C. E. Murphy - No Dominion - A Garrison Report

The hand she offered me to shake had a beer in it. I tapped my own beer bottle against hers and then took my first drink of the day, because she drank and it seemed the natural, polite, and social-class-appropriate response. “Mike Morrison,” I said when we’d both drunk. “Pleasure to meet you.”

“You too. You’re new, or your car never breaks down. Which is it?”

“New.”

“Thought so. Come on, have a drink.” She turned away and sauntered back to her crew, stepping over someone else as she approached the car. With me a step behind her, the man didn’t have time to appreciate it, which gave me a faint smug satisfaction I had no right to. “Guys, this is Mike. Mike, this is everybody. Nick, he runs Motor Pool, that’s Dave, this is Benny, that’s Jake—” She ran through another eight or ten names, ending with, “And yes, there will be a quiz.”

“Nick, Dave, Benny—” I repeated them all back to her, earning a round of applause from the mechanics and laughing approval from Joanie Walker. She even swept a hand over the purple car’s hood in invitation, and one of the mechanics wolf-whistled while another two looked put-out.

Protocol would be dissembling, but I was already past the end of the rope. I sat on the car’s hood, shoe heels braced on the bumper, and Joanne scooted forward to sit next to me and tsk . “You always this formal, Mike? Shirt sleeves and leather shoes in the middle of July? You obviously haven’t been drinking enough. There’ll be another quiz,” she added, mock-severely, “once you’ve had enough to loosen up that collar.

“I’ll pass,” I promised her.

She arched an eyebrow. “The quiz, or on loosening up?”

“You decide.”

Her grin came again, slow and long and amused before she took a pull on her beer that emptied the bottle. One of her crew chortled and Joanne threw the bottle at him, not hard. He caught it and offered an un-credible apologetic look. She slid a glance at me, winked, then shrugged innocently at the guy on the ground.

This was going to be a mistake. I had no business trying to flirt with employees, even if—especially if—they didn’t know I was the boss. But it had been a while since a woman had caught my eye as quickly as Joanne Walker had, and even knowing nothing could come of it, indulging was a rare satisfied temptation.

I glanced over my shoulder at the long hood of the car we sat on. It was a classic, and every model of classic car I’d ever known slipped out of my mind. “What is this, anyway? A Corvette? A—” I was only certain of one classic Corvette line, and offered it up: “A Stingray, maybe? 1963?”

Joanne Walker laughed out loud, a bray that sounded delighted, but it faded into jaw-dropped disbelief when she saw I’d meant the question. “Are you serious? Oh my God. You think Petite’s a Corvette ?” She glanced at her crew, most of whom were watching with reserved glee, though the two who’d been irritated by my invitation onto the car’s hood were openly grinning already.

Walker, all too clearly egged on by their quiet delight, repeated, “Oh my God,” and launched into . “No, Corvettes are curvy, you idiot. I mean, the classic ones are. They came straight out of the fifties, shaped like the women, you know? Hips and boobs, that’s what all those curvy wheel wells are, and the Stingrays had a split back window, swear to God they were supposed to look like a woman’s butt. Petite’s a Mustang, a 1969 Mustang, a muscle car, you moron. Twiggy, not Bettie Page, that’s the kind of model she’s built on. She’s a Boss 305, there were only a few thousand like her made, oh my God , a Corvette, really ? How can you not know this?”

Stiff with embarrassment, I said, “I was never really in to cars,” and she choked a laugh. “Dude, apparently not even enough to get laid. Didn’t you ever get it on in the back seat of one of these things?”

“How old do you think I am ?”

Her eyes narrowed in the instant before she blurted, “Oh, God, I don’t know, like forty-five?” She didn’t think I was anywhere near that old, or she wouldn’t have invited me to sit on the Mustang’s hood in the first place, but she’d put herself on the spot with her own question, and had to upwardly revise whatever she thought the answer really was. And probably downwardly revise it as well, because I’d asked, and I wondered if she’d mentally come up with an answer anywhere close to the truth.

It still stung, which wasn’t any more appropriate than the smugness I’d felt a few minutes ago. “Not quite.”

“I guess not , if you don’t know a ‘69 Mustang from ‘63 Stingray. I didn’t think that was actually possible for people with Y chromosomes. Ar—oh, hey, Captain.”

Nichols walked up, a bowl of potato salad in one hand and a hot dog in the other, and smiled genially around at the Motor Pool crew. “Hi, folks. I see you’ve met Captain Morrison already. What do you think of him?”

“What do we think of him?” Walker crowed

Nichols, as if oblivious to the tone of her voice, went on pleasantly: “I’ve been introducing him around. I thought it would be good for the precinct to meet my replacement before his first day of work in August.”

Blood drained from Walker’s face. She looked at me, white with accusation, which was fair enough: I’d all but introduced myself under false pretenses, and I was just about ashamed enough to look away. Just about, but not quite, and she had just enough pride and anger to drown out her horror. We glared at each other, neither willing to back down, long enough to make not just the Motor crew, but even Captain Nichols, uncomfortable.

Walker finally broke the stalemate with a tight smile and a low harsh voice. “Well. Live long and prosper, Captain Morrison.”

She looked pointedly at my seat on her Mustang. I got up, stepped through the crew, and walked away thinking I’d never been told to go fuck myself so politely in my life.

Somehow she’d found a taxi in my quiet residential neighborhood after all. By the time I followed her, she was gone, the street empty but my driveway filled with not just my Toyota Avalon, but the 1969 Mustang Boss that had been the source of years of contention between myself and Joanne Walker.

The car had had a rough year. Almost as bad as Joanne, and unquestionably worse than my own. An arrow had been shot through the gas tank, an ax dragged through the roof, and then a helicopter had winched the vehicle out of an earthquake fissure that had crumpled the back end. Joanne had spent every spare moment and all her spare cash re-restoring the car, even finally putting in the manual transmission she had always wanted to.

As far as I knew, no one but Joanne had driven the car since she’d found it in a barn a dozen years earlier and started the restoration work on it. I unlocked and opened the driver’s side door slowly and sat down. The seat didn’t need adjustment. Walker and I had proved to be exactly the same height, in the end. I put the keys in the ignition and my hands on the wheel, feeling the shape of Walker’s body in the seat and the soft worn spots in the leather from her hands. Faint scent lingered: mostly Irish Spring soap, but with a hint of oil and grease that would always remind me of Walker.

“It’s all right, old girl,” I finally whispered to the car. “She’ll come back to us as soon as she can.”

We sat together, two things that loved her, and I fell asleep a little while before dawn.

“No Dominion” begins and ends in the middle of RAVEN CALLS (Book Seven of the Walker Papers).

The author feels strongly that you should read RAVEN CALLS first.