Urban Shaman (2 page)

Sometimes I wonder if I have a big old neon sign stamped on my forehead, flashing Asshole. I retaliated with stunning wit: “I’m not a kid.”

Gray eyes darted to the mirror again, and back to the road. “You’re what, twenty-six?”

Nobody ever guessed my age right. Since I was eleven, people have misguessed my age anywhere from three to seven years in one direction or the other. I felt my jaw drop.

“It’s a gift,” the cabby said. “A totally useless gift. I can tell how old people are.”

I blinked at him.

“Great way to get good tips,” he went on. “I go into
this long explanation of how I always get ages right, and then I lie. Works like a charm.”

“So why’d you guess my age right?” The question came out of my mouth without consulting my brain first. I didn’t want to have a conversation with the cabby.

“Never met anybody who didn’t want to be in their twenties, so what’s the point? Why you going out there, lady? Lotta trouble out that way, and you don’t look like the type.”

I glanced sideways at the window. A faint reflection looked back at me. He was right. I looked tired, hopeless and worn-out, but not like trouble. “Looks can be deceiving.” His eyes slid off the rearview mirror like he was too polite to disbelieve aloud. “It’s somebody else who’s in trouble,” I said. “I saw her from the plane.”

He twisted around yet again. “You’re trying to rescue somebody you saw from an
airplane?
”

“Yeah.” I flinched as he twitched the steering wheel to keep in our lane, again without looking. “What do you do, use the Force?”

He glanced at the road and shrugged before turning around again. “So, what, you’ve got a hero complex? How the hell are you gonna find one dame you saw from the air?”

“I passed a couple basic math classes in college,” I muttered. “Look, I got the approximate height and speed we were traveling from the pilot, so figuring out the distance wasn’t that hard. I mean, adjusting for the change in speed is kind of a pain in the ass, but—” I
set my teeth together to keep myself from rattling on. It was a moment before I was sure I had enough control over my brain to continue without babbling. “Someplace in that vicinity there’s a modern church on a street with only one amber streetlight. If I can find it before the lights go out—”

“Then you’ll be the first one on a murder scene. You’re nuts, lady. You must be desperate for thrills.”

“Like it could possibly be any of your business,” I snapped.

“Touchy, too. Pretty girl like you oughta be on her way home to her sweetie, not chasin—”

“I don’t have one.” I admit it. I snarled again.

“With your personality, I can’t figure why not, lady.”

I leaned forward and rubbed my eyes with my fingertips, elbows on my knees. The knot of unpleasantness in my stomach felt like it was trying to push its way out through my sternum, pressuring me to act whether I liked it or not. The idea that it would go away if I could just find the woman was settled into my bones, logic be damned. “Haven’t you ever just really felt like you had to do something?”

“Sure. I felt like I really had to marry my old lady when she got knocked up.”

I was in a cab with Plato. His depth overwhelmed me. I lifted my head enough to stare over the back of the seat at his shoulder. He grinned. He had good teeth, clean and white and strong, like he hadn’t ever smoked. They were probably false.

“Never felt like I had to go chasing down some
dame I saw from an airplane, nope. Guess I figured I had enough troubles of my own without adding on somebody else’s.”

I leaned against the window, eyes closed. “Maybe I’ve got enough that I need somebody else’s to make the load seem lighter.”

I could feel his gaze on me in the rearview mirror again. Then he grunted, a sort of satisfied noise. “All right, lady. Let’s go find your corpse.”

“T
hanks for the vote of confidence.” I glowered out the window. I wouldn’t have been so annoyed if I’d felt more confident myself. The cabby—whose name was Gary, according to the posted driver’s license, and whose seventy-third birthday had been three days ago—drove like the proverbial bat out of hell, while I clung to the seat and tried not to gasp too audibly.

The streetlights were still on when we got to Aurora, and I wasn’t actually dead, so I felt like I shouldn’t complain. Gary pulled into a gas station. I squinted tiredly at the back of his head. “What are you doing?”

“Go ask if anybody knows where that church of yours is.”

My squint turned into lifted eyebrows. “I thought men couldn’t ask for directions.”

“I ain’t askin’,” Gary said with aplomb. “You are. Go on.”

I got.

The pimply kid behind the counter didn’t look happy to see me. Judging from his thrust-out lip and down-drawn eyebrows, I figured he wasn’t happy to see anybody, and didn’t take it personally. He smirked at me when I asked about the church. Smirking is not a nice expression. The only person in the history of mankind who’d been able to make smirking look good was James Dean, and this kid, forgive me Senator Bentsen, was no James Dean.

I tried, briefly, to remember if I’d been that sullen and stupid when I was sixteen. I figured the fact that I couldn’t remember didn’t bode well, and went straight for the thing I knew would have gotten my attention at that age: cash. I wasn’t usually prone to bribing people, but I was too tired to think of anything else and I was in a hurry. I dug my wallet out and waved a bill at the kid. His eyes widened. I looked at it. It was a fifty.

Shit.

“You better walk me to the church for this, kid.”

