Yours, Mine, and Ours (25 page)

Ah! It was Cathie. She’d cheer me up. She probably had some zany adventure of her own—a painting she couldn’t finish so she drenched it in orange juice, maybe, or another gallery owner wanting “this one and this one, and can you do seven more just like that one?”

“Hey, Cath. So you know those khaki pants I—”

“Why is my brother in jail?”

“—hate,” I finished, so astonished I almost dropped the phone. “What? Patrick’s in jail?
What
?”

“Yes! Jail! And he won’t say anything and the cops won’t say anything and are you going to fix this or am I going to use your
eyeballs
to hold my
brushes
?”

“Really, the whole thing sounds very bad.” My brain kept trying to grasp the concept. And the concept kept refusing to be grasped. Every time I thought I had a handle on it, it just slid away. “Cathie, tell me everything you know.”

“He’s in jail.”

I was hopping through my bedroom—which Dawg thought was a wonderful game—pulling on slacks I hated and trying to hold the phone with my chin and ear. That never worked with these skinny cell phones, but old habits died etcetera.

“How’d you know?”

“Michaela called and told me!”

“What … Michaela?” In my horror, I nearly dropped the phone. “My boss, Michaela? That Michaela?”

“Yes! I guess he called her, and asked her to call me to tell me
not
to come—you believe it? She was his one phone call. He could have hired the best lawyer in the tristate area, but he used his call to tell her to tell me
not
to help him.”

“But of course you ignored that.”

“Duh, Cadence.”

Charming.
I could almost see Shiro, smiling sardonically.
She frantically calls you for help, and gives you “Duh, Cadence”? So gracious.

I shoved the thought (almost a vision, I guess you could call it) away.

“But the slippery son of a bitch wouldn’t tell me
which
jail,” she was saying. “Which in the Cities … you know.”

I did know. There were a number of counties in the Minneapolis/St. Paul area. The largest was Hennepin, which was home to over a million people. That was
one,
in one city. There were many more just within Minneapolis, never mind St. Paul and the surrounding towns and cities.

I didn’t even know where Patrick had been arrested … well, when we got right down to it I didn’t even know
why
he’d been arrested, or what he’d done, but those were secondary considerations. If he’d been arrested in Burnsville or St. Paul or Minneapolis or Lilydale … There were different counties, procedures, and yes, jails, for each. A fed didn’t have a lot of pull with the locals. Resentment was too easily stirred up.

“—so I didn’t even know where to go, never mind what I could—”

Hop, hop. Make reassuring grunt into phone. Shoo Dawg away from shoes. Lose balance; crash heavily into carpeted bedroom floor. “Nnnnfff! Ow.”

“—could be any one of ten courthouses—Cadence!”

“I’m here, I’m here, did he say anything about an arraignment or … come back! I need that, Dawg!”

“You need that dog? What dog? Can you even have dogs in your—fuck it, I don’t want to know. Dammit, are you even listening to me? My brother has been caged like a rabid skunk, and my best friend appears somewhat distracted! More so than usual!”

“Cathie, I’m sorry, it’s just—it’s just a crazy time right now.” Understatement. “I’m taking this seriously, I promise.”

“Okay, granted, you usually have about eight hundred crises to deal with at a given time, but I’m calling in the best-friend marker. That’s gotta count for something, Cadence, so it’s on the table today. I am cashing the best-friend chip!”
Please don’t cash it. Please don’t cash it. Put it back in your purse for another day.
“Just this once, my brother and I have to be the crisis that you put above all your other weird crises
this one time.
”

I’d run after Dawg, realizing I was rewarding an overgrown puppy for undesirable behavior, but too short on time and too frazzled to care. I managed to corner her and get the other half of my pair of black flats away from her. Damp, but not chewed. Excellent. Uh, relatively speaking.

“Yep, yep,” I was saying, though I’d only caught the end of her rant. “I’ll get—” My phone beeped; another call. I took a peek … drat it to heck and back! “Oh, Fraggle Rock! That’s Michaela.”

“No you don’t, Cadence Jones,
we
are your crisis
du jour
, we just established that, so you can’t—”

“Cathie, she’ll have news about Patrick. Whatever it is, I promise, I’ll fix it. I
promise.
Hon, I’m sorry, I have to go, somebody might be dead.”

“Somebody always is!”

That
was true enough. Cringing, I disconnected her. Ohhhh, I was going to pay for that. And pay and pay and pay. And then pay some more.

The last time I’d incurred such Cathie-wrath, she’d painted my front door lime green with wide pastel blue stripes. The colors weren’t just awful to look at; people would actually stay away from my door altogether so they didn’t have to deal with the sensory input. And that had been over a disagreement about whether or not Van Gogh cut off part of his earlobe for love, or insanity. It wasn’t over an incarcerated family member, for gosh’s fargin’ slimy smelly sakes!

“Michaela?”

“We’ve got a break. Get here.”

“I—”

What? What could I tell her? That I had no idea what had happened, not just with Patrick but with JBJ? That I’d been out of the picture a whole day and had only been back five minutes and oh, by the way, I have a dog now?

And lest we forget: for some reason my boyfriend had been arrested, which Michaela knew all about? Ah, yes, I’m sure
those
facts had nothing at all to do with one another.

How to tell my boss, a woman who frequently waded hip-deep into bureaucratic trouble to keep me licensed/employed/sane that whatever the break was, I cared more about finding and helping Patrick than I did about … well … anything else right now?

Did that make me a good girlfriend, but a bad agent?

And would going to Michaela right now make me a good agent, but a bad girlfriend?

Max Gallo wouldn’t get you in this kind of jam. He’d solve his own problems. Anyone with eyes like his knows all about holding cells.

