The door to Trevor’s room was open, the insides neat as a pin. There was no clutter, not even on his desk, and you’d be able to bounce a coin from his bed.
“That’s Marines for you,” I noted, leading Jackson in. I remembered a different kind of room back from our childhood, so messy you could barely walk in. Well, my room had been messy too—once I didn’t have to share it with Tessa anymore after Travis moved from home. Until then, Tessa had made sure I kept my side as clean as she did hers.
Jackson smiled. “When I resigned from active service I kept my apartment messy for months just because I could.”
“I didn’t know you were in the military.”
Although I’d suspected as much. I imagined he must have been a sniper, as he had this amazing ability to withdraw into himself when he was on a stakeout. And he’d dropped the murder suspect about to kill me with one precise shot without hesitation—and recovered mentally from it fairly fast too.
He leaned against the doorjamb. “I was a jarhead too. My uncle thought it was the only way to straighten me out. He was right.”
I had no recollection of him as a teenager, even though he’d been a friend of Travis’—they were eight years older than me, and I hadn’t cared about the big boys that always filled the house—but both he and Travis had given to understand that Jackson hadn’t exactly been a nice boy.
“You definitely turned out fine.”
I was rewarded with a smug smile.
I went to Trevor’s closet and took out a white T-shirt from a flawless pile. Everything in the closet was perfectly organized, and I found the insight into his mind slightly disturbing. I closed the door and was met with the sight of Jackson removing his shirt.
Whoo boy…
I’d caught a glimpse of his torso through a sweaty T-shirt once, but nothing prepared me to his bare chest: fine, lean muscles hinting at a six-pack should he flex them, and a light dusting of black hair on his wide upper chest.
There was also a star-shaped scar on his right shoulder, but it spoke volumes about the beauty of his chest that it wasn’t the first thing I noticed.
“Can I get the T-shirt?”
I came to my surroundings to find Jackson holding out his hand for the shirt. “Sure, sure…”
He took the T-shirt from me and pulled it over his head. I tried to swallow, but my mouth had gone so dry it felt like I was trying to force my own tongue down my throat. His chest should be illegal.
“Come on. I have time to eat before I go.”
“Fearing the small portions?” I managed to say as I followed him downstairs, happy for the change of topic.
“I don’t want to embarrass myself by wolfing the food down.”
“Just remember to buy a new shirt before your date.”
“I’ll go in this T-shirt or I won’t go at all.”
I sighed. “At least it’s not black.”
We wandered into the kitchen, where Dad had dinner ready.
“This is a nice surprise,” he said, smiling warmly. He was another tall, dark, and handsome in my life, even if his hair had turned gray already. He’d retired from the NYPD a couple of years ago on a full pension, and had since amused himself by learning to cook—and teaching me to pick locks. Which I’d totally aced.
“Difficult day?” he quizzed, looking at our clothes. Neither of us had changed our jeans that were still white, even though we’d tried to dust them before we came in.
“Sort of,” I sighed. I started to set the table. “We were looking for missing girls and ended up in the middle of a drug bust.”
“Is that illegal substance on your clothes?”
“I hope not, because Mom’s busy vacuuming it off our clothes. But it’s most likely cement.”
“Either way she’ll end up blocking the filter,” Dad noted with a frown. “Remind me to buy a new one. So what’s with the hair?” He looked more curious than amused, so I shrugged.
“I needed the change.”
“It’s pretty.”
“Thanks,” I smiled. I could always trust Dad to say nice things.
Mom returned with Jackson’s blazer, looking triumphant. “Black again.”
“Thank you, Mrs. Hayes,” Jackson said with a warm smile. “I never would’ve thought to vacuum it.”
“Just remember to dust those jeans and shirt really well before you put them in the wash or they’ll turn into concrete.”