He didn’t take his eyes from the bill. “There’s two A-frames I can think of. One’s about five blocks from here. The other is a couple miles away.”

“Which direction? For both of them.” He told me, still watching the fifty like it was a talisman. I sighed, dropped it on the counter, and muttered, “Thanks,” as I pushed my way out of the gas station. He snatched it up, hardly believing I was really handing it over. Great. I’d just turned a kid onto the lifetime role of snitch.

Worse, I’d given away a quarter of the meager cash I had on hand, and cabs from SeaTac were damned expensive. I climbed back into the car. “East a few blocks, and if that’s not it, there’s another one to the southwest. Hurry, it’s getting light out.”

“What, you want to get your fingers in the blood while it’s still warm? You need help, lady.”

“Joanne.” Having a nosy cabby know my name had to be better than being called “lady” for another half hour. “And you’re the one hung up on corpses. I’m hoping she’s still alive.” I tugged on my seat belt, scowling again. It was starting to feel like a permanent fixture on my face.

“You always an optimist, or just dumb?”

A shock of real hurt, palpable and cold, tightened itself around my throat and heart. I fumbled the seat belt. It took effort to force the words out: “You have no right to call me dumb.” I stared out the window, seat belt in one numb hand, trying furiously to blink tears away. Gary looked at me in the rearview, then twisted around.

“Hey, hey, hey. Look, lady. Joanne. I didn’t mean nothin’ by it.”

“Sure.” My voice was harsh and tight, almost too quiet to be heard. “Just drive.” I got the seat belt on this time. Gary turned around and drove, quiet for the first time since I’d gotten in the cab.

I watched streetlights go by in the hazy gold of sunrise, trying to get myself under control. I didn’t generally cry easily and I didn’t generally get hurt by casual comments from strangers. But it had been a long day. More than a long day. A long week, a long
month, a long year, nevermind that it was only the fourth of January. And the day was only going to get longer. I still had to stop by my job and get fired.

The streetlights abruptly winked out as we turned down another street, and with them, my chance to find the runner. A small voice said, “Fuck.” After a moment I realized it was me.

“That one’s still on,” Gary said, subdued. I looked up, keeping my jaw tight to deny tired, disappointed tears. A bastion of amber stood against the dawn, one single light shining on the entire street. I watched it go by without comprehension, then jerked around so fast I hurt my neck. “That’s it!”

Gary hit the brakes hard enough to make my neck crunch again. I winced, clutching at it as I pressed my nose against the window. “That’s it, that’s it!” I shrieked. “Look, there’s the church! Stop! Stop!” The car was gone from the parking lot, but there was no mistaking the vicious spire stabbing the morning air. “Holy shit, we found it!”

Gary accelerated again, grinning, and pulled into the church parking lot. “Maybe you’re not dumb. Maybe you’re lucky.”

“Yeah, well, God watches over fools and little children, right?” I tumbled out of the cab, getting my feet tangled in the floor mat and catching myself on the door just before I fell. “Well?” I demanded. “Aren’t you coming?”

His eyebrows elevated before he shrugged and swung his own door open. “Sure, what the hell. I never saw a fresh murdered body before.”

I closed my door. “Have you seen stale ones?” I decided I didn’t want to know the answer, and strode away. Gary kept up, which surprised me. He was so broad-shouldered I expected him to be short, but he stood a good two inches taller than me. In fact, he looked like a linebacker.

“You look like a linebacker.”

“College ball,” he said, disparaging enough that it was obvious he was pleased. “Before it turned into a media fest. It’s all about money and glory now.”

“It didn’t used to be?”

He flashed me his white-toothed grin. “It used to be about glory and girls.”

I laughed, stopping at the church door, fingertips dragging over the handle. They were big and brass and twice as wide as my own hands. You could pull them down together and throw the doors open in a very impressive fashion. I wasn’t sure I wanted to.

“You sure your broad is gonna be in here, lady?”

“Yeah,” I said, then wondered why that was. It made me hesitate and turn back to the parking lot. Except for Gary’s cab, it was empty. There was no reason the woman couldn’t have gotten into the car with the man with the butterfly knife, no real reason to think she’d even made it as far as the parking lot, much less the church.

“Yeah,” I said again, but trotted back down the steps. Gary stayed by the door, watching me. The car’d been on the south end of the parking lot, between the woman and the church. I jogged over there, eyes on the ground. I heard Gary come down the steps, rattling scattered gravel as he followed me.

“What’re you looking for? I thought you said the broad was in the church.”

I shrugged, slowing to a walk and frowning at the cement. “Yeah, but that’s probably just wishful thinking. I was wondering if there’d been a fight. If the guy with the knife was after her, she’d have had to have gotten thr—”

“
What
guy with a knife?” Gary’s voice rose as I crouched to squint at the ground. I looked over my shoulder at him.

“Didn’t I mention that?”

“No,” he said emphatically, “you didn’t.”

“Oh. There was a guy with a knife. He was good, too.”

“You saw this from a
plane?
”

I puffed out my cheeks. “You ever seen somebody who’s good with a knife? Street-good, I mean?”

