked my beat, nodding at locals and stopping to give directions to tourists. I didn’t have to think, which was a godsend. Thinking put me back into that place where it was too hard to breathe. Gary might’ve believed there wasn’t anything I could’ve done, but I wasn’t so sure.
At lunch I went back to the station instead of stopping on my beat to get a bite to eat. I wasn’t hungry, and I needed comfort smells, grease and oil and gasoline. I went down to the garage, even though I didn’t think I was up to watching Nick carefully not look at me.
It was almost a relief that Thor was the only one around, lying on his back beneath a vehicle. I stood there by his feet until he slid out to get a wrench from the toolbox by the car. His eyebrows, grease-smeared, rose a little as he saw me. I looked around, unable to meet his eyes as I mumbled, “Wondered if there was anything I could help out with for a while.”
He frowned at me. I looked somewhere else again. “Please.”
“Yeah.” His answer was so gruff and so long in coming that I flinched, startled out of trying to think of where I was going to go when he said no. “Rodriguez got his wheels out of whack again. Get some coveralls and take a look.” He gave me the faintest smile possible and slid under his work-in-progress again. I was left staring at his legs, stunned.
I’d warned him about Rodriguez’s axle alignment problems six months earlier. Maybe good of Thor wasn’t so bad after all.
Rodriguez didn’t really spend hours beating his vehicle’s axle out of alignment, even if I’d accused him of doing so in the past. I’d never yet checked his vehicle and found the alignment outside of factory tolerances, which didn’t mean he was wrong. Some drivers are more sensitive to the variations in alignment, and Rodriguez was like the princess with the pea. The camber and casting readings on his vehicle were a full degree side to side off, enough to cause a pull.
And that was something I could deal with. Methodical, straight-forward work could fix an alignment problem. It took my mind off everything, and I finished the job with reluctance, not wanting to leave the garage and face the world again.
Thor, still on his back, rolled out from under the car he was working on and pushed up on an elbow, watching me. I wiped my hands down on the cleanest towel I could find and stripped the coveralls off. I’d done it a thousand times—just about literally—with the guys in the shop there. I’d never felt self-conscious before, too aware of Thor watching me. Big and thick and clumsy: that was the Joanne from high school, too tall and too poorly socialized. I fumbled the coveralls as I tried to put them back on their hook and caught a new handful of grease. I closed my eyes, sighed, and shoved my hand back through my hair before my brain caught up with my actions.
Thor’s laughter, deep and out loud, made hairs stand up on the
back of my neck. I looked over my shoulder, mouth twisted. Propped up on an elbow, still on the creeper, he looked like a beefcake calendar picture, except in a pinup he’d be in jeans, stripped to the waist, and glistening with baby oil instead of wearing tar-smeared coveralls. “You know where the shampoo is.”
My mouth betrayed me and the corners turned up in a tiny smile. “That bad?” I headed for the washroom, not expecting an answer. Thor’s voice followed me anyway.
“Well, they said you’re Native American, but I think war paint’s supposed to be different colors.”
I stopped. “War paint can be black. They?”
He shrugged the shoulder his weight wasn’t on. “People talk.”
“About me?” I wasn’t sure if I was pleased or alarmed.
He gave a sharp snort. “Don’t sound so surprised. Replacing you’s like trying to replace David Lee Roth.”
“Hagar was better.” For a moment we stared at one another, caught in an unexpected camaraderie. “I gotta wash up,” I said abruptly. Thor slid back under his car. He didn’t come back out when I jogged through the garage a few minutes later, my hair still damp. The summer day was already heavier than the air-conditioning could defeat, and I figured I’d be back outside and dried off before anyone could comment.
Morrison caught me two halls away from the front door and gave me a scathing look. “You smell like a grease pit, Walker. I thought you were on beat.”
The fragile sense of well-being garnered in the garage evaporated and I clenched my fists, fixing my gaze on the floor. Heat prickled at the back of my eyes, and the flutter in my stomach didn’t have anything to do with magic, for once. It was just plain old-fashioned nausea, all knotted up in a ball of misery. “Lunch. On my way back out now.” I knew I sounded sullen, but that was better than bursting into tears.
Morrison stepped aside, surprising me. For a second I didn’t know what to do, stings prickling the inside of my nose, another precursor to embarrassing tears. I hunched my shoulders and flared my nostrils, trying to press the tingle away without being so obvious as to use my hands, and bulled past him.
“You all right, Walker?” There was a note of what sounded like genuine concern in Morrison’s voice, and it pushed me even farther off-balance.
“No.” I hadn’t given my mouth permission to tell the truth, and bit my lower lip hard in admonishment. “I’m fine.”
“Which is it?” He came back around me, frowning, and for a few seconds Captain Michael Morrison clearly didn’t know what to do with his hands. Even with my gaze locked on the floor I could see him reach for my chin, like he’d tilt it up so I had to meet his eyes. Then the sheer inappropriateness of that gesture hit him, even as it made me look up, the knot in my stomach giving a sick thump.
His fingers brushed my jaw because I moved, the contact making his hand drop like a dead weight. The breath in my lungs went with it, my chest beginning to ache because I didn’t seem to be able to remember how to inhale again.
“Walker.” Morrison was not a man I thought of as uncertain or unprepared, but his voice was tight and he held himself in such a way that I thought maybe he’d forgotten how to breathe, too. That began to concern me. Surely we couldn’t just stand there, not breathing at one another, all afternoon. My heart was pounding much too loudly in my ears, like it was determined to drown out whatever Morrison might say next. But he didn’t say anything, only kept watching me as if he wasn’t entirely sure what to do with me. My palms began to ache with the need to do something, but the obvious thing to do with a man in my personal space.
“Joanie!”
