by J. D. Mason
Marlowe toyed with the hem of that shirt and thought about telling him to go away. Pizza and beer were not exactly her idea of food, but it did smell good, and she couldn’t remember the last time she’d eaten.
“Wait,” she said, leaving him standing at the door and then rushing over to her purse to pull out her pepper spray. Marlowe’s rosary was securely around her neck, along with her Solomon’s magical circle amulet and her Guardians of the Four Quarters amulets, which both protected against evil. And her favorite, the Hamsa Hand amulet, which provided her with the protection of the angels. The pepper spray was just a deterrent that he could understand.
She came back to the door and reluctantly invited him in. He sat on the bed, opened up the pizza box, and held out a beer to her. Marlowe was appalled.
“No,” she said, shaking her head. “We don’t eat on the bed.”
He looked dumbfounded as she picked up the box and took it over to the small table across the room and sat down in one of the chairs. Reluctantly, he followed suit. She grimaced when she saw that thing, smothered in processed cheese, bacon, sausage, peppers, onions, and only God knew what else. Plato smacked his lips, wrapped those massive hands around a slice, folded it in half, and shoved most of it into his mouth.
“That’s delicious,” he said after he’d finished sort of chewing and swallowing.
Marlowe chose her slice and then began the painstaking process of picking off the parts she didn’t want—onions, some brown things, bacon, sausage, peppers.
“What the hell are you doing?” he asked, mortified.
“I can’t eat that. Too much cholesterol and sodium,” she said, shaking her head. After she’d finished, all she had left was part of the processed cheese, bread, and pizza sauce.
He immediately began collecting everything she’d pulled off her slice and piled it onto his next one. Then he tried passing her that beer again.
Marlowe shook her head. “No, thank you.”
“You’ve got to wash it down with something,” he pointed out.
She nodded. “Water’s fine.”
Plato raised both eyebrows like water was a foreign substance he’d never heard of as it related to beverages.
They ate in silence, but the air was thick between the two of them. Marlowe owed him a debt, which scared the mess out of her, considering the warning she’d gotten about him from the bones, but he’d come to her rescue. The part that bothered her, though, was that he even knew she needed rescuing. How long had he been watching her?
“What if you can’t find Eddie?” she finally asked.
“You’ll likely go to prison.”
She stared curiously at him. “You didn’t have to say it like that,” she said, genuinely offended.
He didn’t respond. Didn’t even blink.
This O.P. was no detective. So what was he? “So you’re just supposed to find Eddie and take him back to the people who hired you? Or do you plan on turning him in to the police?”
Apparently, he worked on a need-to-know basis, and Marlowe obviously didn’t need to know anything. But maybe it was for the best.
“Have you been paying as much attention to Lucy Price as you’ve been paying to me?”
He grinned. “Nah. With you, it was like I won the lottery. Lucky me. I get to spend a whole lot more time with you than her.”
“What does that mean?” she asked suspiciously.
“It means that you’re the last person who’s seen him alive. So I’ve decided to start at the end and pick up the trail from there.”
“I don’t know where he is. If I did, I’d have no problem telling you.”
He stared at her with those dark eyes and made her spirit uneasy, and it must’ve showed.
“I keep telling you that I’m not here for you, Marlowe. So why are you so afraid of me?”
The last thing she’d wanted was for him to see her fear. But waving around pepper spray like an idiot obviously didn’t help.
“I think that a person would be crazy not to be afraid of you.” She was being honest.
He leaned back and graciously accepted that honesty.
“What’d you and Lucy talk about?”
She shouldn’t have been surprised that he knew about Lucy coming to see her. She was, though.
“Not everything’s your business, O.P.,” she said coolly.
“But some things are,” he said, leaning forward. “You are my business. Lucy Price is my business, and anything or anyone else with any connection to Price is most definitely my business.”
There it was. That hint of menace that seeped from him into the room like smoke. It was subtle, but not invisible, and it came with a warning, a threat. He was charming when he wanted to be, and when he needed to be. And then he was something else entirely.
Open Your Eyes
ROMAN SAT ACROSS FROM LUCY at a restaurant called Belle’s, trying to focus as much of his attention as was humanly possible on his meal. Had he really signed on for this? Lucy hadn’t hired him to help solve a mystery. She’d hired him to referee a catfight. Her sole purpose in coming here was to claw out Marlowe Price’s eyes over some conniving asshole who didn’t deserve either one of them.
“I’ll be leaving in the morning,” he finally said.
Roman had made arrangements to rent a car in town and drive back to Dallas on his own.
“I wish you wouldn’t.”
“There’s nothing for me to do here, Lucy. The police are investigating a murder, and even they don’t have anything to go on, not even a body that they can positively identify.” The woman was disappointed, but she was wasting good money on a hopeless cause. “You want me to do what? Find Ed Price? Confirm that that’s his body they found in that car? You can listen for that on the evening news, and as far as me finding him, hell. I wouldn’t even know where to start.”
“With her, Roman,” Lucy argued.
He shook his head in disgust. “She doesn’t know where he is.”
“How do you know? You didn’t even ask her.”