Trevor came home just as we were about to sit at the table. He was a homicide detective in the 70th Precinct nearby, and enjoyed the job. He took after Mom with his coloring—strawberry blond hair and green eyes—and with his tall, muscular body that had been sturdier than Dad’s, Travis’s, and Tessa’s leaner forms even before he started working out regularly. Of all my siblings, he was most like me—apart from the compulsive neatness, that is—and now that I was a P.I., we’d become even closer.
He took one look at me and started laughing. “You liked Mom’s car so much you had to dye your hair to match?” he asked when he finally could talk.
“I like the hair,” Mother said, giving him a reproachful look. “It’s as if real Tracy has finally emerged.”
Her words stunned me with their clarity. For as long as I could remember I’d dyed my hair to match Tessa’s, partly because I liked the color, partly because I wanted to look like her—a futile wish, as she was an almost six-foot-tall supermodel, and I was a five-foot-six plain Jane. And while I hadn’t chosen this color, it did look like how I felt inside.
“Thank you, Mother. I couldn’t have said it better myself.”
She smiled. “You’ve always been the wild-one.”
That was definitely true, at least if you compared me to Travis and Tessa.
Trevor shook his head. “At least it’s easier to spot you in a crowd. But wear a hat when you’re tailing someone,” he added with a grin. I feared he was right. The hair was noticeable.
Jackson took his leave right after dinner. “Don’t forget, we’re going running tomorrow morning,” he said as I walked him to the door. I’d kind of hoped he’d forgotten, but no such luck.
“I’m keeping my fingers crossed that your date wears you out tonight.”
A slow smile spread on his face. “I’d still be good for a morning jog.”
Whoo boy.
Chapter Nine
I borrowed Mom’s car when I left. Driving in Brooklyn traffic aggravated me—though it would make it easier for me to conduct my own search for the girls—but I wanted to get comfortably to my morning jog with Jackson the next day. No need to make the ordeal more difficult than it already was by taking a bus to Marine Park, where he lived.
Even in the evening light, one thing was clear: the color of the car really was much like my new hair, only with a metal sheen. We’d be impossible to tell apart in daylight.
My parents encouraged me to take Mom’s car, but I’d borrowed it only a couple of times the past month. And that mostly because I’d had stitches in my knee and it had been difficult to get around with the crutches Tessa had made me use. She was an ER doctor and happened to be the one who patched me up. Twice. I’d managed to tear open the first set of stitches when I tried to avoid being shot.
I hadn’t complained about the stitches, or the crutches—much. At least I’d survived the ordeal without bullet holes.
I was more comfortable with driving than when I’d first borrowed the car, so I took the shortest route home, even though it meant I had to drive down Ocean Parkway, a multi-lane street cutting through Brooklyn from north to south. Even with the heavy traffic it was better than the detour that would’ve brought me close to Scott’s Irish bar on 18th Avenue.
It wasn’t solely that I didn’t want to run into him. It bugged me that he had his own business, even if he’d married for it—or perhaps because he had married for it. There was no saying what I would’ve done if I’d spotted him exiting the bar. Last time, I’d tailed him to his home through southern Brooklyn, and even though he hadn�
�t caught me, Jackson had, to my eternal embarrassment.
I reached my building at the corner of Ocean and J, a fairly nice seven story with its own janitor and rent stabilized apartments, without causing any traffic accidents—yay—and popped into the grocery store down the street before heading to my fifth floor apartment.
The moment I stepped out of the elevator I spotted Jarod Fitzpatrick, my housemate, sitting on the hallway floor. It wasn’t the first time—he tended to forget his keys—but the relieved look on his face when he saw me revealed there was more than a just forgotten key in play here.
“Finally. I’ve waited for, like, an hour or something,” he said, getting up.
He was tall and lanky, and—though I’d tried my best to feed him—painfully thin. The slim fit jeans he wore hung lose from his hips, and I swear I could see ribs through his shirt. He was wearing a button-up today, so I deduced he’d been at work and not at the college. T-shirts were good enough for the latter.
He was twenty-one, but a genius, so by day he was a grad student in computer science at Brooklyn College nearby, and during most evenings and weekends he worked at a private security company preventing cyber threats.
