Unhoppy: The Case Files of Dr. Matilda Schmidt, Paranormal Psychologist #3 Read online

  “Could you hold them for five minutes?” I interrupted, not completely successful at keeping a tremor out of my voice.

  Her wide brown eyes narrowed a fraction. “I was just going to say your next client is a no-show. Are you okay?”

  A hasty nod jerked my neck. “Yes. Fine.”

  “How was the new guy?” She folded her arms across a tight sweater in her signature hot pink—a color that, as far as I could tell, occupied every object from sticky notes to toilet seat covers in Julie’s life.

  “New guy?”

  “Bret Barrett? The new client? With the trust issues and a seriously hideous mustache?”

  Barrett the Ferret. No wonder the nickname had suggested itself. “Trust issues,” I snorted.

  “That’s what he put on the paperwork, anyway. Didn’t you read it?”

  Look at it? Yes. Read it? No. My thoughts had been otherwise occupied, mentally retracing the chiseled lines of a demigod’s body all morning.

  A body that Julie had not only seen, but felt.

  Both times, in the storage closet just a few paces from my office door.

  I brushed away the sudden stab of jealousy that pierced my chest. Who Crixus chose to screw was the least of my concerns. Or not screw, depending on who dialed the batphone before I could get my hands on his—

  “Matilda?”

  “Hmm? Oh, yes. I looked at it. But I think Mr. Barrett lacks some insight into his own issues.”

  “Well that’s a first,” Julie laughed sarcastically. “Speaking of firsts, the Women’s Rotary Club called again about a donation for their annual Women in the Workforce bake sale and fundraiser.”

  My shoulders sank as I remembered being cornered at the mailbox by my mostly well-meaning silver-coiffed neighbor, Mary Ellen Mayes. “Who would be better to donate to Women in the Workforce than a successful young woman like you?” she had asked, continuing on to add: “Why, you’re just the perfect example to show that a woman really doesn’t need a husband, or children, or even a boyfriend to be happy!”

  “Tell them I’ll get back to them about that,” I sighed.

  “Okay,” Julie said, her tone just a hair shy of good-natured scolding. “But the bake sale is tomorrow, and—”

  “Duly noted,” I interrupted. “I—”

  “Dr. Schmidt!”

  I winced, recognizing the voice by its inability to speak my name with anything other than exclamation points—Rolly Boggs, my ardent admirer and former security guard for the office building that had housed my growing practice for the last two years. The former part had been a recent development resulting from his failure to stop a certain Las Vegas hit man from abducting me at gunpoint right under his bulbous nose.

  He bounded past Julie and into my office with the overflowing energy of an espresso-fueled golden retriever. The last time he had been in this space was during a therapy session that ended with him wetting my patent leather pumps with tears while begging me to give him a chance.

  “Dr. Schmidt! You’ll never guess what!” Dishwater blond hair clung to a forehead I knew to be perpetually coated with the sheen of sweat common to large, soft men. Sweat darkened the pits of the khaki button-up shirt, the buttons of which were one cheeseburger away from becoming projectiles. A walkie-talkie chirped from the pocket of brown pants that appeared to be standard issue for security guards the world over.

  “You got your job back?” I ventured.

  “Yes! How did you—oh yeah.” His sheepish laugh coaxed a deeper shade of pink to his already rosy cheeks.

  “What happened to the other guy?” Julie asked, her voice tinged with something like regret.

  Understandable, considering the tattooed ex-Marine body builder who had been Rolly’s replacement strained the uniform in an entirely different fashion.

  “I guess Mr. Ross found out that he had been in some trouble,” Rolly said, pale blue eyes wide. “Big trouble.”

  “That I could believe,” Julie said wistfully.

  “Anyway, after interviewing a bunch of guys and not being able to find anyone, he called and said that he guessed having me was better than nothing and offered me my job back!”

  “Congratulations, Rolly.” My pleasure on his behalf was genuine. Judging from the bits of information I had both gleaned and conjectured from our interactions over the years, life hadn’t handed Rolly too many breaks.