“How could I when you were busy accusing her of stealing your husband?” he said, using air quotes around your husband for emphasis.
“I didn’t mean to do that,” she said, frustrated, tossing her napkin on the table. “Ed certainly doesn’t deserve that kind of consideration.”
“Well, regardless,” he said, wiping his mouth and tossing his napkin on the table, too, “after seeing what happened to her on the news last night, I doubt she’ll be talking to anybody from this point on.”
“That was insane,” Lucy said reflectively. “I can’t imagine … that whole mob-mentality thing was crazy to watch.”
He wanted to believe that she really was just that naïve because the truth was ugly.
“Do you think she killed him, Roman?”
He thought about it before just blurting out an answer. “Too many things just don’t add up to me to point a finger at her,” he explained. “Like, how would she get a man out there by herself? And how’d she get back home if they drove out there in that car and she set it on fire?”
“You don’t think the police have thought about those things?”
He shrugged. “I hope they have. It’d be unfortunate for her if they’ve chosen to ignore the obvious just to get a scapegoat, but it happens.”
“So just as a hypothetical, if that’s not Ed they found in that car, who could it be?”
He stared back at her. “I have no idea, Lucy. All I know about this case is what you’ve told me and what I’ve read. All of Ed’s secrets disappeared with him.”
“I still think that he could’ve left a few with her.”
He found her expression and her tone interesting. “Like what?”
“I don’t know,” she said, quickly recovering. “I’m just thinking out loud.”
Was she? From their first meeting, Roman had always believed that Lucy was reluctant to tell him everything that she knew about her husband. It was that old gut instinct that h
e’d always had and relied upon that made him feel that way.
“What are you really looking for, Lucy? And don’t tell me that you want to find out the truth about your husband’s death or whatever. I think it’s more than that.”
Before she could answer, Roman turned his attention to the door and immediately recognized the man who’d pulled Marlowe from that mob yesterday outside of the police station coming into the restaurant and taking a seat at the bar. The dude was huge, at least six four, two forty, maybe two fifty, dark, and bald. A man like him stood out in a crowd without even trying.
“Welcome back,” the woman behind the counter said, wiping off the space in front of him and putting down a place setting.
Roman noticed that she wouldn’t look him in the eyes. She looked guarded.
“You need a menu?”
He shook his head. “Nah. I’ll take the special. And a beer.”
“He was on television,” Lucy whispered. “On the news with Marlowe.”
Moments later, he slowly turned and looked over his shoulder right at Roman and Lucy. That good old intuition of Roman’s kicked in, and he had a strong feeling that the man’s being here wasn’t a coincidence.
Their waitress brought the check. Roman paid, and the two of them left, but once outside, he searched the nearly empty lot for the black sedan that he’d seen that guy inside drive Marlowe away in. Roman pulled out his cell phone and took a picture of the plate. Illinois.
“What are you doing that for?”
“Just curious,” he said casually.
“You’re not just curious, and since I’m still paying you, I’d like to know what’s going on.”
He looked at her and sighed. Lucy stubbornly folded her arms across her chest.
“I want to know who he is and what he is to her.”
“Why would it matter?” Lucy curled one corner of her red-stained lips, and he surprised himself and almost smiled at the gesture, thinking that it was … cute.
Roman quickly shook it off. He wasn’t here for cute. “If Marlowe did kill that guy in the car, she would’ve needed help.”
Lucy’s eyes suddenly widened.
“There’s no way she could’ve done it by herself,” he concluded.
A big, strong dude like that could easily manhandle the Ed Prices of the world. Marlowe was a lovely woman, so yeah. Finally, he could begin to make sense of a situation that had stumped him from the beginning.
* * *
Back at the hotel, Roman logged on to his laptop and plugged in the tag number of the sedan. Lucy refused to go back to her room and sat on the bed behind him while he pulled up the information.
He almost laughed when he saw it. “It’s registered to a corporation. Acme LLC in Michigan.”
“Acme? What does that stand for?”
“Not a damn thing,” he muttered. “Remember those old Road Runner cartoons?” he asked, turning to her.
She nodded.
“Acme? They delivered the bombs and the anvils and all that crap that that coyote used to try and catch that Road Runner.”
Lucy smirked. “This is a joke. Right?”
He nodded. “On us.” Roman tried doing a search on Acme LLC in Michigan and came up empty.
She was disappointed, and it showed. “So it’s a dead end?”
“Are you kidding?” he asked, excited about something for the first time in a long time. “It’s a clue, Lucy.” He laughed unexpectedly.
“To what?”
“I have no idea. But that big sonofabitch doesn’t want anyone to know who he is, which means he’s hiding something, or the two of them are. I’d like to know what.”
Real private investigator work was boring as hell. All of a sudden now, this case had some legs underneath it. There was a real mystery here and a possible scenario playing out in his head, damn near to music. Who’s to say that Marlowe Price didn’t have a lover and that he didn’t kill Ed Price for her? Stranger love triangles had happened.
“Does this mean you’re not leaving in the morning?” She crossed one of those long legs over the other. Roman didn’t think she’d meant it to be seductive, but it sure looked that way to him.
