Read Lost Dog (A Gideon and Sirius Novel Book 3) for Free Online Page B

things he does professionally.”
    “And he’s really an honest-to-goodness shaman?”
    “I don’t know if you need a license to practice being a shaman in California, but that’s his job.”
    “So he’s like a medicine man?”
    “I’ve heard him describe his work as ‘spirit healing.’”
    “What the hell does that mean?”
    “He offers healing tools to those who are sick in spirit. Seth is often a featured speaker in grief workshops.”
    “If that’s the case, why don’t you ask him if he’d like to be next month’s speaker?”
    “I’ll do that,” I promised.
    “I like to get a mix of speakers. Most of the club members are still actively grieving, and they need to hear from someone other than a detective from Robbery-Homicide.”
    I nodded. “There was a time when I wanted nothing more than working RHD, but working Special Cases meant I could keep Sirius as my partner.”
    “It took me a lot of years in the field before I finally got to Robbery-Homicide,” said Walker. “I’m not sure it was the best match for me. You know that Peter Principle thing about rising to the level of your incompetence? Now I’m not saying I was a bad detective. And I know no one outworked me. But some detectives seem to have this sixth sense. They intuit what’s happened. I was always more plodding. I would work the evidence like a dog chewing his bone. I’d work it every which way, but the problem is sometimes you don’t have the luxury of time to do that. You get assigned another case, and then another. When I look back at my years in Robbery-Homicide, it’s the unsolved cases that gnaw at me.”
    “All of us have cases we haven’t made.”
    “There’s a difference between haven’t made and should have made.”
    “You don’t sound very retired to me.”
    “There’s a ghost that’s been haunting me,” he said. “I’m working to put it to bed.”
    His affable expression hardened, as did his tone. The cold case was clearly important to him. Before I had a chance to ask him about it, Leticia approached our table, and his scowl turned to a smile.
    “I heard your sweet tooth calling,” she said, and we never did get back around to the ghost.

CHAPTER 3
    A LONG WAY FROM HOME
    Despite Walker’s threat about splitting the check, he must have slipped Leticia his credit card when I wasn’t looking, thwarting any chance for me to pay.
    “Let’s not be strangers,” he said, and then he bent down and scratched Sirius’s ear and told him, “Give my best to Little Red Riding Hood.”
    Walker stayed behind to give his regards to several of the staff while Sirius and I made our way out to the car. Because Sirius hadn’t gotten enough in the way of handouts, I pulled out a dog protein bar from the food stock I keep for him. According to the ingredients on the label, his protein bar contained beef, bison, peas, flaxseed, carrots, broccoli, and blueberries.
    “Good, huh?” I asked.
    Sirius gave a few weak wags of his tail and began eating his bar, although it was clear he was a lot less interested in it than he had been in the pecan praline sweet potato pie Leticia had dropped off for dessert. I really couldn’t blame him.

    Our Sherman Oaks home is about a twenty-mile drive from the restaurant, but in its own way it could have been another world. I was going from a black and urban neighborhood to one that was white and suburban. As ethnically diverse as L.A. is by the numbers, neighborhoods still tend to divide along racial and ethnic lines. Within L.A.’s borders are Koreatown, Chinatown, Little Tokyo, Little Salvador, Little Osaka, and Little Armenia. The Fairfax District is sometimes called Little Israel. Much of Westwood has a large Persian population and is referred to as Tehrangeles.
    Before we began our drive home, I lined up the musical selections. Peter Gabriel and Biko would lead off, followed by Joan Baez’s dulcet tones singing about a terrible bombing in “Birmingham Sunday.” Bob Marley’s