Any Given Doomsday (Phoenix Chronicles, #1) by Lori Handeland
Acknowledgments
Grateful thanks to:
My editor, Jen Enderlin, a brilliant talent and a great cheerleader. Thanks for letting me go where the muse takes me.
My sons, who turned into such lovely young men. I’m so proud.
My husband, for singing “You are my sunshine,” in answer to my every snarl. (Yep, he’s a keeper.)
My first-Thursday-of-the-month breakfast group—without you I’d go stark, raving nuttier.
Chapter 1
On the day my old life died, the air smelled of springtime—budding trees and just-born flowers, fresh grass and hope. I should have known right then that something was coming.
I’ve always been psychic. I’ve never once been happy about it. In fact, I did everything I could to drown that gift in the realities of a normal life.
But normal went out the open doorway that morning in early May, and I never got it back again. I’m not sure I ever really had it in the first place.
I went to work as always. I’m the first-shift bartender at Murphy’s, a cop bar on the east side of Milwaukee. Twenty-five and still a bartender. I’d be more concerned about my career arc if I hadn’t already tried being a cop—and failed.
Cops and psychics don’t mix. Go figure.
Not that I’d ever broadcast what I could do. I wasn’t a complete moron. However, sometimes those flashes were impossible to hide. Sometimes hiding what I knew would have been more criminal than what I’d seen in the first place.
Of course I’d tried to downplay it; I’d tried to invent excuses for the information that came to me in a way I couldn’t explain. But what excuse is there for something like that? I was never able to come up with one that made any sense.
The cops I worked with didn’t trust me because they didn’t understand me. They avoided me as much as they could, unless they needed my help. When they asked, I had little choice but to answer, if there was any answer to be had. Eventually my too accurate hunches had led to a disaster, and I’d had no choice but to leave the force.
Thank God for Megan Murphy. Without her, I don’t know what I would have done.
Luckily Megan had been in my situation before— without income, alone in the world, and desperate. Just because I was the reason she was a widow didn’t mean she wasn’t going to help me.
A lot of cops become private detectives when they leave the force. I had the training; I even had a gun. All I would have had to do was get my license and hang up a sign.
ELIZABETH PHOENIX —DICK FOR HIRE.
Can you imagine the business I’d get just from the walk-ins?
In the end, I’d taken the job at Murphy’s. I figured I owed Megan, and at the time I’d wanted nothing more than to be flogged daily for what I’d done. Becoming a bartender in a cop bar after getting my partner killed was a good place for that.
That morning I had customers pounding on the door before eleven a.m. There’s a reason beer made Milwaukee famous. When the sun shines and the temperatures climb above freezing, people in my hometown make a beeline for the Miller Lite.
I propped the front door wide open, all the windows, too, and watched the just-sprouted tree limbs waver, sending dappled shadows dancing across a sidewalk the shade of storm clouds. The spring wind stirred my hair, and goose bumps sprang up all over my body despite the uncommon heat of the day. I was possessed with a sudden and undeniable urge to—
“Leave.”
The five off-duty cops at the bar glanced up from their beers and sandwiches. They looked at each other, then back at me.
“Not you,” I said.
They returned to their meals, but not without a few eye rolls and one derisive snort.
Why on earth had I said that out loud? No matter how hard I tried to be normal, the truth remained—I wasn’t.
The lunch help hadn’t arrived yet, but that didn’t matter. Everyone at Murphy’s was a regular. Often, when Megan had a problem late at night with one of her kids, she’d toss the keys to the top cop in the place and go about her business.
“Kenny.” The man looked up from his Reuben with a scowl. I was already headed around the end of the bar. “Got an emergency. I’ll be back as soon as I can. The lunch shift will be here in ten.”
Kenny’s scowl of annoyance became a frown of confusion. “What emergency? You didn’t even get a call.”
What else is new? I thought.
I did use my cell phone once I got into the car, but Ruthie didn’t answer, which wasn’t surprising. Sometimes I wondered how she juggled all the responsibilities in her life without two extra sets of hands.
Ruthie was an ancient black woman who ran a group home on the south side of Milwaukee amid an explosion of ranch houses built in the 1950s. Nice yards. Good schools. A lot of last names that ended in ski.