in NYC would have relegated his ass to desk duty for a month for that kind of sloppiness.
“Tastes kind of salty.” Eat your heart out, Agatha Christie.
I joined him beside the girl and we spent a companionable moment sizing up the corpse, Aldus running his hands through his greased-back grey hair and me tearing at a fingernail with my teeth. I looked up at him from my notebook. “Hm. No obvious marks or wounds. ’Cept the shoe-print. No blood or other fluids. No weapon. Just a dead girl. Didn’t even take the hair.”
Aldus frowned, huffily muttering something about “too much goddam NCIS.”
He hated it when I did this. You know, police work.
I looked at our dead blonde again. Something was so definitely wrong with this picture. I felt it low and deep, someplace between my stomach and my heart. I hadn’t been home to Aegira for thirteen years, since I found out I was a dead woman walking. But I still knew what the blonde looked like. My intuition was telling me what she was, clear as a bell. And my intuition’s just about the only thing on earth I trust. I may be only half-Sicilian, but I got the suspicious part. In fact, I avoid thinking about what Dr Phil would make of my trust issues. But tonight my logic was waging war with my intuition, and my logic was winning.
First time for everything.
“Better call it in,” I offered as we stood up, by way of making up with Aldus. “And don’t worry.” I squeezed his shoulder, feeling a warm rush in my tummy as I touched this man, who’d given me a job when I’d needed so bad to come back home. “I’ll take the late shift.”
“Okay,” he agreed, with a relieved whoosh of spit and breath. “I’ll call Billy.”
I crouched again to look at the blonde, out of sight of Aldus’ Buick. My eyes swept the scene, trying to work out why my arm-hairs were going crazy. I started making notes in the little spiral notebook I carry in my pocket. No signs of a scuffle. No hand-bag, or any other accessories. No wedding band. No jewelry of any kind.
I stood back, sniffed the thick summer air, sized her up.
Tall, slim but broad-shouldered. Like a supermodel. I checked the bottom of her white, no-brand trainers. Size 10. Big feet. Her eyes were wide, almost in shock. And ice blue. Don’t get excited, I warned myself, balancing my book on my knee and rubbing my patch in hopes of cajoling it into releasing some more nicotine. Most blondes have blue eyes. It didn’t mean…
Something twitched in my consciousness again, and my hand slid off her face and down her shoulder to fall beside her, grazing the pool of liquid. Unconsciously, I brought a ragged fingernail to my mouth to chew and worry at. And then I tasted it. Aldus was right. Salty.
Shee-yit.
She was lying in a pool of saltwater.
In the middle of Dirtwater. The only settlement in the recorded history of humans settling anyplace that lays claim to no naturally occurring water of any kind. Salt or fresh. Even the town fountain, once a semi-ironic feature piece, dried up two years ago and has since stood empty. A bone-dry reminder that this place really is a hellhole.
So what was my beautiful blonde, clearly dead but with no apparent sign of injury, doing lying in a pool of seawater on its main street? I had a sick feeling it was a question to which I really needed to know the answer. And not just for the sake of the blonde.
Apart from Mom, I hadn’t seen a mermaid for thirteen years. So why would one turn up now, when I’ve only got three weeks left? It was just too neat. Only one way to know for sure.
My hand twitched nervously as it swept aside the white blonde hair on the left side of her cheek, and revealed her swan-like neck. Her skin was more golden than a Baywatch babe but cold as a popsicle on a summer day. And there it was. A tiny blue-green tattoo of a stylised fish.
Holy shit, she was a watch-keeper.
I could hear Aldus behind me, on the two-way to Billy, the local paramedic. Billy runs the funeral home as well, but no-one’s ever questioned the conflict of interest. He picks up Dirtwater’s bruised, battered and, ever so occasionally, dead, and takes them to the hospital, the funeral home or the morgue. Depending on the type