We head out after a change of clothes and three extra-strength ibuprofen. The sun is still far too pale for my tastes, and the air's cold with people struggling out of bed. I wish I could say I didn't sign on for this.

Paul spends the ride from downtown to 101 contemplating the ins and outs of suicide. He's got some choice questions for me that I'm not sure I want to answer, mostly centered around Christmas. Knowing Paul ruined any fun I might have once gotten from Star Trek: the Next Generation.¹ I give the lion's share of the attention to the other cars and the steering wheel, and wait for Paul to wind down of his own accord. The pause comes about five minutes later than I'd like.

"Find anything interesting in your navel?" he asks.

"Lint rates above your views on mortality."

Paul snorts at that one, a horrible wet thing like car without a muffler. Ten years and he still hasn't figured out those muscles. "So what would you rather talk about?"

All I'm thinking about is the way Caring Tommy smiles. "I'd rather not talk about anything."

I feel a finger prod my thoughts, and Paul lights up in outrage. "Oh, come on," he sneers. "What, you're gonna suggest we go somewhere and then bitch about it? Randy, man, there's such a thing as buying into a stereotype."

"Thanks, Ringo." I settle back in my seat, take a subtle glance at the surfer girls cruising past us on the left. "Tommy just bugs me, is all. He'd bug you too, if you had a working conscience."

"Not my fault demons don't come with a superego."

"And it's not my fault that Tommy's a pedophile." I all but spit. "So yeah. He bugs me."

"What, too much like looking in a mirror?"

"Fuck you." My mind goes white; the road's just a line studded with big bright pucks. My breath comes out like I'm in a slasher flick, all heaving and raspy.

Paul's aura tamps back down, and I get something like reticence flowing off him. "Sorry." It sounds as natural from him as Portuguese.

I take a tighter grip on the steering wheel, and ride the worst of the tantrum out. "S'alright."

Paul takes his time lighting a cigarette, pours a lungful out the window before he makes another attempt at a talk. "So what's your take on all this?"

The gates of my mind slam shut. Little panicked villagers run through my skull, and I flash back to Dr. Barg, and his image of Paul lit up by a pile of burning evidence.

"What," I rush to say, "the murder? Murders." I flinch as I correct myself. "I don't really have one yet."

"Oh, bullshit. Demons come talk to you on the bus, same night the cops get an anonymous tip about a double murder? That spells conspiracy."

My brain starts shuffling through subtexts, trying them on for size. Fleming never mentioned Bond getting nauseous. "It spells conspiracy because there is one, Paul. Or did I dream the part where we tried to cover up a murder?"

"I don’t mean that, I mean like—I don't know what I mean." He shakes his head. "Doesn't make sense. Long way to go for the demons to get a favor out of you."

"Depends on who they think you are," I say. I'm already getting sick of double meanings.

Paul shrugs, rolls that around his brain. I take the Fair Oaks exit just to be near more concentrated thoughts, even if it does mean getting tangled up in suburbia. Flat grey highway becomes flat grey buildings, Crayola-brown houses and Norman Rockwell gas stations. My brain comes up with a kewpie doll as we drive past the park.

"Maybe there's an angle man who doesn't want to come forward?" I suggest. "Afraid of what we might dig up if he was a suspect?"

"Come forward to us?" Paul's too fast on the draw for guilt, too deeply doubtful; this soon after the link-up surprise would've been a fireworks display. "It's our job to keep them under wraps, what the hell does he have to fear from us?"

My thoughts get wrinkled. "Not enough."

"I'm wounded," Paul drawls, complete with fake pout.

I turn and look him in the eye. "Paul, your entire pleasure principle is based in pissing people off. As much of a bitch as you can be, you're a fucking pussycat."

And as the words tumble out, I determine that I can in no way be convinced that Paul is caught up in these murders. My mind soars, my heart relaxes, and I glide us onto El Camino Real, wrapped up in a blanket of warm silence. Paul's just thinking I'm weird.