Actually, he tended to skip college in favor for work too. He got bored in college.
“You should’ve called. I’d have been home earlier.”
I gave my grocery bags to him and took out the key from my messenger bag. Then I inhaled slowly to fortify myself before unlocking the door.
We peeked in. The apartment was dark and empty and we sighed in simultaneous relief, though, come to think of it, it shouldn’t have come as a surprise to Jarod.
“Didn’t you even check if I was home?”
Jarod shook his head, slightly bashful. “I didn’t want to risk it. I figured you’d come for me sooner or later. It wasn’t so bad in the hallway. I got plenty of things done.” He carried the groceries into the kitchen and we emptied the bags.
“Have you eaten?”
“Yeah, I popped back out when I realized I didn’t have the key.”
The apartment had two bedrooms—one for me and one for Jarod—a nice bathroom, and a kitchen-living room combo that was decorated with secondhand furniture from the 70s. Everything was colorful, cozy, and easy to maintain. It was perfect for two people who didn’t spend all that much time together, and when we did we mostly ate and watched TV.
However, a month ago a snake had slithered into our proverbial paradise: Jessica, my former roommate. She wasn’t an obvious snake. She and I had shared the apartment for three years without great problems until she’d moved in with her boyfriend, Harris, at the beginning of the summer. But they hadn’t suited each other after all, or some such shit, and she’d shown up at our door with a suitcase and declared she was moving back in.
Only, I had Jarod living in her former room.
I’d promised she could sleep on the sofa for a couple of nights until she found another place, and she hadn’t taken it well.
“I have a greater right to that room than he has,” she’d said. She was my age, small and fashionably thin, with blond hair and a perky attitude that served her well in her job as a waitress. The attitude made it difficult to live with her now.
I’d tried to reason with her. “You moved away. I couldn’t pay the rent alone. Surely you didn’t think I’d leave the room empty just in case things didn’t work out between you and Harris?”
“Can’t he sleep on the sofa?” She’d made a contemptuous gesture towards Jarod that I hadn’t taken well. I was a tad overprotective of him, but I couldn’t help it. He looked like a kicked puppy.
I’d seen Jarod was prepared to move on the couch just to avoid strife, but I’d shaken my head. “He’s paid two months in advance for the room. It’s his.”
“But it’s my bed!”
That was true. She’d left some of her furniture behind when she moved away, because Harris had already had everything they needed. “You said they were mine to do with whatever I wanted.”
I don’t know why I’d been so adamant, especially since I’d usually just given in to Jessica’s demands when we lived together. And only that day I’d rued my lack of girlfriends. I’d always worked with women my age, so there’d been plenty of opportunities for sharing and gossiping, and at home I’d had Jessica. Then in short order I’d lost both my roommate and my job as a waitress, and consequently the female friends too.
But I’d been miffed when Jessica had moved away without warning, leaving me to pay the rent alone. And I’d been almost killed the previous day, and in pain from the wound in my knee, and hadn’t been in the best of moods to receive an uninvited houseguest. So I hadn’t budged, and Jessica had ended up sleeping on the couch.
But the couple of nights had turned into a week, then another week, and another, and she hadn’t shown any signs of leaving. She hadn’t been a graceful guest either. She needed to go to bed early to rise early for her job at the café she worked in, so Jarod and I weren’t able to watch TV. She hogged the bathroom in the mornings—she’d done that when we were roommates too—and every once in a while she tried to talk Jarod into moving out.
But I didn’t want Jarod to go away and I didn’t want Jessica back. And not merely out of principle, or because I liked Jarod better than her—which I actually did. My lease had a clause that stipulated that my landlord had a right to renegotiate the rent if the tenants changed, and he wanted to raise the rent by five hundred dollars. Travis had managed to negotiate the old terms for us after Jarod moved in, but it wouldn’t happen again. I couldn’t afford the change, and neither could Jessica.
Not that she believed me. I’d had to call in Travis to explain it to her. It had finally made her look for a new place, but she hadn’t found one yet.
