by S. E. Harmon
“I’m a grown-ass man,” I reminded him tartly.
He snickered. “Come on, I’ll drive you home. I can pull the car around front while you grab your stuff.”
I never argued with curbside service—not with Applebee’s and certainly not with him. I packed up my laptop without shutting it down properly and threw a couple files in my bag. By the time I got downstairs, he was waiting by the front entrance, and I got in like a zombie.
He pulled off from the curb, the car’s rumble so throaty I could feel the vibrations in my seat. Aside from the fact that he drove like the Tasmanian Devil, it was strangely soothing. I settled back in the seat and closed my gritty eyes. Between the ghosts and the dreams, quality, uninterrupted sleep was hard to come by.
I felt a hand in my hair, brushing it off my forehead. I swatted at Danny without opening my eyes. “Hands on the wheel and eyes on the road, Taz.”
“I’ll have you know I scored the highest of my class in the driving qualifier.”
“The instructor had a hard choice to make. Either give you a high score or go on Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride again.”
He chuckled. “Don’t fall asleep. I’m going to have you home in less than twenty-five minutes.”
Twenty-five minutes. That was the distance to my place, not his. Maybe he just wanted to get me to a bed quicker. Maybe he just wanted his bed to himself so he could get a little uninterrupted sleep. I didn’t know, and I was too tired to mull it over.
“Thanks for driving me home,” I said around a yawn. “And making sure I didn’t fall face first into a bowl of yogurt.”
His soft laugh barely registered as I fell asleep. “Always.”
Relationships. They really were about the small things.
Chapter 14
A passing siren woke me a few minutes before Danny pulled in my driveway. When the noise faded, the neighborhood was once again peaceful and quiet. It usually was, which I appreciated. As for the neighbors, well, let’s just say there were complications.
To the left was Mrs. Johnson. She was over seventy and grumpier than an individual had a right to be. She always made sure to slam her front door whenever I called out a cheery good morning. I still put out the recycling bins and trash cans for her ornery ass, and in return she didn’t leave a flaming bag of dog crap on my porch. It was win-win, really.
To the right, I had another kind of problem, the kind of problem that had taught me to never move into a house with a For Rent sign next door. I mean, you never know what could happen. Some hippies’ conversion bus could break down for the last time and you could wind up with them for neighbors. Those folks might consider their front and side porch extended living space and hardly ever go inside. They might think pink flamingo lawn ornaments are the bee’s knees and decorate with abandon. They might hang more windchimes and dreamcatchers than you ever dreamed possible. And if you listened hard enough in the mornings, you might even hear one of them playing an African rainstick during their early morning yoga sessions. As if all that wasn’t enough, those folks might erect a giant tent/greenhouse behind the house to grow weed in, one you’ll then pretend to know nothing about.
Those folks might also be my parents.
They were unapologetic hippies, free-spirited people who marched to the beat of their own drum. Well, first they’d make the drum out of animal skin and twigs, and then they’d march to it. Truthfully, I wanted to live closer to them. That was kind of the point of moving down from DC—to create a fuller, richer life, closer to everyone I loved. So, check plus for me. Only in my plan, I imagined a couple of highway exits between us, not a shabbily constructed fence.
When Danny pulled in the driveway, my father was sitting on his back porch in a lawn chair. He was clad in some wildly patterned Hawaiian shorts, an undershirt, and some battered sandals. He was smoking something leisurely that he fumbled when he saw us. He closed his newspaper over it quickly. Smoke still hung like a fog in front of his face, and he tried to clear it by waving his hands frantically.
Good Lord. I rolled my eyes as I got out of the car. He was about as smooth as extra-crunchy peanut butter. I slung my attaché over my shoulder and headed up the walk. “Hey, Dad.”
“Rainstorm!” He gave the air one last discreet wave and moseyed over to the fence. His face brightened as he looked slightly behind me. “Danny boy.”
I glanced back, surprised to see Danny right behind me. I was even more surprised when he hit the car alarm on the fob and the horn honked obnoxiously. Guess he was staying after all. Or maybe just seeing me to the door like a glorified prom date.
