Page 46 of Spirit Dances

I put my head in my hands, trying to press my thoughts back into a more useful order. “One crisis at a time, Joanne. Take it one crisis at a time. All right. Rita.” I looked up, and she came to attention like I was a drill sergeant. “My partner here thinks a bunch of unrelated things are actually related. I’m going to go out on a limb and say your missing friends are related, too.”

“Why?”

I flexed my jaw, making cords stand out in my throat. “I don’t suppose you’d just take it on faith.”

Resignation deepened lines around her eyes. She would take it on faith, obviously, but I got the feeling it made her a little bit less of a person, somehow. I said, “Okay,” very softly. “It’s just usually easier for people to not really pay attention to what’s going on around me, but you might be an exception. You know how you said you being alive was a miracle?”

“I said you saving me was a miracle,” she corrected. “Me being alive, that’s a gift I don’t want to screw up.”

I couldn’t help smiling. I’d screwed up so much myself it was nice to come across somebody else trying not to blow it, too. Kindred spirits, we, not that I’d have ever imagined such a thing. “Ever heard of shamans?”

“Like medicine men, right? Indian medicine men?”

“Native American, yeah, although a lot of cultures had, or have, shamans. Anyway, they’re healers. We might call them magic-users.”

“And you are one, and that’s how you saw me get attacked and called it in before I died?”

My jaw flapped open and Rita shrugged. “What else were you gonna say, with that kind of lead-in? What’s the difference between magic and a miracle, Detective?”

Billy came to my rescue while I continued to wave my jaw in the wind: “From the outside, probably not much. From the inside, I don’t know that I want to get into the theology of it.”

Rita smiled. “I don’t think it matters. So there’s something magic going on?”

“How is it that everybody else is much calmer about that idea than I’ve ever been? I mean, doesn’t it seem incredibly unlikely? Like, totally preposterous?” My voice rose, and Billy very sensibly herded us out of the soup kitchen as I said, “I mean,magic.People don’t believe inmagic.It’s like believing in fairies and unicorns and, and, and?—”

“And other magical things,” Billy finished. I gave him a dark look, but nodded.

Rita folded her arms around herself and peered up at me. “If you’d asked me three months ago I’d have said you were hitting the bottle too hard. But then I got stabbed and should have died, but instead a bunch of cops and ambulance people showed up because somebody who wasn’t even there sent them on ahead to save my life. If something like that happens to someone like me, you start to have a little faith in something bigger. I don’t know if I believe in magic or miracles all the time. But I believe in you, Detective Walker. I believe in you.”

Jeez. I felt like Tinkerbell. My nose stuffed up and my vision got all bleary and for some reason I snuffled a couple times as I patted Rita’s shoulder. “Okay. Okay, fine, I guess you told me. All you people are just a lot cooler than I am.

So anyway, basically Billy thinks I’m being pulled where I need to go.” The very phrase made fishhooks sink into my belly, insistent tug that felt, somehow, like it came from a long way off. I rubbed my stomach and went on. “If he’s right, then a murderFriday night and Lynn’s death Saturday morning are related, and your missing friends might be, too.”

Hope lit Rita’s lined features. “So you’ll help me look?

Even if it’s not your case or your jurisdiction?”

I smiled feebly. “No reason to get hung up on technicalities at this late stage of the game.” Besides, though I didn’t want to say it aloud, exploring the possibility that I was a nexus of some kind was probably kind of important. It might mean those retirement plans to the top of a remote mountain would get moved to sooner rather than later, but it also seemed like if it was an unpleasant reality I wasawareof, I might be able to mitigate the fallout somehow. “Maybe you could take us down below and we could…”

So we could start hunting for someones or somethings we knew nothing about. That didn’t sound like my brightest idea, but Rita clasped her hands together like a kid given a gift, and struck off down the street at a healthy clip. “There are sections of the Underground nobody goes because?—”

“They’re haunted?” I guessed when she hesitated, and she nodded with embarrassment. “At this point in my life I can safely say less likely things have happened. All right. I’m game for exploring the haunted Underground if you are. Billy?”

“I’m starting to like the idea that your bad guy is in a high-rise instead of mine about him being down in the?—”

“Slums,” Rita supplied when he broke off, and it was his turn to look abashed. Rita, though, shrugged it off. “It’s not like we don’t know we’re on the fringe, Detective. And I’m sorry about your suit. Most of where we live isn’t very clean.”

Billy looked down at himself, dismayed. “Maybe I can write off the drycleaning bill.”

“Maybe I’ll pay for it, in thanks for you trudging around on one of my weird cases.”

“I’d be trudging around on it anyway, if it was in our jurisdiction. I’ll take you up on that anyway.” He followed Rita into an alley where the overwhelming scent of soy sauce and old rice informed us the neighboring building housed a hole-in-the-wall Chinese restaurant. My stomach rumbled despite the hint of decay, but I wasn’t quite desperate enough to go Dumpster-diving. Then I wondered if Rita ever had to, and got caught up in a whirlwind of first-world entitlement and guilt that lasted down the length of the alley all the way into a tiny concrete back lot. Boards and fencing made an unfriendly barricade between it and another brick building, but Rita walked up to the fence, twitched aside a section of chain-link laced with green fencing stuff—I didn’t know what it was called—and revealed a hole almost big enough to let a rabbit through. “This way.”

“Are you serious?” It wasn’t even that I objected to crawling into the backsides of buildings. It just didn’t look big enough for anybody to fit in. Rita, however, gave me a sour look and crawled into it backward. I exchanged glances with Billy, shrugged, and followed her.

It was bigger than it looked, chain-links willing to flex and let me through. There was maybe four inches’ clearance between the fence and the building I clambered into. An enterprising kid might find the hole from the building side, but anybody short of a contortionist would have to come the long way around, down the alley and into the back lot, to actually gain entrance to the Underground. It wasn’t bad, as far as secret hideaway doors went. I’d have never noticed it, had Rita not shown me the way.

I backed through a couple feet of wall space before my feet hit dead air. Rita reported, “Ladder,” from below me, and I lay on my stomach to kick my feet and find the rungs. The iron gleamed from years of use, reminding me of how many homeless my city held, before I emerged into an unexpectedly well-kept stretch of Underground.

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