I didn’t expect the chef to do what he did in this scene – characters quite often surprise me – but I just went with it and I like how it turned out. Adds another twist to what’s going on.

Here’s this week’s work:

“So what if she’s trying to kill Hugh Smalls?” I asked. I was walking home from the coffee shop and talking to the grim, who was pacing happily beside me. “I mean, maybe I should let her, that’d solve the problem.”

The grim looked over at me and I said, “You’re right, I probably wouldn’t get paid if that happened. Because then there’d be nothing to investigate, and you know Arnold would weasel his way out of paying me fee.”

The spark prickled on my skin and I closed my eyes and sighed. What had been wrong with being oblivious? It hadn’t been nearly so unsettling.

I opened my eyes and looked around, glancing down the alley I was passing, squinting at the hedges, the grim at my side.

I saw nothing out of the ordinary and then the grim straightened beside me and let out a low growl. He was looking up at something and so I looked up, too, lifting my arm at the same time to protect myself from whatever might swoop down at me.

It wasn’t swooping. It was crouched on the roof of the apartment building we were walking past, a thin feral woman with tangled dark hair.

The grim let out a howl of outrage and the thin woman started, then raced across the roof and disappeared.

I had a sudden image of her scuttling down the side of the building like a cockroach and could not repress an “ew.”

“Banshee, was it?” I asked the grim. “A little territorial, aren’t you? Only one harbinger of death per city block, is that it?”

The grim ignored me, his attention still focused on the roof of the building. I kept walking and eventually heard its footsteps behind me.

I wondered who’d died or was going to die in that building. I supposed it was someone of Irish extraction, because banshee. But I wasn’t sure. The bird-woman was of Greek or maybe Roman origin, and that didn’t necessarily mean it was drawn there by a Greek or Italian person. Maybe these things just existed.

I wasn’t quite sure how it worked. I was just glad the banshee hadn’t been on the roof of my apartment building. Having the grim was bad enough.

“What were we talking about?” I asked the grim, then remembered: the mermaid and what I should do about her. I imagined telling Arnold that Hugh Smalls was sleeping with a mermaid, and that might complicate our situation. I imagined being immediately fired.

I opened the gate to my apartment building and as I entered the grounds, I remembered the amethyst I’d picked up the other day and used like a crystal ball. I decided to see if I could get it to answer me about next steps.

I should have asked Nikki about that experience. I’d attempted some magic and maybe I’d made some, hard to say for sure. Did it say anything about my magical abilities that I’d conjured the image of my worst enemy? I would have had more faith in the magic if I’d recognized the guy. I mean, how could someone I didn’t even know be my worst enemy? If it had been the image of that jackass thief I’d written about in the Times and who then filed a lawsuit against me and the paper for telling the truth, that would have made sense. Or my former mother-in-law, who’d hated me from the beginning for marrying her precious baby and then divorcing him—

The shadow by the doorway made me stop in my tracks.

The gate wouldn’t necessarily deter criminals but it did tend to keep out the casual junkies.

“Get away from my door,” I said sharply, hooking my shoulder bag crossbody so I would have my hands free.

Like anyone, my natural tendency was to keep my attention hyperfocused on the immediate threat, but that made you miss things, so I deliberately softened my focus to take in everything, not just his eyes, which might telegraph his moves, but his hands and feet and the general surroundings. Assholes sometimes travel in packs.

“I said, get away from the door,” I told him, raising my voice. The amulet glowed warm against my skin and he pushed off and ran straight at me, flying at me, almost faster than thought.

I sidestepped, putting my foot out and shoving against his back, adding my energy to his own, and he went stumbling down. He tried to right himself but his momentum had brought him to the stairhead and he couldn’t keep his balance and fell, ramming against the stone steps. He stuck his hand out to grab the railing but missed, and hit the landed with a thud that shook the floor where I was standing. I had my phone out now, recording, but he never looked back and I never saw his face. He shoved to his feet and went down the turn in the stairs.

The gate clanged shut and I counted to ten before I went to investigate and make sure he was gone.