Danny reached over the gate to give my father a half hug, half back slap. “What’s going on, Leo?”
“Nothing much. Just good to see my boy.” My dad gave me a sly grin. “You’re over at Danny’s so much, I’m surprised you even remember how to find your way home.”
I tried not to blush, but I might as well have saved the effort. Blushing was as much a part of my DNA as sandy blond hair and long, narrow feet. My father’s sly comment only echoed what I’d been thinking myself.
My last house hunting session with Mary Anne had been interesting to say the least. I expected to find ten things wrong with the townhouse before I even set foot in the door, but it was surprisingly perfect for me. It was in a good neighborhood, too, and reasonably priced. But as she looked at me expectantly, I couldn’t help the sense of wrongness I had felt.
I’d told Mary Anne that I’d think on the property and get back to her; she told me not to wait too long. She hadn’t called me with any listings since, and I wasn’t surprised. We both knew the townhouse was perfect.
Truthfully, I didn’t want to move somewhere else. I wanted to live with Danny. I’d sort of started moving myself in anyway, one little thing at a time. It wasn’t intentional, it was just that a lot of my furniture and appliances were just better. After the sixth time Danny’s relic of a toaster burned my bagel, it only made sense to bring mine over. And so what if I brought a couple sets of tumblers? And a pair of lamps. An ottoman. A couch?
I scratched my head. Alright, so maybe a few bigger ticket items had fallen through the dragnet, but Danny’s couch was a certified back assassin. Six kills at least. It just made sense.
If I had any stones, I’d make him acknowledge that we were practically living together. That he loved me, and I loved him, and I wasn’t interested in playing games—I was playing for keeps. And maybe if I didn’t routinely take him on HALO type missions with ghosts as our squad leader, I’d do exactly that. It was something we should probably discuss, and sooner rather than later. But not right now, not in the side yard, and certainly not in front of my father.
My father gave me a knowing look and changed gears. “Come on over, Danny.” He waved at the lawn chairs eagerly. “Sit a spell. Put up your feet. I could use a little company before I turn in. Robyn went to bed hours ago.”
I wasn’t surprised when Danny hopped the fence with little ado. It was undeniable at this point—he and my father had a complete bromance going on. They could talk for hours about the most random of topics. They rarely agreed on anything, and my father could go on rants about the government for hours at a time, but Danny was always respectful and never dismissed him. While I would never admit it, I thought it was cute as hell.
I watched with a tiny smile as Danny flopped down in a lawn chair and put up his booted feet on an old, red cooler.
“You look tired,” my father said to me.
My smile grew. That was code for me to buzz off, so he could bend Danny’s ear for a while. Luckily for him, I had no desire to stick around.
“So tired I can barely see straight,” I agreed. “I’d love to stay and chat but—”
He leaned across the fence to pat my cheek in a conciliatory manner. “Don’t even stress about it. And if you need a little something to help you take a load off—”
“Dad,” I said warningly, and he waved his hands at me.
“I was talking about you
r mother’s new lilac tea blend. Guaranteed to help you relax.”
“Oh, well thanks for the thought, but I don’t think I’m going to have any trouble getting to sleep.”
“You haven’t been drinking coffee, have you?” he asked suspiciously.
Six cups. I couldn’t be more juiced if they put clamps on my nipples and hooked me up to a car battery. “I wouldn’t dream of it,” I said loftily.
“My boy works so hard.” Before I could be too flattered, he frowned. “Better if it wasn’t working for the establishment, but we can’t have everything we want, I suppose.”
“Words to live by,” I said with the proper amount of gravitas. “And while we’re on the topic, your newspaper is smoking.”
“Oh, is it?” He swatted it violently against his leg. Whack. “That’s awfully—” Whack! “—strange.”
“You certainly are,” I agreed. “If I had to guess, I’d probably say it’s the joint crammed in the Sports section.”
“You’re such a smartass. He’s such a smartass.” The last part was directed at Danny, who just laughed. “I don’t know how you put up with him.”