I drew in a sharp breath, air startlingly cool in my lungs as guilty color burned my cheeks. Morrison stepped back as if he’d been released from confinement, and Billy came lumbering around the corner with a sticky note in hand, his voice raised. “The reason the department gives you a cell phone is so you can be called on it. The hospital’s been trying to get through to you. They’ve got some paperwork you need to sign. Excuse me, Captain,” he added, perfunctorily.
Morrison grunted. “Hospital?”
“That’s what I was just trying to tell you,” I snapped, not at all fairly. Refuge in anger. Good, Jo. I watched the indecipherable thing go out of Morrison’s expression, to be replaced by far more familiar irritation. Unexpected regret lanced through the general nausea in my stomach, turning my voice even more acid. “My friend Gary had a heart attack last night. What do they want to talk tome for?” I addressed the last to Billy, who thrust the sticky note at me.
“You’re down as next of kin, I guess. Insurance wants you to sign off on his physical therapy stuff.”
I reached for the note with a hand gone so numb I couldn’t feel the paper. It stuck to Billy’s fingers as he tried to let go, and the edge sliced a thin gash in my index finger. I stared at the blood welling up, waiting for the sting of pain. “Next of kin?”
“That’s what the lady said. You and the old man didn’t get hitched, did you?”
I didn’t trust myself to look at either of them, especially Morrison. “No.” Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Billy wince as his joke fell flat. “Thanks for taking the message.” My voice was too hoarse. “I’ll call the hospital and see if I can get over there tonight.”
“Take half an hour if they need it right now,” Morrison said, more gracefully than I deserved after snarling at him. “Otherwise, get back to work.” That, too, sounded more like sympathy than an order, though he turned a scowl on Billy. “You, too, Holliday. I’m not running a messenger service here.”
Billy said, “Yessir,” as we both watched Morrison stomp down the hallway. Then Billy turned to me, squinting. “Did I interrupt something there?”
Sometimes it was nice to have friends who demonstrated more sensitivity than the average male was reputed to. Other times, not so much. I said, “No,” because there was no other answer I could reasonably give, and Billy didn’t look like he believed it for a minute. “Thanks for the message.”
I went out into the June sunshine to get my phone and call the hospital.
CHAPTER 13
Saturday, June 18, 10:18p.m.
“Officer Walker?” A young man’s surprised voice sounded in my ear, welcome distraction from the eye-crossing insurance paperwork I was trying to fill out. I looked up, catching a glimpse of myself in a window reflection. My hair had wilted from the cute spikes it’d dried in after my shower. A boy who looked vaguely familiar was also dimly reflected in the window, standing behind my chair. I twisted around to frown up at him.
“Garth,” he said. “Garth Johannsen. From the coven?”
“Oh!” I blinked at him, my frown getting deeper. “Hi, Garth. What’re you doing here?” I hadn’t even changed out of uniform before coming to the hospital. The nurse I’d talked to said I didn’t need to come during work, but if I could come immediately after that would be great. I’d picked up the paperwork and visited with Gary until he started dozing off, then retreated to the lobby to go through it. It was after ten now and I was sticky and uncomfortable.
“You weren’t at the meeting tonight.” He came around to sit one chair over from me, leaving an empty space between us. I was grateful on a variety of levels, the most basic of which being that I was too damned hot to want to deal with someone’s body next to mine. “We were worried,” he added.
“And so you what,” I said, “hunted me down at the hospital? How’d you do that, magic?” I set my teeth together and flopped my head against the padded plastic chair back. The kid was earnest and polite and didn’t deserve to be the victim of my sarcasm. “Sorry,” I muttered, then straightened up, convincing myself that I would be more gracious from here on out. “I forgot about the meeting.”
“You forgot?” All the injury and dismay in the whole world were conveyed in those two words. “But this isvery important.”
“Garth,” I said in what I felt was a reasonable tone, “a very close friend of mine had a heart attack last night whi
le I was chasing down your goddamn Virissong. Forgive me if your priorities are not my priorities.” So much for courtesy.
“Oh.” Garth’s voice went all hollow. “Oh, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to be a jerk.”
Ihad meant to be a jerk, and now I felt like even more of one. Venting at Garth struck me as being on about the same level as kicking puppies. I was going to have to consider the possibility that it’d be better if I never spoke to anyone again as long as I lived. “It’s not your fault. Sorry I snarled.”
“You didn’t,” he assured me hastily, which was nice, if blatantly untrue. “Is your friend going to be okay?”
I sighed and looked down at the paperwork. “Yeah, if I can get all this stuff filled out so they’ll put him in PT.” I shuffled the stack, then shook my head. “Did you really magic up my location?”
Garth looked guilty. “No.”
I frowned up at him. “Then what’re you doing here?”
Garth brightened a little. “Visiting somebody. Come on.”
I eyed my paperwork, then groaned and stood up. “Anything for a break.”
The sordid truth was I expected Garth to lead me through the hospital to meet some handsome, starry-eyed young intern who he would euphemistically introduce as “my friend.” Instead he took my hand and tugged me up to the cancer ward, where we stopped at the reception area and Garth leaned on the desk without letting go of my hand. “We’re here to see Colin.”
The man behind the desk waved us on without looking up, then followed us with, “He’ll be glad to see you, Garth.”
“You come here a lot?” I asked. Garth nodded, knocked on a room door, then pushed it open. Despite the hour, the young man in the bed sat up and smiled wearily as we stepped inside.
“Garth, man, who’s this? You didn’t tell me you were dating an Amazon.” His voice was thin, rising and falling on shallow breaths. He was good-looking, even through the bloat of weight that cancer treatments had put on him. His eyes were hazel and cheerful, and the handshake he offered was full of concentrated strength. “I’m Colin,” he said. “Garth’s my big brother.”
