I caught Myra’s eye over the top of the car. She nodded and we both tried the handles. The doors opened smoothly without even a squeak.
“Boss?” Jean asked.
“Yep.” I popped the trunk release under the dash to unlock the trunk for her, then leaned into the space, checking for signs of…well,anything.
“Myra?”
“Nothing. It’s clean.”
“Very clean,” I agreed. “So someone just dropped an empty car out of the sky?”
It wasn’t the strangest thing—by far—that had happened in Ordinary.
Maybe a spell had gone wrong. Kids messing with magic they didn’t understand and couldn’t control. Somehow poked a hole in the sky. Somehow stopped time. Then pushed a car out of the heavens.
Wielding that kind of magic would take some real supernatural muscle. It would set off all sorts of warnings with all sorts of people in town. Someone would have caught that spell before the lastabrawascadabraed. It would have been smothered.
I glanced at the odometer. The mileage was one. Just one mile.
I had no idea what that meant.
“Okay, so we’ve got—” A scrabbling scratch from inside the car shut me up quick.
There was something in there. Something under the front passenger seat.
“Come on out,” I said. “We’re here to help.” I shifted my weight so I could keep a hand on the door, glancing quickly at Myra to make sure she was getting into position on the other side of the front seat.
A flicker of movement drew my attention to the space under the seat. Whatever was under there wasn’t human—there was no space for a body under the seat. But there were a lot of tiny supernatural beings.
“It really is okay,” I said more gently. “Come on out. You’re safe here.”
Whatever it was moved out from beneath the seatfast. I jerked back and sucked in a breath.
“Crab!” I yelled.
The little Dungeness crab was about the size of a glazed donut. It scuttled in a circle on the floor like it didn’t know how to work all its legs yet. Something fell out of its mouth, then it rounded on me, waving both claws threateningly.
“Hey,” I breathed. “Hey, there little guy. How’d you get in here?”
It jerked right, left, right. Then made a run for it.
Right at me.
It shot out the door, dropped like a rock, and quickly scuttled under the car.
“Incoming,” I shouted to Myra. “Tiny crab.”
Myra stared at the sand. “This our perp?”
“It’s a crab,” I said.
“I see that. Did you want me to cuff it, Danno?”
“Shut up.”
She grinned. “Too small to eat,” she noted. “Probably just crawled in there for a nice nap and then you scared the shell out of it.”
“Ha. Ha.” I joined her near the front fender. The little crab was running as quickly as it could toward the water.
