“Yeah, that’s sweet. You’re like a prom date, you’re so sweet.” Zeke was eyes forward again and back at the page turning. “Lie. Now.”
And I thought I was skeptical. I swung the car onto West Sahara as Griffin gave in and snapped, “Fine. You can cook. You help me with the laundry. You love thy neighbor. I’ve had better sex than with you.”
“You’re not trying at all, are you?” Zeke said with disdain.
I cut the lesson short, my audience part of it—which was too bad as it was distracting me from thinking about Cronus making Armageddon look like a toddler play-date. I pulled the car into one of three parking spots by a cracked-stucco one-story building with one profoundly dead dwarf palm planted by the door. “This is it. Only damn real medium in Vegas apparently.” I could feel him or her, bouncing off my radar. “A black thumb and can talk to the dead. It makes sense. You two can stay in the car. You’re having too much fun. I don’t want to break that up.”
At first Griffin looked as abandoned as a five-year-old his first day of school—not a good look for a grown man. Then he frowned darkly in a manner most certainly not prom-date sweet. He regretted what he’d done to Zeke and still did, but me? The regret was fading fast in the face of being the victim of the newly patented Zeke tutorial. I slammed the car door and tapped the back window just as you weren’t supposed to do on fish tanks. “Live and learn, sugar. Lie and learn too.” I heard the locks snick fast, trapping Griffin inside. Zeke’s grin was as dark as his partner’s frown. Ah, for the ability to be in two places at once.
I gave up on my voyeuristic wishes and walked to the glass door and opened it. There was no old-fashioned tinkle of bells but there was the smell of burning sage. Someone was cleaning out the bad mojo or thought they were. Burning sage was an old custom and who was I to say it didn’t scrub out the invisible stain of foul intentions, but I did know it had never kept me out of a building or a village, and my intentions? That all depended on whom they were focused on.
I also smelled dog. Lots and lots of dog. A truly massive amount of doggy odor overpowering the sage.
The office was one small room but with very little furniture, making it seem roomier than it was. There were two chairs against one wall and a tiny round table in the middle. Opposite the wall the chairs were parked against was the Dog Wall. I wasn’t terribly surprised. There were at least thirty pictures of dogs. If you studied them, you’d see they boiled down to about six dogs. There was a gray-muzzled hound, a mutt (I had a soft spot for mutts) with a small head and big fat belly, a cocker spaniel with about four teeth left and the inability to keep its tongue in its mouth, a three-legged Siberian husky, a Chihuahua with an underbite (if there were hellhounds, Chihuahuas would be fighting for the job), and a German shepherd. I hoped the last wasn’t the one I’d tried to pick up while drunk in New York. Werewolves versus German shepherds—add a few gallons of alcohol and it was a mistake anyone could make—even another werewolf.
“I guess you see why they call me the dog lady.”
I’d heard the flush from behind a door and was already facing her when she came out. Her hands were pink from the recent washing and she had enough dog hair on the sweater she was wearing to have knit a second one and had enough left over for matching mittens. “Someone has to be the dog lady on your block. Why not you?” I had no problem with it. I liked dogs. I’d been a dog once or twice. Dogs were good people. Furry, but good people.
Her eyes were sharp behind bifocals. “That’s very true, young lady, if a bit slippery of tongue. Pull up a chair.” With her tightly permed short gray hair, she could’ve counted as a seventh dog herself, an intelligent poodle who might or might not nip you if she thought you deserved it. Rolling her wheelchair up to the table, she reached into a flower-patterned bag that hung from the armrest. It looked as if it ought to hold yarn and knitting needles, but it wasn’t a half-completed scarf she pulled out. No, it was a .357 Magnum to be laid on the table. “Nothing personal, dear. But I’ve been robbed once. I won’t be robbed again.”