Disclaimer: Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Life, and Veronica Mars are owned by their respective creators, production companies, and distributors. This is a wholly amateur work and no copyright infringement is intended.

Neptune, CA

Let's get some things straight: in Neptune, California, there are the haves and have-nots, and while most people see the divide between those-who-have-money-and-lots-of-it and those-who-don't, when you work as freelance high school detective, you find out pretty quickly that there are a lot of different kinds of have-nots, and some of them are a lot worse than not having money.

Little Lucy Sinclair stood in front of me waiting for my verdict. She lived with her mom in one of the nicer condo developments in town, the kind very rich people use as a vacation home for attending golf tournaments or just to get away from LA, but not away-away. Her mom, screen name Tiffany St. Claire, was a third-run D-list actress who'd faded into obscurity and barely rated a mention on Remember the 90s for her string of parts in the original Slasher trilogy. Lucy had a lot of things - money, intelligence, good grades, and the favor of all the AP teachers - but she was definitely a have-not, and she'd come to me to find at least one of the things on her Not list.

"Will you take my case?" she asked.

I looked over the slender contents of the file she gave me. A copy of her birth certificate, father's name entered as "unknown". A copy of a picture of what might have been her mom's wedding, though it was hard to tell, what with the picture torn in half and missing whoever might have been the groom. A xerox of a xerox of a newspaper picture published well before Lucy was born, showing her mom in the clutch of a muscular, smiling man with a well trimmed beard. Someone had taken a marker to the photo's tagline, so no help there.

"It's kind of thin," I said, giving her a look.

"It's all I can find," she apologized.

Lucy did that a lot. Apologized. Other kids took advantage of it, which bugged me, but, hey, you can't take on the whole world. I, for one, don't have the closet space.

I sighed.

"Okay, I'll do a preliminary search," I told her. "Look up what I can in the Bureau of Vital Statistics and see if there are any leads from there."

"He set up his trust for me in LA county, too," she said. "There has to be something in the official record."

"I'll check on that as well," I said, "but no promises. Okay? You know my rates?"

"Oh, sure." And she broke into a dazzling, happy smile. She took out an envelope and handed it to me without checking the contents. "That should be enough for a week."

I almost choked on my gum. A full week's worth of work, paid upfront? Looked like me and Dad would be splitting some bonafide delivery pizza. None of that frozen stuff.

I made the envelope disappear and took a look around. This early in the second semester, there wasn't a lot going on after classes let out. Most of the seniors disappeared as fast as they could. Little Lucy, being a freshman, had classes scheduled to the end of the day, and here we were, an hour after the last bell. Only the janitors were still on campus in voluntarily.

"How do you get home?" I asked.

"Oh, I walk," she answered, hugging her binder. "I like walking, especially when the weather's nice."

It's not like Neptune is that big of a town, but Lucy's walk would take her through a fairly questionable part, and it was already dark. And Little Lucy was actually on the small side - no taller or more muscular than I was. She also had that air of not being exactly on this planet. It's more like she's taking a stroll on the planet Disney, and while little tweety birds that light on your finger and chirp in harmony with you are pretty awesome, it does not do much to scare off the local gangbanger population.

"Come on," I said. "I'll give you a ride."

Fatal mistake, Mars. Fatal. Mistake.

Los Angeles, CA

It was pink.

She refused to stare, because she knew that's exactly what her partner hoped she would do. He was dying for her to ask, so therefore, she wouldn't ask. He'd have to pull his gun on her before she would ask.

He held it up as if contemplating the ethereal beauty of it. Then he flipped open his knife, drove it into the fruit, and began cutting it.

"You're not going to ask?" he asked.

"I am not going to ask," she answered.

"That's fine."

She ground her teeth.

"What do you think of Cooper?" he asked, cutting out a chunk of crispy white flesh dotted with tiny black seeds.

"I think Tidwell is right," she answered. "Which I will kill you if you repeat in his hearing. But clearly, Cooper is hiding something, and it's probably got nothing to do with the case. He just has a bad case of messed up priorities and thinks it's more important that his wife not find out he's banging her cousin than we have an actual alibi for him."

"Which do you think is worse," Crews started, gazing at the piece of fruit, "I mean, if it were you. Is it worse that he's cheating on you, or worse that he's cheating on you with your own cousin, or is it worse that he's cheating on you with your own cousin, and it's your own male cousin?"

"I'd like to think I'm not a bigot," Reese answered. "Besides, I'm know that if he were cheating on me with my own cousin, male or female, my aunts and uncles would kill him and then ask me how I'd like his body disposed of. My cousin, male or female, would be lucky to get out of it with a beating."