Feeling giddy for having the place to ourselves for once, Jarod and I settled on the couch to watch TV. There wasn’t even anything on that we liked, but we watched it anyway, though we mostly chatted about the day we’d had. I won with my drug bust story.
Jessica came home late and slumped on the other end of the couch, looking cross. “I’ve had a long day and I need to get up early. Switch that off.”
Jarod and I got up and headed to our rooms without protest. She wouldn’t listen anyway, so why waste our breaths. At the door to my room I turned back to Jessica.
“Any luck with the new apartment?”
“Maybe.”
I had to settle with that.
I was already in my PJs, ready to go to bed, when there was a knock on my door and Jarod came in carrying a laptop. We settled on my bed, leaning against the wall with pillows behind our backs, the laptop in front of us, and like every evening since Jessica had come, watched a movie from the laptop, just the two of us—I didn’t even like the movie he’d chosen, but I watched it anyway. And like every night I made him a promise I wouldn’t be able to keep.
“I’ll make her move away tomorrow.”
Usually Jarod just nodded, like he believed me, but not tonight. “Maybe I should start looking for a new place,” he suggested. “I’d be able to afford it better.”
For all that I hadn’t wanted him as my roommate when he first moved in—he’d been dirty and smelled of weed—his capitulation upset me now.
“No. I like you here.”
And I did. He didn’t hog the bathroom, he bought his share of takeout food, and he usually liked the same movies I did. He even cleaned up occasionally.
“If she hasn’t found a place by the end of the week, I’ll ask Travis. He’ll know what to do.” And if that didn’t help, I’d call Trevor. He’d get rid of her in no time.
Chapter Ten
I was late leaving to meet Jackson the next morning. Jarod and I had watched the movie later than we’d meant, plus I’d lost my routine of getting up early since I’d started working for Jackson, so I’d had trouble getting up at six. Only my next door neighbor, Mrs. Pasternak, banging at the wall from her apartment had made me switch off the alarm and
get up.
Then Jessica had taken her sweet time to get out of the bathroom. When it was finally my turn, my new hair had proven troublesome. It was too short for a ponytail now, but I’d wanted to fix it so it wouldn’t brush my face when I ran. I ended up using about a million hairpins, doubling the weight of my head. Felt like it, anyway.
But the worst obstacle had been my new running pants.
When I’d first decided to start running a month ago, I’d let a salesman talk me into buying knee-length running shorts, which I’d consequently worn only once before I cut my knee and had to stop exercising. But it was almost November and the weather was too cold for the shorts now, so when Jackson told me we’d start running together again, I’d made another trip to the sports store and returned home as the new owner of full-length Lycra running pants. I don’t know what happened there. I’d meant to buy perfectly normal sweatpants, under which you could hide anything. Like my thighs.
If the shorts had been difficult to put on, the pants were downright impossible, they were so tight. They hugged my legs like a second skin, and while they did push my feminine—ahem—form up nicely, I wasn’t entirely ready to let the world see that much of me. Anticipating the result, I’d also bought a light running jacket that covered my bottom and gave an illusion of modesty. It would have to do.
Jackson lived in Marine Park, a fifteen minute drive to southwest away, near the park itself in a nice semi he’d inherited from his uncle—the same uncle he’d inherited the agency from. Marine Park, the park, was a low stretch of grassland and saltwater marsh by Jamaica Bay, with a golf course and a cricket field—weird, I know, but the Asian population was booming in Brooklyn, hence the popularity of the game—and some paths for running too. It was actually the closest park suitable for running for me as well, so we’d decided I’d come here with him. Besides, left on my own, I wouldn’t have got out of bed for this.
He came out of his house dressed in much more comfortable jogging gear, gray sweats with a Marines logo on the shirt, just as I pulled over outside. He looked all too cheerful and awake for such an early hour.
Tracy Hayes, P.I. to the Rescue (P.I. Tracy Hayes 3) Page 5
