A Perjury of Owls

by Michael Angel

  “One would like to express his thanks,” he announced. “She-from-another-world has shown me what one must do for one’s own parents. And that is to tell them how much happiness and love one feels for them.”

  A gasp of joy came from Xandra’s beak.

  She and her mate unfurled their wings. They came together and brought Perrin into their little circle of warmth.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Saturday night in the hills above Los Angeles.

  Saturday night with Esteban.

  It may have been November, but Southern California was unseasonably toasty and humid. The air felt as warm and slick as bath water. I luxuriated in it after chill autumn of Andeluvia.

  I’d emerged from the Roost of the Star Child humbled by my experience. Then I’d tumbled into bed immediately after returning home and checking for any messages about Shelly. There hadn’t been any.

  And yet somehow, after my visit with Xandra’s son, I felt like there might be some hope left. That maybe all my judgement calls weren’t suspect. Either way, after the evening with him I felt completely drained. I slept in, only getting up to slap together something together for brunch once I’d gotten a text from the genetics lab.

  The sample of the Albess’ horn feather hadn’t told me much. The lab confirmed that the sample had come from a female Great Horned Owl of advanced age, and that was about it. I didn’t have any prior tissue samples from Thea to match it against, so that was about as far as I could go.

  I got my lazy bones moving. Then I forced myself to stop checking the phone every ten minutes so I could get ready for my date with Alanzo.

  So far, the evening had gone swimmingly.

  Esteban picked me up early that evening in his newly restored convertible, a ’67 Plymouth Barracuda. The car’s finished paint job sported a black-ice shine, gleaming wickedly in the late afternoon sun. Esteban and I had gone out in the ‘Cuda when it was still in mid-restoration, and up until now I associated the car with the raw smell of paint primer.

  Dinner had been at a place down in Westwood that did teppanyaki, the kind of Japanese cuisine that involved a sizzling-hot griddle and a whole bunch of knife juggling. A pile of fried rice, cubed chicken and shrimp, and a whole lot of ponzu chili sauce later, I was in heaven.

  And to my pleasant surprise, I found myself enjoying Esteban’s company even more than I expected. We laughed, we talked, we joked with each other with a freedom I hadn’t felt since the first time we’d gone out. I had Perrin to thank for that, in an odd way.

  The little owlet had shown me that I could trust my instincts a little more when it came to people. That I could risk friendship. That maybe I could even risk learning to love someone.

  After dinner talk had let to an exhilarating top-down drive up the steep, winding curves of Mullholland Drive. Far below, the lights of the city stretched away below us like the starscape of a far-off galaxy. I wanted to drink it all in, the neon and the Hollywood spotlights and the glow of life being lived by millions of people.

  The lookout spot, which was probably Southern California’s worst-kept-secret when it came to a ‘Lover’s Lane’, had people parked on either side of us. Judging on the moist sounds come from a couple of the cars, some people were doing a lot more than just admiring the view.

  I wasn’t one to criticize. We were only a few degrees down my newly-christened Dayna Chrissie Scale of Friskiness, patent definitely still pending.

  Esteban’s lips were hot on mine. One of his arms curled protectively about my shoulders, drawing me in, making me feel wanted and protected. His other hand rested on my thigh, a heavy warm weight that was ripe with promise.

  I ran my hands over the hard muscle of his chest, leaned into his kisses, felt the parting of his lips and the first electric touch of his tongue on mine. Now it was getting good. My tongue did a wet little dance around his, making his heart beat so strongly that I felt it pound against the palm of my hand.

  He shifted in his seat with a painful little grunt, and I broke our kiss.

  “Are you all right?” I asked playfully. “You’re not getting a cramp anywhere important, are you?”

  “Nah, I’m just fine,” he said, embarrassed. “Just need to move my arm a bit.”

  I leaned forward a bit so he could extract his arm from behind my neck. I missed the reassuring warmth, but he really did seem to be in pain. Esteban grasped his right bicep with his left hand, roughly massaging it.

  He grimaced. “Didn’t mean to alarm you. I pulled a muscle while lifting yesterday.”