I frowned, wondering what the fuck, and then I walked back up to my apartment. Had he been trying to get in or had he already accomplished that and been on his way out? I looked at the door for signs of forced entry but I didn’t see anything unusual.

I thought about fingerprints but who was going to come and collect them? Dear LAPD: someone was standing by my door, could you please dust for fingerprints and then arrest him if he’s in your database?

I tried the handle. The door was locked. Whether that meant he hadn’t gotten in or he’d locked it after leaving, I couldn’t tell, but I took it as a promising development. What thief locks up behind himself?

Unless he’d locked up behind him so that I would march confidently into the apartment, into some kind of trap. Maybe an accomplice waiting for me?

Being paranoid is emotionally exhausting.

I looked around for the grim but he’d disappeared, which was a pity because I would have liked to talk things over with him.

LAPD, can you please come to my apartment to investigate whether there is anyone dangerous waiting inside?

I sighed and unlocked the door. I stood to one side and turned the handle, pushing the door slightly open. Nothing. Still staying to the side, I  pushed the door all the way open with my toe, waiting for the bomb to detonate or the Rottweiler to rush out at me.

Nothing.

I ventured a peek around the door jamb. The apartment has a short hallway with the bedroom door off to the right and the living room straight ahead. No one was in the living room.

I edged into the hallway, feeling a little like a cop in one of those television shows, wishing I had a Glock and a backup.

I pushed the bedroom door open. Nothing. I moved quickly now, flinging open the closet and the bathroom door, rattling open the shower curtain, stooping to look under the bed.

I snatched open the hall closet; the Swiffer and the broom were undisturbed. The kitchen, which was beyond the bedroom and next to the living room, was open plan, with no place for anyone to hide. No one was hiding under the sofa or out on the balcony, except the neighborhood squirrel.

Nothing seemed disturbed. My clothes were all still neatly folded in the dresser. No one had moved anything to feel underneath. The locked files in my closet were still locked and no one seemed to have tried to open them. The laptop on my desk was still off and no one seemed to have tried to turn it on and log in.

Which suggested several possibilities. I’d surprised the intruder before he could actually intrude, he’d been waiting for me, or he had nothing to do with me and had actually been targeting someone else’s apartment.

I was pretty sure I’d have liked it better for him to steal the $1000 I keep in cash in the trinket box I keep on my dresser. (I’d checked; it was still there.)

I sat on the sofa and checked the camera footage I’d taken. I’d gotten a great shot of the intruder going ass over teakettle down the stairs, but not his face.

Dear LAPD, can you identify this literal ass?

My inability to get a picture of his face bothered me more than it should have. I mean, things like that happen in a flash and you’re more focused on trying not to get hurt than you are attempting to identify the miscreant. So it was natural not to have registered the man’s face. I’d only thought of the phone after I’d shoved him down the stairs, so obviously his back was to me.

He never looked over his shoulder, I realized. I’d shoved him down the stairs and he’d gotten up and run out of the gate but he had never looked back.

I was not sure what that meant. I probably would have looked back just to see if anyone was coming after me, but I’m not a criminal so that didn’t mean much. Maybe he was more concerned about my getting a good look at him than he was concerned about anything else.

I went into the bedroom and got out my magic eight ball. I looked down at it, for a moment wishing I was capable of sustained seriousness; I was sure Nikki and Serena would use actual crystal balls to peer into the future. Why couldn’t I be like them, and have some gravitas? Lacking that, why couldn’t I be the kind of witch who would light incense and wear flowing clothes and carry an athame with me?

Why couldn’t I be like Nikki and sense magic?

Well, I could sense magic, of course; that was what the sparks on my skin were, a sensation that something magic—or mythological or fantastical or whatever—was in the vicinity. But that wasn’t quite the same as knowing that magic had been used near me. So, had it? Had the shadowy man been here to cast a spell? Maybe he’d been successful. Maybe he hadn’t been trying to hurt me. Maybe he’d just been trying to get away from me once he’d—

No, he definitely had run right at me; he’d wanted to knock me down at least, if not something worse. But a man might still do that just because he was trying to get away; sometimes offense is the best defense.

