At first I just kind of stared at Uncle Bob, not sure what he was doing. Then I realized he was using a kitchen table for its intended purpose. Weird. “Well, duh. I could have told you that. His bout with cancer and his sudden remission made his telling me he was going on a trip plausible. He said he was going to learn to sail. But Denise seems to think otherwise. What could he possibly be up to?”

I sat beside Ubie at the table. It felt strange. I’d never eaten at my kitchen table. This was an experience for me.

“I hate to make assumptions,” Uncle Bob said as he stabbed at his lasagna. “But if I were to guess, I’d say it had something to do with you.”

“Me? Why me?” I twirled spaghetti around my fork.

“Didn’t you notice how, after going to all the trouble of having you arrested just to try to get you out of the PI business, he seemed to give up pretty easily?”

“I noticed him trying to shoot me. The rest is kind of a blur.”

“I’m just finding everything he’s done lately pretty suspicious. If I didn’t know better, I’d say he was investigating something. He’d get like that in the old days. When he was on the scent of something big, he’d get secretive. Defensive. I haven’t seen him like that in a long time.”

“But what kind of case can he be working? What can he possibly investigate? He’s not even a detective anymore.”

He put down his fork and extended me his full attention. That meant he was about to tell me something I probably didn’t want to know. “Let’s just say he’s been asking a lot of questions about your boyfriend.”

I put down my fork, too. “Reyes? Why would he be investigating Reyes?”

“I don’t know, pumpkin. I’m probably wrong. So, Cookie has a date?”

At last. I was wondering when he would bring her up. “Yeah. I think she joined some kind of online dating service. From what I understand, she’s very popular. She has a date every day this week.”

“With a different guy?” he asked, appalled.

“With a different guy.”

After that, Uncle Bob seemed to lose his appetite. He barely touched his lasagna and left with a grim expression on his face. We definitely got him thinking, contemplating what his lax attitude toward a delicious creature like Cookie was costing him. Now I just had to worry about one thing: Uncle Bob’s penchant for investigating. If he figured out what we were doing, he’d disown me. And possibly sell me to a Romanian count.

6

Sometimes I wrestle my demons.

Sometimes we just snuggle.

—BUMPER STICKER

Duff finally showed after Uncle Bob left. He seemed embarrassed, and I wondered if he’d heard what Reyes said about him. That he was bad. But how bad could he possibly be? The way I understood it, if someone was very bad, they went straight to hell when they died. So, no matter what Reyes said, Duff couldn’t have been that bad of a person.

“S-sorry about that,” he said, hanging his head in shame. “I didn’t m-mean to r-run out on you. Reyes and I don’t r-really get along.”

“Reyes and a lot of people don’t really get along,” I said.

I’d made another pot of coffee and was in the middle of pouring when he popped in. I’d need all the energy I could muster to face this Dealer guy. Which was a cool name. Any demon living off the hard-earned souls of humans didn’t deserve a cool name. It was like when the media gave cool names to serial killers and terrorists. They didn’t have the right to anything cool, in my opinion. Of which I had many.

“Reyes told me you used to visit him in prison.”

If I didn’t know that Duff had exactly zero blood pumping through his body, I would’ve sworn he’d blushed. “Oh, th-that. I was just k-keeping an eye on him.”

“Why?” I asked, sitting back at my kitchen table. It was nice there. Homey.

He drew his shoulders in, unable to look at me. “B-because. H-he kept going to s-see you.”

That baffled me more than a little. Flummoxed, I asked, “You mean, incorporeally?”

“Y-yes. He shouldn’t have.”

“Why’s that?”

“B-because he’s n-not a nice person.”

Interesting. “That’s funny. He said the same thing about you.”

His gaze shot up in surprise. “He d-doesn’t know me. He w-wasn’t there.”

This was getting more intriguing by the moment. “He wasn’t where?”

“At my h-house. Where it h-happened. But because of it, they took me away and th-that’s how I m-met Rey’aziel. I didn’t know he was the d-devil’s son when I m-met him, though. He was j-just an inmate. Like me.”

“You were in prison?” I asked, more than a little taken aback.

I could tell by his expression he was waiting, no hoping, that the world would swallow him. His shoulders concaved even more. His chin tucked in shame. “Y-yes, Charley, I was in p-prison. I knew Rey’aziel w-wasn’t like the rest of us, but I d-didn’t know how different until I died.”

I wanted to ask him why he’d gone to prison, exactly what happened, but if Duff had wanted me to know, he would have told me. I didn’t want to push him, but I did want one thing. “Did you die in prison, Duff?”

“Y-yes. Kind of. I had b-been paroled and was j-just about to leave when it happened.”

That explained why he was in civilian clothes when he passed. “Do you want to talk about it?”