I opened my eyes uncertainly, looking down at myself. I couldn’t do anything about my clothes. “I think I’m okay now.”
“What about that one?” The coyote poked his nose at the long cut on my cheek from Marie’s butterfly knife. I put my hand over it; the new paint job hadn’t entirely taken care of it. Instead of disappearing, it had scarred over, a thin silver line along my cheek. After a moment I shrugged.
“It wants to stay.”
Very smart dogs can look approving. The coyote did, then snapped his teeth at me. “I’m not a dog.”
“What is it with people reading my mind today?” I looked down at myself, the one lying in the grass. I still looked horrible, my skin a ghastly pallor that made very faint freckles stand out across my nose. My face wasn’t one that did sunken flesh well. My nose is what you might politely call regal, and my cheekbones are high, making my cheeks look very hollow and fallen. Lying there like that, I looked two breaths from dead. The drumbeat, my heartbeat, was still thudding with a degree of uncertainty. I put my hand out over my torso and chewed my lower lip. “There’s still something wrong. Like…” My car analogy almost fell apart. “Like the windshield is all cracked up and burnt from the sun.”
The coyote did the approving look again. “This is the hard part.”
I frowned at him nervously. “What do you mean, the hard part?”
He pushed his nose out toward the me that was dying, there on the grass. “You have to change the way you see the world.”
“Isn’t this place enough proof of that?” I asked, pitch rising. The coyote’s ears flicked back and he sat up primly, offended.
“Is it?” he asked. “Do you believe what’s happening here?”
I looked down at my body again. My heartbeat was drumming much too slowly. “I don’t know. It feels real, but so do dreams.”
“This place shares much with dreams.” The timbre of his voice changed, deepening from a tenor into a baritone. I jerked my eyes up, to discover a red man sitting there on his butt, arms wrapped around his knees, loose and comfortable. He wore jeans with the knees torn out, no shirt, and he was genuinely red. Brick red, not a color skin comes in, not even sunburned skin. Long straight black hair was parted down the middle, and his teeth were better than Gary’s. His eyes were golden, as golden as the coyote’s. I blinked, and the coyote was back.
“Is Coyote even a Cherokee legend?” I kept blinking at him, hoping he’d turn back into the red man. He stayed a coyote. Still, if men like that were wandering around here, I’d take it as a good argument that this garden had a lot in common with dreams.
“It’s a little more complicated than that,” Coyote said. “You don’t have a lot of time, Jo. Is this real?”
I scowled down at my body. If this is a dream, I decided, when I look up, he’ll be the guy again. I’m aware, so it’s a lucid dream, so I can affect it, and he’ll be the man because I want him to be.
I looked up. The coyote was sitting there, head cocked, waiting for me.
“Dammit,” I said out loud. A thin line in the spiderweb I felt inside me made a hissing sound like cracking glass, and disappeared. The drum missed a long, scary beat, then fell into a natural, reassuring rhythm.
“Time to go back,” Coyote said, and the garden went away.
CHAPTER 6
Shit, I thought again, I didn’t want all that crap about a white tunnel to be true. I closed my eyes. The light continued to bore into my eyelids until I opened them again. The paramedic squatting above me clicked the penlight off, announcing, “She’s back,” to someone out of my line of sight.
“I’m back,” I agreed in a croak, and closed my eyes again. Perhaps if I was very lucky I’d go away again.
“Getting the crap beat out of you isn’t gonna make Morrison feel bad enough not to fire you, Joanie,” the someone said, then lifted his voice. “Forget the ECG, Jimmy. She’s back with us. Looks like the other guy got the worst of it. What happened,” he said, addressing me again, “his gang dragged him off to die?”
My arm weighed about twenty thousand pounds, but I picked it up and dropped it on my chest, trying to find the hole the sword had poked in me. I found it by proxy. There was a gash in my shirt, a nasty hole stiffening with dried blood. Beneath it, my rib cage seemed to be unpunctured. I rolled my head to the side, somewhat amazed that it stayed on, and croaked, “Gary?”
All I could see were feet. I didn’t know what kind of shoes Gary wore, but I was pretty sure they weren’t open-toed blue leather heels, absolutely impractical for Seattle in January.
“Who the hell is Gary?”
I rolled my head back to where it had been and tried to focus on the paramedic. “Oh,” I said after a while. “Billy. Cabby.”
“No, Billy Holliday, sweetheart. You’ve always been easily confused.” He squatted by me again, pushing my eyelid back and inspecting my pupil. “How many fingers do you see?”
“I don’t see anything, Billy, somebody’s got his damn thumb stuck in my eye. What happened, you get called in early?”
“How’d you know?” He took his thumb out of my eye and elevated his eyebrows at me.
“The shoes.”
Billy Holliday was, as far as I knew, Seattle’s only cross-dressing detective. I’d met him three days after I was hired: dispatch asked me to rescue an off-duty officer whose car had broken down. Dispatch hadn’t mentioned that the cop in question would be wearing a pale yellow floral print dress and had biceps bigger than my head. Billy looked better in a dress than I did.
Not that I could remember the last time I wore a dress.
Billy inspected his feet. “I shoved my feet into the first thing I found next to the door,” he admitted. “Do you like them?”
I decided I was feeling better, and began to sit up. Billy pushed me back down. “I think they’re great,” I offered, and tried to sit up again. The admiration didn’t appease him, and we had a good little tussle going when Gary’s knees intruded in my line of vision. He crouched while I wondered how I recognized his knees.
“You oughta be dead, lady.”
I let Billy win and dropped onto my back. “Yeah?” I asked. “What’s Marie got to say about that?”
“You ought to be dead,” she said from above my head. I tilted my chin up and looked at her foreshortened form through my eyebrows.
“That’s reassuring.” I closed my eyes. “What happened?”
I felt Marie and Gary cast uncomfortable glances at Billy. “Billy,” I said without opening my eyes, “go change your shoes, would you?” Mortal offense filled his voice. “What, so you can get your story straight? What kind of detective do you take me for?”
“It’s a little more complicated than that.” I tried to remember where I’d heard that recently. Oh, yeah. Coyote.
My head began to hurt again.
I pushed up on an elbow, opening my eyes. “I’m asking as a friend, Bill. Or I’ll steal your distributor cap.”
He grinned reluctantly. “Friends don’t threaten friends’ distributor caps. Look, you sure you’re okay, Joanie? You look like hell.”
“I’m sure. I’m fine. I swear I’ll explain it later.”
“Arright.” Billy stood up. So did Gary. They sized each other up while I worked on climbing to my feet. Gary nodded tersely, and Billy walked off. It all smacked of some sort of bizarre male testosterone thing. I tried hard to ignore it.
“What happened?” I asked again. My balance was off. I spread my arms out, trying to find my center. Then it occurred to me that Coyote wanted me to do exactly that, and my head hurt more. I rubbed my temple, then my face, and that didn’t hurt at all. Fascinated, I prodded at my cheek. No pain.
“You got a scar,” Gary pronounced, staring wide-eyed at my face. “On your cheek. Where she cut you. A real thin scar. It was still bleeding just a minute ago.”