“I know.” He didn’t move. He just stood there and let his hand brush against mine again. My heart started to beat faster. “I looked you up.”
“That’s a little creepy,” I said. “Are you sure you’re not stalking me?”
He snorted a little. “Not completely. I was thinking I was checking out a witness when I did it, but I suppose I might have had ulterior motives on a subconscious level that I was unwilling to acknowledge to myself.”
“Pretty fancy talk for a beat cop,” I said.
“I’m full of surprises.”
“There was a baby, a little girl.” My voice shook a little. I took a deep breath. “She was sleeping in her crib. She got hit by a piece of shrapnel.”
I don’t know why I said it. Maybe I needed to tell someone. Maybe I needed to tell someone who had seen what I’d seen tonight and more, someone who would understand. What good it would do, I didn’t know. Probably none. Telling someone wouldn’t get the shrapnel out of that tiny body.
“I know,” he said. Then he took my hand and laced his fingers through mine. We stood in silence and watched the sun rise over the city.
I’D EVENTUALLY HAD TO GO BACK INTO THE HOSPITAL IF ONLY to clock out for the day. I was happy to get out of there, away from the groans and calls for help, the chill of the hallways and the ever-present smell of death with the coppery tang of blood beneath it.
I went home and showered under the hottest water I could stand, and when I got out, I called my aunt.
“Aunt Kitty? It’s Melina.” I took a deep breath, held the phone away from my ear and waited for the ear-piercing squeal to be over. Aunt Kitty is my mother’s younger sister. She’s only five years younger than my mother chronologically. Maturitywise, she’s younger than me. I think her emotional development arrested somewhere around fourteen.
I wanted to follow up on the McMansions, and I knew the best place to start would be with Aunt Kitty. I knew she’d be likely to be home, getting reorganized after a busy weekend of showing houses and wheeling and dealing, and that if anyone could get the information I wanted, it would be her.
“Melina, sweetheart! How are you? How’s work?”
“I’m fine. Work’s fine.” That wasn’t entirely true, but nobody really wants the truth when they ask those questions. “I’m just curious about something and wanted to see if you could help me.”
“Of course, darling. Anything for you. You know that.” Aunt Kitty is the kind of aunt who takes you shopping and buys you makeup when you’re twelve, lets you rent R-rated movies when you’re staying at her house when you’re fifteen and proclaims “Dessert First” night every so often just for the hell of it. She’s like a teenager but with all the rights of a grown-up. The only thing more dangerous that I can imagine would be cats with opposable thumbs.
“Can you look up an address and figure out who owns the house?” I asked. Aunt Kitty is a real estate agent. She’s a pussycat of an aunt but a tiger when it comes to buying and selling houses. She always makes it high enough on the board at her office to park in one of the nice spaces in the underground parking garage. In real estate speak, we’re talking rock star.
“Of course I can. Is there some place you’re interested in? Are you thinking of buying?” Bless her pea-picking heart, but Aunt Kitty managed not to sound incredulous at the idea. I am as likely to have enough money to make a down payment on a house in northern California as I am to grow wings and fly.
Actually, the flying thing might be a teensy bit more likely. I’m never quite sure what new things I will discover about being a Messenger. Maybe that’s right around the corner for me.
“No. I’m just curious as to who owns this one house.”
She sighed. “I’m probably not supposed to ask why.”
“Probably not.”
Aunt Kitty has always hoped that the makeup purchases, the R-rated movie rentals and the Dessert First nights would gain her some special entrée into my life. She’s right. They have. There are just some things I’m better off not telling anyone no matter how much I want to share. It’s been tough for her to deal with, but she tries. She really is an awesome aunt. She sighed again. “What’s the address?”
I gave her the number of the McMansion the
kiang shi
’s handlers had gone to the night before and listened to her fingers tippy-tapping at her computer keyboard. “So are you seeing anyone?” she asked.
“Do I have to answer that to find out who owns that house?” I countered.
“No. It’s just a conversational topic to kill time while I wait for the search results to come up.”