  “It’s okay,” I said. “You sure you don’t want me to rub it?”

  “There’s lots of places I’d like you to rub,” he said, with a glint in his eye. But he nodded in my direction and changed the subject. “That’s new. That second pendant, I mean. Where did you get it?”

  Without thinking about it, my hand went to the chain around my neck. Esteban was used to seeing the silver medallion that Galen had enchanted with my multiple-use transportation spell. But next to it now hung a locket in the shape of an exotic flower or seashell.

  “It’s from the other world.”

  “Uh-oh. Now I have competition from some lordling with an iron sword and a Renaissance Faire style outfit, right?”

  “Hardly. Believe me, there’s a shortage of good men over there.”

  Esteban leaned back, still rubbing his arm, and sighed languidly. “Then maybe you can tell me the story behind it. There has to be one. My tía once told me that every woman has a story about her favorite pieces of jewelry just like all men have stories about their scars.”

  I considered for a moment. It wasn’t that I wanted to hold back anything from Esteban. But I’d just relived the memories around this locket last night, and they were pretty heavy things for a fun night out.

  “This was given to me by a very brave woman before she died,” I said, carefully picking and choosing my words. “She was someone who turned out to be a friend. Not enough of a friend at the very end, I guess, but a friend in her own way.”

  Esteban gave me a puzzled look. Before he could ask me anything further, an electronic jingle sounded in the confines of the car. He looked pained as he stuck a hand in his pocket.

  “Dayna, I’m sorry,” he apologized. “But I better take that. That’s telling me it’s from Homicide.”

  “Then you’d better take it,” I agreed. While he dug out his phone, I re-adjusted my top and tucked the locket back into place.

  “That’s interesting,” he said, as he held up his screen. “It’s Vega’s extension. I’ll put it on speaker so you can listen in.”

  Esteban thumbed the speaker button and then hit ‘Receive’. Of course, right at that second someone in the car next to us hit one of passion’s high notes. There was an awkward pause at the other end of the line, and Vega’s voice came out rather matter-of-factly.

  “You know, if I’m interrupting something, I can call back later.”

  “If that had involved me, do you think I’d have picked up in the first place?” Esteban growled back.

  “Good point.”

  “Well, you’ve got my attention. I’m on personal time now, so what is it?”

  “Hold on. I need to put someone else on the line.” There was the sound of muffled talking, and then a new, male voice came through the speaker.

  “Detective Esteban? Max Cohen here. Sorry to bother you on a Saturday night,” the older man said, and I could practically hear his ‘attaboy’ smirk through the receiver. “Vega’s the only one around who knew your number. She thinks you’ll be with Dayna, and I need to talk to her, pronto.”

  Startled, I looked up at Esteban. He nodded, so I leaned over closer to the phone. “This is Dayna, Max. What’ve you got to tell me?”

  Cohen let out a sigh. “It’s about your friend, Shelly Richardson.”

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  “I tried to get hold of you as soon as I had a lead on your friend,” Detective Cohen said. His voice sounded
tinny through the speaker on Esteban’s phone. “Tried your work and home phone, but I couldn’t reach you.”

  “That’s my fault,” I admitted. “I left it at home since I was going out for the evening.”

  “Anyway, I thought you should know. Your hunch about Shelly Richardson might be correct.”

  Hope flared in my chest like a beacon. I sat up, hands clenched. “What did you find?”

  “We’ve got a possible sighting. An undercover officer working south of Figueroa talked with a tweaker down there. He said the guy was talking non-stop about a woman that matches Ms. Richardson’s description to a tee.”

  A tweaker was LAPD lingo for a methamphetamine addict. Given how the drug could reliably produce obsessive-compulsive behavior, it was no wonder the guy was talking non-stop about what he saw. Esteban’s brow furrowed, and he spoke before I could say anything else.

  “This tweaker you’re talking about,” Esteban inquired, “Are we talking about a freakishly tall guy, shaggy hair, smells like a goat? Goes by the name of ‘Jagger’?”

