Page 24 of Spirit Dances (The Walker Papers #7)

Jim Littlefoot was waiting for me when I got there.

I had a brief vision of myself: cropped hair a mess from the hat I’d been wearing, winter-weight police jacket unzipped to show my sweater hanging over the silly knit skirt and my bare legs poking out until heavy boots enveloped my ankles.

It wasn’t, overall, a particularly flattering picture.

It was still a hell of a lot better than Littlefoot looked.

I knew I hadn’t slept, but he obviously hadn’t, either, and his dancer’s stamina did nothing to alleviate the bags under his eyes.

I almost yawned, looking at him, and did make my eyes water by fighting the yawn off.

“Mr. Littlefoot. I didn’t expect to see you.

This is my partner, Detective Billy Holliday.

” I gestured to Billy and got out of the way so they could shake hands.

They spent about five seconds trying not to do the obvious: Billy struggling not to look at Littlefoot’s feet, and Littlefoot fighting the urge to ask if this was live or Memorex.

Nobody much cared that it had been Ella Fitzgerald on that recording.

She and Billie Holiday were contemporaries, and that was close enough.

When they’d both manned up, gotten past impulses and shaken hands, I offered Littlefoot a seat, took my own and said, “What can I do for you?”

“You can come to tonight’s performance.” Littlefoot pushed a pair of theater tickets across the desk toward me.

Billy’s eyebrows rose with interest, and he pulled a chair over from nearby, thumping down to listen in.

Littlefoot glanced at him, then turned his attention back to me.

“The troupe decided this morning that the only way to honor Naomi’s memory was to continue the show. ”

“You have someone who can…” I didn’t want to say take her place , because that sounded needlessly callous. “Who can dance the part? You said it had been hard to find the right people for the troupe.”

“Two understudies. You can’t go on a tour this long with out a more-than-full complement. The understudies are as much a part of us as the primary dancers. And they under stand the risk they’re taking.”

It took me a minute to catch up to the risk, and then I straightened in my chair.

“This isn’t just about the show must go on, is it?

You’re hoping to draw another attack.” It was exactly the kind of thing I would do.

I had a disconcerting moment of heart-lifting admiration combined with gut clenching fear, and wondered if that’s what people around me felt when I charged off on some particularly stupid campaign against evil.

I didn’t dare look at Billy for fear of finding just exactly that expression of accusation on his face.

“Only if you’ll help us,” Littlefoot said, therefore showing far more wisdom than I was ever inclined to. “You said last night you’d been unable to track the attack after the fact. What if you were prepared for it?”

“I might be able to, then.” After today—after the wendigo, after a whole series of failures to track or recognize bad guys when I thought I should be able to—I wasn’t going to make any promises.

“What I can almost certainly do is protect you all from the attack. It’s psychic, which means I should be able to shield you from it. ”

Relief shadowed Littlefoot’s dark eyes. “We all understand the concept of shielding, but the ghost dance—the entire program—is about sharing, not shielding. I’m not sure we could change our intent fast enough, even after last night, to protect Winona.

Naomi’s replacement,” he said to my brief incomprehension, though he and I both winced at the choice of word. “Naomi’s understudy.”

I nodded, then had to say it, just to be sure: “You realize this is a completely insane risk you’re taking here, right?”

A smile flickered across his face. “Not if I’m right about trusting you. I have to get back to the theater, Detective.

You’re welcome to join us as early as you like. The tickets are a formality, in case you want to be in the audience, but I don’t know what you’ll need to do.”

“I’ll be there early enough to meet everyone. That’ll make shielding them easier.”

“Good. Thank you.” Littlefoot stood and so did I, with Billy, who’d remained suspiciously silent, coming to his feet a moment later. We shook hands with Littlefoot and as he left, I reached for the tickets he’d put on my desk.

Billy snatched them up. “Bet Mel and I can find a babysitter for tonight.”

I took them out of his hand. “I have to go tell Morrison about this.”

He took them back. “It’s Saturday. He’s not in. Call him.”

Thwarted, I shrugged my coat off and rooted around for my cell phone, dialing Morrison’s number. I had finally learned how to save numbers in the damned thing, but still feared the atrophying of my brain if I didn’t make myself memorize and dial phone numbers.

On the other hand, Morrison’s slightly impatient, “What do you want, Walker?” made me think phones as a whole were overrated, never mind their anti-atrophy potential.

Resentful, I said, “I said I’d let you know if I had anything interesting. Jim Littlefoot just gave me two tickets for tonight’s dance performance. I thought maybe it qualified.”

“What time?”

I took the tickets back from Billy and checked the performance time. “Same time. Eight o’clock.”

