Fish Out of Water (2 page)

The girl looked a few years younger than me, maybe 25. And she had the kind of beautiful, never-gonna-be-lined face used by anti-wrinkle cream companies to sell insecurity to fifty-year-old women. Her head lay slightly askew on her neck, an angle you’d never quite pull
off alive. A trace of purple outlined her full lips. A pair of wild blue eyes stared upwards to infinity. And, because of what I am, I could smell it too. The smoky stench of death.

I crouched down and laid a hand on her forearm, expecting the usual chill but registering that she was even colder than I’d expected. Must have been here longer than we’d thought.

Looking at her, touching her, thinking about her deadness, my brain filled up, thinking about my responsibilities. I felt the sweat start to bead on my lip again and straightened up. Spots jangled in front of my eyes and the tendons at the back of my knees danced a mini hula. By the Goddess, only three weeks. Who was gonna take care of things when I was gone?

I took a deep breath and said it internally like the yogi taught me:

I embrace my fate and welcome each moment until my end.

“You still doin’ that hippy crap?” Aldus is deeply suspicious of meditation.

“You should try it sometime. Helps you find peace.”

“Whadda I need with peace?” He snorted in disgust. “And whadda you need with peace? Will it help you find a man? Pretty girl like you, goin’ on thirty. Saw this Oprah thing ‘bout these poor girls waited so long they had to freeze their e—”

“Aldus...”

“I’m just sayin’…”

“And I’m just not listening.”

Aldus started muttering under his breath as he stalked around the blonde, his dirty brown point-toed cowboy boots making crunchy noises on the road. “If the good Lord had meantcha to be peaceful, he wouldn’a made you Sicilian.”

He had a point. But you’ve got to find some way to manage the psychic burden of waiting to die. Young. And for me, stumbling into an Ashram in Goa after years of doing my best James Dean, meditation was it.

Aldus took up my previous position crouching by the blonde and ran one dirty finger through the pool of clear liquid she was lying in. “Still can’t work out what the hell she died of, or what this shit is.”

Jesus, talk about contaminating the crime scene. My boss in NYC would have relegated his ass to desk duty for a month for that kind of sloppiness.

“Tastes kind of salty.” Eat your heart out, Agatha Christie.

I joined him beside the girl and we spent a companionable moment sizing up the corpse, Aldus running his hands through his greased-back grey hair and me tearing at a fingernail with my teeth. I looked up at him from my notebook. “Hm. No obvious marks or wounds. ’Cept the shoe-print. No blood or other fluids. No weapon. Just a dead girl. Didn’t even take the hair.”

Aldus frowned, huffily muttering something about “too much goddam NCIS.”

He hated it when I did this. You know, police work.

I looked at our dead blonde again. Something was so definitely wrong with this picture. I felt it low and deep, someplace between my stomach and my heart. I hadn’t been home to Aegira for thirteen years, since I found out I was a dead woman walking. But I still knew what the blonde looked like. My intuition was telling me what she was, clear as a bell. And my intuition’s just about the only thing on earth I trust. I may be only half-Sicilian, but I got the suspicious part. In fact, I avoid thinking about what Dr Phil would make of my trust issues. But tonight my logic was waging war with my intuition, and my logic was winning.

First time for everything.

“Better call it in,” I offered as we stood up, by way of making up with Aldus. “And don’t worry.” I squeezed his shoulder, feeling a warm rush in my tummy as I touched this man, who’d given me a job when I’d needed so bad to come back home. “I’ll take the late shift.”

“Okay,” he agreed, with a relieved whoosh of spit and breath. “I’ll call Billy.”

I crouched again to look at the blonde, out of sight of Aldus’ Buick. My eyes swept the scene, trying to work out why my arm-hairs were going crazy. I started making notes in the little spiral notebook I carry in my pocket. No signs of a scuffle. No hand-bag, or any other accessories. No wedding band. No jewelry of any kind.

I stood back, sniffed the thick summer air, sized her up.

Tall, slim but broad-shouldered. Like a supermodel. I checked the bottom of her white, no-brand trainers. Size 10. Big feet. Her eyes were wide, almost in shock. And ice blue. Don’t get excited, I warned myself, balancing my book on my knee and rubbing my patch in hopes of cajoling it into releasing some more nicotine. Most blondes have blue eyes. It didn’t mean…

Something twitched in my consciousness again, and my hand slid off her face and down her shoulder to fall beside her, grazing the pool of liquid. Unconsciously, I brought a ragged fingernail to my mouth to chew and worry at. And then I tasted it. Aldus was right. Salty.

