“Not cool, Doc Baker!” God damn her arms itched. She groaned and scratched as the pieces started to fall into place with near-audible clicks. “You knew it was me following you, but you still let me walk right into the morgue.” A new thought struck her, one almost as staggering as the realization that everyone in the Crisp and Gross Funeral Home thought she killed her friend, then went to town on a bunch of folding chairs a decade later. “Jesus, no wonder you lost your shit when we ran into your family at the dog park! You weren’t worried about how it upset your routine; you were worried that you’d introduced your niece to a psychopath!”
“In this case, I think sociopath would be more—”
“Not now, Tom!” She stared at him, panting a little because the rant had left her out of breath. She now had to reexamine every moment they’d spent together and … it didn’t look good. “Is that why you haven’t tried to kiss me again?”
“No,” he replied quietly. “I haven’t tried to kiss you again because, one way or the other, you’re just passing through. Because that’s all you do: pass through.”
She decided to brush that aside for now and ponder it later, when she couldn’t sleep. “So all of it—meeting me for breakfast and then dinner and coming with me here … telling me those stories to keep my interest and pretending you liked me a little—”
“Not just a little,” he replied quietly. “And not pretending.”
“Shut. Up. All that … so did it work? Did you find out I killed her?”
“Inconclusive.”
She just looked at him until his gaze dropped. “Inconclusive. Okay. Well. For the record—since that’s all this is—I’ve never killed anyone. Not once. Not ever.” She groped in her purse, found the car key which wasn’t a key
(Ugh, I miss keys.)
and randomly pressed the thing until her door unlocked itself. She started to climb in and paused for a last look back. “It was nice to meet you, and I wish I never had. You have a lovely family, and I felt privileged to meet them. Now go fuck yourself.”
“Ava…”
“Captain Capp.”
That gave him pause, she saw at once, and his expression was that of an unhappy man being yanked in two directions.
“It’s my own fault,” she told him. “I read too much into it.” Way, way too much.
“Cap—”
“Good night, Dr. Baker.”
She was in such a hurry to slam the car door (mostly to get away from the Crisp and Gross Funeral Home but also to get the last word) she almost closed it on her leg. She withdrew her limb like a startled tortoise (but faster), started the car, resisted the urge to run over Tom, and got the holy fuck out of there.
Twenty-Four
THE LIST
Fuck it
Fuck everything
Once she’d gotten a good cry out of the way, Ava wasted no (more) time returning her union rep’s call. To her relief, Jan answered on the first ring. “Oh, hey, Jan. Didn’t think you’d be in this late.”
“How is it that you never remember I’m in California?”
“Because I don’t care about you, or your work, or anything you do.”
A gusty sigh over the connection. “Finally one of you ungrateful jerks admits it. How are you, Ava?”
Jan’s warm sarcasm was already making her feel better. “PCP-free and ready to get back. What’s the scoop?”
“Passed with flying colors. That last test was seriously whiffed. Even the vitamin C deficiency was a false positive.”
Relief made her knees buckle. Not that she’d worried a lab test would show anything harder than Advil. But once upon a time, that was all she worried about—whether she could pass a piss test—so it had stirred up some dark memories.
“You know, it’s strange,” Jan was saying. “I’ve never seen a test come back with hits like that before. The lab’s trying to figure out if it’s the actual test or if it’s a computer glitch.”
“Like someone entering the wrong results under my name?”
“Exactly. But that’s not your problem, it’s theirs. And as of 0700, you’re clean and cleared.”
The magic words. Not for nothing had she made the trip from teenage traumatized murder witness to valuable employee and pilot, even before the belly landing. She knew her time and skill sets were assets, and she enjoyed working for a company that valued them. She could be in New York tomorrow, or Seattle or L.A. or Dallas or Portland. She could be gone from here in no time at all. And if any of those flights took her through MSP, she’d just stay on the fucking plane next time.
That’s not very practical, what if you have to—
Shut it, inner voice. And pay attention. “Sorry, Jan, didn’t catch that.”
“That’s okay. Inattention is a quality we prize in our pilots.”
“Hilarious.” It was, though—Ava giggled in spite of herself.
“Yuk it up, honey. See how you like it on the ground for a month.”
“I’ll call that bluff, Jan. I know you guys are short-handed.”
“You saw through me.” The banter dispensed with, Jan got back to it. “Can you take the four-twenty to Boston tomorrow? Eleven thirty A.M.?”
Fly away, Ava. Again.
Are you mocking me, inner voice? Because it’s not working.
Because: why shouldn’t she? She’d done what she could here, and the sky was waiting for her. She had a wonderful job and a wonderful union and wonderful coworkers and a wonderful life and she needed to get back to all the wonderfulness. Dead was dead, she wasn’t a TV detective, and she was done with Tom Baker, who showed her only yesterday where a fast-food employee had been drowned in room temperature cooking oil.
“I’ll take it,” she said. “Up, up, and etcetera.”
Twenty-Five
An hour later, Ava was so busy throwing up she didn’t care about the welts blooming all over her arms.
The illness—flu, food poisoning, non-food poisoning, a visceral reaction to all the evil in the world, whatever it was—had snuck up on her. In less than an hour, she’d gone from giddily thrilled about being cleared to calm to vaguely nauseated to nauseated to oh shit go-go-go and, as G.B. once put it, “shoutin’ at the floor.”
Adding to her woes:
“I feel strongly we parted on bad terms and would like further discussion on the matter, please!”
Tom Baker was knocking on her hotel room door and hollering from the hallway.
“Get bent!” she managed, before vomiting again.
“There is a better than average chance you are in danger!”
“Get. Bent!”
Ava didn’t often envy the dead, but at the moment Danielle’s fate sounded, if not appealing, then at least not completely horrible. Wherever she was in the afterlife, Ava doubted anyone was pounding on Danielle’s door as she ejected half a pound of bread pudding and devoutly wished for all the toothpaste in the world.
“I am sorry to trouble you! But I respectfully demand entrance!”
Good God, is this going to go on all night?