He hadn’t been with a woman in ages, and he missed them, the feel of them, the smell, the taste. Women were traps, though, and the last thing he needed right now was for an anvil to fall on his head.
“This means I’ll probably stay a while longer. See where this leads.”
She swept a tuft of hair back behind her ear, uncrossed her legs, and stood up to leave. “Good.”
He immediately got up and walked her to the door.
“Then I’ll see you in the morning.” She smiled. “I’ll bring you a bagel.”
Hungry Work
Obsession:
1. the domination of one’s thoughts or feelings by a persistent idea, image, desire, etc.
2. the idea, image, desire, feeling, etc., itself.
3. the state of being obsessed.
4. the act of obsessing.
OBSESSION. IS THAT WHAT she was?
Obsessing. Is that what he was doing?
Processing.
The thing about hanging out in a town like this was that there wasn’t shit to do while he waited. Not having shit to do meant having too much time on his hands. Having too much idle time forced him to consider the kinds of things a man in his line of work had no business considering.
Marlowe Price should’ve been just a piece of a complicated puzzle that would ultimately lead him to her husband. She should’ve just been a nice bonus, pretty ass, tasty ass, delicious, that he should’ve been able to fuck, come, zip up his pants, and walk away from. But for the last two days, he’d hardly been able to think about anyone or anything else. That bothered him. He wasn’t here for her. How many times did he have to remind himself of that?
Plato had come here with a simple enough agenda. Find Ed Price, take care of the problem, and leave, but since he’d taken her to that hotel yesterday, he couldn’t get the image of Marlowe, knowing that she was naked under his T-shirt, out of his mind. Tantalizing creamy, thick thighs particularly left an impression on him. Marlowe was most definitely an obsession, but she was absolutely not letting him get close enough to sample any part of her.
Sex was sex was sex. It was what it always was and what it would always be. It was procreation and pleasure. The procreation part he’d nixed a long time ago. But he still held on to his conviction for the pleasure part. With her, though, he found himself fixated on time, on savoring that woman in slow, delicious motion. He imagined that torturous kind of lovemaking, pulling nonstop orgasms from her until the sheets were soaked and she begged him to stop and yet held on to him as if her life depended on him.
Plato abruptly closed the door on his fantasies and adjusted his rock-hard cock straining against his jeans.
Pleasure? Yes. Connection? What kind? Physical. Yes. Emotional? What did that even look like? What would it feel like? Emotions were catalysts for disaster. They made the water dirty, the mind open and susceptible to dust and debris. Twenty-plus years of doing this kind of work had taught him that with emotion came a kind of professional impotence. He didn’t have the luxury of feelings like empathy, sympathy, love, or consideration because they could get him killed. Nothing was personal to a man like Plato. Not even death.
* * *
Ed Price wasn’t dead, and he wasn’t far enough away. Instinct told Plato that, and he trusted it because instinct had saved his ass and earned him one hell of a good living. The air was foul because cowardly mother fuckers like him left an odor. And now, Plato wasn’t the only one following Price’s trail. Marlowe had some very valid reasons for finding the man. A living, breathing Price would save her life. Lucy Price, on the other hand, was the fly in his Kool-Aid. What would finding him alive do for her? She could’ve just loved him. She could’ve just wanted her husband back, despite learning that he had married another woman. Right?
* * *
Plato had no idea what the hell this woman put into these steaks, but he had become addicted and went into withdrawals if he went longer than twelve hours without one. The attractive couple sitting at a table behind him got up and left not long after he’d arrived. Lucille Price he’d recognized. Her gentlemen friend he did not. He wasn’t worried, though.
“Here you go,” the nervous woman said, setting his order down in front of him. “Can I get you anything else?”
She never could look him in the eyes for some reason, and he was starting to wonder if he should be eating her food at all. He didn’t trust people who didn’t make eye contact.
“Steak sauce,” he told her.
She forced a smile. “Oh, I’m sorry. I’ll be right back.”
Plato’s phone vibrated in his pocket, alerting him to an incoming text message.
Roman Medlock, private investigator.
Mrs. Price’s boyfriend was a PI. Interesting.
“Here you go,” the woman said, damn near dropping the bottle of steak sauce on the counter. “I’m so sorry.”
“What’s wrong?” he finally asked impatiently, startling the woman.
For the first time since he’d been coming here, she looked at him. “I’m sorry?”
“You don’t like the way I look? Sound? Smell? What?” Plato challenged.
The woman stared at him.
“You’ve got me feeling some kind of way, and not a good one. Have I done something to you?” he asked.
He waited. She took a deep breath and finally spoke up.
“You’re Marlowe’s devil.”
She looked and sounded absolutely relieved that she’d finally gotten that nonsense off her chest.
He stared blankly at the woman like she’d just spoken to him in Mandarin.
“I’m her cousin, Belle,” she said nervously, as if, now that she’d actually made eye contact with him and referred to him as the devil, she was now obligated to volunteer information. “She told Shou Shou, our aunt, about you.”
“Shou what?”
“Said you were the one coming for her. She told us that even before you got here.”
Marlowe knew he was coming? How was that possible?
