Chapter Minka #2
“Which is why I wanna get it out of the way before Estefan is gone.”
“But we don’t know when that’ll happen. Do…” I search her eyes and wonder, “Do you know? Can you pinpoint exactly when—”
“I see his death,” she murmurs, softly shaking her head. “I see his funeral. I see him dying in his bed, and not at the end of an enemy’s gun.”
“Lucky him, I guess.” I sit back and ignore the way my wax sticks clang together with the movement. “If you can see him in his bed, can’t you just…” I roll my wrist. “Ya know, search the room and find a calendar?”
She snorts. “No, Chief. I cannot. As for the surrogacy stuff, Tim and I have gone round and round about this for months already, and then we’ve gone around some more since Sunday.
If I wait too long, I risk not being able to do this for my brother at all, and if I get the timing wrong, I risk being pregnant when I’d really prefer not to be.
So…” She seems to run out of words, so she shrugs. “Don’t forget to pull your plugs.”
Crap!
I check the time on my computer, but I didn’t actually pay attention to when my two minutes began.
Frenzied, I grab a stick and give it a fast yank.
“Holy mother of six-armed fucking octopuses!” Tears flood my eyes, and pain radiates all the way to my toes.
I’m crying! “Oh my shit, Aubs.” I choke out a watery laugh and study the end of my hair-infused wax ball. “Ouch!”
“You’re bleeding.” Giggling, she jumps to her feet and snatches my spent wax stick.
Scrunching her nose, she tosses it into my trash can, then, fisting a handful of tissues, she comes around my desk and perches on the edge to get a closer look at the second.
“The worst thing about doing this is that it’s not one and done.
You pull the first plug, feel the pain, cry about it for a minute, but then you have to rally and do it a second time. ”
“You’re more likely to conceive twins via IVF than if you were to do it the good old-fashioned way.”
Curious, she pulls back and searches my eyes.
“So you do the thing,” I explain. “Feel the pain, cry about it for a minute, and then you have to rally and do it a second time.”
“Nice segue,” she snickers. “You ready for the next one?”
“No!” Panicking, I slap her hand away and cover my poor, aching nostrils.
“What in the world is going on in here?” Eyes wide, grin even wider, Sophia blows through my door with a pair of pliers casually hanging from her front pocket and a hammer fisted in her left hand.
However, her teasing mood lasts only until the Isaac Hawthorne stench invades her senses, then she slaps a hand over her mouth and retches.
“What the shit, Mayet? Did you take a dump in the corner or something?”
“No.” My voice comes out nasally and weird. “Go away. This is important official business.”
She charges around my desk instead and perches her butt right next to Aubree’s, then dragging my hand down, she reveals my weird face.
“Well…” She breathes noisily through her mouth.
“This is new. What the hell are you two doing? And seriously.” She gulps.
“What stinks so bad? You got a skunk hiding in your butthole?”
“That smell is decomposition.” In my distraction, Aubree grabs the second wax stick and tears it downwards.
“Ow!” I slap her arm. Then I slap her a second and third time as fresh tears flood my eyes and my vision turns blurry. “Stop hurting me!”
“Had to do it, Chief.” She hands the hairy stick off to Soph and grabs more tissues to plug up my second hole. “If you leave it in too long, you risk it hurting even more.”
“Why are we waxing during work hours?” Soph demands. Loudly. “And why is no one confessing to the smell?”
“The smell is from a DB.” Aubs bounds up from my desk and crosses my office, swinging the door open and riffling around in her top desk drawer for just a second.
Gripping whatever she needs, she strides back in again and returns to her spot directly in front of me.
“When people die, they decompose. When they decompose in a dumpster for almost a week, baking in the summer heat, they tend to smell a little extra ripe.”
Sophia scrunches her face tight.
“When our illustrious chief M.E. decides to go dumpster diving to collect each individual, disconnected section of a man’s body, then sometimes that stink gets into our pores.”
“That smell is a dead person?” Sophia’s chest bounces with a heave that almost undoes me. “You have dead people on your skin?! Ew!”
“Seriously?” I pull my bloodied tissues away and scowl as a fresh droplet splats onto my black pants.
“Dammit.” I look up in search of more, but Aubree’s quick, shoving a whole handful against my face.
“You’re Sophia Solomon, and you’re saying ew?
” I bring watery, blurry eyes back to the ballerina. “Seriously?”
