Second Grave on the Left

Chapter Five

WHAT HAPPENS IF YOU GET SCARED HALF TO DEATH, TWICE?

—T-SHIRT

My head reeling, I left Pari’s shop stunned, wandering aimlessly toward home before I remembered I had a job to do. And a job I would do. Time to pull the curtains back on my shadow. Whomever Uncle Bob had assigned to follow me was about to have a very bad day.

I opened my cell phone and answered as if it had been ringing. I stopped, incredulous. I looked around. Gestured wildly. “Meet? Now? Well, darn it, okay. You’re in the alley to my right? You’re that close? Are you crazy? You’ll be caught. Surely someone will suspect you might get in touch with me. Surely … Okay, fine.” I closed the phone, scanned the area, then eased between two buildings, the passageway leading to an alley, all the while throwing furtive glances over my shoulder.

After my production of Casablanca meets Mission: Impossible, I hightailed it toward a Dumpster and ducked behind it, waiting for my shadow to appear. As I sat scrunched, feeling oddly ridiculous, I played with Reyes’s name in my head, let it shape and slide over my tongue. Rey’aziel. The beautiful one. Boy did they have that right.

But why would he hurt Pari? I calculated ages. If Pari had been fourteen when she performed her little séance, then Reyes could have been no more than eight. Nine at the most. And he attacked her? Maybe it wasn’t him. Maybe she summoned something else accidently, something evil.

“Whatcha doin’?”

I started at the voice behind me and—having flailed a bit—fell back, my palms and ass landing in an illegally dumped oil slick. Wonderful. I ground my teeth together and looked up at a grinning departed gangbanger with more attitude than was socially acceptable.

“Angel, you little shit.”

He laughed aloud as I examined my filthy hands. “That was awesome.”

Freaking thirteen-year-olds. “I knew I should have exorcised your ass when I had the chance.” Angel died when his best friend decided to take out the puta bitch vatos who’d invaded their turf by utilizing the drive-by technique of execution so popular with the kids today. Angel tried to stop him and paid the ultimate price. Much to my eternal chagrin.

“You couldn’t exorcise a cat, much less a bad-to-the-bone Chicano with gunpowder in his blood. Besides, you hate exercise.”

Chuckling at his own joke, he took my outstretched hand and pulled me onto the balls of my feet. I needed to stay squatted behind the Dumpster, the prime tactical position for an ambush. “You don’t have any blood,” I pointed out helpfully.

“Sure I do,” he said, looking down at himself. He wore a dirty white T-shirt with jeans hanging low on his hips, worn-out sneakers, and a wide leather wristband. His inky black hair was cropped short over his ears, but he still had a baby face and a smile so genuine, it could melt my heart on contact. “It’s just kind of see-through now.”

I scraped my hands down the side of the Dumpster to no avail, wondering how many germs were hitching a ride in the process. “Do you have a reason for being here?” I asked, now swiping my hands at my pants. The oil was obviously going to remain stuck until I found some water and a professional-grade degreaser.

“I heard we got a case,” he said. While Angel had been a constant companion since my freshman days of high school, he agreed to become my lead investigator when I opened my PI business three years ago. Having an incorporeal being as an investigator was kind of like cheating on college entrance exams—nerve-racking yet oddly effective. And we’d solved many a case together.

Facing no such quandaries with the oil slick, he sat down in front of me, his back against the Dumpster, his eyes suddenly drawn to my hand as I knocked the rocks and soil off my left butt cheek. “Can I help?” he asked, indicating my ass with a nod. Thirteen-year-olds were so hormonal. Even dead ones.

“No, you can’t help, and we suddenly have not one, but two cases.” While Mimi was my professional priority, Reyes was my personal one. Neither was expendable, and I pondered which case I should put him on. I opted for Reyes because I simply didn’t have any other resources in that area. But Angel wasn’t going to like it.

“How much do you know about Reyes?” I asked, hoping he wouldn’t disappear. Or pull a nine-millimeter and gank me.

He eyed me a moment, shifted uncomfortably, then rested his elbows on his knees and looked off into the distance. Or, well, into a warehouse. After a long while, he said, “Rey’aziel isn’t our case.”

I sucked in a soft breath with the mention of Reyes’s otherworldly name. How did he know it? Better yet, how long had he known it?

“Angel, do you know what Reyes is?”

He shrugged. “I know what he isn’t.” He leveled an intent gaze on me. “He isn’t our case.”

With a sigh, I sat on the pavement, slick or no slick, and leaned against the trash bin beside him. I needed Angel with me on this. I needed his help, his particular talents. After placing a dirty hand on his, I said, “If I don’t find him, he’s going to die.”

A dubious chuckle shook his chest, and in that instant, he seemed so much older than the thirteen years he’d accumulated before he passed. “If only it were that easy.”

“Angel,” I said, my tone admonishing. “You can’t mean that.”

The look he stabbed me with was one of such anger, such incredulity, I fought the urge to lean away from him. “You can’t be serious,” he said as if I’d suddenly lost my marbles. Little did he know, I’d lost my marbles eons ago.