"Ah, you see? Family. You can't beat family." He munched on his bite of strange fruit, happily considering the joys of family. "Well, unless it's the cousin. Then I guess you can beat him."

"Exactly," she agreed, then she dusted her hands off and got to her feet. "Look, long day. Tons of stuff to do in the morning. I'll see you then."

He grinned at her and waved another piece of white fruit flesh on the tip of his knife at her. She gathered her stuff up and headed off to her car.

"Oh, hey, Reese?" he called.

"Yeah?" she turned back.

"It's a dragonfruit," he told her. "Also called a pitaya."

"I did not ask," she said, grimly pointing a finger at him. "I. Did. NOT. Ask."

"Of course not," he agreed, "but sometimes truth finds us even when we don't want it to."

She turned and kept walking, refusing to answer.

Neptune, CA

Because I'd already been home, Backup was waiting for me in the car. Instead of getting nervous like a lot of people do around a pit bull, Lucy only blinked a couple of times and then squeed with delight. Backup lunged to get at her, panting and straining at his collar. I let Lucy give him some hugs. Props to the kid. Thinking about it, I couldn't remember ever seeing her scared. Sad, lonely, and discouraged as a little wallflower who never got asked to dance at the Wallflower Cotillion, but not scared. Huh.

"All right, all right," I said, shoving Backup back into the backseat of my fragrant car. "You're riding shotgun. You'll have to give me directions."

"Okay," she said, grinning. "Hey, would you like to stop at one of the Starbucks on the way? My treat."

"Uh," I managed.

Geez Lou-eeze, this kid had a serious case of the lonelies, and I had to discourage her. She might have been on the bottom rung of the social ladder, but to reach the nadir of my pariah status, you had to climb off the ladder and start digging a hole. Should I recap? Best friend murdered, ex-boyfriend convinced he might be my half-brother, father fired from his job of sheriff over investigating the wrong person, crashed a party and was drugged and raped, ID'd the killer, dated the killer's occasionally psycho son, and was now dealing with a busload of classmates gone off a cliff. If I worked hard, I might just parlay it into a back-to-back championship of the persona non grata competition. Being seen with me was not going to do her any favors.

"You know, I've got another case I have to work tonight," I lied. "So it's best if I just drop you off."

"Oh," Lucy said.

She looked about three inches tall.

And because I am a gutless, spineless wimp whose heart is just a big sopping sponge of guilt, I ground my teeth and relented.

"Of course, there's always enough time for the drivethru," I announced.

I let her pay.

While we were paused at a light, enjoying our careful hot beverages, my client turned contemplative.

"Veronica, do you ever have weird dreams?" she asked, studying her whipped cream with itty bitty chocolate chips.

"Weird like Gilligan keeps stealing my shoes because he wants to start an all-sailor crossdressing revue?" I asked back. "Because that one comes up surprisingly often."

"No, more like really, really real dreams, like you know you're dreaming, and everything's really vivid, and people tell you things you want to remember when you wake up, but you can't," she answered.

"Can't say that I have," I said, keeping an eye on the traffic. Like I said, not a good neighborhood, even if it did have the only Starbucks with a drivethru in Neptune. "What do you think you're supposed to remember?"

Backup woofed softly and sat up, looking around. That got my attention. He was watching a spot across the street, between the autoparts store and the discount dentist, where the shadows were too thick to see into. You could have hidden a KPop boy band in there and had room leftover for a plastic surgeon convention.

"Like, I'm supposed to go someplace," Lucy said, frowning in thought. "And meet someone? And that . . . maybe there's something bad looking for me."

Now, see, that deserved my full attention. Dad once said something about clients who brought you a small to medium sized problem because they couldn't figure out how to tell you about the extra-large problem scaring them silly. I'm pretty sure he also said something about 'run away very fast' when dealing with those clients, but Backup started whining, high pitched and curious. He shifted his weight, licked his chops, and then checked to make sure I had seen whatever he'd seen. Except I hadn't, and I was starting to worry.

"It's stupid," Lucy said, shrugging, when I didn't answer.

"It's not stupid," I told her, taking the green arrow to pull out onto the main drag. Then I started channeling my dad. "Whatever that voice is, you listen to it. Trust your instinct. Trust your gut. It'll keep you alive."

Lucy's home was several blocks off the thoroughfare, and as we left the scarier part of town behind, the manicured streets seemed awfully dark. My eyes kept getting dragged off the road by what could have been harmless shadows, but my scalp started to tighten and tingle. The complex Lucy lived in was behind some seriously well guarded walls. She handed me the access card, and as I swiped us in, something moved through the yard opposite, fast. Backup woofed, and it wasn't his 'hey, what's up' woof either.

"What was that?" Lucy asked.

"I don't know," I said, grabbing my Taser, "but hang tight."

