our drunk old asses off the street. We got up, dusted ourselves off, and headed for the nearest diner.
“Well, shit,” Andy finally said, over bacon and eggs. “I guess maybe I’d better tell you about Brer Rabbit and Big Man-Eater, then.”
Petite
“Petite” takes place moments after SPIRIT DANCES (Book Six of the Walker Papers) ends. The author feels strongly that you should read SPIRIT DANCES first. Very strongly.
The most infuriating woman I had ever met handed me the keys to her car, kissed me, and walked out my front door.
Every bone in my body said to follow her. Not just to stop her from leaving, but because I lived in a residential neighborhood. She wasn’t likely to catch a taxi on my block at four in the morning. Smart money would be on me driving her to the airport. But I stayed where I was, looking at the keys in my palm.
Joanne Walker had never voluntarily handed those keys over to somebody else in her life, and she’d just given them to me.
FIVE YEARS AGO
“Michael. Michael Morrison. It’s good to meet you.” I’d repeated the same words, the same solid handshake, dozens of times already. Seattle weather was cooperating, pouring sunshine down on a Fourth of July picnic, and it looked like everybody from the Seattle Police Department’s North Precinct who wasn’t on duty that day had turned up. The man introducing me around, Captain Anthony—Tony—Nichols, was pleased. It was a good opportunity to meet my new team in less formal circumstances than the department building, he said. It would warm them up to me.
I didn’t want them warmed up, I’d said. I wanted them to do their jobs.
He’d looked at me, and though he hadn’t said it, I’d heard it anyway: You’re young, Mike. Trust me on this.
I was young, and that was why I wanted formality. Thirty-three was damned young to be taking over as precinct captain. I had the credentials—youth correctional programs in high school, college completed in four years, volunteer services for the department in my free time, top of my academy class, made detective by twenty-five, lieutenant by twenty-eight. Every officer in Seattle knew the only thing I’d ever wanted to be was a cop, and they respected the effort I’d put into it.
My hair had also gone silver by my thirtieth birthday. I wasn’t kidding myself: if it hadn’t, I’d still be a lieutenant instead of preparing to take over the North Precinct when Tony Nichols retired at the end of the month.
But I was young, which was also why I listened to Nichols. Why I trusted him. He’d been a cop longer than I’d been alive, and he’d been a captain since before I reached double digits. If all I wanted was to be a cop, then I’d be a fool not to learn from men like Nichols. So I was at the picnic in shirtsleeves and slacks, as informal as I would let myself get, even surrounded by men and women in shorts, tank-tops, t-shirts and skirts. Plenty of them were in uniform, too: men—mostly men—coming or going from their shift, but mostly they were casually dressed, and I was a little too formal.
That suited me just fine.
We worked our way through the picnic—this is Bruce, bad hamstring injury sideline him to desk work, that’s Ray, real fireplug of a guy, Jenn works Missing Persons, over here is Sandy, yes, he knows his hair is red, not blond—and I’d relaxed enough to accept, if not drink, the bottle of beer someone offered when I first saw her.
She was sitting on the hood of a purple car that had been rolled illegally far onto the grass. A dozen or more big men sat around the vehicle’s front end, passing beer and whiskey bottles back and forth, frequently via the woman on the hood. One bottle tipped as it was passed over, and the guy who’d spilled wiped the splash off the car’s paint job without thinking about it, like making sure the Mona Lisa didn’t get stained. I knew nothing about cars, but the paint job had to be Mona Lisa quality: the purple glowed with an internal shimmer, like someone had layered starlight into it. Its shadows were black and in sunlight the purple looked deep enough to dip your hand into. The only reason I was certain you couldn’t really was because she was sitting on it, not sinking in like it half-seemed she should be.
She was as startling as the car.