  “Yeah, figured you might know who he is after what went down last night. That’s the guy. Want me to send someone down, talk to him some more? Or hold off until you get one of your people down to handle it?”

  Esteban cast a quick, guilty glance in my direction. “Neither. I’ll drop Dayna off and go check this out myself. Shelly’s a friend of mine too.”

  “Copy that,” Cohen said, and hung up.

  “If you think you’re going to get me out of this car, you have something else coming,” I said defiantly.

  Esteban chuckled. “I know you better than that.”

  He put the car into reverse and left our amorous neighbors to their business. Then he swung us out onto Mullholland and back down towards the expanse of lights below. I did my best to tamp down on this crazy rush of hope that made me want to shoulder Esteban out of the driver’s seat and then gun the motor far beyond the speed limit. But he knew where we were going, and he wasn’t about to arrive at our destination with a slew of traffic cops in tow.

  We’d exchanged the Hollywood Freeway for the slightly faster moving southbound Harbor Freeway by the time I figured something out. That guilty glance Esteban had thrown my way had come right after Cohen had mentioned something that happened just twenty-four hours ago.

  “Hey, I don’t mean to pry,” I said carefully, “But what ‘went down’ last night?”

  Esteban smiled grimly as we passed one of the few clusters of Los Angeles’ skyscrapers. The lights cast a chalky pall against the cloud cover. “You remember that body we worked on last week? Mister ‘Stay out of the thirteen’?” I nodded, and he continued. “You were right about that underground rave club. Vega and I have been working ‘upstream’ from that case, trying to find out who’s supplying the drugs.”

  “Something go sour last night?”

  “You could say that. I got a lead from Jagger to talk with this camello, a mid-level dealer. The talk turned into some ‘aggressive negotiation’. I got tagged in the fight.”

  “Your arm,” I realized. “Injured it ‘lifting’, you said?”

  “Well, technically, I was ‘lifting’ two hundred pounds of drug dealer when I tossed him into the garbage dumpster. He objected to my doing this, so he nicked me with his knife. I went down to medical services after that, got stitched up, and that was that.”

  My voice went up a notch. “So ‘nicked’ means ‘only needing stitches’? I swear, you and my griffin friend Grimshaw ought to hang out more often. You have the same philosophy when it comes to on-the-job injuries.”

  “I didn’t want you to worry.” His jaw tightened, but he focused on the road ahead as he spoke more quietly. “I try not to worry about you, you know. I fail all the time.”

  “You worry–”

  “I’ve never even seen half the creatures that you’ve told me about in that world of yours. But I do know one thing: they’re dangerous. Much more dangerous than you let on. And you’ve been lucky. Your friends have been pulling your butt out of the fire a lot more than you think.”

  I wanted to flare up at him, tell him that he didn’t know a damned thing. The only problem was, he was right. The opposition didn’t come in my weight class all that often. And those that did either had magic, claws, armor, or simply fought dirty.

  We pulled off the freeway down a long boulevard and into a warren of side streets. The street signs, the ones that you could read through the graffiti, were a mixture of English, Spanish, and an Asian script I couldn’t identify.

  Esteban pulled over to the curb, just down the street from where a club and several bars lit up the night sky with red neon. Techno music pounded out a skull-cracking beat. A couple women dressed in stilettos, short jackets, and fishnet hose hung out under one of the few working streetlamps. One strutted up to the car and leaned a hip against my door so that we could both get a good look down her generous V-neck.

  “Hola, guapo,” she said to Esteban, in a voice made gravelly by cigarette tar and night air. “Nice car. You interested in a three-way-bang?”

  “Take a good look at my face,” he said, in a chilly voice. “Then you tell me.”

  The woman paled and took a step back, like she was going to bolt. “You don’t have anything on me, officer.”

  “Don’t worry. I’m not here to bother you. I’ve got something special for Jagger.”

  Her blood-red lips curled up in a sneer. “You got something for him? If you want me to talk to Jagger, then what do you got for me?”

  “Christmas already came early for you. I’m not bringing you back for the boys in Vice. If I change my mind, you’ll have to explain it to your chulo. He’ll probably cut your smile a little wider for having to bail you out twice in as many days.”