“No. I’m not seeing anyone,” I said.
“There’s a young man at my office who just started . . .”
“Aunt Kitty,” I said. “We’ve been through this before.” I am not cut out to date real estate agents. Or maybe they’re not cut out to date me. I’m not exactly sure. I do know we scare each other. Sadly, I think they scare me more than I scare them. Real estate agents are fearless.
“Here it is,” she said brightly. “The owner of the house is Edwin Ho. Oh, that’s interesting.”
“What is?” Goodie. There was something interesting about the house. Maybe it would help me figure out what the hell was going on.
“Well, I thought the agent who brokered the sale was retired. I didn’t know he was still in the business.” Aunt Kitty prides herself on being tapped in to all the good info that’s out there. Missing a detail like that would rankle with her, I was sure.
“What’s his name?” I asked.
“Winston Chung.” I could hear Aunt Kitty’s fingers furiously typing. “Look at that. I guess I must have gotten my wires crossed. He’s brokered at least ten sales in Elk Grove over the past three months.” She tapped some more. “Now that’s odd.”
“What’s odd, Aunt Kitty?” I felt a little like Jay Leno’s audience. Next thing I knew I’d be screaming, “How odd is it?”
“All these properties have their mortgage from the same bank.”
“Is that really that weird?” I knew for a fact that Aunt Kitty had banks she preferred to work with and steered her clients that way. I bet easily seventy percent of Kitty’s clients ended up financing their homes with her friend Lavonda at the Second Northern Bank of California.
“It’s weird enough that I want to do some checking, and that’s going to take some time,” she said. “Can I call you back?”
I told her she could call me back anytime, which is pretty much true—I don’t sleep much—and we hung up.
I gathered up my karate gear and headed out the door to go to the dojo. The teen sparring class was this afternoon. It took both Mae and me together to contain the raging hormones that flooded the place during those. Ben was in his usual place on the stoop as I left. He had on a pair of skintight red plaid pants that seemed to have the legs from the knees down attached by a combination of fishing wire and safety pins.
“No Sophie today?” I asked as I stepped around him.
He leaned back on his hands and looked up at me. “At least, not for me,” he said.
“How long have you two been friends?” I asked.
He shrugged. “I’m not sure we’re friends now. She stopped by. We chilled. That’s all.”
I nodded. She stopped by and they chilled. Of course. How could I have been so dense? “What’s her story?”
“You mean the scars?” He looked up at me. It was good to see his eyes clear and not red and puffy.
“Yeah, I guess so.” I sat down next to him.
“Car accident. At least, that’s what I heard. She doesn’t talk about it.” He picked at the safety pins holding his pants legs together. “Somebody said she actually died and they brought her back. Cool, huh?”
“Yeah,” I said, not meeting his eyes. “Cool.”
I chewed over what he’d just told me as I drove to the dojo. Someone who had died and been resuscitated. Now she was hanging around Mae and me.
I was spectacularly unsurprised to find Sophie at River City Karate and Judo when I walked in. She, on the other hand, looked a little apprehensive as I walked in. Her eyes widened and she ducked behind her hair.
“Hi, Sophie,” I said. “Care to tell me who you really are?”
“I TOLD YOU SHE’D BE UPSET,” SOPHIE WAILED, PRACTICALLY hiding behind Mae, which was not so easy since she had about four inches on her.
“I’m. Not. Angry,” I said through gritted teeth. “I just want to know what’s going on and I want to know now.”
I’d found the two of them working out on the mats in the dojo. Sophie was dressed in a beginner’s
gi
and white belt. Her skinny ankles stuck out the bottom of the too short pants. Her toenails were painted pink, but the polish had chipped.
Mae was, well . . . Mae.
“That’s not possible.” Mae smiled at me the same way she smiles at the Little Dragons when they want candy.
In response, I came damn close to stamping my foot when I asked why.
“Because I don’t know and neither does Sophie,” she said.
