by Lucy Score
This time Nick couldn’t tell if it was the truth. “You sure?” he pushed.
“Look, Nicky. I got a lot of businesses to oversee. A lot of balls in the air. Dickie Frick was a gnat. An ant. A little, bitty, baby bacterium. I just need you to prove that I didn’t whack him.” He reached into his jacket pocket, and Nick blinked at the wad of cash he produced. “A retainer for your services,” Tony said.
Nick’s door opened, and Tall gestured for him to get out.
“I’ll be in touch, Nicky. Make this right, and you can expect a very generous wedding gift.”
Nick watched the Escalade drive off, then glanced down at the pile of cash in his hand and wondered if he’d just fucked up and how badly. He heard a thud and looked up to see Burt’s dog face smushed against the window of his apartment.
Never a dull moment.
36
9:46 a.m., Thursday, July 2
Riley’s working life felt like one never-ending dull moment. She was suffocating within the gray walls of SHART.
“Let’s circle back to that when we can get our arms around what’s really in our wheelhouse,” the mid-level manager was saying to the project coordinator. Seven team members were gathered around the conference table in the coffin room with the express purpose of throwing corporate jargon in each other’s faces.
“I’d like to take this opportunity to remind everyone that we’ve made the switch to the new timesheets,” a second mid-level manager said, holding up one of the new paper timesheets. “Employees will now be required to bill their time in five-minute increments. We expect everyone to be billing a minimum of seven hours and forty-five minutes a day.”
Riley experienced something like an out-of-body experience when she raised her hand. “What about bathroom breaks?”
Pre-Nick Riley would never have spoken up in a meeting, let alone done so passive-aggressively.
The manager gave her a tight smile. “We’re anticipating that our employees will be more mindful of the amount of time they spend not working on essential client tasks.”
“Look—” Leon Tuffley Jr. rose and made a grab for the timesheet with one hand and his crotch with the other. “We ain’t asking you for much, for Chrissakes. Just a full day of billable hours every damn day. So stay off the internet and the shitter, and you won’t have any problems.”
Riley felt itchy and irritated. Like she was allergic to just sitting here in this room. She thought about running from the law with Mrs. Penny last night. And about how she could have had sex with a really hot naked guy this morning and then taken Burt for a swim in the river. But instead she’d shown up here for a measly paycheck and crappy health insurance.
“The next item on the agenda is on-time arrivals. Donna is asking that everyone arrive five minutes early so she can lock the side door promptly at eight a.m. rather than waiting until 8:05. And before anyone asks—” The manager gave Riley a steely look “—no, you won’t be paid for the extra five minutes.”
It took all of her willpower not to run screaming out the conference room door.
The rest of the meeting was survived by planning out which mini bottles of liquor she’d start squirreling away in her desk. Vodka for mornings. Whiskey for lunch hours. Tequila for afternoons.
She returned to her desk. Bud the designer was asleep in his chair. Only seven more hours before she could leave. If she didn’t work on the first floor and she weren’t a new dog mom, she’d think seriously about jumping out of a window.
Time for some non-billable fun. She logged on to Channel 50’s social media and cued up the morning newscast. She smirked when Griffin gave a report on last night’s vigilante activity.
“Several dogs were recovered from the neighborhood and remanded to the Harrisburg Humane Society,” Griffin told the camera in his modulated anchorman voice. “Meanwhile, police are asking anyone with information on the situation to contact them. Over to the beautiful Bella Goodshine for the weather.”
Riley rolled her eyes.
The camera cut to the future Mrs. Gentry, who was poured into a baby pink dress with a deep scoop neck. She was holding a fluffy white dog that looked as though it were about to drown in the woman’s abundant cleavage. There was something vaguely familiar about the dog, and Riley realized it was one of the ones that had sprinted past her in the alley last night.
“Thank you, sweetie pie,” she chirped. “If anyone is ready to open their homes to a rescue dog, the Humane Society needs your help. Isn’t that right, baby?” she crooned to the dog.
Riley could hear the mid-state audience swooning at the adorableness and tried not to barf in her desk drawer.
“Help me! Help me!” Bella squeaked, waving the dog’s front paw. “Pwease adopt me, Gwiffin!”
Riley choked on her lukewarm coffee. If there was one thing Griffin Gentry hated more than running out of his favorite bronzer, it was dogs. All dogs. He hated dog hair and dog poop. He couldn’t stand barking. Or the smell of puppy breath. The man had once screamed at an entire litter of golden retriever puppies to “Quit whining!” when the sound woman kept picking them up on the audio playback.
They’d all had to pretend it was a joke to smooth things over with the rescue.
“Does Gwiffin want to bwing me home?” Bella baby-talked, waving puppy paws in the man’s direction.
He laughed nervously when the camera swung back in his direction. Riley noted the sheen of sweat popping up on his forehead, making his foundation run. “Ha ha! We’ll have to discuss that later,” he said with a forced smile.
“Oh, but don’t you want to be my daddy?” Bella approached, holding the dog out at arm’s length. At this point, Riley wasn’t sure if Bella was asking that question as the dog or as herself.
“Looks like the Channel 50 family is getting bigger, folks,” Griffin’s co-anchor announced.
Griffin looked like he was going to vomit when Bella held the dog up to his face. He scooted his chair back from the desk. The video ended abruptly, and Riley imagined it was because he’d toppled over backward.
She was feeling pretty damn entertained. Until she looked at the stack of job jackets on her desk. God, this job sucked.
Maybe it was the moonlighting or playing fake fiancée or her latest stint as a getaway driver, but SHART had gone from sufferable to soul-destroying.