  The woman stalked away as quickly as she could in her wobbly high heels. She shot Esteban the finger, and then disappeared into the shadows. The other working girls followed suit. Alanzo let out a sigh.

  “To protect and to serve,” he muttered, and then turned his attention back to me. “Jagger’s a strange guy. He doesn’t smell like a rose bush, but he’s not dangerous. He’s usually got his ear to the street, too.”

  “Can you trust him?” I asked. “I mean, if he’s a meth addict?”

  “Yeah. He’s not only into meth. He’s got a special addiction I help him with.”

  Jagger came shambling out of the alleyway up ahead. He spotted Esteban’s Barracuda and made his way over. This guy looked as skinny as Herald – if someone had thrown the Lord Pursuivant onto the rack and given the wheel a few spins. He had a shaggy mane of nut-brown hair and the classic pockmarked complexion of a regular meth user.

  He stood over by the driver’s door, somehow managing to slouch when standing straight, oblivious to the occasional car that whizzed on past. I thanked my lucky stars that he’d gone to Esteban’s side of the car. Even from where I sat, the scent of cat piss rolled off of the man in a wave.

  “Hey, ‘Lanzo,” he said, in a voice that squeaked like a rusty gate, “What’s my number one hombre up to?”

  “Just thought you might be interested in a nip of something that came in today.” Esteban reached over to grab a paper bag on the floor behind my seat. He shook it, and I heard the sound of liquid sloshing. “That is, if you can help us out with something.”

  The junkie’s eyes sparkled with life for the first time. “You got the stuff?”

  “It’s fresh, my man. Right off the boat.”

  Jagger spread his arms wide, which helped fan the stench some more. “Lay it on me, then. If I know it, I’ll spill it.”

  “I’m looking for someone.” Esteban paused and turned to me. “Dayna, do you have a picture I can show him?”

  “Sure,” I said, and I dug in my purse. I came up with a wallet-sized picture of me and Shelly at last year’s office holiday party, and handed it over.

  “Oh, her!” Jagger said, almost instantly. “She’s all right. I got some hash and beans fr
om her, might’ve been the morning before last. Up at the soup kitchen. The one at the mission off of Florence and the barrio azul.”

  “Do you think she’s still there?” I asked.

  “Huh? Oh, yeah, that’s for sure. She showed up there like, a week ago. Works every day, all day. Never goes home, seems like.”

  “You’re my guy, amigo,” Esteban said, handing over the bag. Jagger beamed as he pulled out a slim plastic bottle filled with a snotlike yellow liquid. Before he turned to vanish back down the alleyway, I caught a glimpse of a red label reading Banana Sun – Get Peeled.

  Esteban put the Barracuda into gear and accelerated away from the curb. Even though we still had the top down, he switched on the dashboard vents to whisk away the last of Jagger’s stink. I gave him a puzzled look.

  “What the heck did you give him?” I asked.

  Esteban shrugged. “Banana-flavored soft drink. I came across it when I visited with my sister-in-law’s family down in Costa Rica. Jagger used to be a beachcomber or something down there and got hooked on it. He thinks it prevents malaria.”

  “How come I’ve never seen this stuff?”

  “It keeps failing some federal test for being ‘fit for human consumption’. That, and a lot of people don’t like the flavor.”

  I shuddered. “Did you try it?”

  “Put it this way. You don’t develop a taste for the stuff. You develop an immunity.”

  With that, Esteban turned us north onto Florence Avenue and gunned the motor.

  Shelly, I thought, I hope to God that you’ve stayed put. Then maybe I can actually get a decent night’s sleep for a change.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  The ‘barrio azul’ literally means ‘blue neighborhood’. Or, to be frank, it meant ‘the blue ghetto’. It referred to the high poverty area towards the southern end of the L.A. Metro blue light rail line. I’d been down here all too often during my time working with the LAPD. Shootings and stabbings were common crimes in this area, either over drugs, contraband or a relationship that had turned a dark corner from control to abuse.