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“No, not me. Geez, what kind of woman do I look like?”
He laughed.
“One that talks to dead guys, apparently.”
I flashed him a grin. I’d seen this detective on several crime scenes. It had crossed my mind that he was handsome, carried himself well, and that’s where I stopped thinking about him at all. Just like every other guy. They were about as useful as good old Willson on the floor.
“Well, talking to the dead means that they can’t judge you. Now can they? But going back to the obvious with this guy. I recognize him. I brought my car to that shop on Main St. and Valley Brook. It’s close enough to my apartment that I could walk. He tried to get me to suck his dick for a twenty percent discount.”
The detective’s eyes darkened. I was starting to recognize Detective Fuller’s facial expressions. He had his own demons, that was for certain, and I supposed you didn’t get anywhere in law enforcement unscathed.
“You’re kidding, right?” he asked.
I shook my head.
“No, Detective Fuller, I am not kidding you. He wasn’t going to give me my car back either, but then, like magic, it was returned to my apartment with some kid handing me the keys. It was really odd, but I assumed it was him trying to cover his perverted ass. And now? Well, karma has covered my ass.”
Over my shoulder, his lifeless body still lay there, because the one thing I could depend on what that the dead stayed dead. The one thing I liked about this job.
“That SOB.”
I turned back to Fuller. “It’s not nice to speak badly about the dead. But I still agree that maybe this was his karma.”
The detective chuckled.
“If karma came with a nasty bite, sure,” he said.
I shrugged.
“Don’t you think in your line of work you would prefer karma to bite back? Sure you wouldn’t have a lot of answers, but you’d have fewer assholes in the world.”
I tried to not dwell on what ifs, but I sort of liked this idea. I liked the idea that no one would have to live through pain. I liked the idea that bad guys got what was coming to them.
I’d come back to this city not because my aunt approved, but because it was my first core memory of something actually working out. I associated this city with Caspian Weber. The one person who had made the bad guy in my life pay.
“What are you smiling for, Klein?”
I shook my head.
“No reason. Just remembering a good memory from my teens.”
He let out a whistle.
“I guess there’s a reason I ask for you to come to my crime scenes. Nothing seems to get to you. How the fuck do you see blood and brains and smile at memories of being a kid?”
I shrugged.
“Because not everything you see here is the worst thing that’s ever happened.”
His hand was on my elbow as he forced me to look at him.
“What does that mean?”
I didn’t like the way he was studying me.
“It means that sometimes the monsters get what they deserve, and sometimes it’s not pretty, but it can still be more beautiful than the bruises they leave.”
I pulled my arm away from him. I’d known peace all of five minutes in my life and it was not at the touch of any man or even my aunt. I’d had peace for the moments that I’d been able to live next to Cas. He had been my nightmare and my dark angel. The problem was that, when I’d been taken away, I’d never been able to thank him, and it had haunted me.
