18
PATRICIA COULDN’T GET that image out of her head: Laurence dropping out of the sky and waving money around, boasting that he would Save the World by writing off the planet. Even if she hadn’t seen it with her own eyes, the video clip was all over the net afterward. Patricia shouldn’t be surprised that Laurence had turned into an entitled yuppie. This was what he’d always wanted, wasn’t it? To be admired, to have everybody get his name right. Patricia kept feeling annoyed, until she realized maybe she was jealous. She spent so much energy keeping her good deeds secret, it was hard to watch someone else show off. Lately, the other witches were always on her case about Aggrandizement, no matter how hard she tried to be humble.
Patricia found herself still obsessing about Laurence as she slid on knee-high leather boots and a black babydoll dress with red sparkles and went to an Irish bar in the Financial District to put a curse on someone.
Patricia sucked at walking in spike heels, and kept almost wiping out as she strode inside the stuffy, blaring pub and tried to recognize Garrett Borg from the picture Kawashima had e-mailed her. In person, Garrett looked like a once-hot Alpine ski instructor gone to seed, with very fair hair and a blue double-breasted suit that camouflaged his pudge. He was halfway passed out at the bar, drooling into the Guinness towel but still raising his head to pour more high-end Scotch into his mouth with his free hand every few moments.
In theory, Patricia shouldn’t need to know why she was hitting this guy—Kawashima had ordered it, and that ought to be enough for her. But Kawashima had included some other pictures along with Garrett’s head shot: the coroner’s photos of the teenage girls he’d left buried in an old culvert along the I-90, nearly matching bruise marks on their necks and inner thighs. So Patricia was properly motivated when she slid onto the leather-top stool next to Garrett and whispered in his ear. “I bet you’ll have one hell of a hangover tomorrow. But you know what? I know the best hangover remedy there is. This shit will cure anything.” She made it sound miraculous, but also sexy and illicit. He popped both the pills she gave him without hesitation. Then she helped him into a cab, and he went home to Pacific Heights, to sleep it off. She hadn’t lied: The shit she’d given him would indeed cure anything.
There was zero chance that Patricia would sleep after putting a curse on someone. But she would be careful and would follow Kawashima’s advice to avoid overreaching. She knew why they were so worried about her going off the rails: She could still see Toby’s corpse when she closed her eyes. The janky expression, like Toby was about to sit up and tell a dirty joke.
Patricia had to crouch down to talk to a confused marmalade cat, who needed help finding his way home. (He remembered what his house looked like on the inside, but not on the outside.) Patricia checked on Jake the krokodil junkie, who seemed stable now, give or take, and then she cruised the St. Mary’s emergency room, looking for people to heal on the down-low. She spent a couple hours trying to compose a letter to the Parks Department on behalf of some gophers whose burrow was being disturbed, pointlessly, by some inept landscaping in Golden Gate Park. It took a lot of concentration to translate from gopher language into bureaucratese.
Right about now, Garrett Borg would be evaporating into a whiskey-scented cloud over his heart-shaped bed.
Patricia ended up at the edge of the Park, on Fulton. Staring at the warm dirt, so full of life, between her pointy toes. She wasn’t pacing herself, after all. She dug in her bag for her phone and peered at the screen. There was nobody for her to call at three in the morning. Even at three in the afternoon, there would have been nobody to call. Maybe Kevin, her ambiguous friend-with-benefits/boyfriend? She was trying not to crowd him. The traffic light at the edge of her vision changed primary colors. It was another hot, itchy night.
An owl landed on a branch nearby, without a sound. “Hello,” Patricia said. The owl blinked at the sound of her voice.
“If I can see you, so can others,” the owl said.
“I’m not trying to hide, exactly,” Patricia said. The owl shrugged with its whole body, like it was Patricia’s funeral, then flew off again because there were some gophers with an imperfect burrow not far away.
Just as Patricia was rallying to pull her butt out of the dirt and go home, someone sat on the low stone wall and blocked her view of the street. A man. She almost hid, but decided not to bother.