I saluted them both and headed inside.
I changed into my oldest, rattiest pair of sleep pants and a faded college T-shirt. Then I tossed my work duds in the chair designated for housing my dry cleaning. I didn’t waste any time crawling into bed. The sheets were nice and cool, and I wiggled my toes in satisfaction.
I was asleep within minutes.
Sometime later—much later it seemed—a heavier weight depressed the mattress behind me, and I started to roll. I came to a quick stop against Danny and his forearm came across my chest. I blinked blearily. “Everything okay?”
“Yeah.”
“My dad?”
“Yeah. He got sleepy and turned in.”
“Okay.” I closed my eyes, but a thought crossed my mind and I popped them open again. “Did he put out that joint? I don’t want him burning down the house—”
“Will you relax? Your dad is fine, we’re fine, and before you ask, your mom is fine, too.” His arm tightened and pulled me in even closer, so we were flush against one another. “Everything is fine when I get to hold you like this.”
“Smooth talking devil.”
He chuckled and kissed the nape of my neck. “Go back to sleep.”
I reached back absently and patted his cheek. Well, I was going for his cheek and wound up patting his eye. “I don’t want you on the road if you’re sleepy. If you’re going to drive home, you should probably do it now.”
The words were already out by the time I heard how they sounded. Almost like I was giving him a test of some sort. I worried about it for about two nanoseconds before I realized I was too sleepy to care if he thought it was a test, too.
“I’ll just stay here tonight. I sleep better when I know you’re getting some sleep.”
I settled back into him more firmly, resting a hand on the arm he’d locked around me. Apparently, he had no problems passing any tests I threw at him.
“Besides,” he murmured into my neck, “I’m in no hurry to be anyplace you’re not.”
With flying colors.
Help me. I don’t want to die, die, die.
I stood in my darkened kitchen, drinking a cup of coffee silently. I scratched at an itchy patch above my hipbone as I stared at the ghost of my reflection in the kitchen window. A pair of plaid pajama pants hung low on my hips. My favorite sleep shirt was so faded, the “F” was long gone, and only read “BI” across the front.
I shivered at a sudden gust of cool air, goose bumps popping up along my arms. A ghost drifted through the kitchen, but I didn’t turn around. He didn’t seem inclined to talk, which was fine by me.
A ghost-fueled dream had me up at two a.m., a scant three hours after I’d closed my eyes, leaving the room smelling of lake water. He danced away from me on what appeared to be a bridge, overrun with vines and weeds. I chased after him, but it was like my feet were mired in mud. His laugh seemed to float all around me.
“What’s your name?” I finally yelled in frustration.
His skin fell away slowly, blackened and fetid. What I first thought was a macabre smile was actually a grimace of pain. He reached for me with skeletal fingers. His words bounced around in my head like a hyperactive pinball.
Help me. I don’t want to die, die, die.
I’d originally thought he was talking to me, but now I had my doubts. He seemed stuck in a memory and unable to communicate. I didn’t think he was really seeing me at all. That left me with the conclusion I’d been afraid to acknowledge; he’d begged for his life and someone had left him there to die. It was unsettling to say the least. Much too unsettling to drift back off to sleep.
I grabbed Mason’s laptop and his murder book from my attaché case and headed into the living room. If I wasn’t seated at a desk, it couldn’t be classified as working. And if the TV was on, that really wasn’t working, right? I settled down on the couch and flicked on the TV so it could watch me.
At some point I took a short break to make a bowl of cereal. I stumbled across Danny’s special bowl while looking for the sugar, and I finally got why he enjoyed it so much. The division of milk and cereal meant I could eat at my leisure without the milk threatening the integrity of my flakes the whole way.
I spooned some more cereal into my mouth and hummed. Crunch, crunch, crunch. I didn’t remember commandeering the bowl, which meant he’d brought it over himself. I guess I wasn’t the only one merging our stuff without realizing it.
“Is this a new couch?”
