I glanced sideways at him. “That’s the seventh time you’ve asked me that, cowboy. I’m starting to think I should tell you something other than ‘no.’ ”
Dutch laughed. “I’m just trying to let you know that it’s okay if you are. I mean, these guys can be rough at first.”
Dutch was referring to my new job with the bureau, which began the next morning at eight a.m. I would not only be giving my impressions on various cases, but also teaching a select group of agents how to open up their own intuition. “Harrison has my back, though, right?” I said. “I mean, he keeps telling me that he won’t allow anyone to show me any overt disrespect, which is incredibly ironic coming from him of all people.” Harrison had been one of the most skeptical nuts my intuition had ever had to crack.
“Oh, he’ll have your back, all right. Candice would kill him if he didn’t.”
“I can’t wait to see her,” I said wistfully. My partner, Candice Fusco, was a licensed PI and had followed Harrison down to Texas two months before. I knew from the few e-mails I got from her that she was ridiculously head over heels for Harrison, and the two were even talking about moving in with each other.
“They’ve invited us over for dinner,” Dutch said. “Apparently Candice laid down a big chunk of change for some swanky condo in downtown Austin and she closed on it last Saturday.”
“How is it you know more about Candice than I do?”
“Harrison keeps me in the loop,” Dutch said with a bounce of his eyebrows.
I smiled. “You’re pretty proud of yourself, aren’t you?”
“Little bit,” he said.
I shook my head ruefully and stared out the window again, but Dutch’s cautionary words about my first day on the job were settling in and making me nervous. “Do you really think they’ll give me a hard time?” I asked him after a time.
“Who?”
“The agents I’m going to be advising.”
“Yes.”
My mouth fell open. “Gee, cowboy, thanks for cushioning it a little.”
Dutch reached out and squeezed my hand. “Sorry, doll, but you’re better off knowing what you’re going to be walking into.”
“Do you think it’ll be as bad as the first time I met Harrison?”
Dutch considered that for a minute, which made me even more nervous because the first time Harrison and I had met had been bad. “Maybe just a little less awkward than that,” Dutch said.
“Shit,” I said, and that won me a sideways glance from Dutch. My anger management instructor had forbidden us from swearing. “Zu,” I amended quickly. “Shitzu!”
Dutch laughed and shook his head. “That’s a new one.”
Since I’d been conditioned the last two months not to swear—my instructor was convinced it led immediately to an anger impulse—I’d been coming up with some rather colorful alternatives. “I’m never going to be able to stop,” I admitted. Of all the alternate behaviors we’d learned in the class, the single greatest challenge for me was not swearing. I’d yet to go a full day without letting at least one expletive fly out of my mouth.
“Anything’s an improvement,” Dutch muttered. And I knew he was right. My mouth could put most sailors to shame.
“Yeah, yeah,” I said, then got back on topic. “So, what’s your advice for making my first introduction to these agents less awkward?”
“Don’t be yourself,” Dutch said, and it took me a minute to realize he was kidding.
“I’m serious!”
Dutch laughed heartily, but then sobered a little when he saw the look on my face. “I think that it can’t hurt to be as professional and down to earth as possible, Abs. You can’t go in there and talk about your crew, you know.”
That shocked me. My crew was the term I used for my spirit guides, and they were such a part of my intuitive process that I was aghast at his suggestion. “Why the hello-dolly not?”
That won me another smile. “Because the minute you start talking about the voices in your head is the moment these guys will earmark you for a nut job and discount everything you’re telling them. Then they’ll discount both me and Harrison because we believe in you, and pretty soon we’ll have another political mess on our hands.”
Now I understood why Dutch had continued to pester me about whether I was nervous and what I planned to say to the agents when I met with them. “So what should I talk about?”
“Well,” Dutch said, scratching his chin thoughtfully, “I guess giving them a demonstration would be good. But don’t read them. Read a case.”
“Why can’t I read them?” I asked. That was my forte after all, and much less difficult for me than solving a case.
“Because you’ll intimidate them.”
It was my turn to laugh. “Come on,” I said, thinking he was still joking.
But Dutch wasn’t smiling. “You don’t think that going in there and revealing all their hard-held secrets about their personal lives and relationships to an audience will turn them immediately against you?”
My eyebrows shot up. I hadn’t considered that. “Okay,” I conceded. “I see your point. So I tune in on a case—then what? Have them go out and solve it?”
Dutch shook his head. “Nope,” he said. “What you should do is tune in on a case that has already been solved. Something where we’ve already nabbed the bad guys, but something that took a while to solve, which will be totally relevant because that’s this group’s forte, after all.”
I shook my head in confusion. “You lost me,” I said. “What do you mean, their ‘forte’?”
Dutch looked at me in surprise. “You do know that the group Harrison was assigned to is the cold case bureau for the Southwest, right?”
My jaw dropped, and it was a minute before I could speak. “Uh . . . no!”
“Oh,” Dutch said, looking chagrined. “Sorry, I thought I told you.”
I turned my face away and pouted in my seat. “Nope. You didn’t.”
“Why does that upset you?” Dutch pressed, reading my body language.
I sighed heavily. “Because cold cases are ridiculously more difficult to tune in on than current cases. The energy is all old, Dutch. It’s like coating my radar with dust—it’s just harder.”
“Think of how difficult they are to investigate,” he countered. “Abs, we need every available tool and technique we have to try to solve some of these, and no one thinks you’ll be able to go in there and solve every one of them, but maybe there are a few we’ll get where the energy won’t be so old, and you’ll bring us one new clue. Sometimes, Edgar, that’s all it takes—one new clue.”
I sat with that for a bit and realized he was right. “Okay,” I said. “I get it. So I’ll go in there tomorrow and do my thing—but not overdo my thing—and impress the heck out of these guys and we’ll all be singing “Kumbaya” around the campfire by dinnertime.”
Dutch laughed. “That’s the spirit,” he said, adding, “And up ahead is the city of Round Rock. We’ll be in Austin in about fifteen minutes, and to the house in twenty.”
I looked ahead, and saw that Dutch was absolutely right as I-35 began to undulate over more hilly terrain. We entered Austin exactly when he said we would, and my head swiveled back and forth as I tried to take in as much of my new home as possible.
Dutch took an exit not long afterward and we got onto one highway, then onto another called Route 360. The moment we crossed onto 360, my breath caught. As far as my eye could see were great sandstone cliffs dotted with lush forest, bluebonnets in full bloom, and various other wildflowers welcoming me to the Lone Star State. Dutch glanced over at me as we cruised closer and closer to our destination and asked, “What do you think?”
“I think I’m home, cowboy,” I said, my voice cracking. “I think I’m home.”
Victoria Laurie, Doom With a View
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