I gaped at him. It was like he was speaking a foreign language—except I knew them all, so that wasn’t the best analogy. “I’m sorry?”
“The captain and me. Can you leave us alone for a minute?”
“I don’t understand.” Ubie had never asked me to leave the room. He usually argued incessantly to let me stay in every situation.
“We need to talk in private.”
“No,” I said, completely offended. “I’m in this thanks to Van over there, and I’ll stay right here, thank you very much.”
Ubie raised a hand and gestured for a uniformed officer to come in. I didn’t recognize him, but he was big and blond and big.
“Could you escort Ms. Davidson out of the building, please?”
I balked. “It’s—it’s that fake psychic chick, isn’t it? You think she’s going to solve cases for you? She’s as fake as your hairline.”
Ubie scowled at me. I scowled back, all the way to the front door of the station, where I proceeded to wrench free from the officer and brush myself off. “That was so uncalled for,” I said to him. He stood there and watched me go.
My phone rang when I got to Misery.
“Are you okay?” Cookie asked.
“Yes. I’m fine.”
“You don’t sound fine.”
“I’m fine.”
“You don’t sound fine.”
“I’m so not fine!” I said, collapsing into a blob of sniffling nerves. “Something is up with Uncle Bob. I think he’s … he’s mad at me.”
Cookie gasped. “Robert is never mad at you.”
“I know. I just don’t know what to think.”
“Me neither. On the bright side, you can talk it over with your therapist. Your appointment is in half an hour.”
“I can’t go to therapy. That woman needs more therapy than I do.”
“Most therapists do, hon. You still have to go. If you miss again, your sister will kill you.”
“Cook, I have a thousand cases going on at once. My life has been threatened. My apartment has been ransacked. A half-human, half-demon stole a priceless dagger from me and won’t return it until he gets together with Swopes so they can talk prophecies. And I was just almost arrested for drug possession and kiddie p**n .”
“Your sister won’t care.”
“My sister is at a conference in D.C.”
“And you think that would stop her?”
I changed lanes to head back the direction I’d come. “Fine. I’ll go.”
“Good girl. We need coffee and creamer at the office.”
“Okay.”
“And I need an orange bra and a tennis racket. It’s a new home-defense thing.”
“Okay.”
“And I thought about ha**ng s*x with Garrett on my desk.”
“Okay. But really, why do you think Ubie is mad at me?”
“I don’t know, hon. He adores you. He’ll get over it.”
“He even called in a fake psychic. When he has me! You’re going to do what, where, and with whom?”
“Just never you mind. Go to your appointment.”
“Okay.”
* * *
I sat through another pointless session of talking about my feelings when all I could think about was Uncle Bob. Hopefully, he’d talked the captain into putting his plans on hold, but I wondered if I was doing the right thing. There was still a dead kid. True, he died thirty years ago and his death was accidental, but wouldn’t his family want to know what happened to him?
I had Cookie track Garrett’s whereabouts and parked at my apartment building to walk the block and a half to the Frontier. He was sitting at a booth in the middle room of the meandering restaurant, reading the paper, a green chile burger with fries and iced tea on his table.
I sat across from him and decided to get right to the point. “What if you knew someone killed someone else decades ago, but it was more like an accident and now the person who accidently killed the other person wants to turn himself in and ruin a pristine career in law enforcement.”
He didn’t look up from his paper. “I’m assuming there’s a question in there.”
“Yeah. What would you do? What would you recommend he do?”
“It was an accident?”
“Yes,” I said, stealing a fry off his plate.
“And this was how long ago?”
“Thirty years, give or take. They were just kids. But the man has done a lot to help people. He’s a good person. If he goes forward, he’ll ruin his career and negate all the good he’s done over the years.”
“That’s a tough one. If it’s eating him alive, that tells me he probably is a good person. He can do more good in law enforcement than in jail, if he went to jail.”
“See. That’s what I was thinking, but my moral compass doesn’t always point north. You said earlier, right after I almost plummeted off that fire escape to my death, you had a condition? You scratch my back, I scratch yours.”
“And why am I scratching your back again?” he asked.
“I need you to meet with someone for me. He’s very knowledgeable and wants to work with us on all this prophecy stuff. Just do not let him talk you out of your soul. He’s really good at that.”
“I doubt he would want my soul.”
“Okay, so you have a condition as well?”