Page 26 of Spirit Dances

“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 ifyou 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?”

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