“What
do
you and Sophie know?” I asked, trying to unclench my jaw while I said it. I slung my backpack down in the tiled waiting area, bowed slightly and walked onto the mat.
There’s something about the sensation of that scratchy mat under my feet that makes me feel like I’m home. Tension runs out of my body like saline out of a leaky IV bag. I don’t feel it at my apartment. I don’t feel it at my parents’ place. I don’t feel it at the hospital. I feel it at the River City Karate and Judo.
I am so screwed up.
“I know that ever since I came out of my coma, I see things that nobody else sees and hear stuff that nobody else hears,” Sophie said, her head now held high as if she were defying someone or something by saying those things out loud.
I looked over at Mae. She shrugged.
“What kind of things?” I asked.
She let her hair fall in front of her face again. “Stuff,” she said.
“Stuff,” I repeated. “You’re seeing and hearing stuff. There are medications for that, you know?”
“I do know,” she said softly. “Don’t you think I’ve considered that? That maybe I got knocked hard enough on the head that I’m crazy now?”
That did actually make me feel a little bad. I’d never had to go through that. Three years old is too young to consider that you may be becoming delusional or schizophrenic or bipolar or whatever the popular diagnosis of the day is. Everyone else around me may have wondered, but I was blissfully without that concern.
“Oh,” I said. “So did Mae tell you that if they told you to come here, the voices were probably real?”
She sighed. “Yeah. I can’t decide if that’s good news or bad.”
I patted her on her skinny shoulder as I walked past her to retrieve my backpack and go change. “Welcome to the club, kiddo. Welcome to the club.”
9
I LAY EXHAUSTED ON THE MAT. I WAS PRETTY SURE I WAS GOING to have a heck of a bruise on my right bicep and would probably be limping for at least a day. As usual, the sparring class lived up to its name and reputation. The kids might bow and say a respectful “sir” or “ma’am” as they walked in the door, but once we were on the mats, they were ready to rumble. It felt so good. It was a good clean pain, not that murky ache in my stomach every time I thought about little Maricela and her weeping mother.
The kids had gone and I was trying to fill Mae in on what I’d learned so far.
“They’re called
kiang shi
.” I was talking to Mae but kept Sophie in view. Was she ready to hear this stuff? She’d been a Messenger for what? About a nanosecond? If that even was what she really was. Was she really ready to hear about hopping undead Asians feasting on the living flesh of Latino gang members? I’d been a Messenger for twenty-three years and I wasn’t particularly ready for it. She seemed calm enough, though.
“Never heard of ’em,” Mae said.
“Me neither, but both Alex and Aldo knew what they were.” And had a big argument about them, but with Alex and Aldo that pretty much went without saying.
“What are they going to do about them?” Sophie asked.
I shook my head. “Nothing as far as I can figure out. Aldo says they’re not the Seethe’s problem, and I can’t see Alex taking on a community improvement project.”
“What about the guys in the SUVs? Are they
kiang shi
?” Sophie scooted closer to me on the mat.
“No. They’re human. At least, they’re as human as you can be if you’re the kind of person who would sic a vampire on a human being.”
“How are they controlling them?” She picked at the peeling polish on her big toe.
“Hell if I know.”
Mae stood up and stretched. “It sounds like there’s an awful lot you don’t know.”
Wasn’t that always the case? The one thing I was constantly sure of was that there was a hell of a lot of unknown stuff coming at me in unexpected ways. “I’m not sure I really need to know anything more. It’s not really my business. I don’t have a delivery to make. Nobody is asking me to take anything anywhere.” I sat up on the mat.
“But people are getting hurt.” Sophie sounded indignant.
“People are always getting hurt somewhere. It’s not really my job to protect them.” I knew that sounded heartless. Maybe it was heartless, but it was also true.
“Whose job is it then?” she demanded.
I looked over to Mae for some help. She looked right back at me and didn’t say a word.
“What am I supposed to do?” I stood up and did a last few stretches.
“Maybe you could start by tracking down some of the stuff you don’t know,” Mae suggested.