Caring Tommy lives in a motel turned apartment complex on the Santa Clara border: open parking lot with an embarrassment of a front lawn, a Bauhaus balcony bolted onto an L of tempura blue and spackle. Lingering emotions include drunken sobbing and a waft of manipulative sex I could've done without. Paul sucks down half a pack of cigarettes while I look the place over; we settle on a room next to a staircase, after careful elimination via watching the Google and Cisco kids leave for work.

"Something's not right," I say.

Paul looks at his cigarette butt, stubs it out in a taco wrapper. "Define that, please."

I screw my eyes shut, try to concentrate. "Sadness. Like, I mean, fresh sadness." My nerves are directly proportional to my use of commas.

"Yeah..." he says, cool sixteen to my frenetic pubescence. "Maybe we have our culprit?"

"Why do you think I brought you along?"

I don't bother looking at him; I know I can't manage the smirk.

We head up the stairs to the second story, give a knock at the first door we come to. Tommy answers the door himself. He looks like a frog, in the most sincere way I can give that description: soft-bellied, pop eyes, lips that could double as an inner tube. It'd be comical if I'd never read his thoughts.

"Morning," I say, right as he slams the door.

I stare at the door for a minute, feel the knives of panic soaking through from behind it. My stomach's full of maggots. "Culprit?"

Paul frowns at the door. "No. Just fear, no guilt. No more than he usually has anyway..."

"You want good cop?"

"You're the one who's human."

"And that matters here how, exactly?"

Paul rolls his eyes inexpertly.

"Oh. Right." There goes my self-esteem. "Don't get him too angry, yeah?"

"Yeah.", he drawls. Instead, he'll just try to rile me.

I sigh, straighten my shirt hem, and knock on the door. I hear someone shifting around, a door or two closing.

"Tommy," I call through the wood.

"I didn't do anything!"

Paul and I trade a look.

"That's not very convincing," Paul shouts.

"I didn't do anything," he calls again, "I didn't do anything and you're bugging me, go away."

"People are going to start staring," I mutter. I sigh, close my eyes, and do my best to feel nothing more than curious.

Only in my world does standing there and feeling really hard get you results. There's another burst of shuffling, and the door comes open. Tommy has put on a pair of bifocals, and it's only the memory of the dead body that's keeping me from laughing.

"Birthday girls," Paul says, by way of prompting. Ants crawl down the base of my spine. "Seen any lately?"

I just keep on feeling. Tommy looks at me, and slumps against the doorjamb. I feel a bolt of relief pour through him. I'm immediately on my guard, which proves my emotions are well-adjusted.

"You're here about that," he says, and his tone reminds me of the real definition of "ecstatic".

"Yeah, we are," I say; my Marlowe act is starting to wonder if it's in the right classroom.

Tommy's head sways to and fro. "I told Boys, I told her—"

My pulse goes out for a jog. "Told Boys what?"

"I didn't—I told her that's not what I do, it's not how I treat—" He scrunches up his face, and ten tons of sorrow crash down on my head. "I didn't do it."

I freeze. I look Tommy in the eyes. They're begging me, pleading for some understanding; there's not a single thing between me and the blunt force trauma of his emotions. Tommy's a wreck, beyond words and somewhere just past gestures. With a quick glance at Paul, I grab Tommy by the shoulders, and guarantee I won't sleep right for a week.

My mind tears around Tommy's memories, verbs and colors all mixed together. I feel myself bash into the railing, the cement rasping my palms; I catch Paul and Tommy's voices and the sound of a closing door. But the memories are too loud for that, too recent and too raw. There's panic, and an emergency room, the smell of bacon and gas; there's a fully-lit bathroom the size of a phone booth, and there's Tommy's feeble heartbeat as he looks down at the floor.

I somehow hand Paul the car keys, stagger downstairs and roll into the passenger seat. I'm aware we're moving, aware the houses are shrinking into highway-side shrubs. I hear Paul trying to talk to me, offering Taco Bell, smokes, vodka; I hear the warmth in his words, the little barbs meant to stir me back to action. But all I can see is the girl, framed in three different kinds of white; always bloody, always staring, and always shivering despite the third-degree burns. And I can feel through Tommy's hands, through his memories, that it wasn't an accident.

About halfway back to the house, I pass out; and I hear that sickly-sweet voice, somewhere just behind my head, telling me they know exactly where he is.