by Lucy Score
“You’re not going somewhere, are you?” she asked.
His eyes were more puppy-doggy than Burt’s, and his lips were pressed in a firm line.
“I assumed my work here was complete,” he said, toeing a seam between porch planks. “Since you have embraced your powers.”
The parlor phone rang. “Yeah, what do you want? I’m in the middle of a bucket of Bloody Marys,” they heard Mrs. Penny answer.
There was a beat of silence.
“Look, I’ll tell you what I told your seventeen other journalist buddies. Ms. Thorn isn’t giving interviews or psychic readings. At least not without a five-figure booking fee.”
“Mrs. Penny!” Riley yelled.
“Whoopsie. Never mind,” the woman said into the phone. “You’ve got the wrong number. Bye!”
“Journalists are calling?” Riley asked.
Gabe nodded. “It would seem that your live video on social media became contagious.”
She leaned against the back of the chair and closed her eyes. She’d claimed and then shown off her psychic abilities to an invisible audience. “Well, shit,” she sighed.
“Sorry, kiddo.” Mrs. Penny said, poking her head out of the front door. “We’ve been getting calls all day long. You’re famous!”
Riley groaned. Her new, internal rejection of normal for the sake of normal was going to be unfairly and publicly reinforced.
“You coming out is perfect timing,” Mrs. Penny said cheerfully. “I’m looking for a new gig now that the vigilantes have to disband under ‘penalty of the law’ bullshit. Did those cops even say thank you to us for running justice for them? Maybe a little, but it’s not like they coughed up any cash reward or anything. Anyway, I’ll be your manager. Come on inside and have a Bloody Mary. We’ll talk appearance fees.”
Riley could only deal with one crisis at a time.
“I’ll be in in a minute. I need to talk to Gabe first.”
“Okey-dokey! I’ll start your Facebook page as soon as you show me how to use Facebook. Your video got way more views than Wander’s down dog ever did,” she said chipperly.
Burt, hearing “down dog,” lay down in the ice cream he was still lapping up.
“Gabe,” Riley began when Mrs. Penny banged back into the house. “What would you say if I told you I thought we had more work to do?”
He perked up. “I would agree wholeheartedly.”
“I can’t afford to pay you,” she said quickly.
“My work is not linked to a paycheck,” he said magnanimously.
“Yeah, but how do you afford stuff?”
“The universe provides,” he said, opening his palms and looking up. Fat stacks of cash did not fall from the porch rafters.
“Uh-huh. We’ll come back to that. Money aside, if you’re still up for teaching me how to get better at this stuff, I’d like to learn,” she told him.
He bowed his perfectly shaped head. “It would be my greatest honor.”
“Good,” she said.
“Excellent.”
“Okay then,” Riley said.
“If you will excuse me, I will replace my sadness ice cream with happiness ice cream,” Gabe said, beaming.
“Have at it, man.”
“Yoo-hoo! Riley?” Lily called from somewhere in the house. “Do you have any pictures of Nick’s butt? I want to show it to my friends at pottery class!”
Fred poked his head out of the parlor when she stepped inside.
“Jasmine called. She wants to come over for drinks tonight. Lots of drinks, she said.”
“That sounds good,” Riley said wearily. The steps looked insurmountable. So she flopped down in the lift chair and pushed the button.
She sighed. It was a new normal.
59
12:47 p.m., Sunday, July 5
“Mrs. Zimmerman. I was just getting ready to call you,” Nick said into his phone as he eyed the smoldering wreckage of his office and apartment.
According to the fire marshal, it was a total loss. But it didn’t really feel like one to him. It felt like the right excuse for a new beginning.
“I can’t say I’m not disappointed,” his client said stonily. “Imagine discovering that the PI I hired solved my nephew’s murder without telling me.”
Nick ran a hand over his bandaged ass. “Yeah, I can see how disappointing having your nephew’s murder solved would be.”
“Ah, there’s that sarcasm I’m not at all fond of,” she said. “I suppose, since you did deliver on your promise, I should pay up.”