  “I guess that means we’ll be seeing a lot more of each other now, huh?” Rolly’s fleshy cheeks squeezed his eyes into a squint when he grinned.

  “I suppose so,” I said.

  Julie shot me a quick, pitying glance.

  “Oh! I almost forgot!” He presented my mail like it was a bouquet of flowers. “I brought this all the way up for you. I can do that any time you know, I don’t mind at all. I get a lunch break.”

  “That’s very kind of you to offer, Rolly,” I said. “But I’m sure you remember that I usually pick it up on my way in every morning. I was just a little…distracted today.”

  “Oh, okay.” He was only minutely crestfallen, still buoyed by his apparent joy at regaining his job. “Well, I better get back to the desk. I’ve got your list of appointments,” he said, pulling a rumpled rectangle of paper from his shirt pocket. “No one gets up here without my say so. I promise, I’ll never let you get kidnapped again, Dr. Schmidt.”

  His words failed to provide much assurance against the sort of beings I had recently become acquainted with. Creatures like Crixus for whom walls and even locks provided no disincentive. “Thank you, Rolly. I appreciate that.”

  Julie waited until the door to my office suite was closed before erupting into a monumental groan. “Can you believe that? What the hell is Mr. Ross thinking, bringing him back on? I mean, the guy practically sat around and picked his nose while you got dragged off by some psycho with a gun!”

  Yes, I thought. And you were in the supply closet fucking a demigod at the time. “Psycho isn’t a term we use, Julie. And everyone makes mistakes,” I said. “Maybe this second chance will be good for him.”

  “I sure as hell hope so.” Silver bangles sank down her wrist as she propped a hand on her hip.

  “Who was my next appointment?” I asked. “The no show?”

  “Another newbie. He said he was a referral. Marvin Coddle—something? The spelling was weird.”

  “Just as well,” I said. “I have a call to make.”

  *****

  A film of sweat separated the phone from the palm of my hand. Dial, I ordered myself.

  He would answer.

  He always did.

  The contact name on the screen fished a tangle of feelings to the surface. Liam Whatshisface. The first name I had moaned. The last name I had snickered.

  But only before learning that it had been his chemically creative mother’s way of solving for the pesky issue of a birth certificate. I had never bothered to ask the names of his siblings. There were six children total, including him, and none of them shared a father.

  Cunning, ruthless, and protective, it had been Liam who drove halfway across the country to bring me information about the Westies. Liam who waited in my office, ready to shoot an assassin they had sent after me.

  Liam who had bent me over this very desk.

  It was the jet of heat surging through me at the memory that finally set my thumb on the dial button.

  Each ring lasted as long as a symphonic movement, the silence between stretching into an endless void. After what felt like an eternity, the system-generated message declaring the voicemail box hadn’t been set up buzzed into my ear. Not that I had expected something to the effect of “This is Liam the hit man. Leave the name and number of the person you need taken care of, and I’ll call back.”

  I was equal parts relieved and annoyed. On the one hand, I didn’t have to rattle off a moronic explanation of this latest development. On the other, my mind was left to generate the endless number of scenarios that might be occupying Liam’s attention at present. All of t
hem involved one or the other of the weapons he used best, and the worst of them included both.

  After waiting a few minutes for a return text that didn’t materialize, I indulged in a heavy sigh and sagged backward toward my leather chair.

  “Watch it!” a voice squeaked a millisecond too late.

  A sharp pain pinched my backside and sent me rocketing toward the other side of the room. Back braced against the door, heart pounding, ass smarting, I turned and confronted the room’s newest occupant—a rabbit.

  Black-eyed, pink-nosed, snowy white in his yellow paisley vest and matching bow tie, he sat in my chair like something dropped out of an Easter basket. “Sorry I’m late,” he said, whiskers twitching. His voice had the oxytocin-overload inducing pitchy quality of a baby animal cartoon character. “Marvin J. Cuddlestein.” He held out one small paw, which was warm and soft between my thumb and index finger as I shook it. The overwhelming urge to snuggle him was immediate and dire.

  “You bit me,” I said, massaging the still-sore spot on my rump.

  “I panicked,” he replied.