She studies her hairy wax gift and giggles. Which is better than gagging, I suppose. “I’m just a delicate woman, Doctor Mayet. I dance for a living, am mother to two equally delicate ballerina daughters, and rarely have to deal with anything smelly, since my husband does it all for me.”
“In and out of the home,” I drawl. “Evidently. Don’t you have work to do?” I pointedly look toward my glass wall and, on the other side, Doctor Kirk’s wide, staring eyes.
His breath races, his chest lifts and falls. His hands dangle listlessly by his sides, and yet, he stares. And stares. And stares.
“Go away!”
He startles back with a panicked yelp and crashes into an amused Theo Griffin. At least the second has the good manners not to stare at my bloodied face. Kirk spins and sprints away, his feet noisily slapping the tile in his haste.
“You’re a mean boss,” Soph teases. “Why are we waxing our noses, though?”
“Because I already showered a bunch of times and I still smell!”
“Here.” Aubree peels a plastic wrapper open and presents a crisp white tampon. She steals the tissues from my left hand and slaps the tampon in their place, then she guides my hand up. “Insert.”
“Are you shittin’ me?” Soph loses it, throwing her head back as the sounds of honking laughter fill my office.
“Is this real life?” And because she wants to make sure, she brings her eyes down…
and falls apart again. “It’s real life!” She tosses my wax stick into the trash and whips her hand around to her back pocket. “I gotta get a photo of thi—”
I snatch the device away and slam it onto my desk. “Photograph me, and I’ll shove that hammer straight up your nostril until the metal end scrambles your brain.”
“Here.” Aubree takes my second wad of tissues and replaces it with another tampon. She guides my hand up, plugs my leak, and bites the vicious smirk trying ridiculously hard to cross her face. “You don’t look as dumb as you think you do.”
“Yes, she does!” Sophia howls. “She looks like a fucking idiot.” She flicks the dangling strings and makes the ends tickle my chin.
But I don’t scratch.
I can’t.
I refuse.
“Oh my God. I’m actually crying.” She swipes her eyes, her shoulders and chest bouncing with laughter. “I don’t remember the last time I felt this much joy.”
“It’s infusion night, right?” Aubree asks seriously. “And the heat is making you bleed faster.”
“Yeah.” I pull the first tampon out and groan as, in the single second it’s gone, fresh blood trickles to my shirt and lands with a splash.
Unlike my pants, my ivory shirt is not black. “Shit.” I shove it back into place. “Remind me never to do this in the summer ever again.”
“Do you need me to get your Factor from home?” She whips my desk drawer open and snatches out a set of car keys, but before her feet even touch the floor, my cell trills and Archer’s name flashes on the screen.
She looks at me. Looks at my phone. Looks at the tampons literally hanging out of my face. Then back to my phone again.
I nod. “You get it.”
My voice comes out high-pitched and nasally. Ridiculous. And most importantly: noticeable.
“Yep.” She grabs the device and answers with a fast slide of her thumb, but then she saves me the effort of asking and automatically sets him on speaker. “Detective Malone, this is Aubree.”
The rush of wind and, in the distance, the honk of cars, tells us he’s on the move. “Oh, hey Aubs. Chief Mayet unavailable right now?”
“Yeah… she’s, uh…” She grits her teeth. “She’s dealing with a little personal hygiene situation. Actually, the next time you’re at the store, maybe you could buy a jumbo pack of tampons for the office.”
“Oh… Oh!” he repeats, his brain clicking over to what he thinks she means. “Cool. I can totally do that. Detective Banks and I are heading your way right now. We were hoping to catch an update on Josey’s autopsy.”
“We’ll be ready for you. How long till you think you’ll be here?”
“Ah…” I picture him pulling the phone from his ear, checking the time, then bringing it back again. “Maybe ten minutes. Does that work for you guys?”
“Uh-huh. We’ll be here.”
“Alright, I’ll—”
But I don’t know what he intends to say, because she kills our call and swings panicked eyes back to me. “He’s on his way!”
“Yeah.” I sit back with a grunt and loathe the pitch of my voice. “I know. I heard him.”
“You have blood on your shirt, and the stench of death clinging to your skin! I don’t pretend to know exactly how he’ll react to that, but I imagine life is still kinda raw since last week, and I’m not sure he’s capable of handling anything well right now.
” She sets my phone down and shows me the keys.
“I can run to the house and get your meds, but it’ll take me twenty minutes at least. Or I can sprint down to the pharmacy and get you a fresh set. It’ll be quicker, but—”
“For the low, low price of forty-five thousand friggin’ dollars,” I snarl. “No, thanks.”