One of the last remaining shingles on what was left of the roof cracked off and landed at his feet. “I’d sure appreciate that,” he told her.
She sighed. “And I suppose I could include a small bonus for you socking that Gentry moron in the mouth. I’ve been waiting years for someone to do that,” she grumbled.
“Happy to oblige,” he told her.
There was a beat of silence. “You did an acceptable job, Nicholas,” she said grudgingly.
It was the gold star of compliments from the gym teacher who had looked the brand-new school record holder for the fastest mile in the eye and said, “Well, if that’s the best you can do.”
“Thank you, Mrs. Zimmerman,” Nick said, fearing that he was about to get misty-eyed.
“I’ll mail the check to your office,” she told him.
A piece of glass the size of a football fell from a broken upstairs window and landed shard point down in a still-smoking piece of wood. “Uh, maybe mail it to my cousin instead?” he suggested.
“What’s next, boss?” Josie asked when he disconnected the call.
“I’ve got a couple of stops to make. You up for riding along?” he asked.
“Sure.”
“On the way, you can tell me all about how you forgot to mention to me you were doling out vigilante justice all over the city.”
She shrugged. “Work was slow. I was bored.”
Between stops, they listened to the radio, and Josie debriefed him.
The damage count for Mayorgeddon—as one of the stupid media outlets dubbed it—was impressive.
Mayor Nolan Flemming suffered a broken nose, eye socket, and right pinkie finger, along with two superficial gunshot wounds, and was in the hospital under police custody.
Detective Shapiro didn’t fare any better. She took four bullets to the vest, one to the neck, and earned two broken legs from Mrs. Penny’s minivan. Since the news of her arrest broke, witnesses had come out of the woodwork to share their Crooked Katie stories.
Duncan Gulliver spilled his guts in the hospital on both Flemming and Shapiro.
Officer Billings and the skateboarder Flemming shot were both expected to make full recoveries.
Josie was annoyed that she had arrived too late to the action to try out her new knife.
Riley’s Facebook live of the shoot-out on City Island already had 75,000 views.
As for Nick, he’d earned himself a heart-shaped suture job from the joker of a surgeon who’d dug out the bullet and stitched his ass back up.
And it was only lunchtime.
He pulled up to the curb and studied the house. It was a modern Greek monstrosity with columns and plaster and urns everywhere. No matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t imagine Riley living here. “Ready for this?” he asked Josie.
She cracked her neck to the left, then the right. “Oh, yeah.”
The front door was painted gold. Metallic flake gold. Nick ignored the lion head door-knocker and used his fist to announce their arrival.
The door swung open, and they were met by a swollen-nosed, even shorter than usual Griffin Gentry. He was barefoot.
“No! Back! Go away!” the man squeaked as he tried to wrestle the door closed.
But Nick wasn’t waiting for an invitation to come inside. He shoved the door, knocking it into Griffin’s forehead, and strode across the threshold. “Thanks, we’d love to come in,” he said.
The foyer, with its beige textu
red walls and gold tile floor, seemed soulless and tasteless, just like its owner.
“You need to leave, or I’m calling my lawyer,” Griffin whined.
“Yeah, about that,” Nick said, pulling the papers out of his back pocket and slapping them against the man’s chest. “Sign these.”
Griffin sputtered and snorted, taking the papers and giving them a quick scan. “You want me to release Riley from her financial obligation to me? Ha! That’s not happening. Not now, not ever,” he said, braver now that he’d backed out of Nick’s reach.
“I’m so glad he said that,” Nick said, grinning at Josie. She smiled wickedly and advanced on Griffin.
He backed up a step and then another one.
“If you don’t sign these papers,” Nick explained. “I’m going to call Claudia at Channel 49 News. You remember her, don’t you? She’s the anchor your dear old dad fired so he could give you her job right out of college.”
“Big deal,” Griffin snorted, still backing away from the advancing Josie until they were in a room with a piano and very ugly furniture.
