C.E. Murphy - Coyote Dreams

Morrison said, “For Christ’s sake, Walker,” and hung up the phone. I stared at it, then called back. Maybe he had the same Pavlovian response to ringing phones that I did, because he answered even though he had to know it was me.

“She’s there, isn’t she?” The very idea made my eyes hot. “Morrison, listen to me. That topaz is working. If you don’t have it, there’s nothing protecting you, and if she’s there you’re in danger. You’ve got to get out of there.”

I heard him pull a deep breath. His voice was very steady a moment later when he said, “Walker, you sound ridiculous. Yes. Barbara’s here, though that’s none of your business. You need to go home and go to bed. You’re obviously overwrought.”

“I’m over—I’m…Morrison! You told me to solve this thing! I’m telling you, she’s got something to do with it! She and Mark were—”

“Walker, listen to yourself. You sound like—” My boss was at a loss for words there for an instant, then finished as if he couldn’t believe what he was saying. “You sound like you’re jealous, Walker.”

I slammed the heel of my hand into Petite’s horn and shouted, “Of course I’m jealous, you idiot!” over its blare. “Could we get past that and get you out of the house, please?” I pounded on the horn, short bursts of noise that emphasized my words. Then I remembered I was sitting outside a hospital, and stopped hitting the horn.

The silence that followed was profound. Not just the silence in the car, but Morrison’s quietness on the other end of the line. He finally said, very gently, “Go home and get some rest, Walker. We’ll talk about this tomorrow.” He hung up, and I wrapped my hand around my cell phone and smashed my fist into the opposite palm until I stopped wanting to cry.

It took long enough to let me decide that if Morrison wasn’t going to listen to my irrational, embarrassing self over the phone, I was just going to have to go to his house and talk to him in person. Because that would go over so well. It might help if I started with an apology, though that wasn’t going to help my general feeling of humiliation any. I was pretty sure that karmically speaking, though, the universe would approve of it as a first step.

The problem was I didn’t know where he lived. Or even if he was at home, for that matter. He could’ve been with Barb, for all I knew. The whole idea made my stomach hurt, a fishhook tug that felt like I was being pulled where I didn’t want to go. While my mind ran in circles trying to figure out how to figure out where he lived, my hand opened up and dialed the front desk at the precinct building. The guy who answered wasn’t Bruce, which it wouldn’t have been, anyway, because he didn’t work a night shift, but my heart missed a beat and hung there miserably in my chest while I asked to be, and was, transferred to the missing persons department.

Intellectually I didn’t expect anybody to be there at goingon two in the morning. My intellect, though, was still working on how to find Morrison’s house while some other part of my mind, working on automatic, actually tried doing something about it. My stomach hurt even more, a bubbling mess of sickness that roiled and twisted beneath my breastbone. I made a fist and thumped it against my diaphragm, trying to work some of the discomfort out, and narrowly avoided burping in the ear of the woman who picked up the phone, her Spanish accent tired.

“Jen? What’re you doing there?”

“Joanie? What are you doing calling?” Tired didn’t cover it. She sounded exhausted. I thought I probably sounded the same. “I’m popping NoDoz and drinking Jolt,” she answered. “I fall asleep if I’m at home, so I thought I’d hang out here and try to get some late-night work done.”

My face crumpled. “Are a lot of people doing that?”

“All over the place. Everybody’s trying to stay awake. What are you calling MP for, Joanie? Is everything okay?”

Talking about staying awake made me yawn. I tried to keep it tight so it wouldn’t set Jen to yawning, too. “I have kind of a weird question.”

“Is it weirder than asking me to find a modern-day kid from a reference painting of mythological figures?”

I lifted my eyes to look blankly through Petite’s windshield. “When you put it that way, no.” For a moment my vision fused with the Sight and I could see spiderweb cracks all through Petite’s window, streetlight glinting on the damaged lines. “I need Morrison’s home address.”

The silence that followed was long and profound enough I found myself shifting uncomfortably in Petite’s bucket seat. “What,” I finally said, “is that weirder than the painting?”

“The jury’s still out,” Jen said after another long several seconds. “Why don’t you just call him?” She sounded, I thought, suspiciously like a teenager waiting to get the dirt on a topic she’d been polite enough not to ask about until now. I began to wonder if I was the last one who’d picked up on my own emotional conflict regarding Morrison. I hoped not. I hoped, at least, that Morrison was still a step behind me.

That seemed painfully unlikely, especially at this juncture.

“Can you just get me his address, Jen?” I had to at least try to draw a line in the sand. I had no illusions about how long it’d stay drawn if Jen insisted, but I wasn’t going to go down without a fight.

Jen said, “Huh,” and then, “Just a second,” leaving me to eye my reflection and the phone in the rearview mirror. It couldn’t be that easy, could it?

“All right, here it is. You have something to write with?”

Apparently it could be. I scrambled for a pencil, writing down the address and repeating it back to her. “Thanks, Jen. Look, the topaz seems to be working. You can probably sleep safely if you’re hanging on to it. It looks like it’s keeping Billy’s brother from going under, anyway.”

She said, “Huh,” again, then, “Ok, if I get desperate. Thanks,” and hung up on me. I glanced over my shoulder as I keyed Petite on, and pulled out onto the street wondering what I was going to do if Morrison wasn’t home.

I didn’t have to worry about it. Morrison’s Avalon was parked next to a quarter-ton Dodge Ram in the driveway of a two-story cream-colored house with trim that looked black in the nighttime city lights. Curtains lined the insides of windows. I didn’t have curtains on my windows, only the blinds the apartment had come with when I’d rented it in college. At a glance, Morrison was Suzy Homemaker, compared to me. Of course, the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse were probably Suzy Homemaker, compared to me. I bet Morrison cooked his own meals, too. He certainly mowed the lawn, right up to the edge of a picket fence that matched the trim. I’d never thought of Morrison as a picketfence kind of guy. Young spruce trees bordered the fence, with hedges growing up between them. They looked like they probably reduced the noise off the street, which might help a cop sleep better at night.

Unless, of course, he had employees calling him up in the middle of the night to rant and rave and profess jealousy to him. This minute examination of his front lawn was not getting me any closer to dealing with my embarrassing behavior or the woman in Morrison’s bed. The Ram had to be hers. I couldn’t imagine Morrison owning a recreational vehicle.

I gritted my teeth and left Petite, following a stone footpath up to Morrison’s front door. Yellow rosebushes lined the front of the house, and a wheelbarrow sat up against the bushes on the porch’s far side. A blue tarp was tucked neatly around the barrow’s burden, a plastic-wrapped set of shears weighing it down for good measure.

I knocked on the door, staring at my feet, and nobody answered. I could think of a lot of reasons why someone might not answer the door at two in the morning, and none of them were reasons that suggested pushing the doorbell was a good idea. I did it, anyway. For a moment I thought it was broken, then heard it bong twice with increasing volume, and decided it probably rang three times, working its way up to being heard instead of starting out shrill and scaring the hell out of the people inside. It seemed like a good doorbell for a cop.