And just where had that come from? Of all the things
not
to be wondering about right now, Max Gallo’s thousand-yard stare was number one on the list.

Honestly, I had a question that wasn’t rhetorical: How do people who aren’t medicated and/or under psychiatric care handle these day-to-day stressors?
Because I really wanted to know!

I knew what it felt like to have a psyche pulling me in different directions. To feel mad or glad or sad, but also know that another part of me felt happy or depressed or euphoric about the very same thing.

It was strange but also a known quantity. It was dizzying but familiar, like when you hit the roller coaster when the state fair came to town. You knew it’d leave you with an upset stomach for a good hour, but to
not
ride it was unthinkable.

I’d never known what it was like to have my heart torn—
shredded
—in multiple directions. Not since the day my mother killed my father and I’d split from one to three. For the first time, I truly understood on an emotional level, not just an intellectual one, what a coping process that had been. My brain had tried to protect itself from shattering into a thousand pieces by forcing controlled splitting into three.

Like the man said, “It seemed like a good idea at the time.”

I couldn’t help but notice, though, that no matter how frazzled and freaked and stressed I got, Shiro wasn’t stepping up to help me. Progress? Or a strike? The more tense I got, the more I half expected to wake up and find it was a day later. But I was still here.

That was what a nightmare my day-to-day existence had become: when I was disappointed not to be yanked out of the control room of my own body.

To know that the part of me that lived for solving puzzles and catching bad guys could demand as much of my heart as the part that wanted to drop everything and go to Patrick right now—that was something new and terrible and wonderful.

And Dr. Gallo? Dr. Max Gallo? A mere acquaintance and, worse, the family member of a victim. A man I should think of in purely professional terms … and I never had. Not once.

I guess you could say I was having a mental split decision. (Perhaps several.)

“Hmm, well, Dan, I guess the judges are putting their heads together to see if … nope, no one’s backing off of this one, Dan! We’ve got a winner, and one of the judges is
not
happy about it!”

Yeah, well. I knew how he felt.

chapter fifty-eight

“I gotta give
it to that twitchy son of a bitch,” was how George greeted me. “He knows his shit.”

“Which?” I gasped. I’d made it to the office in record time, but burned with shame when I thought about all the traffic laws I’d violated to do it. No one was above the law, no matter how many personalities she has. Or boyfriends. Or boyfriend, singular, in jail.

“Which twitchy SOB? Or which shit?”

“George, I haven’t been here for about twenty-four hours. Pretend you care, and pretend I’m being fooled by your faux care, and let me know what I missed.”

“Well, you missed a lot of the pure simple Awesomeness That Is George Pinkman,” he said. Ah. Instead of faux care, it was faux modesty. “And it was pretty great! Like I have to tell
you
that. But what happened was, Paul came away from the crime scene—you remember, Aaron Mickelson, Edina, that weird Dr. Gallo who may yet be my wingman?”

“Yeah, yeah. We didn’t think copycat, we thought JBK might be getting a little fed up with his extracurricular activities. We didn’t bounce Gallo into a cell because he’s related to one of the victims.”

“Yeah, I found out that’s why he moved here in the first place. Guess his family’s taking it pretty har— You’re nodding, you already knew that. Fine. Well, after all that, Paul pretty much vanished into whatever geek hell hole he occupies when he’s not out in the real world trying to vibrate himself to death. Hours later he pops out, he’s got HOAP.1 running and all kinds of new tidbits for us. Me and the New Girl started plowing through it, and—”

“You’re back!” Emma Jan had come bustling out of the kitchen—the office kitchen, not Michaela’s other office—carrying Cup-a-Soup. Ugh. I’d rather drink Cup-a-Barf. We’ve got synesthetes designing software that can tell a computer how to think for itself, but instant noodles still tasted like broiled Styrofoam no matter what we did to them? If God was on vacation, I wish he’d finish with the barhopping and get back to running the universe already. “Great! Listen, Shiro, Paul was—”

“That’s Cadence.” George was looking rumpled, which told me he’d been intrigued by Paul’s invention in spite of himself and hadn’t gone home in a while. No one here had to worry, though. If he thought he’d worn one of his ties too long, he’d switch it out with one of the fifteen he kept in his lower-left desk drawer. Today’s model sported grasshoppers that seemed to be mating. Uh. No. After a closer glance I realized they were cannibalizing each other. Against a peach background.

Whenever I wondered what the dealio was with George’s ties, I could almost feel my freaked-out psyche contemplating growing a fourth personality just to deal with all the necktie fallout. So I never thought about them for very long.

“It’s Cadence,” he was saying. “You can tell because no matter how shitty I am to her, she won’t be shitty back. Oh, and her swearing sucks. She’s also freaked about keeping Michaela waiting, when Shiro wouldn’t give a shit.”

“Oh.” To my annoyance, Emma Jan looked crestfallen. Crestfallen! Not disappointed. Not mildly annoyed. Not somewhat sad. Crestfallen! The way you feel when something really important—like finding out if you got into your dream college or not—happened! “Sorry, Cadence.”

“Sorry
I’m
not who you were expecting.” I put every shred of sugar I could into my tone, which, since I repress a lot of rage, was considerable.

There was a short silence while Emma Jan fidgeted. She was wearing the green pantsuit again, but with a black blouse. The gigantic purse was still the same, practically bursting with … were those dog treats? Did she know that Behrman didn’t have a dog anymore, but I did? Has Shiro been telling her my secrets?

“Listen, uh, don’t take this the wrong way—” she began.

“Aw, fuck.” George slumped into his chair. “Don’t do it, Emma Jan. She’ll cry and everything will take longer.”

“I will not!”