“My stepmother is a bitch,” I said, semi-agreeing. “But I don’t know if I can tell Dad. Not that. Not the grim reaper thing.” I pulled my hand back.

She let me. “I just think it might make him feel better about all of this, if he knew you had more on your side than just your ability to talk to the departed.”

“Maybe.”

“So, seriously, your accountant is crooked?”

“As a do-it-yourself haircut,” I said, grateful for the change in subject. “It took me forever to find an accountant with flexible morals.” I added a double wink to get my meaning across. “Apparently there’s this whole code-of-ethics thing they have to get past.”

My cell rang. I fished it out of my front pocket and checked the caller ID. It was Neil Gossett, a friend I’d gone to high school with who was now a deputy warden at the prison in Santa Fe.

“Hello?” I said, because Charley’s House of Pasties seemed wrong.

“Reyes wants to talk.”

3

Damn it, Jim!

—T-SHIRT

“A long time ago, in a galaxy pretty much exactly like this one, a little girl was born to a set of wonderful parents named Mom and Dad.”

“I already know this part.”

“She had a head of dark hair,” I said into my phone, ignoring Gemma, my slightly OCD sister, as I steered Misery onto the interstate toward Santa Fe. Hopefully, there were no cops around, because I really didn’t need another ticket for talking on the phone while driving.

Garrett had dropped off Misery after he checked for any mechanical damage from the fender bender, and Misery seemed to have forgiven me, so we were good to go. I set Cookie on the mundane task of checking out the good doctor’s background, then tore out of the office so fast, papers went flying behind me.

“And she had shimmering gold eyes that the nurses cooed over for days,” I continued.

“The nurses cooed? That’s what you’re telling people?”

“The mom so loved her daughter, she sacrificed her life to give the little girl a chance at one.”

“I don’t think it was really a choice.”

“On the day her daughter was born, the mom died and crossed through the infant, as the girl was made of magic and light, but this saddened her father. Not the light thing. He didn’t know about that. But the mom passing thing.”

“Yeah, I got that.”

I charged past a trucker who clearly didn’t get that ninety was the new seventy-five. “And the little girl lay in the nursery for three long days.”

“Three days? Are you sure?” Gemma asked, doubtful.

Gemma and I had been sisters my whole life, and she’d always known that I could see the departed, that I’d been born the one and only grim reaper this side of the Milky Way, which resulted in my assisting Dad and now my uncle Bob with their cases. But we’d never been particularly close. I figured my whole status as death incarnate had put her off, and I’d only found out recently that it wasn’t my job title that kept her at a distance, but my insistence that she stay far, far away. I never dreamed she’d take me seriously.

“Yes, stop interrupting,” I said, swerving to miss a tire in the road. Of all the places to leave a tire. “Where was I? Oh, right. No one came to get her. No one came to see her, except for a plethora of dead people who’d gathered around, standing vigil until her father could fight through his grief long enough to come back and take the little girl home.”

“I don’t think it was three days.”

“The infant remembered all of this because she had really good short-term memory for a newborn.”

“Obviously,” Gemma said. “Get to the good part.”

Gemma was a psychiatrist, which meant she could take care of everybody’s problems but her own, just one of a dozen ways we were alike. But our looks was not one of them. While I had dark hair and gold eyes, she was the classic blond-haired, blue-eyed beauty that set men’s hearts aflutter. I could set men’s hearts aflutter, too, but I owed my success to mad skill. The things I could do with my mouth.

“So, you already know I remember the day I was born?”

“Duh, you told me a thousand times when we were little.”

Wow, I didn’t remember that. “So, I told you about the huge scary being enshrouded in an undulating black robe that filled the entire delivery room, like ocean waves crashing against the walls, and how he hovered in a corner, stayed with me for three days, promised me Dad would be there soon, though I never actually heard his voice? And how I was deathly afraid of him because his mere presence seemed to sap my strength and steal my breath?”

After a long pause that had me wondering if she’d fallen asleep again, she said, “No, you didn’t mention that part.”

“Oh, okay, then.” I thrummed the fingers of one hand on the steering wheel to the classic rock playing in the background, happy I could get back to my story. “So, that happened, then on the third day, when the little girl’s father finally showed up to take her home, she really wanted to ask him, ‘Where the f**k you been, Dad?’ but she lacked the motor skills necessary to speak. A year passed and the little girl was a happy camper. She hadn’t seen the big scary creature again, and her dad seemed to genuinely like her. Except when she ate pureed peas, but that was his own fault. Then he brought home a woman named Denise, and camping pretty much sucked from then on.”