Burning Heat

Penny almost didn’t answer her phone when the caller ID flashed the words Private Number at her in the dim light of her bedroom. She wasn’t waiting on a call from any particular organization, and everyone that she gave a crap about was programmed into her phone. So whoever was calling her at six in the morning on a frickin’ Saturday could go play in traffic.

But the moment the phone gave up and dropped the call, it rang anew, so Penny decided it was easier for everyone if she bit the bullet and told the caller where they could stick their phone directly.

Tangled in blankets and her own long limbs, it took several attempts to find a seated position, and she did not hurry as she flipped her hair out of her eyes and reached for the phone.

“Penny Lanoue’s undead remains. How may I direct your call?”

“Penny, thank God! I’ve been trying to get a hold of you for the last hour! I was actually starting to think something had happened to you.” The force of the exclamation pushed air down the speaker, distorting the sound, but Penny realized that she did recognize the caller’s voice.

“Rodi?” Penny blinked in hard contemplation at the Private Number ID on the phone before replacing it by her ear. “I immediately have so many questions.”

“I’m kinda hoping you have answers for some questions of my own.” Constance Rodriguez had one of those sultry, earthy voices that suggested she might have been a singer in another life. She’d worked in New Orleans for almost ten years, but she still sounded unapologetically New York. “Can we meet up? I got a really important favour to ask.”

Penny immediately regretted picking up the phone. “You always have important favours to ask.” She scrubbed at her face with her free hand as she bemoaned. “And you never want to ask them over the phone, which always makes things really complicated.”

“It’s not a personal favour. That’s why I’m calling you from the precinct’s number.”

Well, that answered one of her questions. Actually, potentially it answered several questions, but Penny had lost track of half the questions she had as half of her brain began pondering the possibility of coffee.

The ponderance was just starting to shape itself into a heady fantasy when Rodi’s voice called her back to the present.

“Come on, Penny. I’ll owe you one. Please.”

It wasn’t the prospect of a favour that made Penny take a deep breath and sigh through her nose. After all, she wasn’t a vampire, and even if she was, she definitely wouldn’t be high-ranking enough in the syndicate’s hierarchy to be excited by the possibility of collecting favours.

No, the thing that actually made Penny consider hauling herself out of bed at six on a Saturday was the ‘please.’ Rodi rarely, if ever, said please. It was why their relationship hadn’t lasted more than a few dates. That, and Rodi was always working.

Of course, so was Penny. Half of her work happened after dark, and half of it happened at weirdly precise astrological times. So her schedule barely ever aligned with Rodi’s schedule, and when it did, Rodi almost always forgot her manners. So she was a great friend, and a fantastic pastime, but she was a really shitty partner.

‘Please,’ was enough to get Penny to swing her legs out of the bed and to seriously consider putting her coffee plans on hold. “Do you want to at least tell me what this favour is?”

“I just had a new case roll across my desk. A big one. And I need a set of eyes that can see way more than mine to look at it.”

What she meant, which she could not say in a room full of human police officers, was that she needed a witch. And like it or not, Penny was one of the most witchy women around. In fact, the only people who might be more witchy were Penny’s two younger sisters. But neither of them had ever done any unofficial consulting for the police before, and Penny had.

And that was why she was standing, even though it was barely five past six. “I’m going to do this for you, but you really do owe me, okay? And I’m talking like a get-out-of-jail-free card or something, because last time I helped you, I had to talk to my brother-in-law about vampire politics spilling into the NOLA fraud unit, and it was a whole thing—”

“Penny,” Rodi’s voice took on a sharp edge that did a good job of cutting through the grumbling haze of complaints spilling through Penny’s brain-to-mouth filter. “I don’t work for Specialist Investigations anymore. I work in Major Investigations.”

Blinking rapidly, Penny flipped through her Rolodex of procedural dramas looking for the unfamiliar department. For as much as she thought she’d heard the phrase, she was pretty sure she’d only really heard it from Rodi in passing.

“What’s that mean?”

“It means homicide, Penny. I’m asking you to help me solve a murder.”