“I’m sorry I dragged you out here,” I said to Ubie. “She has to show up eventually. She said her family couldn’t find her body. That she had been there for days. Someone had to report her missing.”

“We’ll look into it,” Ubie said. “In the meantime, I have a date with a golf club and a little ball.”

“You and your little balls.” I shook my head in disappointment. How could I get any work done without slaves? Speaking of slaves, I called Garrett on the way back to town.

“A guy in an SUV tried to kill me.”

“That’s strange.”

“Why?”

“Because the guy I hired doesn’t drive an SUV.”

“That is strange.” Swopes. Always the kidder. “Wait. If someone else kills me, do you still have to pay him?”

“I think I should at least get a discount.”

“Right? There’s also a na**d elderly man in my passenger seat.”

“TMI, Charles.”

Poor dead na**d man. No one wanted to know about him. “Well? Does Marv have any priors?”

“Nothing. His record’s spotless, but how old did you say he was?”

“I don’t know, around thirty-five?”

“Then I have the wrong Marvin Tidwell. This guy is fifty-four. And dead.”

“Really, yeah, this one didn’t look that dead.”

“Probably not, but it could be you’re dealing with a case of identity theft.”

“Seriously?” I asked, straightening. “I hadn’t thought of that.”

“Again, it’s doubtful, but I can look into it if you want.”

“I want. Thanks a gazillion.”

I knew I tolerated him for a reason. I hung up and contemplated what he’d said. Identity theft. Now, that would be incriminating. I knew the odds were against it, as my dead na**d man was well beyond fifty-four, but just in case, I looked over and asked him, “Your name doesn’t happen to be Marv, does it?”

7

I am currently unsupervised. It freaks me out, too, but the possibilities are endless.

—T-SHIRT

Unfortunately, I had an appointment with a psychologist. I’d remembered my paintings, the ones that involved several counts of death and dismemberment. I wanted to impress her, to start our relationship off on the right foot. Albeit a severed one. On the way over to her office, I brought up another voice. There was one guy I could listen to all day and still not understand a word coming out of his mouth. Ozzy. Who could resist a Brit with slurry accent?

“Um, okay, yeah, so in aboot three hundred feet, beah right.” Poor guy always sounded drunk. This app had to be pirated and altered in some way. Surely the real app would make Ozzy sound a little more coherent.

“All right, then in two hundred feet, tahn left.”

The funny thing about GPS was it didn’t always send you in the right direction.

I knew that if I took a right and took Twelfth instead, I’d get there faster, so I turned right. Ozzy did not approve.

“Wut the foock?”

Did he just say the F-word?

“Ya not even foocking listening.”

“Ha! This is great,” I said to the dead na**d guy. He ignored me. Ozzy was so entertaining, though, I had a hard time cutting him off. He got really mad when I missed the right on Central, so I started missing turns on purpose just to listen to him rail at me. I was almost late for my head shrinking.

But I finally found the office of one Dr. Romero, the shrink my sister, Gemma, set me up with, despite Ozzy’s nagging. Gemma was so determined for me to deal with my PTSD, but I thought I was doing pretty well with it. We were friends now. I had my incontinence under control and Chihuahuas rarely frightened me anymore. Besides, I was certain the one that did was rabid. He had foam around his mouth and a crazy eye that looked off into the distance. The fact that he gave me nightmares was hardly my fault.

I stepped inside a nice office with the usual Southwestern decor of so many professional offices in Alb. Sadly, this was the cheesy Southwestern decor. The kind that was popular in the nineties, complete with plaster cactus plants and a howling coyote. Okay, I had a thing for the howling coyotes, especially the kind with bandannas around their necks, but I wasn’t going to let Dr. Romero know that.

“You must be Charley,” she said, and I could smell the New Age coming off her in waves. She was going to be one of those. This shouldn’t take long.

“I am,” I said, and forced a smile.

“Come on in.”

She led me into another room with two chairs and a small sofa. “I’m feeling much better,” I said to her before sitting on the sofa. It was the farthest I could get from her without being rude.

“I hope it’s okay, your sister filled me in on what happened to you.”

“Isn’t that breaking some code of confidentiality?”

“Not technically, but does it bother you that she told me?”

“Not at all. I was just wondering.”

“Well, I’m sorry we had to meet on a Saturday. Your sister’s a good friend and I’m going out of town next week. She wanted me to get you in before —” She noticed the portfolio I was carrying. “What is this?”

“Art therapy. I thought I’d impress you with my rehabilitation. I painted this one last week.” I lifted the painting of dead birds with a brown-haired girl eating them. “And I painted this one last night.” I showed her the one of the birds flying past a bright sun with a rainbow and unicorn in the background. If this didn’t prove my sanity, I didn’t know what would.