Shee-yit.

She was lying in a pool of saltwater.

In the middle of Dirtwater. The only settlement in the recorded history of humans settling anyplace that lays claim to no naturally occurring water of any kind. Salt or fresh. Even the town fountain, once a semi-ironic feature piece, dried up two years ago and has since stood empty. A bone-dry reminder that this place really is a hellhole.

So what was my beautiful blonde, clearly dead but with no apparent sign of injury, doing lying in a pool of seawater on its main street? I had a sick feeling it was a question to which I really needed to know the answer. And not just for the sake of the blonde.

Apart from Mom, I hadn’t seen a mermaid for thirteen years. So why would one turn up now, when I’ve only got three weeks left? It was just too neat. Only one way to know for sure.

My hand twitched nervously as it swept aside the white blonde hair on the left side of her cheek, and revealed her swan-like neck. Her skin was more golden than a Baywatch babe but cold as a popsicle on a summer day. And there it was. A tiny blue-green tattoo of a stylised fish.

Holy shit, she was a watch-keeper.

I could hear Aldus behind me, on the two-way to Billy, the local paramedic. Billy runs the funeral home as well, but no-one’s ever questioned the conflict of interest. He picks up Dirtwater’s bruised, battered and, ever so occasionally, dead, and takes them to the hospital, the funeral home or the morgue. Depending on the type and degree of their misfortune.

Aldus has loved Billy since Billy played ball for Dirtwater High a dozen years before, and I could tell he was thinking passing Blondie over to him might be his ticket back to the air-conditioned bliss of Boss Hadley’s poker room. I tried to tune Aldus out. My hands were shaking and my heart pounding as I contemplated it all.

A mermaid. A
watch-keeper
. On the main street of Dirtwater. Dead.

What the hell was she doing there? There’s never been a mermaid in Dirtwater. Talk about a fish out of water. So far out of water it’s not funny.

Well, correction. There’s never been a mermaid here apart from my Mom. And me.

Although technically I’m only half-mermaid.

“Travel well, little one,” I said, sweeping my fingers lightly over her eyelids and down her cheeks in the ancient farewell. “May the seas be gentle with your ship of sleep.”

My heart constricted and I felt out of breath. The spots before my eyes lengthened into jagged lines at the edges of my vision. Wow, go figure. Just when you’re sure you’ve seen it all and nothing can make you sad. I could hear Mom saying “Baby, your heart’s too big for this job.” Tell that to all the badasses I’d locked up, throwing away the key without a second thought.

I looked again at the blonde. Her stillness stopped me. It seemed small and selfish to think about my own impending fate, but I couldn’t stop myself. Three weeks.
Tick, tick, tick…

Still, nothing an old friend wouldn’t fix.

I tapped a cigarette out of its packet and slid its clean, dry beauty between my lips.

It was like coming home. I’d been planning to clean up my body to prepare it for the hereafter – no Twinkies, no cigarettes. If I had to meet the Goddess, I didn’t want her seeing what a lousy job I did of looking after the fine body she gave me. For a start, I’d never seen another mermaid with cellulite. But I figured that was a technicality now. The quitting thing, I mean. Now I had something else to focus on for the next three weeks. I had to find out who hurt this Chosen One.

I lit up, looking for comfort as much as the dizzy hit that I knew was my pay-off for walking this carcinogenic tightrope.

I could always give up tomorrow.

“Wish some woman loved to suck on me that much,” a seedy voice behind me wheezed. I swivelled to see a face that was heading towards handsome in high school but never quite fulfilled its promise. Billy. By the Goddess, this day couldn’t get any worse.

“Hi Rania,” he oozed in that breathy drawl that some cheerleader back in the day had told him was sexy. He swayed closer to me so I could smell the sweet-sour cocktail of bad whiskey and bourbon chicken on his breath. I didn’t need to look into his puffy blue eyes to know he was looking at me the way he’d looked at me since we were in second grade together. Like he couldn’t decide if he wanted to catch me in a game of kiss chasey or pull my pigtails.

Even now that I didn’t have a pigtails.

“So what’s with the stiff? Aldus says we need an autopsy. Been trying to get Larry, but no luck. Done one of his disappearing acts. I guess I’ll take her to the morgue anyway, prep her, ’til we reach him.” Billy sidelines as a forensic assistant, helping out the coroner.

Damn. Last thing I needed was this doofus poking around my girl.