“A very big deal,” Nick agreed. “You see, Gentry, I’m a private investigator. I investigate things. I follow people. I catch people doing things they wouldn’t want their mistresses-turned-fiancées finding out about.”
On cue, Josie pulled an envelope out of the back of her jeans and tossed it at Griffin. He bobbled it, and when it landed on the cold tile, a series of black-and-white photos fell out.
Griffin’s eyes went wide, and he scrambled to pick them up, but Josie pushed him back with a boot to the chest, forcing him down onto an overstuffed pink ottoman.
He stared in horror at the photos that showed him entering and leaving motels with two different scantily clad women, neither of whom were Bella Goodshine. And neither of whom had any problems with very public, very illegal displays of affection.
“You know, I think your viewers would love to know how you use your expense account to pay for motel rooms and prostitutes,” Nick mused.
Griffin sputtered but didn’t manage to form any actual words.
“You can make it all go away, just by signing those papers,” Nick told him.
“And if you don’t,” Josie said, leaning into the man’s space. “We’ll tell everyone you wear lifts in your shoes.”
His tangerine complexion faded to an ashy orange. “They’re arch supports!”
“Oh, no, they’re not, Mr. Size Six and a Half,” she hissed. “That’s right. We got your shoe guy.”
“Not Lionel!” Griffin gasped. The man was more upset about the lifts than the prostitutes.
“Sign the papers, Gentry, and no one needs to know anything,” Nick insisted.
Josie produced a pen, somehow managing to make the gesture threatening. “Sign.”
“Griffy, do we have company?” a breathy voice called from the grand staircase.
Griffin grabbed the pen, signed like his life depended on it, and then swept the photos under the ottoman with one tiny, bare foot.
“There you are!” Bella pranced—because there was no better word for describing the way she moved—into the room wearing a pink silk robe with furry lapels and five-inch stilettos with matching furry puffs on the toes. She was carrying a small, scruffy dog in a bedazzled collar. “Look, LaLa,” she baby-talked to the dog. “We have guests!”
“They were just leaving,” Griffin said, his face satisfyingly terror-stricken.
Nick took the crumpled papers that Josie handed him and scrawled his signature at the bottom. “We just stopped by for autographs,” he said.
Josie whipped out her notary stamp the way someone would produce a knife, causing Griffin to fall back down on the ottoman.
“Y-y-yeah. Autographs,” he stuttered.
“Pleasure doing business with you,” Nick said with a lazy salute.
Josie leaned into Griffin’s space once more. “I hope we’ll meet again,” she told him with a wicked gleam in her eyes.
“Daddy’s so famous, LaLa,” Bella crooned to the dog, oblivious that her fiancé was two seconds away from pissing his pants.
They said polite goodbyes, and Nick and Josie showed themselves out. “Your friend is so tall and handsome,” Bella said to Dirtbag Gentry just before Nick closed the door.
He stretched his arms overhead and squinted up at the blue sky. “Another satisfying job.”
“Are you seriously not going to tell Bella “Cartoon Birds Sing in My Head” Goodshine about that dick?” Josie asked as Nick limped toward his SUV.
He grinned and slid behind the wheel. “Check the glove box,” he said.
Josie found another similar envelope. Inside it was a series of similar pictures. Only instead of Griffin with prostitutes, it was Bella making out with—and sometimes doing more with—a handful of men who were all much, much taller than her fiancé.
“Oh, shit. Is this…”
“Yep. That’s Griffin’s old pal, Mayor Nolan Flemming. Seems he and Mrs. Gentry to Be had a quickie behind a Dumpster at a fundraiser a few nights after he had Frick murdered,” Nick said, driving down the long leg of the circular driveway.
“A match made in the sulfurous fumes of hell,” Josie mused.
He stopped at the bottom of the drive, signaled, then floored it. His front fender took out the mailbox and sent it flying.
Josie didn’t so much as blink. “So you’ve been tailing them since he showed up at the hospital and shoved a microphone—which totally represents the penis size he wished he had, be tee dubs—in Riley’s face?”