Danny’s voice made me gasp, and a mouthful of milk went down the wrong pipe. As I went into a coughing fit, he reached over and slapped me on the back a few times, and he almost sent me flying off the futon. If I hadn’t been in the middle of choking to death, I would’ve given him a lecture about knowing your own damn strength. As it was, I just sent him a foul look.
He was rumpled from head to toe, hair mused, pajama bottoms wrinkled. He sipped from a glass of what looked like orange juice as his aggressive back slapping gentled into a soothing rub. I finally relaxed enough to stop coughing, and he squeezed my shoulder before his hand fell away.
I wiped my teary eyes. He’d never even put the glass down. That was pretty damned nonchalant considering I was almost felled in my prime by a bowl of Special K.
“Are you okay?” he asked.
I nodded wordlessly. It was a second before I could find my voice. “Nice of you to ask.”
“Don’t worry, I know the Heimlich,” he said with a small smile. “Is this a new couch?”
I cleared my throat. “No, it’s not new. It’s an old futon my parents were getting rid of.”
“What happened to your couch?”
“I gave it away.”
He looked at me skeptically, but I wasn’t admitting shit. Technically, it wasn’t a lie—after all, I did give it to Danny. He just didn’t know it. The deep brown leather of the couch was the exact same type as the old one. Just better. My brother-in-law, Rick, had helped me move my couch in and toss Danny’s out. Thanks to that hippie’s tenuous grasp of counting, I wrenched my back lifting the damn thing. Rick stubbornly wouldn’t admit fault, but when the plan is to lift on the count of three, you lift on three, not four.
I pretended to read as he stared at me. When he opened his mouth to speak, I rustled the pages loudly.
“Here, let me get you some more light—” He broke off as he looked at the side table where my lamp used to be. “Where are your lamps?”
In your living room. “They didn’t go with my décor anymore.”
I managed to say that with a straight face, which was quite a feat. Categorizing my style with a word as lofty as décor was a bit of a stretch. I liked things to match, be neutral in color, and be clean—that was my décor in a nutshell.
He sat on the futon gingerly, which was good news for the questionably built frame. The next time he looked my way, I k
issed the perplexed look right off his face.
Luckily, the stack of pictures on the coffee table caught his attention. “Is that the piece Saunders showed us? Are you obsessing about it again?”
I’d taken pictures of the piece from several different angles and magnified them. No matter how long I stared at those pictures or which way I turned them, the significance wouldn’t come into focus. It was just a black, ridged piece of plastic. I still didn’t know what it was, or where it came from, or if it was important at all.
“Well, it’s driving me crazy,” I finally admitted.
“I don’t know if you can blame these pictures for your level of crazy.”
“Shut your face, Daniel.”
He huffed out a laugh and put the pictures back down. “I forgot to tell you that I talked to one of my snitches earlier. She had information on Luke.”
I blinked at him. “You have snitches?”
“You don’t?”
“Of course I do,” I said quickly, wondering where I could submit a request to acquire some fucking snitches, ASAP. “I was just making sure you did.”
He chuckled. “Turns out this snitch used to run numbers. Remember Sue said Luke had to move in with Mason because of a financial crisis?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, Luke had a big gambling problem. He owed some low-level bookie named Jeremy Watts over twenty grand.” He leaned back against the futon, already done treating it with kid gloves. “Rumor says Watts has a violent streak and doesn’t mind getting his hands dirty.”
“You think this bookie could’ve killed Mason to show Luke he meant business?”
“Maybe.” When he didn’t say anything else, I glanced his way only to find his eyes closed. I elbowed him and his eyes popped open. “What? I said maybe.”
I woke my laptop with a jostle of the mouse. I logged into the BBPD database and did a search for Jeremy Watts. I got results pretty quickly. A lot of results. His four mugshots were almost like a progression in criminology—in his first, he was smaller in build and pale, his dark eyes wide with trepidation. By the last, he had a wraparound tattoo on his neck and his eyes were hard chips of merciless obsidian. He was also smiling in a mugshot, which told me everything I needed to know about his personality.