“Thanks Billy,” I purred, real friendly, to the background buzz of crickets and a lone generator. He grinned hopefully. “But you better not prep her tonight, huh? Federal law. Anyone who deals with a corpse under the influence is liable to hefty penalties.”

Billy licked his lips in a gesture that came off stomach-churningly sensuous. “Really?”

I nodded. “Oh yeah, man. And there’s something about this case.” I searched for the right word. “Something… fishy.”

The crickets buzzed. The generator groaned. I waited, to give him time to catch up.

Billy nodded, mentally watching the greenbacks fly out of his account.

“The feds are gonna be all over it. Might be best if you just keep her on ice. I’ll meet you at the morgue in the morning.”

Billy’s now glum face lit up, creasing into a toothy smile. “Tomorrow? Sunday?”

I nodded reluctantly.
Here it comes
.

That tongue reappeared to caress his lips. “Your Ma still do brownies Sunday mornin’?”

Men and their appetites
. Every atom in me wanted to tell him to take his greedy little brownie-loving fingers and shove ’em where the sun don’t shine, but I needed him on my side.

“Sure. Leave Blondie alone tonight and there’ll be brownies in it for you tomorrow.”

Billy smiled and turned back to his rig to pop the gurney out before speeding off, leaving Aldus and me on Main Street looking at the slick stain where she’d been a moment before. Aldus cracked his knuckles enthusiastically and smiled hopefully, but I couldn’t shake the fog of wrong that was dogging me.

“I guess we’d better start canvassing,” I suggested to Aldus, who looked like a petulant twelve-year-old whose Mama’s told him he’s gotta do his homework before he goes to surf porn on the internet. Dr Phil would tell him to “muscle up.”

“Come on Aldus,” I offered heartily, punching him on the arm affectionately but forgetting my strength until he winced and rubbed the spot my fist had landed. “Remember I said I’ll take the late? But we have a dead girl here. Our first corpse in God knows how long.”

“Do you have to act so goddamn excited?” He sounded really petulant now. “Anyway, how bout old Mrs Kraus, down on Park and Lincoln last week? You forget already?”

“Buh-bow.” I made a noise like a game show buzzer signalling
wrong answer
. “Cardiac arrest. She was eighty-five. Her team lost the bridge final. She didn’t have the heart to go on.”

“
Uncommon courage
, my ass,” Aldus bitched. “Uncommon nagging more like. Shoulda given you the Medal of Pain-in-the-Ass, not the Medal of Freakin’ Valor.”

I laughed and scratched my arm, where the shiny, plastic scar ran from cuff to elbow.

Thing is, I agreed with him. No way am I brave. A year later and I still have nightmares about red-headed girls clutching smoking teddy bears.

Aldus swiftly changed tack, reminding me he wasn’t as clueless as he liked everyone to believe. “Ah, so okay, okay. What the hell else we gotta do this week, right? Only business lately’s been those crazy sonsabitches out at the old Hagan estate.”

“Technically,” I corrected him, “there are some pretty damn irritating daughtersabitches out there too.” We both sighed into the claggy heat of the Dirtwater night.

Aldus and I had really had it with the Children of the Apocalypse. “They aren’t the only ones sayin’ the world’s gonna end,” Aldus snorted. He was in his Buick, one leg propped on the dash, and I could see sock and way too much hairy white leg. “I know it’s hot as hell and feels like the end of the goddamn world, but I blame her.” He jabbed a finger at the radio, which he’d flicked onto NPR. Not that he’d ever admit to anyone else that he loved the hell out of what he called in company
that liberal crap
.

I tuned in.
“…so I say it’s okay to look out for each other. To have a healthcare system that protects the vulnerable. To stop sending our kids off to die on foreign soil-”

Aldus flicked it off as I visualized Susan Murray, the stunning fifty-something blonde with the soft voice. He made a throaty tick that was hard to interpret. “Ever since that goddam woman came on the scene, the nutjobs have gone even crazier. ‘S the heat, y’know?”

I raised an eyebrow at him, and he went on.

“Makes people nuts. Horses and nutjobs, they can smell the change in the air.” He made that phlegmy tick again. “Maybe it is global warming or whatever the hell they call it. Whatever. But what I say is this. If we really are facing down maybe the first female President, then maybe the crazies are right. Maybe the world really is ending.” He paused for effect and I knew what was coming next. I’d heard it often enough. “No matter how good-lookin’ that goddam woman might be.”