  “That hurts like a motherf—” I caught the word before it could escape, a verbal remnant, no doubt, from spending extended periods of time in the company of a hit man and a demigod. “That really hurts.”

  “Try getting sat on sometime.” He reached a paw up to scratch the tender pink interior of his ear. “You could have kill—” His round black eyes widened. “I’ve never tried that one! Do it again!”

  “Do what?” I asked.

  “Sit on me! Pretty please?” His hopping up and down in my chair was so damned adorable, I found myself considering his request in earnest.

  “What? No! Absolutely not!”

  “Come on,” he begged. “Just one good hard sit. Actually, could you maybe stand on the coffee table and get some height? You’d be more likely to really crush my little bones that way.”

  A suicidal rabbit? Was that a thing? “Stop talking like that. Right this instant.”

  “Eros said you’d try to talk me out of it. But you won’t succeed. No one has.”

  “So it was Cupid who referred you?” I asked, taking up a pen and spare notepad from my desk.

  “Yep,” Marvin said. “We go way back.”

  “How far back, exactly?”

  His nose twitched. “Hard to say. You humans hadn’t started recording time yet. When Cupid was a baby”—he paused—“you know, like a real baby, not just a creepy toddler-looking guy in a diaper, Aphrodite thought it would be nice for him to have a pet. One minute I was hopping through a field, banging bunnies left, right, and sideways. The next, I’m shitting jelly beans and I can talk.”

  “Aphrodite changed you? In what ways?”

  “In every way!” The paws he lifted didn’t so much emphasize his statement as fill me with the mad urge to tickle his downy belly. “Only she didn’t have Zeus’s permission to create an immortal rabbit, and he has this rule about every supernatural having a purpose in the human world, so they slap this ridiculous vest on me and tell me to go make the vernal equinox fun for people. My job’s a fucking joke.”

  “When you say your job…” I began, not quite being able to bring myself to say the words.

  He blinked at me. “You’re kidding me, right, Doc?”

  “So you are the…”

  “Easter Bunny,” he finished for me. “Yeah.”

  “Would it be fair to say that you’re burned out when it comes to your work?”

  His tiny sigh had me fighting the urge to leap across the coffee table and hug him to my neck. “Doctor, I was burned out before the Roman Empire fell. Now, all I can think about is how to die.”

  “How many times have you attempted suicide?” I asked.

  The filaments of his whiskers vibrated with thought. “About twenty.”

  “In all those years?” I asked. “That’s not such a bad average.”

  “I meant today,” he clarified. “Depends on whether or not you count the trucker. He swerved and mostly missed me. Crushed my hindquarters though. Gods damned vest. I look like a construction flagger. And yet…” Poof! He hopped for emphasis. “Everything pops right back into place.”

  My pen hovered over my pad much the same way my mouth hovered in an open “O.”

  “Why keep trying? After all this time.”

  Marvin looked thoughtful for a moment, which is, on a rabbit in a vest, roughly equated to cute enough to melt your face. “Something Zeus said once. That if I wanted Death, I’d have to find him for myself.”

  “Oh, no,” I groaned. “No. Not that.”

  “Not what?”

  “Death. Death is not an actual guy. Not an actual person. Or entity. Or whatever.”

  Marvin squinted at me. “’Course he is. I even migrated to Port Townsend one autumn, where I heard he had this gig with some witches or some shit, and it was a total bust. Last time I pull the Doomsday Grimoire off the shelf for some toilet reading. Bullshit prophesies. I don’t care if the world does end. Maybe then I can get some effing rest.”

  I put my pen down and shoved my pad into the coffee table drawer. “I’m going to pretend I didn’t hear anything you just said.”

  Marvin’s hind leg swept forward to scratch his cheek. “Would that be a charactered adult response, Doc?”

  “There’s a bow-tie wearing rabbit in my office talking about the end of the world. I’m doing pretty good to not stuff my head into the fish tank until I stop thinking.”

  Our eyes locked, and I realized my mistake. We shot off the couch at the same time, but with his powerful hind legs and supernatural constitution, Marvin was faster.

  “No!” I shouted. “Marvin! Stop! Sigmund has suffered enough!”

