Banshee Cries

Dear Reader,

In September of 2004 I got an e-mail from my agent, the incomparable Jennifer Jackson, saying she’d just spoken with my equally incomparable editor, Mary-Theresa Hussey, who wanted to know if I’d be interested in participating in a LUNA Books anthology as one of three contributing authors. The other two authors were to be (need I say the incomparable?) Tanith Lee and Mercedes Lackey.

Not being a great fool, I said yes.

A month of frenzied thought was interspersed with me singing, “One of these things is not like the others,” followed by a flurry of frenzied writing. The result is “Banshee Cries,” Book 1.5 of the Walker Papers. It fits chronologically between book one, Urban Shaman, which came out in June 2005, and book two, Thunderbird Falls, due out in May 2006.

I hope you enjoy the story!

C.E. Murphy

Sunday March 20th, 2:55 p.m.

Cell phones are the most detestable objects on the face of the earth. Worse than those ocean-variety pill bugs that grow bigger than your head, which were on my personal top ten list of Things To Avoid.

My life had been a lovely, cell-free zone until nine weeks, six days, and four hours ago. Not that I was counting. On that fateful day I got an official business phone to go with my bulletproof vest and billy stick. I’d even been given a gun to go with my shiny new badge.

I wanted those things about as much as I’d wanted to bonk my head on the engine block I’d sat up beneath when the phone rang. I rubbed my forehead and glared at the engine, then felt horribly guilty. It wasn’t Petite’s fault I’d hurt myself, and she’d been through enough lately that she didn’t need me scowling on top of it all.

The phone kept ringing. I rolled out from under the Mustang and crawled to her open door, digging the phone out from under the driver’s seat. “What?”

Only one person outside of work had the phone number. As soon as I spoke I realized that a politer pickup might have been kosher. The resounding silence from the other end of the line confirmed my suspicion. Eventually a male voice said, “Walker?”

I turned around to hook my arm over the bottom of the car’s door frame and did my best to stifle a groan. “Captain.”

“I need you—”

These were words that another woman might be pleased to hear from Captain Michael Morrison of the Seattle Police Department. Then again, if he was saying them to another woman, there probably wouldn’t have been the slight tension in his voice that suggested his mouth was pressed into a thin line and his nostrils flared with irritation at having the conversation. He had a good voice, nice and low. I imagined it could carry reassuring softness, the kind that would calm a scared kid. Unfortunately, the only softness I ever heard in it was the kind that said, This is the calm before the storm, which happened to be how he sounded right now. I crushed my eyes closed, face wrinkling up, and prodded the bump on my forehead.

“—to come in to work.”

“It’s my weekend, Morrison.” As if this would make any difference. I could hear his ears turning red.

“I wouldn’t be calling you in—”

“Yeah.” I bit the word off and wrapped my hand around the bottom of Petite’s frame. “What’s going on?”

Silence. “I’d rather not tell you.”

“Jesus, Morrison.” I straightened up, feeling the blood return to the line across my back where I’d been leaning on the car. “Is anybody dead? Is Billy okay?”

“Holliday’s fine. Can you get over to Woodland Park?”

“Yeah, I—” I tilted my head back, looking at the Mustang’s roof. Truth was, I’d been futzing around under the engine block because I couldn’t stand to look at the damage done to my baby’s roof anymore. A twenty-nine-inch gash, not that I’d measured or anything, ran from the windshield’s top edge almost all the way to the back window. From my vantage, thin stuffing and fabric on the inside ceiling shredded and dangled like a teddy bear who’d seen better days. Beyond that, soldered edges of steel, not yet sanded down, looked like somebody’d dragged an ax through it.

Which was precisely what had happened.

A little knot of agony tied itself around my heart and squeezed, just like it did every time I looked at my poor car. The war wounds were almost three months old and killing me, but the insurance company was dragging its feet. Full coverage did cover acts of God—or in my case, acts of gods—but I’d only said she’d been hit by vandals, because who would believe the truth? In the meantime, I’d already spent my meager savings replacing the gas tank that somebody’d shot an arrow through.

My life had gotten unpleasantly weird in the past few months.

I forced myself to find something else to look at—the opposite garage wall had a calendar with a mostly naked woman on it, which was sort of an improvement—and sighed. “Yeah,” I said again, into the phone. “I’m gonna have to take a cab.”

“Fine. Just get here. North entrance. Wear boots.” Morrison hung up and I threw the phone over my shoulder into the car again. Then I said a word nice girls shouldn’t and scrambled after the phone, propping myself in the bucket seat with one leg out the door. Bedraggled as she was, just sitting in Petite made me feel better. I patted her steering wheel and murmured a reassurance to her as I dialed the phone. A voice that had smoked too many cigarettes answered and I grinned, sliding down in Petite’s leather seat.

“Still working?”

“Y’know, in my day, when somebody made a phone call, they said hello and gave their name before anything else.”

“Gary, in your day they didn’t have telephones. Are you still working?”

“Depends. Is this the crazy broad who hires cabbies to drive her to crime scenes?”

I snorted a laugh. “Yeah.”

“Is she gonna cook me dinner if I’m still workin’?”

“Sure,” I said brightly. “I’ll whip you up the best microwave dinner you ever had.”

“Okay. I want one of them chicken fettuccine ones. Where you at?”

“Chelsea’s Garage.”

Gary groaned, a rumble that came all the way from his toes and reverberated in my ear. “You still over there mooning over that car, Jo?”

“I am not mooning!” I was mooning. “She needs work.”

“You need money. And snow tires. And more than six inches of clearance. You ain’t gonna drive it till spring, Jo, even if you do get it fixed up.”

“Her,” I said, sounding like a petulant child. “Petite’s a her, not an it, aren’t you, baby,” I added, addressing the last part to the steering wheel. “Look, are you gonna come get me or not? It’s even a paying gig. Morrison called and wants me to go over to Woodland Park.”

“Arright.” Gary’s voice brightened considerably. “Maybe there’ll be a body.”

Morrison glared magnificently when I arrived with Gary in tow. The two of them facing off was wonderful to behold: Morrison was pushing forty and good-looking in a superhero-going-to-seed way, with graying hair and sharp blue eyes. Gary, at seventy-three, had Hemingway wrinkles and a Connery build that made him look dependable and solid instead of old, and his gray eyes were every bit as sharp as Morrison’s. For a few seconds I thought they might start butting heads.