Should I have gone after him? I could have, but I didn’t think that would have been wise. There’s defending yourself, which I’d done, and there was foolishness, which chasing after him would have been. For all I knew, he had a gun and would have used it. There are like five guns for every adult person in the US, so it wasn’t outside the realm of possibility.

I sat on the bed, magic eight ball in my hands. The pendant around my neck was no longer warm, and I wondered if it had actually protected me from danger. Had wearing it helped me send the intruder down the stairs and away?

No way to know, really. I focused my attention on the ball in my hand. The question of Who was that man? was the most immediate and I asked the ball for an answer. I gave it a hard shake and turned it over.

The answer cube bobbed in the opaque window, but I wasn’t looking for a signs point to yes or ask again later answer so I ignored it and concentrated on the window itself.

The glass showed me an image of a shadowy figure, almost an exact replica of the figure I’d seen by my front door.

“Thanks,” I said, rolling my eyes. I could see there were limits to what I could get from the eight ball. But I tried again anyway. I asked, “What should I do about Marissa the mermaid? Is she a danger to Hugh Smalls? Does he know she’s a mermaid?”

The ball was mute, the die stuck at an angle with no answer forthcoming. Of course; I’d asked too many questions at once. Even the Delphic Oracle would have struggled with that.

I tried again. “How should I approach Marissa, the mermaid, in order to decide my next steps in the investigation of Hugh Smalls. I thought that was a good question: clear, specific, and limited.

The eight ball seemed to think about this for a while and then swirling smoke filled the window. I bent forward, peering. The smoke drifted, dissipated, showed a shape….

It was my own face.

*

“And then,” I said to the grim, “it was my own face! My own body, too, I guess, though I didn’t realize I’d gotten so squishy around the middle.”

I shook my head and unlocked the Charger. “You getting in or are you just going to meet me over there?”

The grim gave me a look and vanished.”

“I guess I’ll be seeing you over there,” I called after him.

A neighbor coming into the garage stopped and looked around, trying to figure out who I was talking to. I opened my mouth, then closed it and got in the car.

Why had the eight ball shown me my own face? How did that answer the question of “How should I approach the mermaid?”

I could have understood a nothing answer—no answer at all would have made sense if the eight ball didn’t know the answer, not being the Delphic Oracle. But my own face? What did that mean? Go, girl? Something else? What else?

Traffic on the 10 heading towards Santa Monica was not the breeze Nikki had earlier suggested it might be, but it could have been worse. I guess that’s what you can always say about LA traffic: it could have been worse.

I drove to Marissa’s restaurant and as I was parking in the garage near the Promenade—all the beach parking would be full this time of day—I thought I’m just going to do what I would normally do in an investigation and it popped into my head that maybe that was what the eight ball meant: be yourself.

Just more so?

How I approached someone I wanted to get information from depended on what kind of leverage I had or could develop. With Marissa, I wanted to confirm that she was sleeping with Hugh Smalls and I wanted to get her to speak out about it.

I had the photo of her and her boyfriend with her tongue down his throat, and I could use that to get information from her. I could threaten to tell Smalls. Even though he was a two-timing rat bastard, he would go apeshit if he found out his affair partners was having an affair, too. They always do. They have zero concept of the Golden Rule (do unto others, etc.). Many people seem to have forgotten it or never heard about it.

But I wanted her to go public and that meant she needed to be pissed at Smalls, not at me for threatening to reveal her. So … I needed to throw something in her face and get her steamed at him.

To my surprise, she did a double-take when I entered the restaurant and said, “Back again?” Young women like young men, rarely really notice older women.

“You bet,” I said. I glanced around the restaurant. It was slow; dinner hour was a bit later. I took a risk and said, “I wanted to ask you something if you have a minute.”

Her face took on a guarded look. I understood. She probably was wondering if I was going to ask her if she had invited Jesus Christ into her heart to be her personal savior, so I added quickly, “It’s about Hugh Smalls.”