“Fine. I’ll be there.” Morrison hung up.

I stared at my phone. “I do not understand that man.”

“What’d he do?” Billy lunged for the tickets and I made a clucking noise of disapproval as I held them out of the way.

“He says he’ll be there. You’d better call the theater if you want to bring Mel tonight.”

“Oh, Mel gets trumped by Morrison? She’ll get a kick out of that.” Billy got his own cell phone out, looking pleased.

I snorted. “No, you get trumped by Morrison. Melinda can have the other free ticket.”

My partner gave me a credible look of heartfelt betrayal, at which I laughed. “Don’t worry. Maybe he’ll be just as disappointed as you are to find you’re his date for the evening. Why’s he even coming?”

Billy’s expression slid from heartfelt betrayal to sly knowledgability.

I didn’t kick him, but it took so much restraint not to that I had to stomp out of Homicide and down to the locker rooms, where instead of finding a change of clothes— I’d already used my spare set this week—I found a sink so I could splash water over my face and a mirror to glare into.

I was bad at relationships. I was bad at reading between lines, at figuring out what people really meant if they didn’t actually say it, and at being charming or flirty or whatever it was, exactly, that women were supposed to do to attract men.

My skill sets lay along the lines of taking apart car engines, drinking grown men under the table and—more recently—solving esoteric murders.

I was therefore equipped to deal with men who liked those things, not off-limits police captains who got equal parts protective and pissy about me.

I wished the affair with my coworker Thor hadn’t ended so abruptly, or that Coyote actually lived in Seattle.

The facts that I apparently hadn’t really trusted Thor and that I’d refused to go with Coyote to Arizona were completely beside the point. At least I knew how to relate to them. With Morrison it was just one run of bewildering incidents after another.

I said, “You could talk to him about it, you know,” to the mirror, and the faintly scarred woman reflected in it looked intensively skeptical.

I sighed, backed up until the end of a locker room bench caught me in the knees and sat with my face in my hands.

A nap would probably restore my equilibrium, but I didn’t see one in my immediate future, so hiding in the locker room was as good as it would get.

Inevitably, of course, the door swung open and someone came in.

There were actually comparatively few female officers in the precinct—in the whole Seattle Police Department, for that matter—but there was some kind of law of averages which said if you needed a minute to breathe, that was when a parade would march by.

In this case it wasn’t a parade. It was a friend of mine, Jennifer Gonzalez, who worked upstairs in Missing Persons.

She passed by the lockers aisles at the far end of the room, visible only in reflection, then backed up. “Joanne? Are you all right?”

“Just tired.”

Evidently I wasn’t convincing, because she came down the aisle and sat behind me, hunched forward so I could see bits of her image in the mirrors.

I half expected her to rub my back, simply because she always shook hands with somebody when they came into the room, so being greeted without some kind of physical contact was unusual. “You haven’t dropped by lately.”

“Missing Persons gives me the creeps.”

“And yet you work Homicide. So what’s wrong?”

Jenn, like everybody else I had a passing acquaintance with at work, had long since recognized Morrison and I had some kind of Not A Thing going on.

I was reasonably certain it was a topic of gossip that managed to stay mostly out of earshot, but once in a while I’d said something about Morrison and gotten a resounding, “Ah,” in response, the sort of “Ah” that said, “Well, everything I suspected has now been confirmed.” Jenn had used that kind of “Ah” on me.

So it would be perfectly reasonable for me to tell the truth, and have a nice little vent about totally failing to understand men in general and that man in specific.

So of course I said, “Is it even possible to file missing persons reports on the homeless? I mean, does it do any good at all?” instead.

Jenn’s reflection turned its head to arch an eyebrow at me.

She’d gotten glasses recently, and I thought they made her look saucy, since she was a little too strong of jaw to be quite cute.

“Not much,” she said after a moment. “The handful of homeless actually reported as missing tend to turn up again as homicides or suicides. But the population’s itinerant and even though Seattle’s winters are mild—or they used to be—there are plenty of people who head south and never come back. Do you need me to look somebody up?”

“Maybe tomorrow.” I frowned. “No, wait. It’s Saturday. What’re you doing in?”

“I forgot my gym bag here last night.” Jenn got up, patting my back after all. “If you’re fretting over the guy who gave you the earrings, stop fretting and go for it. Life is short.”

Oh, yes, I was so very sneaky I’d slid that right under her radar, all right. I touched the coyotes dangling from my earlobes, then looked over my shoulder at her. “What if I’m fretting about somebody else?”

She got that “Ah” look in her eyes and smiled. “Then wear a different pair of earrings next time you see him.”

And for some reason, that made perfect sense.