A Taser. She’d handed me a purse with a Taser in it.
I shot her a look. She kept smiling at me in sunny innocence.
The wallet was red faux alligator. I opened it, and there was a California driver’s license in the name of Jo Monaghan, with my wide-eyed mug shot picture next to it. Unflatteringly realistic. I passed the plastic-coated card over, and the cop inspected it for a few seconds, noted down the address that appeared on the card-I wondered whose address it was-and then gave it back. Stan had produced his own ID. The cop followed the same process. Not a chatterbox, this guy. He hadn’t even offered his name.
“Okay,” he finally said, and looked at each of us in turn. “Somebody start talking.”
Stan looked at me with mute desperation on his face. I controlled the urge to thwack him on the back of the head, and summoned as much charm as I could. (Not a lot. It had been a long day.) “I don’t know what we can tell you, sir. My daughter and I were just walking on the beach-we saw the lights and sirens, and we thought we’d take a look.”
“Your address isn’t anywhere near the beach.”
Venna looked chagrined. Of course, a Djinn wouldn’t think about things like that.
“No,” I agreed. “We were out sightseeing, and I didn’t realize how late it had gotten. We were still driving around when the storm hit. Some storm, huh?”
The detective grunted. “So after that you decided to come looky-loo?”
“Yes.” I pointed at the rock wall, dangerously sagging now. “We were sitting there on the rock wall, with a couple of other people-I didn’t know them. There was a British man; I think he might have been a little…” I made the international symbol for crazy at my temple. “He was rambling, you know? And he sounded really angry. I was going to take my daughter home when he got up and ran out there and started yelling. He started to come back at us, and he started sinking.”
The knife, I remembered, just as the detective turned his chilly X-ray eyes on me and said, “Somebody said he had a knife.”
“Oh,” I said faintly. “Did he? Oh, my God.”
“Any reason this man might want to hurt you?”
I shook my head. Venna shook hers, too.
“So when he started sinking, you…what? Tried to save him?”
It didn’t take a lot of work to look guilty. “Not right at first. I was afraid,” I said. “I ran for help. I found this guy”-I nodded at Stan-“and he came with me. We managed to pull the other man out, but-”
“Yeah, yeah, I know the rest,” the cop said. “So you, Waterman, you never saw Miz Monaghan before?”
“Never saw her before today,” Stan said. He sounded utterly confident on that score. “She saved his life, though.”
The detective was looking faintly disappointed with the whole thing. “Either of you here when the building came down? See anything either before or after I should know about?”
“Wasn’t it an earthquake?” I asked, and tried to sound anxious about it. “The building collapsing, I mean? It wasn’t bombs or anything?”
“We’re still looking, but yeah, so far it looks like bad luck and bad weather. Still, we like to ask.” He demanded phone numbers. I made Stan go first, then made mine up, hoping that his area code would work for mine as well. It must have, because the detective snapped his notebook shut. “Okay, I’ve got your statements. If anything comes up that I need clarification about, I’ll call.” He unbent enough to give Venna another smile. “Better get the kid home,” he told me. Venna looked up with a grave expression, and I wondered just how funny she was finding all this. Hilarious, I was willing to bet. The Djinn seemed to have a very strange sense of humor.
I had no car. I was about to say something to Stan about that, but Venna shook her head minutely, pulled on my hand, and led me across the sand in the opposite direction from where all the crazy news media was gathered. Stan trotted to keep up. “Hey!” he said. “You can’t leave!”
“Bet I can,” I said. “Bet you can’t stop me, Stanley. In fact, I’ll bet you don’t even want to try.”
“What about Jamie Rae?” he challenged, and got in my way. Venna looked like she might be tempted to say or do something; I squeezed her hand in warning. “What am I supposed to tell the Wardens?”
“Tell them you were overmatched,” Venna said sweetly. “They’ll believe that.” She smiled. I was glad I wasn’t on the receiving end of that particular expression. “Your friend is waking up,” she said. “You’d better go get her and leave now.”
“But…the sinkhole…”
“You stopped it from growing,” she said. “Someone else will fix it. We have to go now.”
“But…the newspeople-they’ll have tape!”
“Then I suppose the Wardens will have to handle that,” Venna said serenely. “I can’t be bothered. Move.”
He did, skipping out of her way as she advanced. I trailed along, shrugging to indicate that I didn’t have much choice, either; I was pretty sure Stan believed it. There was a hill beyond him, and we trudged up, avoiding the scrub brush and sharp-edged grasses. Stan didn’t follow. He stood there, hands on his hips, looking lost, and then he turned and went back to get Jamie Rae and, I presumed, make a full report to the Wardens.
Venna was right: We needed to get the hell out of here.
“I hope you have a bus schedule in your bag of tricks,” I said, and glanced back down the hill. Some of the news crews had spotted us, and a couple of athletic Emmy-seeking types were pounding sand next to the road, curving around the cordoned-off area and heading our way. “Oh, boy.”
She tugged my hand harder, and we climbed faster. The poststorm air felt clean and soft, the sand under our feet damp and firm. It would have been a nice day, except for all the chaos and mayhem.
“Eamon?” I asked, as we achieved the top of the hill. “He’s alive?”
“Oh, yes,” Venna said. “You saved him. I suppose that makes you happy.” She sounded mystified about it. Well, I was a little mystified about it, too. “It was good you told them he was crazy. That’ll take time for him to convince them he’s not, but then they’ll be looking for you.”
“So, bus?” I asked. A well-dressed anchorwoman-well dressed from the waist up, anyway, wearing blue jeans and sneakers below-was sprinting up the road, with her heavyset cameraman puffing behind her. “Anytime would be good.”
“You don’t need a bus.” She pointed. “That’s your car.”
Parked next to the side of the road sat…a gleaming, midnight blue dream of a car. I blinked. “What the hell is that?”
“It’s a Camaro,” she said. “Nineteen sixty-nine. V-eight with an all-aluminum ZL-one four twenty-seven.” She said it as if she were reciting it out of a book. “Lewis gave it to you.”
I turned to stare at her. “Lewis gave me this. Lewis gave me a car.” She nodded. “And…I took it?” She nodded again. “Oh, boy.”
“You needed a car,” she said. “He just thought you should have a nice one.”
“When did this happen?”
“Just before-” She stopped herself, frowned, and edited. “Before you lost your memory. You drove it on the East Coast. You took a plane from there to Arizona, so it’s been sitting in a parking lot, waiting for you.”
“And you…had it driven here?” We were at the car now, and I ran my hand lightly over the immaculate, polished finish. Not so much as a bug splatter on its surface anywhere. “You get it detailed, too?”
Venna shrugged and opened the passenger-side door to climb in. She looked more little-girl than ever once she was inside, with her feet dangling off the floor. Somebody had installed after-market seat belts; she gravely hooked hers, although I figured there was little chance of a Djinn being injured in a collision. Still playing the daughter role, evidently.