Her eyes widened and then shifted as if she were looking around to make sure no one else had heard me. She took my arm in a tight grip, her green teeth clenched in what no one would mistake for a smile.

“This way, please,” she said.

I could shake her off but I wanted to see how this played out so I let her steer me to a table in the back. She shoved me into the booth, then slid in beside me, trapping me, and I said mildly, “So I guess you know him.”

She let out a kind of piercing cry and I clapped my hands over my ears, half-expecting them to start bleeding.

No one in the restaurant even turned to look at her, so that was odd, and then a large man came surging out of the kitchen, lips pulled back from green teeth, green hair curling from under a cap. He was wearing chef’s whites. He had a knife the length of my forearm in one hand, and a look of fury in his red-rimmed eyes.

“Geeze,” I said. “I only want to task you a question.”

“You,” the man said, so naturally I said, “Me,” even though I wasn’t sure what he was accusing me of.

“Could you let go of my arm?” I asked Marissa, tugging a little. I looked up at the man. “I just thought you should know she’s cheating on you.”

“You what?” The merman-chef lowered the knife slightly and Marissa shifted in her seat to look at me.

“What?” she demanded.

“Yeah,” I said to him. To her, I said, “Please?” and yanked my arm again. This time she released me, though slowly. I was glad I hadn’t tried to blackmail her into spilling the beans about her affair with Smalls because I would probably be dead in the dumpster out back right now if I had.

I rubbed my bruised arm. “Look,” I said, inventing wildly. “Small’s wife suspected he’s cheating on her, so she called me—”

“What?” Marissa said again. I had the idea they were expecting something completely different from me.

“Smalls,” I said. “Hugh Smalls. His wife. Don’t pretend you don’t know who I’m talking about.”

The merman-chef gave a glance around the restaurant, then slid into the bench on the opposite side of the booth. He put the knife on the table, still gripping the hilt.

“His wife hired you for what?” Like he couldn’t believe it. I didn’t quite see what was hard to believe. Maybe merperson culture was different from human culture.

“Hired me to investigate,” I said.

“You’re a detective?”

“No, I just play one on TV,” I said scornfully. I didn’t want to actually misrepresent myself because that could lead to trouble and I figured sarcasm would be the best way to deflect the question. It did, because he immediately said, “Bite me.”

“Not even if you paid me a million dollars,” I said. “You don’t want to hear me, fine, I’ll just—”

“We didn’t say we didn’t want to hear you,” Marissa said. “We’re just a little surprised. We thought she was …oblivious.”

I thought of the woman with the dog in the stroller. She seemed like she might be oblivious, but … a little tingle shot through me. I had the feeling they didn’t just think she was oblivious, they had taken steps to make sure she was.

Could Merpeople work that kind of magic? They’d almost have to if they were so good at luring people to their deaths. Assuming that was true and not a calumny perpetrated by merperson-haters.

“Maybe someone clued her in,” I said dismissively. “Or maybe you were too overt—”

“Me!”

“But anyway, she got on to you.” I shrugged. “And asked me to find out who you were.”

“And you’re here for a bribe?”

“What?” Now I was puzzled. Then I realized Chef here was expecting me to say I would go back to the wife empty-handed if they paid me off. That wasn’t a helpful direction to go so I said, ”The lady pays for the truth, she gets the truth.”

The knife was suddenly a few inches from my face, and my heart banged in my throat, lodging there and slamming away in terror. I could barely swallow.

“What the hell?” I squeaked out.

“Maybe if you disappear you won’t tell her,” Chef said.

“Put the knife down,” I said. “Come on, do you really think I came here to report to you first? She already knows what I know.”

Marissa and Chef exchanged a look and I half-expected more of that high-pitched shrieking but it didn’t come.

“She knows? You told her?” Marissa asked, her voice low in her throat. She glanced at Chef from the corner of her eye while she addressed me.

“What did I just get through saying?” I said.

“You told her and now you’re telling us you told her … why?”

“Because I have some related information that I suspect you might be interested in but not if you’re acting batshit crazy.”

