“How about…” He pauses. “I mean… this is wildly inappropriate, but…”
“How about what?” The eagerness in my voice almost feels like desperation. And I want to smack myself out of this stupor he’s put me in.
“Would you like to have lunch with me? After you’re all sorted and I take care of my scuffle?”
I’m nodding my head before he even stops talking. “I would love that, Russ.”
“Great. Meet me at the Honey Bean in about two hours.”
“Honey Bean?”
“It’s the only diner in town. You can’t miss it. It’s right next to the Buffalo Nickel.”
“Got it.” I smile as I open my door and get out. But then I lean back in. “One hour, Russ.”
He winks. “Don’t be late, Pie.”
I close the door grinning like a girl in love as he pulls away. But as I walk to the grungy office door of the tow yard shop, I suddenly feel like an idiot for the way I just behaved.
What the hell was I thinking?
I’m not dating the stupid sheriff of Granite Springs. I’m in the middle of a curse. A curse that involves a magic cathedral, a cemetery filled with stone monsters, and a real-life monster who expects me to wash his hooves and pleasure him daily as part of my duties.
I have more than enough going on. I do not need a love interest.
And the minute I walk through the shop door I decide I will break this date. Once I get my purse back from my car, I’ll call up the station and let Eileen know that I will not be meeting Sheriff Russ Roth for lunch and have her relay the message.
“Can I help you?” The older woman behind the glass doesn’t even look up at me as I approach. Just keeps typing on her keyboard.
“Yes. My Jeep was just towed in. I need to get it out.”
“Name?”
“Pie Vita.”
Now she does look up. She is late sixties, maybe. Pin-curled blue hair. That’s old-lady blue, not hipster blue. She’s got an elaborate pair of reading glasses perched on her nose. The frames are glittering with rhinestones and they are on an equally elaborate, sparkling silver chain. She pushes them down her nose. “I’m sorry, what language are you speaking?”
I sigh. I get this a lot. Sometimes, if people understand what the word ‘vita’ means, they even get the joke. Pie. Life. Pie is life. And I have to admit, it’s a little bit cute.
Old-Lady Blue does not find me cute. She looks at my outfit, then me. And I see it all on her face.
Trash.
“First name Pie,” I say calmly. “Last name Vita. Pie. Vita. My Jeep just came in and I want it back.”
Her long fingernails click her keyboard as she scans her computer. “License plate?”
“Seriously? I don’t have my purse. It’s in the Jeep. I don’t know the license plate. It literally just came in. It’s that one.”
She pushes her glasses down again. “Can you describe the Jeep?”
“Brown? Rusty? PA plates.”
Her fingernails click again. “That’s two hundred and twenty dollars.”
“What? That’s a joke, right?”
“Not a joke, Pie.” She smiles as she says my name. “It was picked up quite far out of town. So there’s mileage. Plus the hook-up fee, the drop-off fee, and the storage fee.”
“Storage fee? It just came in. It hasn’t been stored.”
“There’s a minimum three-day storage fee for our trouble.”
“Fucking hell—”
“Mmm-mmm-mmm.” She shakes her head at me. “Not today, Satan. We do not put up with the likes of that here at MoMack’s Towin’.”
I sigh. “I need to get my purse out of the Jeep. Can I at least do that?”
“Let me alert MoMack that you’re here and he can help you out. One moment, please.” She gets up and disappears through another grungy door.
“Two hundred and twenty dollars,” I mutter under my breath. “That’s highway robbery.”
I only have fifty bucks left in credit on my card and like thirty in my checking, but maybe they will let me write them a bad check?
Then I see the sign. No checks.
Wonderful.
Oh. Then I remember what Tomas and the beast were saying this morning about how our money works.
Did I just say ‘our money’? And did I make all that up? Or was it real?
One glance down at the silver ring on my finger clears up any lingering doubt about my new reality. And now that I’m looking at it in the light, there is no Green Man face on it. It looks like oak leaves and maybe a tiny acorn or two. I try to take it off and it doesn’t budge… so yeah. It’s all real.
I wish Russ Roth was still here. Maybe he was a little aphrodisiac-y, and that’s a red flag when you’re neck-deep in a magical curse, but I’ll take that swoony feeling over this despairing one any day.
I reach through the little opening in the glass partition and grab a pen and piece of paper, then write down the word ‘MONEY.’