Oedipus.
Eddie. Puss.
He started cackling to himself. Finally, after a month of cohabitation, he’d found the name for his stompy, loud little friend.
“Mew.” This next push against his back was a little harder. Not because the little tiger stripe was more agile, but because the tiny cart that carried her back end was so well-balanced, the kitten couldbreatheagainst the ground and push it half a mile.
“Katie,” he said to the kitten. “Katie, my darling little girl, no, my little one. Simply no.”
“Mew.”
He reached behind him and smoothed her crinkled whiskers back against her crimped, tiger-striped fur. Both kittens forgot immediately about escape, and she folded her paws in front of her and leaned against his backside, while Eddie gamboled to his sister to clean her ears.
He didn’t even have to look at them—he’d seen this dance before—and while his eyes had never left his new neighborhood,he sharpened his concentration on it again and tried to make his decision.
If this cul-de-sac—hell, if this block—had been placed anywhere else in the country, it would have been seen as a prime piece of real estate.
The houses were well-crafted, individual, and spacious, and their landscaping was drought friendly, which was great since they were practicallyin the middle ofa place called Death Valley.
Death Valley tried to kill life forms dead—who wanted to live there?
He was lucky, he figured. He’d landed here in late February, about a month after an historic inland flood—a western hurricane, which was a once-in-a-hundred-year event—and he’d had a couple of days to figure that the high sixties was what passed as winter in a place that got to 120 regularly in the summer.
He needed to have his shit together by then, he thought, sipping his coffee appreciatively. If he was going to keep Katie andEddie—most definitely Eddie—then he had to have a place that he could keep cool when he was not in it.
The RV he’d been living in for the last two months didn’t qualify—although hehadseen some beautiful scenery traveling from Northern to Southern California between December and January.
But if he wanted to stayhere, he had to… what?
He glanced around the cul-de-sac again, remembering that one of the residents had told him that while only one person on the block kept his pool filled, they all knew each other, and were welcome to use it.
On the one hand, it sounded unbearably ’70s and “let’s all get naked in the disco pool,” but having met all the residents, Eric had realized that while some of those men were criminals,noneof them were “let’s get naked in the disco pool” types. This was both disappointing and reassuring, really.
Reassuring because Eric had realized that his “fucking everything that moved” days needed to be left in his rearview—that sort of thing could be fun, but it wasn’t good forhim, not when he’d been craving a place to be accepted—and maybe redeemed—for the last nearly two decades of his life.
Disappointing because, well, damn. He was surrounded bytakengay men, not one of whom he’d kick out of bed for eating crackers.
Oh, and speaking of whom… here came one now.
Ernie—it was the only name he’d been given, and Eric knew better than to dig—was in his early to mid-twenties, willow slender, with dark curly hair and eyes so brown they were almost black. He had a narrow, almost vulpine face and an appealing, dreamy-eyed smile.
And his boyfriend was possibly one of the scariest motherfuckers Eric had ever met, in a long line of scary motherfuckers that Eric had either worked for or killed.
No, Eric would not be jumping into the disco pool with Lee Burton’s boyfriend, thank you very much.
But he would accept a pastry from the plate Ernie carried, because he understood Ernie’s donuts were a rite of passage and a blessing in the little community he’d found himself in.
“Oh my God,” he muttered as Ernie got near and the scent wafted toward him. “Cinnamon rolls?”
Ernie gave a winsome smile. “Yes, I know,” he said smugly. “Your favorite.”
Eric stared at him helplessly. “I, uhm, have some milk if you’d like to sit down with me?” He’d worked with psychics before—or people who had little tiny bits of the gift strewn in with their psyches here and there.
He’d never worked or met with an Ernie before. Ernie had taken one look at him, shaken his hand, andknownhim. The good and the bad. And oh boy, did Eric Christiansen have an awful lot of bad in his soul.
But Ernie had given him a chance—given him avetting—into the exclusive little club that centered on this cul-de-sac, and he could only be grateful. He seemed to recall that gratitude involved social niceties. He’d have to brush up on his etiquette.
“I’d like that,” Ernie said. “Here, give me the coffee, and you can pick up the babies.”