The gate clanged shut behind us, and that's when they hit. One of them dropped onto the hood, denting it. Two more - one on each side - tried to come through the doors.

"WHAT THE FR-"

The one on the hood punched through the windshield.

Punched.

Through the windshield.

It's days like these, my dad would say, that I shoulda stood in bed.

Los Angeles, CA

It had been a long day, and there was still stuff to do. Unfortunately, much of the stuff meant stopping by her parents' house before she could go home. As far as she knew, her father still wasn't speaking to her, but since he'd disappeared a few weeks back, her mother was happy to let her step foot inside her childhood home.

Sometimes, she wondered if even the angry, vindictive shadow she'd grown up with was anything more than a projected fake. Sometimes, she wondered if even her mother had any idea what kind of man her father was.

She stopped at the corner bodega and picked up a large horchata, easy on the ice, just like her mama liked it. The beer cooler tugged at her senses, but she deliberately turned her back on it. After all, if you couldn't stay sober when things were actually mostly good (never mind the insane partner, the insanity of screwing her boss and actually starting to like him as a person, and the missing father), then how were you going to stay sober on a bad day?

Once she pulled onto the street she'd grown up on, two blocks away from the Los Angeles river, five blocks away from Compton, she kept her speed below ten miles per hour. It was self-preservation really, and she was rewarded when two boys dashed directly in front of her, chasing a soccer ball. She managed to pile on the brakes hard enough to keep from hitting them. A teenage girl came out directly after them and started berating them.

"Hey, estupido! You want your brains all over the ground?" she yelled at the boys and grabbed an arm apiece. "Your mamas will make me clean them up and dump them back inside your no good heads, and I don't care if I get them in the right ones!"

"Euw," the younger boy cried, "I don't want none of Eduardo's brains! He picks his nose!"

Reese rested her forehead on the steering wheel for a moment. She really, really could have used a quiet evening, but the thought of the universe giving her what she needed was fairly laughable. Finally, over an escalating shouting match of who had the more disgusting brain, Reese put the car in park, applied the brake, opened the door, and stepped out.

"Hey, Arizay," she called.

The girl, fifteen years old, looked up and grinned at her. She was what Reese's father liked to call an exercise in general principle. He never said it in a friendly way, either.

"Hey, it's the Po-Po!" Arizay declared. "Look at me, officer," and here she lifted both boys up by their arms, "I'm performin' a community service."

"Yeah, that's great, Arizay," Reese agreed. "Look, could you move the performance out of the public street and onto, say, some grass?"

Arizay gave her a dose of fake outrage.

"You think me and my neighbors are growing pot, Officer? That's racist!"

Reese groaned. Arizay was not a bad kid. Not exactly. She could, in fact, be a real sweetheart. Reese's mom adored her. What she was, though, was a complete time sink. Any interaction with her could be counted on taking five times longer than it would with a normal human being.

"You know, you're probably right," Reese conceded. "But it's been a long day of unjustified shootings of unarmed civilians, and I'm afraid my public relations skills are in the toilet right now. So, if it's not too much trouble for you, Ms. Unarmed Totally Not A Chola Civilian, please remove yourself and your cousins from the vicinity of my front bumper so that I do not have to fill in the paperwork for an unjustified running over of a bunch of unarmed civilians. I would really appreciate it.

Arizay relented and dragged her two cousins out of the street, ignoring their protests of "Ow, you're hurting my arm, woman!" and "I'm totally telling Tia Lakiesha on you!" and kicking the soccer ball out of the street and down the slender sidewalk between a rusted out Dodge and a cluster of giant birds-of-paradise. Reese breathed a sigh of relief, got back in her car, and drove it up onto the driveway three houses down.

Her mother came out of the kitchen and onto the covered drive, drying her hands.

"Dani!" she said, holding her arms wide.

Short as she was, Detective Dani Reese was still taller than her petite Mayan mother. She gave her a big hug and then handed over the horchata.

"Oh, so thoughtful, baby," her mama crooned. "I was just telling Arizay yesterday that she should talk to you about becoming a police officer."

Dani managed not to choke in surprise. She did cough.

"That's an . . . interesting idea," she said.

"But she'd be a wonderful police officer," Rosalinda Reese told her. "She keeps an eye on all her cousins, even the older ones, and keeps all of them in line. Her cousin, Eli, was up here last weekend, and she was bossing him aruond."

"Because she's bossy, mama," Dani answered, relaxing into the rhythm of home life. "That's what she does."

"Oh, she's not bad," her mother said.

"She's going to end up either the CEO of an international equity fund or the head of the Sinaloa Cartel, and I honestly couldn't say which is more terrifying," she replied.

That's when the screaming started.