“Batshit … guano crazy?” Chef asked, looking taken aback. “What does this mean?”

“Just a colloquialism,” I said. “Means loco.”

“I am not loco,” he was with dignity, fingering the knife.

“Uh huh,” I said, keeping Marissa in the corner of my eye in case of sudden moves. Look, I thought we could make a trade. I was mistaken. Sorry. If you’ll excuse me….” I gestured at Marissa, who was blocking my way. “I’ll just leave and go back to what I was doing.”

“No,” they both said automatically and at once.

“Tell us,” Marissa said, favoring me with a smile that only bared her teeth.

“That’s why I mentioned the trade idea,” I said. “An exchange. You give me something, I’ll give you something.”

“I’ll give you your life,” Marissa growled, leaning close and making a hissing sound in the back of her throat, which was seriously unsettling.

I swallowed, trying to get my heart back where it belonged and said, “Doesn’t that seem a little dramatic? You’re entire reaction here, I gotta say it’s a little overboard. It makes me curious.”

“I can fix your curiosity,” she said.

“Sure,” I said. “I mean, wow, drama drama drama for a simple statement I made. The way I would have played it, see—”

The knife was in my face again. I was getting a little tired of it.

“We don’t care how you would have played it,” Chef said.

“See, like this,” I complained. My hands were shaking and I put them on my lap so they couldn’t see that. “There’s no need for you to butt in on my conversation with Marissa.”

“She called me.”

“What are you, her pimp?” I said.

They exchanged a confused look.

“Maybe not,” I said. “Maybe OnlyFans has rendered that obsolete. You don’t need a guy to pimp you out when you can do it to yourself.”

“What are you talking about?” He sounded bewildered but the knife was still in my face and I wasn’t convinced that confused knife-wielding man was an improvement over angry knife-wielding man, so I said, “I’m going to reach into my bag. No one stab me, all right?”

No one said anything. I reached slowly into my bag and just as slowly brought out my phone. I turned my shoulder on Marissa to give myself a little privacy as I tapped in my unlock code.

I found my camera app and said, ”See, here’s the thing. I have pictures of you with your tongue down—”

“What?” she shrieked and half rose out of the book, lunging for my phone. I turned my shoulder again, holding the phone away from her, but Chef leaned across the table and snatched it out of my hands. I yelped and grabbed across the table to get it back. I almost got a hand on it but Chef yanked it out of my reach, turned his own shoulder on me, then said, “You bitch!”

I wasn’t sure who he was screaming at until the knife slashed forward and plunged into Marissa’s chest.

Marissa fell back, crying out, and I shoved the table forward, slamming the edge of it into Chef’s gut. I scrambled over Marissa, shouting, “Call 911” to anyone who might listen.

Chef shoved the table forward and shoved himself out of the booth. I grabbed his shirt with both hands and added my energy to his, slamming him down to the floor, my skin sparking, my brain shouting in outrage and terror.

My phone clattered across the tile and I scooped it up and shoved it into my shoulder bag, then stomped on the hand still clutched the knife, glad I hadn’t worn sandals for once.

Chef made a sound of pain, difficult to hear over Marissa’s sounds of pain. One of the servers had dropped to her knees beside Marissa and was pressing a cloth napkin against the bleeding wound.

I stomped down on Chef’s knife-hand again, and this time he released the knife. I kicked it away.

“Don’t move, you goddamned bastard!” I shouted and took a step back to get a breath in.

He didn’t move. A second server and the three customers in the place were staring at me in horrified silence, the LA way, and then I shouted, “Did anyone call 911? Do I have to do everything around here myself?”

A woman in the corner near the door raised her hand and said, “I did, I’m on hold with them right now.”

One of the customers took the opportunity to sidle on out the door—no one wants to get involved and I don’t blame them. If I could have thought of a plausible way to leave before the police arrived, I would have but I figured they’d track me down eventually and it would be better just to wait here and lie through my teeth.

~~~

Jennifer Lawler has been a writer-editor for more than twenty-five years and has published more than forty novels and nonfiction books. She is the founder of the online education company Club Ed LLC.