  I seized him by his furry feet just as his paws locked on the edge of the aquarium. “Don’t try to stop me!” he squeaked. “He might be here! I have to keep looking!”

  “Death is not in the fish tank, Marvin! Listen to me! It’s just my goldfish, Sigmund Freud! You’ll kill him!”

  Little claws scratched the glass as his grip tightened. “He should be so lucky!”

  The aquarium scraped toward the edge of the credenza, the water sloshing up against the side as Sigmund darted into his miniature castle. “Let. Go,” I insisted, giving one final tug.

  And then I was falling backward, my ass hitting the floor. I looked up just as Marvin disappeared into the tank, gasping in horror at the one furry foot still clutched in my hand.

  I fought a gag, dropping the disembodied paw, seeing the white foot bounce on the carpet and land by my shoe. “Oh, Marvin,” I cried. “Oh God. I am so sorry! I didn’t mean to—”

  The sound of splashing water brought me to my senses. Bubbles exploded from Marvin’s pink mouth from behind two prominent front teeth as he kicked his remaining foot to propel himself toward the blue gravel. I scrambled back to my feet, my hand diving into the tank to grab Marvin by the ears. He thrashed within my grasp, trying and failing to seize anything to hold onto with slippery paws.

  Droplets of water flung every which way to land on my books, my carpet, my walls. Marvin’s writhing body soaked my clothing as I hugged him tight. He kicked his good leg, catching my blouse and scattering my buttons to the floor.

  “Hold still!” I ordered. “I need to see your foot!”

  “It’s…fake!” he puffed.

  “It’s what?”

  “Fake,” he repeated.

  “What happened to it?”

  “Napoleon. Napoleon cut it off. How do you think that sniveling Corsican cocknugget came to be the emperor of the France? Sparked the whole lucky rabbit’s foot craze. He got his, though.”

  Recounting the tale seemed to draw a measure of his attention. I urged him on. “Why didn’t it grow back?”

  “Beats the hell out of me.” The breaths pressing the wet fur against my hand slowed. He had thought about this.

  “If I put you down, do you promise not to try and dive back into the aquarium?”

/>   His warm body calmed against mine. “Yes.”

  I gently set him on the couch among the decorative pillows and turned to retrieve the white foot on the carpet. Upon closer examination, I saw a ring of gold capping the stump, not unlike those covering the wildy-colored rabbit’s foot key chains in plastic eggs that gumball machines coughed out. I thought it best not to make the comparison aloud.

  “This is really amazing,” I said, turning it over in my hand. “How long have you—” The words evaporated from my mouth as I froze in place—blouse open, clothing soaked, bunny prosthesis clutched in my hand. Not because of the talking three-legged rabbit on my couch, but because of the two figures standing behind it.

  *****

  The grin smeared across Crixus’s face could have lit the deepest bowels of hell. The other man’s expression was indiscernible.

  But then, he did have a paper bag over his head.

  Crixus looked from my open blouse to the fish tank, to the coffee table, and finally finished at my hand. “Busy morning, Doctor?”

  I clasped the edges of my blouse closed with one hand and tossed the foot to Marvin with the other. “Busy night, Crixus?”

  “It was,” he informed me. “But not in the way I had intended.”

  “Crying shame, that,” I said on my way to snag a couple of the safety pins I kept squirreled away in my desk. “Conversely, my morning is exactly as busy as I intended. In fact, I’m with a new client now. So if you and your friend could kindly excuse yourselves, I need to finish this appointment and prepare for my next one.”

  “Are we early?” came the muffled question from the paper bag. Not at all the voice I would have expected from a man wearing a bag on his head. It had the lyrical quality of a cello’s darker notes, a kind of seduction in strings.

  Come to think if it, the body, at least the part visible below the brown paper, didn’t look like it belonged to a head that would require bagging for public consumption. Broad shoulders, narrow hips, long powerful legs. And stylish.

  Not that Crixus’s usual uniform of faded jeans, motorcycle boots, and a tight black T-shirt lacked for visual inspiration, but his friend was on a whole other plane of coordinated subtle color schemes, where belts matched shoes.