No Dominion The Walker Papers - By CE Murphy Page 0,19

know this?”

Stiff with embarrassment, I said, “I was never really in to cars,” and she choked a laugh. “Dude, apparently not even enough to get laid. Didn’t you ever get it on in the back seat of one of these things?”

“How old do you think I am?”

Her eyes narrowed in the instant before she blurted, “Oh, God, I don’t know, like forty-five?” She didn’t think I was anywhere near that old, or she wouldn’t have invited me to sit on the Mustang’s hood in the first place, but she’d put herself on the spot with her own question, and had to upwardly revise whatever she thought the answer really was. And probably downwardly revise it as well, because I’d asked, and I wondered if she’d mentally come up with an answer anywhere close to the truth.

It still stung, which wasn’t any more appropriate than the smugness I’d felt a few minutes ago. “Not quite.”

“I guess not, if you don’t know a ‘69 Mustang from ‘63 Stingray. I didn’t think that was actually possible for people with Y chromosomes. Ar—oh, hey, Captain.”

Nichols walked up, a bowl of potato salad in one hand and a hot dog in the other, and smiled genially around at the Motor Pool crew. “Hi, folks. I see you’ve met Captain Morrison already. What do you think of him?”

“What do we think of him?” Walker crowed

Nichols, as if oblivious to the tone of her voice, went on pleasantly: “I’ve been introducing him around. I thought it would be good for the precinct to meet my replacement before his first day of work in August.”

Blood drained from Walker’s face. She looked at me, white with accusation, which was fair enough: I’d all but introduced myself under false pretenses, and I was just about ashamed enough to look away. Just about, but not quite, and she had just enough pride and anger to drown out her horror. We glared at each other, neither willing to back down, long enough to make not just the Motor crew, but even Captain Nichols, uncomfortable.

Walker finally broke the stalemate with a tight smile and a low harsh voice. “Well. Live long and prosper, Captain Morrison.”

She looked pointedly at my seat on her Mustang. I got up, stepped through the crew, and walked away thinking I’d never been told to go fuck myself so politely in my life.

NOW

Somehow she’d found a taxi in my quiet residential neighborhood after all. By the time I followed her, she was gone, the street empty but my driveway filled with not just my Toyota Avalon, but the 1969 Mustang Boss that had been the source of years of contention between myself and Joanne Walker.

The car had had a rough year. Almost as bad as Joanne, and unquestionably worse than my own. An arrow had been shot through the gas tank, an ax dragged through the roof, and then a helicopter had winched the vehicle out of an earthquake fissure that had crumpled the back end. Joanne had spent every spare moment and all her spare cash re-restoring the car, even finally putting in the manual transmission she had always wanted to.

As far as I knew, no one but Joanne had driven the car since she’d found it in a barn a dozen years earlier and started the restoration work on it. I unlocked and opened the driver’s side door slowly and sat down. The seat didn’t need adjustment. Walker and I had proved to be exactly the same height, in the end. I put the keys in the ignition and my hands on the wheel, feeling the shape of Walker’s body in the seat and the soft worn spots in the leather from her hands. Faint scent lingered: mostly Irish Spring soap, but with a hint of oil and grease that would always remind me of Walker.

“It’s all right, old girl,” I finally whispered to the car. “She’ll come back to us as soon as she can.”

We sat together, two things that loved her, and I fell asleep a little while before dawn.

No Dominion

“No Dominion” begins and ends in the middle of RAVEN CALLS (Book Seven of the Walker Papers).

The author feels strongly that you should read RAVEN CALLS first.

CHAPTER ONE

A god, an elf and a shaman walked into a bar.

All right, no, they didn’t. They’d walked backward through time, an’ so had I, but if I didn’t make some kinda joke about it, I was gonna get nervous. A joke was usually enough to throw off oncoming