Greywalker - Kat Richardson [50]
I grinned at him. “Maybe I’ll go for the salmon, then. I wouldn’t want to glow in the dark.”
He laughed and ordered drinks and food, then started in on the serious chatting and flirting. We were interrupted by a musical beeping from Will’s waistband. He snatched a pager out of a fold of his clothing and looked at it.
I watched him study the number, then put the pager away. “Is it something important? I can wait if you need to make a call.”
“Nothing like that. It’s just Mikey’s code.”
“Your son pages you?”
“Son?” Will began to laugh and I quivered. The sound of his laughter was like a warm touch on my spine. “Michael is my little brother. He pages me with this code when he goes out. Lets me know he arrived safely.”
“Oh,” I muttered.
He shook his head in amusement. “It’s OK. Lots of people make that mistake. I am old enough to be his father, technically. The relationship is kind of somewhere in between, though. He was a late baby and I was already out of the house—in Europe, in fact—by the time he was a real human being, so I missed a lot. When our folks died, I got the responsibility for raising him. So now I’m Father Goose. I keep tabs on him all the time, which is a little paranoid, but I guess I’m afraid I’ll misplace him or something. We both carry pagers so we’re never out of touch. Overprotective, right?”
I shrugged to cover both my surprise and my chagrin. “Can’t ask me—I’m an investigator, not a family counselor. So you always know where he is? Or at least where he should be?”
“Pretty much. He always knows where I am, too. We’re like two weights on a rubber band—we always bounce back toward each other.”
“I wish more people were like you and Michael. It would be a lot easier to find some of them.”
“You mean your clients?”
“No. Their kids and spouses. Most missing persons are routine,” I explained. “There’s often a strong clue in their past behavior or habits that will lead me right to them, once I’ve figured out the habits in the first place. Most people don’t have any idea how to disappear. Most don’t even mean to. They leave tracks like elephants in mud. But I have one of the other kind right now. Kid just broke his routine and habits completely and disappeared.”
Will blanched. “Oh, God, I’d go crazy if anything happened to Michael, if he just disappeared someday. . . . If somebody took him, I’d—I’d lose it. Do you think someone took this kid?”
I reached over and touched his arm. “No. I think he went for a reason and I’m getting an idea of where he might be. But I’ve got to admit, I’d really like to know why. That’s what’s bothering me. When I know why someone’s vanished, I can make a good guess of where, but the why often turns out to be the most important question. I wouldn’t want to have to approach someone in, say, a crack house, without knowing what I was getting into first.”
He nodded. “I can understand that.” He played with his glass. “You’ve got a dangerous job,” he added, trying to steer the conversation back to my lane. I accepted the transfer, for the time being.
“It’s not so bad. A lot of what I do is hunting down paperwork, filing forms, and waiting around. But it beats milking cows.”
He grinned and raised his eyebrows. “Cows?”
I nodded. “Yeah. When I was little, I went to visit my Mom’s family in Montana. They lived on a cattle ranch, but they kept a few milk cows for themselves. One morning—about four thirty—my cousin got me up to help him milk the cows. I think it was supposed to be fun. But I am not a cow person—my favorite cow comes on a bun. I was sleepy and the cows were large, smelly, and scary. And milking is nasty—which is the real reason they invented automatic milking machines.”
Will chuckled. We chatted on about inconsequential things. Around the time our dinners were served, I was starting to have a strange, queasy feeling in the pit of my stomach. The feeling was familiar. I looked around out of the corner of my eye as I bent over my fish.
I saw a face flicker in the edge of my vision like one of those persistence-of-vision