“Yep,” Nick said, heading in the direction of the city.
“Man, you’ve had it bad for Thorn from the beginning,” she mused.
“Yep,” he said again. “So what are you going to do now that your vigilante days are over courtesy of Detective Do Right?”
Josie stretched all cat-like. “I dunno. Guess get preggo and bake shit. Also, I really want to learn hatchet throwing. What are you going to do now that the fake engagement is over?”
“I’ll tell you what I’m gonna do, Jos,” Nick said, gripping the wheel tighter. “I’m going to drop you off at your house so you and my cousin can make babies or throw hatchets at each other or whatever the hell you do behind closed doors. Then I’m going to drive over to Riley’s and yell at her for a few hours about being careless and irresponsible. Then I’m gonna tell her that if she wants the honor of being my girl, she needs to get her head out of her ass.”
Josie nodded smugly at his stupid, stupid plan. “Sounds like a Nick Santiago plan.”
60
3:07 p.m., Sunday, July 5
Riley didn’t know what day it was, let alone what time it was, when the knock at the door woke her. Judging from the ache in her side, it was still Sunday, and she still had a bullet hole in her muffin top. Burt hurled himself off the couch and galloped to the door, where he sat and growled until Riley wrenched it open.
“Did you even look who it was?” Nick demanded and limped past her with an armload of bags.
“Nice to see you too. I’m fine, thanks.” She yawned.
“Why does it smell like mushroom fertilizer and dead groundhogs in here?” he asked, dumping his haul on the couch.
She yawned again. “Burt ate an entire bowl of ice cream.”
The dog in question nudged Nick in his wounded butt cheek, then grinned like it was a game when he yelped.
“Burt, don’t be a dick,” Riley said. She stretched, then winced. Her entire body felt like it had… well, done all the things it had actually done.
The dog scented something besides stale canine farts wafting in the air and jogged happily out into the hall and down the steps.
Nick kicked the door shut behind him.
“What are you doing here?”
“What am I doing here? What am I doing here?” he demanded, pacing unevenly in front of her. “I’ll tell you what I’m doing here.” He reached into his pocket and pulled out a piece of paper and read the words
out loud.
Dear Nick,
Please forgive me. I had to do this. You were going to get shot and killed. I saw it right before Flemming called. I couldn’t let that happen. Thanks for last night. For everything really. Please take care of Burt for me.
Love,
Riley
“Uh-huh,” she said, shuffling over to the coffee maker on the counter and stabbing buttons. She needed caffeine if there was going to be yelling.
“Stop making coffee, and come back here so I can yell at you, Riley Whatever the Hell Your Middle Name Is Thorn.”
She ignored him, so he followed her into the tiny kitchen space and started unpacking the bags in jerky, angry motions. Riley took inventory. New bowls for Burt. Another bag of dog food. More leashes and toys. Two rib-eyes. One for Burt and one for his people. The remaining shopping bag held a few new articles of clothing and toiletries. Remembering his home and office had been torched, she allowed herself to feel the teensiest bit sorry for him.
As the appliance gurgled to life, Riley dug into her tiny fridge and produced the small bag she’d stashed there.
“Here’s what’s going to happen,” Nick continued. “I’m going to yell at you until you see the error of your ways.”
“Uh-huh,” she said.
“Then I’m going to tell you that I’m moving in.”
“Moving in? Together?” she repeated.
“Technically across the hall, but yeah. It’s gotta be here because my place is charcoal.”
“Should I apologize for that too?” she asked with a yawn.
“No. That one’s on me. I pushed Flemming’s buttons too hard at the party last night,” he admitted. “But I’ve got plenty of other stuff you need to apologize for.”
The coffee maker spat a stream of caffeinated goodness into a mug. The second the stream stopped, Riley yanked the mug out and breathed deeply. “Okay. You’re moving into Dickie’s old place.”
He shook his head. “You’re not hearing me, Thorn. We aren’t going to just be roommates. We’re going to be—”
