Officer Brophy had no time for that idea at all. “Look, Ms. Kendall, you need stitches in your cuts and you need to be checked for a concussion. Plus, to be honest with you, you’ll weaken your position if you don’t do this properly. Your husband’s lawyer will say your injuries were trivial or maybe even invented. Take my advice and cover your ass.”
But that was the point. Liz’s ass was far from covered. “I’ve got a terrible insurance policy,” she told the cop. “It’s from my previous job. There’s a co-pay unless I use that one place. I don’t have the ready cash right now, and I can’t afford to get into any more debt.”
“Well, you’re between a rock and a hard place, Ms. Kendall,” Brophy said after a moment. “I can take the photos, sure, but I can’t give expert testimony on your injuries. Your husband might walk on account of the evidence looking less robust than it should. Plus, you know, you really should get looked at. Suppose you’ve got internal bleeding or something? I mean, how much is the co-pay likely to be?”
“A couple of hundred, maybe,” Liz hazarded. But it could be anything. The last time she’d used the policy was when Zac got a wisdom tooth removed, and the billing had been unfathomably complex. One damn form after another after another until she wanted to scream and rip the damn things up and turn the small print into smaller and smaller print until there was nothing left.
But there was no gainsaying Officer Brophy’s point about the evidence trail. If there was something she could do to keep this from happening again, she had to try—and kick the financial fallout into the middle distance. “Okay,” she said. “You’re right. Let’s go.”
The cop drove her to the hospital in her city-issued Taurus, keeping up a breezy conversation throughout as though she thought Liz needed to be distracted from what had just happened. After the fourth or fifth time Liz called her “Officer Brophy,” she told Liz firmly that her name was Bernadette. Beebee. She had been an officer for seven years, but had only been in Larimer for two of them. Before that her beat was Lincoln-Lemington, on the other side of Negley Run, which she said she missed a lot. “Nicer people there,” she said, “which is not to denigrate, but you know. Sometimes if you live in a shithole the shit sinks into you a little bit.”
At any other time, Liz would have jumped to Larimer’s defense. She liked it here. Liked the urban farm, the shops on Bakery Square, the zoo. Liked walking over the bridge on a Monday evening to the Cineplex where they would pick up the staff discount and then, if she was feeling flush, she’d treat the kids to supper at the Burgatory (best milkshakes in the U.S.!) or Plum Pan.
They had moved here way back when Liz got pregnant for the first time. Marc had hated the new house and the new neighborhood, a serious step down from South Oakland where they had been renting before. “How the hell do you bring a kid up in a place like this?” he had demanded rhetorically, throwing up his hands to indicate the house, the street, the whole damn shooting match.
“You make a home,” Liz told him, with the duh strongly implied. And that was what she had done. Happily, even joyously, one day and one brick at a time.
The police car took a right onto Liberty without slowing down much. “Like rush hour,” Officer Brophy growled. “Where the hell is everyone going at this time of night?”
It felt to Liz like a very fair question.
Her thoughts dipped into the past again, but it was the more recent past this time: the moment when she picked up the bottle and hit it against the kitchen floor. Three times. The violent exhilaration when she pushed it into Marc’s cheek was disturbing enough, but that cold calculation was terrifying. She had smashed the bottle because if she had just swung it against Marc’s face it would have hit with a dull clunk and he would have gone right on throttling her. So she had used the tiled floor to make the bottle fit for purpose. Whatever had been inside her, moving her, had read the situation, found the tools and executed a plan while Liz had been thinking about pharaohs and icebergs and imminent death.
The puppeteer had saved her. But she hoped more than anything in the world that it would never happen again.
A brief, hiccupping whoop from the police car’s siren scattered her thoughts. A car mooching along in front of them pulled quickly to the right, out of their way.
“Sometimes they pretend they don’t see you,” Beebee said. “Can’t make like they didn’t hear.”
Fran Watts clawed her way up out of a shallow, sweating sleep. Quickly, in a panic, as if she were scaling a ladder and something nasty was right behind her.
She came up fighting, scrambling backward, twisting to bring her legs up and kick her attacker right off the bed onto the floor before he could get a proper grip on her.
It took her a few seconds after that to realize there was no attacker. What she’d kicked was her pillow, on which her laptop had been propped when she fell asleep over her homework. The laptop had landed on top of the pillow, thank God. There would have been seven kinds of hell to pay if she’d broken it after her dad worked two months’ overtime to buy it for her.
A siren. A siren had woken her. Fran blinked sleep-sticky eyes and tried to bring herself into the present, out of a miasma of broken images. In her nightmare she’d been back in the Perry Friendly. Bruno Picota was there too, which wasn’t much of a surprise, but this time he’d shown up as a big, lurching mass of shadow with a knife in every hand. Which was a lot more than two hands.
The mood of the dream was still with her, sliming up the inside of her head. She looked over at the clock, which was a cat with big cartoon eyes that rolled back and forth. It was barely nine o’clock, and she wasn’t due any more meds until eleven. After that, the night yawned, wide and pathless. She had had a nightmare before she had even officially gone to bed, which was a crummy omen for the next eight hours.
In the absence of chemicals, she went for the next best thing. She called out for Jinx, speaking her name in a whisper. Sometimes Jinx sneaked off to her secret den at night, but she always came as soon as Fran called her. Fran didn’t even need to whisper: Jinx heard her just fine if she talked inside her head.
The little fox arrived at once, unfolding from the bottom of the bed as though she had been there all along. She looked immaculate, her fur sleek and groomed, and she was instantly alert. That was just one of the many advantages of being imaginary, Fran thought with a slight twinge of envy.
Jinx had two forms. Mostly she was a regular fox, slightly stylized and childlike but more or less realistic. But when she chose, she could put on her armor, stand up on her hind legs and be Lady Jinx, knight errant and champion of the queen. Seeing Fran distressed, she transformed at once, the armor enveloping her in a swarm of shiny motes before coalescing into its proper shape.
Fran! Jinx clapped a hand to the hilt of her sword and drew it halfway out of its scabbard. What’s the matter? Tell me! The sword was called Oathkeeper, but in Jinx’s high, slightly lisping voice it came out as Oatkipper. It was an enchanted sword. Fran couldn’t remember what it did exactly, and she felt bad asking because it was something she ought to remember, but it was definitely magic.
She also didn’t want to admit that she was yelling for Lady J just on account of another bad dream, so she made something up. “There was a siren out on the street, Jinx. Is everything okay?”