Every Other Weekend

by TA Moore

  “Oh, I’ve seen plenty,” she said irritably. “That good-for-nothing—”

  Her husband interrupted her before she could finish. “Let it go,” he told her, and then he scowled at Kelly. “No offense, but you ain’t going to be here tomorrow. He is.”

  The door slammed shut.

  Kelly puffed his cheeks out on a dispirited sigh and stepped down off the porch. He turned and scanned the area. Two little girls at the end of the street worked earnestly to cover the whole of their drive in muddy pastel chalk. An old woman in a bright Hawaiian shirt and shorts limped out of one of the houses, down to the street, and sat down carefully on the bench to wait for the bus. Her hair was tarmac black. It was worth a shot.

  Kelly jogged across the road. The old lady saw him and shook her head.

  “Boy, what good is it for me to see something?” she asked once he was close enough. “That man is bad news.”

  “How do you know who I’m asking about?”

  She snorted and set her Disney bag in her lap. Tanned, liver-spotted skin tightened over her knuckles as she gripped the handles. “You want to ask about Petrosyan, then?” she mocked him. “For leaving his garbage cans at curb all week? Or is the Harpers, on account of their daughter having an odd head?”

  “Fair enough.”

  Kelly sat down on the bench and stretched his legs out. The plastic was hot through his T-shirt.

  “Kelly,” he introduced himself. “I’m a PI. I’m representing Jimmy Graham’s wife.”

  “Margaret Sirkasian. And she finally came to her senses and left him, then?” the woman asked. Her voice tried for tart, but she couldn’t fight the underscore of relief. “About time. I told her.” She pursed her lips together in annoyance.

  “You told her…?” Kelly prompted.

  Margaret gave him a dry look and then sighed. “I told her that men make their sons in their image,” she said. “My husband was a shit. My sons are shits. Good boys—as their mother, I have to say that—but cheats and liars. Harry deserved better than to grow up like his dad.”

  “You and Nadine are friends?”

  “Were friends,” Margaret corrected him. She fished a roll of candy out of her bag, popped one, and offered the tube to Kelly. It wasn’t entirely clear what they were—the half name left on the side was in a foreign language—but he took it anyhow. Maybe it was mint. “He didn’t like that. Couldn’t stop me. I’m not scared of some low-level errand boy for the local crooks. Too damn old.”

  Kelly rolled the candy over his tongue—he didn’t know what it was, but it tasted like roses—and nodded.

  “So he made Nadine?”

  Margaret crunched her sweet. “I would happily blame that man for a lot—noisiness, creepy friends, intimidating people—but he didn’t need to make her do anything. What I said, she didn’t want to hear, so I wasn’t good company. No one wants to be friends with an old woman who isn’t good company.”

  “I think now she’d admit you were right.” Kelly tucked the candy in the side of his mouth. He got his phone out again and flipped the pictures up onto the screen. “Did you ever see any of these men around?”

  Margaret was the first one who actually looked at the men’s faces.

  “I know him.” She tapped the phone with her finger. “He dated my niece for a while. Cried when she left him and sent chocolates every day. I don’t know if he wanted her back or just to make her fat. Kris… something. Moushian? The others I might have seen around, but he has a lot of friends for a shit.”

  “What about a couple of nights ago?” Kelly asked. “Did you see anyone come to the house? Go inside?”

  “None of them,” she said.

  “Who?”

  She sucked her sweet at him and raised perfectly plucked storm-gray eyebrows.

  “It was something to do with Jimmy,” he said. “But they scared Nadine.”

  Margaret closed her eyes and grimaced. “Men like that don’t scare women,” she said. “Is she all right?”

  “She’s… safe now.”

  Margaret took his phone and tapped carefully at the screen with her forefinger. “I don’t know their names, the men who came here,” she said. “This is who Jimmy worked with, though—Gregor. He was always around here, always trying to play the big man. I called the police on him once for pestering a girl, and he threatened me to keep my mouth shut. Showed me his hammer.”

  The contempt was ripe in her voice. She shook her head and tapped the screen again.

  “I don’t know why he bothered. Police never did anything about that man or his friends. No one ever does.”

