C.E. Murphy - Walking Dead

“Matholwch.” Billy got out of the car, exasperated, and I followed him like a lonely puppy.

“Matholwch, Mugwitch, Mud-blood, whatever. The point is, it’s been buried on the other side of the world. So if I’m right about the party ghosts being woken up by Mugwi—Matholwch’s—cauldron, we might be dealing with murders that took place in Ireland over the last several centuries.”

It wasn’t fair. I knew keeping things to myself was bad. From Billy’s expression, I could tell voicing them wasn’t exactly popular, either. He kept the hard look on his face all the way through saying, “I’m going to work with the assumption that these are local ghosts stirred up by the cauldron’s presence.”

“Why? Wouldn’t it be better to have ritual murders linked to the cauldron? Some kind of appeasement or something?” I wasn’t trying to be a smartass. I really wasn’t. It just made sense to me: shake a death cauldron and ghosts come out, regardless of whether it’s their home turf or not.

Billy sighed. “It’d be tidy, and I’d rather that than find out we’ve missed semi-centennial murders in Seattle, not that I know how we’d have caught them. It’s not much of a pattern. But I don’t have jurisdiction in Ireland, and neither do you. So we look where we know the territory.”

I knew he was right. My mouth still went all droopy, like sugar in the rain. Billy sighed again, louder this time. “Okay, all right, fine. I’ll add Interpol to the search. You’re fixing the minivan for a year if it comes up dry.”

It seemed like a bad time to point out I’d fix the minivan anyway. I beamed, said good-night and headed home, praying nothing would go wrong so I could get a full night’s sleep.

Monday, October 31, 8:13 a.m.

I jolted out of bed with the conviction of a woman who’s just heard the bell tolling for her. Thirty seconds later I was scrubbing shampoo out of my hair and reaching for a towel, having completed the fastest shower in human history. My heart raced from the unexpected wake up, adrenaline souring my stomach. My brain hadn’t yet identified whatever noise had awakened me, but it didn’t matter. I was late for work. Morrison would ride my ass and I’d deserve it. I couldn’t believe I’d slept through the alarm.

I couldn’t, in fact, believe that I’d gotten home and gone to bed uneventfully. My past experiences suggested I’d be up for three days straight while I tried to get the world sorted out, so I was grateful for small favors. I tore out of the bathroom and flung my clothes on, then sat down and put my forehead against my knees. I was due in at eight. In the grand scheme of things, Morrison wouldn’t be any more pissed if I got in at 8:31 a.m. than at eight-thirty. Something had woken me up with a scare, and I knew by now that was a bad sign. Half a minute to figure it out wouldn’t signal the end of the world. On the other hand, not taking that half minute might. Such was my life.

The panic faded from my chest, heart rate slowing. I’d been awake barely two minutes. Two minutes was a lot of time in terms of things going wrong, so whatever’d awakened me—a guttural snort, I suddenly remembered, like a wookelar from the old Tim Conway Disney film. The wookelar had been a flesh-eating monster of some kind. It was too early to deal with flesh-eating monsters. I looked for door number two.

It opened with a bolt of sunny revelation. Heat flashed up my face, reached the top of my head, got bored and rushed back down again toward my collarbone. There was no wookelar. Furthermore, I hadn’t slept through the alarm. I’d turned it off because Mondays and Tuesdays were my days off.

And then I’d woken myself up with my own snoring.

Hands over my face, I toppled into my pillow and blushed until my head pounded. This was the sort of event that haunted a person through the years until she suddenly couldn’t take it anymore and flung herself from a building top. Darwinian embarrassment, though in my case it was too late. I’d already passed on my genetic legacy. For a rare moment I let myself dwell on that, hoping the son I’d given up for adoption was more socially adroit than his biological mother.

Of course, Godzilla was smoother than I was. I crawled out of bed and drank two glasses of water, trying to get the blood in my face to thin, and considered going back to bed. Starting all over again seemed like a better way to face the day than starting out by terrorizing myself with violent snoring.

Unfortunately for me, there was a fresh murder case and a whole series of stale ones to be dealt with. I was showered and dressed anyway. I shuffled into the kitchen to make myself a cup of coffee—just what my jumped-up heart rate and sour stomach needed—and shuffled out the door, coffee mug in hand, to walk into a big wall of a man with his hand raised to knock.

Actually, I narrowly missed walking into him. We froze a scant inch or two apart while the coffee sloshed and burned my fingers. I felt like a cartoon character, afraid to move for fear the ground would be gone from beneath my feet. I eased back onto my heels, finding the floor still nice and solid, then grinned and took a full step back into my doorway. “Gary.”

I got a gleaming white smile in reply. “Happy Halloween, doll.”

Gary Muldoon was probably the only man on earth I’d allow to call me “doll.” Or “lady” or “broad,” or any of the other gangster-era endearments he used, for that matter. He wasn’t quite old enough to use them legitimately, at least not unless he had mafia connections he’d never mentioned, but with a name like Muldoon I didn’t figure he did. On the other hand, even at seventy-three, he’d be a great piece of hired muscle: he was a bit taller than me, and still had the broad shoulders of his linebacker youth. We’d been friends since I’d jumped in his cab most of a year ago and demanded he drive me on a wild-goose chase. I’d ended up almost dead—not his fault—and the circumstances surrounding it made him decide I was interesting enough to hang with. Not that he’d used the phrase. I was just proving my street cred with it.

I lifted the hand that didn’t have a coffee mug in it and mocked thwacking his shoulder. “Happy Halloween. You didn’t come to my party!”

He took my coffee and slurped. “You shouldn’t be drinking this stuff before we do a session. Did I miss anything? This needs milk.”

I stared at my—his—coffee in dismay. “We’re not doing a session this morning. I’m going to work. There was a murder.”

Gary pushed past me in search of milk. I followed him and made another cup of coffee as I recounted the weekend’s events. By the time I had a new mug curled protectively in my hands, Gary’s craggy features had settled into an excellent approximation of a sullen child’s. “And you didn’t call me?”

“I thought you were coming to the party. And then it was four in the morning. Why didn’t you come?” I sounded as childish as he looked. We made a great pair.

Guilt slid across Gary’s face. “I was busy.”

“Too busy to come to the first party I’ve ever hosted in my entire life? What’d you have, a hot date?”

Gary’s ears turned a deep, rich red, making a brilliant contrast against white hair. I gasped, very ingenue-like, and set my coffee mug down so I could point at him accusingly. “You did have a date! You had a date and you didn’t even tell me! Garrison Matthew Muldoon! How could you?! Who is she? Do you like her? How did it go? Are you going to see her again? Why didn’t you bring her to the party? When do I get to meet her?” I was worse than somebody’s mother, but I couldn’t shut up. Curious glee had my tongue and was trying for my feet. It was all I could do not to jump up and caper around.