“Yeah.”

“Okay. So have I. It looks a certain way. Graceful. This guy looked that way, yeah, even from a plane.”

“Lady, you better have like twenty-two-hundred vision.”

I stood up. The bubble of icky feeling in my stomach was still there, prodding at me like I hadn’t done enough to help the woman. “I wear contacts.”

Gary snorted derisively. I sighed. “I know what I saw.”

“Sure.” He didn’t say anything for another second, looking at the ground. “I know what you didn’t see.”

“What?”

He pointed, then walked forward a couple of spaces. “Somebody lost a tooth.” He bent over and
poked at a shining white thing on the concrete, not quite touching it.

I walked over, bending to look at the enameled thing on the ground. It was a tooth, all right, smooth little curves and a bumpy top, complete with bloody roots. “Eww. Somebody got cut, too.” I nodded at thin splatters of blood, a few feet farther out than the tooth, that were already dry on the concrete. Gary cast his gaze to the heavens.

“The lady goes ‘eww’ at a tooth and she’s looking for a corpse.”

“I’m looking for a person,” I corrected.

“And you think she’s in the church.”

“Yeah.”

“So why the hell are we screwing around in the parking lot?”

I looked around. “The light’s better over here?” It was one of my favorite jokes, left over from my childhood. I never expected anyone else to get it, but Gary grinned, dug a hand into his pocket, and tossed me a quarter. I caught it, grinning back. “Now that we’ve got that taken care of.”

We walked back to the church together.

I was right. The doors swept open, impressively silent. I felt like I should be leading a congregation in search of the light, not a linebacker-turned-cabby in search of a corpse. I stepped through the doors, half-expecting a floorboard to creak and mar the enormous silence.

Within a few steps I was sure a floorboard wouldn’t have dared creak in this place. It wasn’t the solemn, weighty quiet of old churches or cathedrals. Those
places could absorb the sound of heels clicking and children laughing with dignity and acceptance. This church simply forbade them. I wasn’t even wearing heels, and I found myself leaning forward on my toes a little so that my tennies couldn’t possibly make any excessive noise on the hardwood floors. This was a church where “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” would be performed and harkened to weekly. I noticed I was holding my breath.

It was stunning, in an austere, heartless way. The A-frame probably carried sound beautifully, but the only natural lighting was from a wall of windows behind the pulpit. I use the term natural loosely: there wasn’t much natural about the violent, grim images of Christ’s crucifixion, or Joseph and Mary being turned away from the inn, or Judas’s betrayal, or any of the other scenes I recognized, more of them jimmied into the stained glass than I would have thought possible. This was a church where you came to be terrified into obedience, not welcomed as a sinner who has found the true way.

The pews were hardwood, without cushions, and the choir books looked as though they’d never been cracked open. I guessed you’d better know your music before you came to church. It was not a friendly place.

It was also completely empty of human life other than my own and Gary’s. I looked back at him. He frowned faintly before meeting my eye. I couldn’t blame him.

“I don’t know where she is,” I said before he could ask, and lifted my voice. “Hello? Hello?” My voice bounced up to the rafters and echoed back at me. The
acoustics were incredible, and I tilted my head back to look longingly at the ceiling. “Wow. I’d love to sing in here.”

“Yeah? You sing?”

I shrugged. “I don’t scare the neighbors.”

Gary bent over and looked under the pews. “Yeah, well, maybe you can sing yourself up a dame. There ain’t nobody here, Jo.”

A muscle in my shoulder blade twitched. “Y’know, nobody calls me that except my dad.”

“What, did he want a boy?”

“Not exactly.” That seemed like enough information to volunteer.

Gary unbent a little, hooking his arm over the top of a pew as he looked at me. Enough time passed to let me know that he was politely not asking about my dad before he asked, “Then what do they call you?”

“Joanie, or Joanne, usually. Sometimes Anne, Annie.”

Gary straightened up, hands in the small of his back. “My wife was named Anne. You don’t look like an Anne to me.”

I smiled. “What’d she look like?”

“’Bout four eleven, blond hair, brown eyes, petite. You gotta be at least a foot taller than she was.”

“Yeah.” It came out sounding like a laugh, and I smiled again. “So call me Jo, then.”

“You sure? I don’t think you get along with your old man.”

“I don’t not get along with him.” How had I ended up in a church looking for a body and discussing my home life? “It’s okay. I don’t mind Jo.” I waited for
the muscle in my shoulder blade to spasm again. It always did when I was tense. This time it didn’t. Maybe I really didn’t mind being called Jo. Who knew?

“There’s nobody in here, Jo,” Gary repeated. I tried to stuff my hands in my pockets, only to discover I didn’t have any. The thing I’d learned about traveling was that it was slightly less miserable if I wore stretch pants with an elastic waistband. The ones I was wearing were black and comfy and had nice straight legs, but no pockets. I hooked my thumbs into the strap of my fanny pack, instead. I hated the things, but I never learned to carry a purse, and a fanny pack is at least attached to me. Makes it harder to forget.

“C’mon, let’s go. Nobody here.”