  She gave Kelly his phone back. The name and address were typed out in lowercase letters.

  “Thank you,” he said. “I’ll tell Nadine. I think she’d be glad to know you still wanted to help her.”

  Maybe if Marie had known how many of her old friends—lost over the years to Byron’s wandering dick and inability to share attention—had come to cry at her funeral, she’d have called them after the divorce. She might have ended up in rehab instead of a coffin.

  Margaret snorted and handed him a tissue. “Just spit it out if you don’t like it,” she told him. Then she levered herself up off the bench with a glare for him when he tried to offer his arm. She nodded as the bus stopped, a blur of red down the street. “My bus.”

  The bus pulled up and sank down, the hiss of its suspension almost a sigh, and she climbed on. She paused after she paid the fare and looked around.

  “Tell Nadine she made the right choice,” she said. “For Harry. And I’m not one to hold grudges.”

  The door’s closed, and the bus pulled away as she stumbled to a seat.

  Kelly checked his phone. It said “Frank’s Body-Sheep,” but she’d taken more time to spell out the name. Gregor Kevoian.

  He googled the address on the way to his pickup.

  KEVOIAN DIDN’T look like he’d fit under a car. He was a big man with a bigger gut that sagged down over the waistband of his jeans. No chin, though. He scratched the patchy black stubble on his jaw and glared at Kelly down the lumpy beak of his nose.

  “I don’t know what the fuck Jimmy is doing these days,” he growled as he stuck a cigarette in his mouth and flicked the flint on the lighter. The unlit end bobbed as he talked, never quite in the guttering flame. “You want him, find a friend of his.”

  Kelly lifted his hand to block the sun. Behind Kevoian he could see a handful of cars up on blocks to be worked on, from a gently aged purple Toyota to a glossy black shark of a Firebird. None of the mechanics were at work, though. They stood in oil-stained overalls and muttered to each other as they watched their boss.

  Kevoian’s name might not be over the door, but he was definitely the boss.

  “I heard you were his friend,” Kelly said, at his most affable. He held up crossed fingers. “You and him were like this. That’s you on top.”

  That was worthy of a snort. Kevoian finally got his cigarette lit. He drew on it deeply, and the threads of tobacco sparked. Then he plucked it from between his lips as he exhaled, pinched the cigarette between thumb and forefinger, and tucked it into the callused cup of his palm. Smoke eddied up through his fingers.

  “Then you’re lying about knowing Jimmy,” he said. “Because he ain’t got no friends.”

  “Colleagues, then?” Kelly said.

  Kevoian narrowed his eyes, and Kelly turned his hands palm out in a shorthand for harmless. “I’m not a cop,” he said.

  “Reporter?”

  “Private investigator. I work for his wife.”

  Kevoian laughed and took another puff on his cigarette. He squinted through the smoke. “Silly cow finally found out he’s catting around on her?” he asked. “About time. I thought she was blind as well as stupid.”

  Kelly didn’t correct him. For some reason, you mentioned domestic violence, and people clammed up as they muttered “don’t know what goes on behind closed doors.” A whiff of scandalous sex, though, and they’d be at
the door to peep through the keyhole.

  “I heard Jimmy worked for you.” Kelly exaggerated what he’d been told to fluff Kevoian’s feathers. It worked. “I’m just… running down some of his revenue streams. The more legitimate ones.”

  “Not a cop?” Kevoian checked.

  “Too short,” Kelly shrugged with a grin.

  Kevoian laughed and looked over his shoulder into the garage. He jerked his thumb at Kelly. “Get a load of this. He wanted to be a cop but couldn’t see over the counter.”

  The other mechanics sniggered on cue, and Kevoian turned back to Kelly. He thumbed his nose and sniffed.

  “Me and Jimmy,” Kevoian said, “we had a parting of the ways. He thought he was some hotshot, that he was too good for my… how’d you put it?”

  “Revenue streams?”

  Kevoian pointed a blunt, nail-bitten finger at Kelly’s nose. “That’s it,” he said. “Revenue streams. He’s got some new colleagues these days, but don’t get his wife’s hopes up.”

  “Oh?”

  “From what I hear, all of Jimmy’s revenue streams are about to dry right up,” Kevoian said. “In a permanent sort of way. It looks like he didn’t learn his lesson from double-crossing me, and his new friends? They ain’t as understanding as I am.”

  Kelly’s job was a lot like a conversation with his mom. People talked themselves into confidences, a bit of flattery went a long way to grease the wheels, and once it was done, it was done. It felt like Kevoian had dried up, but Kelly gave him a prod just in case.

  “Still my job to make a list,” he said. “These new partners of his, do they have names?”

  Kevoian smirked, his teeth yellow behind his lips, and flicked the cigarette on the ground to grind it to shreds under a steel-capped toe.

  “Let me think. It was…. Fuck Off,” he said, “and Shortass.”

  Clever.

  Kelly shrugged and stepped back. He pulled a pair of sunglasses from his pocket and slid them on to cut the glare.

  “Thanks for your help,” he said. “I’m sure Nadine will appreciate it.”

  Kevoian snorted and spat a wet glob onto the ground in front of Kelly’s boots. Then he turned his back and stalked into the garage. The other mechanics shrugged, looked disappointed it hadn’t escalated to a fight, and wandered off.

  Well, that was less useful than Kelly had hoped, but more than he’d expected. He tugged his phone out of his pocket and pulled up his texts as he walked away. Cole had worked Glendale for a few years. He’d know who Kelly should chase up for information on tensions between the local gangs.

  The answer that popped back almost immediately was “Why?”

  Kelly rolled his eyes. He started to reply but put it on hold as he reached his pickup. A bright white citation was snapped under his windshield wiper.

  “Shit.”

  That was just what he needed. Kelly leaned over, yanked it off the window, and tossed it onto the passenger seat as he climbed up into the oven-hot cab. He was just about to start the engine when the sharp rap of knuckles on glass interrupted him.

  A lean, dark man in a baseball cap gave him a blandly handsome smile through the window and rotated his finger in a “roll it down” gesture. It didn’t seem like a good idea, but when Kelly glanced out the front window, another man—sunbaked blond with the same bland look—stood in front of the pickup. His grin had something of a shark around the corners—all white teeth and no humor at all.

  “Yeah, well, I was always too pretty for my own good,” Kelly muttered as he took his glasses off.

  He dropped his phone and kicked it under the seat. Before he could do anything else, the driver’s-side window exploded. Nuggets of hot glass hit Kelly in the arm and on the side of his face. Chunks of it caught in the neck of his shirt. He swore and twisted around to see tall, dark, and blandsome use a hammer to wrench what was left of the window out of the frame. Then the man reached in and popped the door open.

  “You know, the door wasn’t locked,” Kelly cracked. Tension always made him stupid. “That’s going to have to go on my insurance.”

  Blandsome didn’t find him funny. He grabbed the collar of Kelly’s shirt and dragged him out of the cab.

  “You’ve been asking too many questions,” Blandsome said as he smacked Kelly against the hood of the pickup. “We think you need to learn to mind your own business.”

  “This is literally my business,” Kelly said. He mock-patted his hips. “I’ve even got a business card here somewhere.”

  Blandsome sneered as he glanced over at Beefcake One. “He thinks he’s a comedian. Maybe we should—”

  Kelly shoved his hand between Blandsome’s legs, grabbed, and twisted as hard as he could. The noise that came out of Blandy sounded like the air escaping a balloon, and the color washed out of his face. Before he could recover, Kelly headbutted him in the face.

  He didn’t get the satisfying gristle-pop noise of a dislocated nose, but Blandsome still grunted and staggered backward with blood drooling from split lips.

  “Stupid fucker,” Beefcake One said mildly. “You should have just taken the beating.”

  He lunged at Kelly, who dodged out of the way. Beefcake hit the side of the car with a heavy thud, muscle against alloy, and bounced off. Kelly threw a nice punch—clean from the shoulder, knuckles right on target—that Cole would have been proud of. It caught Beefcake in the jaw, hard enough to rattle, and Kelly slammed a second, short and nasty, punch into his gut.

  That one he thought hurt his knuckles more than Beefcake’s gut. Beefcake grunted, shook it off, and rammed Kelly. The heavy width of his shoulder hit Kelly in the stomach and drove him off balance. Kelly grunted and hammered his elbow down between Beefcake’s shoulder blades. It hurt him enough that Kelly managed to twist free of him.

  Blandsome spat blood on the pavement and pulled a baton out of his jacket. He extended it with a flick of his wrist, and Kelly backpedaled with his hands held up to ward Blandy off.

  “C’mon, now,” he said. “No need to—”

  He’d forgotten about Beefcake Two. The punch came from nowhere on the left and caught him on the cheekbone. He felt a nasty snap-pop and a chill draft behind his eye. Fuck. His ears rang with a sharp, off-tune note, and he couldn’t quite keep his legs under him.

  His knees hit the pavement with a crack and a dull pop of pain that quickly faded. Kelly braced his hand on the ground and tried to push himself back up. Blandsome stamped a booted foot on his fingers and ground down.

  Kelly swore and bit down on the inside of his cheek.

  “You don’t belong down here,” Blandsome said. “We know you. We know your vehicle. Remember that.”

  The club cracked down across Kelly’s thigh. Then one of the beefcakes kicked him in the stomach. Kelly grunted out a pained breath and threw himself into Blandsome’s legs. The impact was enough to knock Blandsome back a step, and his foot lifted off Kelly’s fingers. It didn’t do any good. The next kick landed in Kelly’s ribs with a hollow thud of impact and knocked him down.

  Kelly sucked in a painful breath and curled in on himself as kicks and punches rained down on him. Beefcake One was right. It was three on one. He should have just let them deliver the beating. It would have been over quicker. Now he just had to wait it out.

  Chapter Nine

  “AFTER CONSIDERATION my client is unwilling to surrender his interest in the talent agency,” John Barton said. There was a hint of weariness in his voice, as though he were as tired of his client as everyone else was. “His contribution to business might not have been easily measured, but his support for his wife was invaluable.”

  In the seat next to Clayton, Charity Tate snorted. It was an excellent snort, full of contempt and from somewhere just below her sinuses. Before she could say anything, Clayton raised a finger. She snorted again but sat back in the chair.

  “Fine,” Clayton said.

  “What?” both soon-to-be-ex spouses blurted out.

  Charity added, “
The hell it is” for emphasis.

  “Since we can’t come to a settlement,” Clayton continued calmly, “the judge can decide. I can also convince my client to repursue her strong claim on Mr. Tate’s—” He fanned out the paperwork and ran his eye down the list of property. “—beach house and vineyard.”

  Anger flushed Declan Tate’s skin ruddily over his cheekbones, a deep, livid color like someone had slapped him from the inside.

  “That bitch doesn’t even like wine,” he spat.

  “So you say,” Clayton pointed out. “Yet every single merlot produced there is named after my client, and I have witness testimony that she spent considerably more billable hours at the vineyard than you ever did.”

  “Because she was fucking the manager.” Declan spat the word out between tight, white lips.

  “A liaison she regrets.” Clayton ignored the mutter of “do not” from Charity. “And that she only entered into due to the alienation of affection caused by her husband’s long absences and his affair with her niece. I think blood relative trumps employee there.”

  The color in Declan’s face managed to darken further. It didn’t look healthy. The almost congested red was stark against the pallor of his temples and jaw. He was a wealthy man, a generous man where charity galas and glitter-spangled, celebrity fundraisers were concerned, but the divorce had brought out the worst in him. The way that not getting his own way brought out the worst in a toddler.

  “You think you can fucking blackmail me,” he spat across the table. “That goddamn bitch has always planned to take me for everything I’ve got.”

  Clayton nudged his knee against Charity’s under the table, but she held her tongue. She always did behave better once she’d gotten a rise out of her ex. She just smirked at him with a smug pleat of matte-red lips and leaned in to whisper something in Clayton’s ear.

  “If you lose me the agency, I’ll marry you,” she murmured. Her breath was sticky hot against his neck. “Then fuck your life up too.”

  She squeezed his arm and sat back, still smiling. Across the table Declan clenched his fists and then snarled and lunged up out of his chair. It fell over backward, and he stepped over the legs on his way out of the room. John looked relieved that the chair was the only thing on the ground.