The clock on the wall behind her ticked interminably toward noon. Her cubicle mate was awake now and snorting at the YouTube video of bikinied blondes on trampolines. Two supervisors walked by discussing the afternoon staff meeting.
The intercom system clicked on. “Whoever thinks it’s acceptable to turn your timesheet in with illegible handwriting will not be paid for hours that can’t be read,” Jan from accounting announced. Jan was the kind of person you invited to a party if you wanted it to break up early.
Once again, the intercom system beeped. “If someone has a problem with their reading comprehension, perhaps they should personally seek out the employee and ask the question rather than publicly shaming them.” It was the fresh-out-of-college vegetarian social justice warrior in project management. Jan was probably going to dock his pay now, Riley thought.
She was surrounded by miserable, bored people. And it was sucking the life out of her.
She still had over an hour before lunch, and she felt like there was a good chance she might die if she waited that long. Especially if she dug into the stack of work that included such exciting projects as a bank’s annual report and seven ads for a sleazebag used car dealer whose wife just demanded bigger breast implants.
Hmm. Maybe she could take a few minutes and practice some of her psychic stuff?
She glanced around, making sure no one was paying attention to her, before stuffing earbuds in her ears. She cued up one of Wander’s soothing meditation mixes and closed her eyes.
It took her a few tries before she swooped into the cotton candy cloud place. But she made it and all by herself too.
It was nice here. Warm and
happy. She felt a nudge on her consciousness. Not exactly a something, but also not a nothing.
“So, hey. It’s me, Riley. Just practicing here.”
She felt the nudge again and wondered if that was their way of saying, “What the hell do you want?”
What did she want? She wanted to find out who killed Dickie and stay out of jail, but so far those questions weren’t resulting in clear answers. Debating for a moment, it popped into her mind almost unbidden. Beth. The name had surfaced during Nick and Detective Weber’s last bro fight, and neither one had answered the question.
It wasn’t like she was prying into Nick’s mind. Asking her spirit guides was just an exercise.
“Okay, guides. Who’s Beth?”
The clouds thickened, then darkened before they began to thin again.
Detective Weber and Nick appeared through the mists in happier, younger times. There was a young woman with long, dark hair and bright pink lips. Short, curvy. Bright and happy. Her arms were wrapped around Nick, grinning up at him. “I thought I told you to keep your hands off her,” Vision Weber said to Vision Nick.
Suddenly, Vision Beth disappeared. Poof. Like she’d never been there.
Riley recoiled from the vision so fast she felt like she was having one of those falling dreams. The mists and clouds vanished, and when she reached out to steady herself, she knocked over her water bottle.
Her heart was pounding, and she was sweating. She collapsed back against her chair and tried to catch her breath.
What the hell had she just seen?
37
10:10 a.m., Thursday, July 2
After Fat Tony left, Nick returned to his apartment. The lingering odor told him that Burt was probably going to need a few more meals of organic kibble before his biome regulated itself.
He opened the windows, changed into his work uniform of jeans and a clean t-shirt, and put the dog on his new leash. Together they headed down the back stairs.
Nick wasn’t buying the Fat Tony angle of the investigation. He also didn’t like the feel of the gambling theory either. Dickie and his rec league gambling was penny-ante shit, and he’d paid his debt to Fat Tony.
He wondered where Frick got the money to pay Fat Tony.
“Yo, cuz. Whoa,” Brian said when Nick walked in with Burt. “You get a dog?”
Nick shook his head and unhooked the leash. “Not exactly. Long story.” Burt trotted in to sniff at Brian’s wheelchair, his hand, and his breakfast sandwich before wandering into Nick’s office.
“Does it involve why an unmarked cruiser drove by nice and slow twice this morning already?”
Fucking Weber.
“It factors.” Nick poured himself a cup of coffee from Brian’s fancy machine. His third of the day already.
“Well, table the story. Because I’ve got updates.” His cousin’s fingers flew over the keyboard in nerd fluency. Brian turned the screen toward him. “That LLC name that Riley got us at Nature Girls?”
“Shell company?” Nick guessed.
“Yep,” Brian said, tapping a pencil on the desk. “Still digging through the layers. But I should be able to find a name eventually. In the meantime, I did find something interesting.”
“Interesting like poodles doing parkour or case-related?” Nick had fallen for Brian’s YouTube rabbit holes before.
“This time case-related. But that poodle was fucking awesome.”
“Agreed.”
Burt seemed to know they were discussing dogs and wandered back out to them. He rested his head on the arm of Brian’s wheelchair and stared at the monitor.
“Nature Girls is a shithole, right?” Brian said, giving the dog’s head a scratch.
“The shittiest.”
“Then isn’t it interesting that despite the plethora of one-star reviews on Yelp, it’s never once been cited by the health department?”
“I saw a cockroach the size of a toaster walk across the bar while I was there,” Nick mused.
“I smell something fishy in Harrisburg.”
“There’s no way that hellhole would pass a health inspection,” Nick agreed. “Can you get me the name of—”
“The inspector? Way ahead of you.” Brian held up a sticky note between his fingers.
“Nice work, keyboard warrior,” Nick commented, pocketing the name and address. It was his turn to pay someone a visit. “You mind watching the dog for me for an hour?”
Walter F. Henry was a sweater. Despite the frigid air circulating in the drab downtown office building, the pit stains continued to grow on his jaundice yellow short-sleeved button-down. He had a bristly red mustache that twitched under a bulbous nose. Red patches appeared and spread on both cheeks under his wire-rimmed spectacles. He looked fifteen years older than his forty-eight.
“You look nervous, Walt,” Nick observed. The guy looked like he was going to piss his pants.
“Nervous? Ha! Who? Me?” To emphasize how not terrified he was, Walt tried to kick back in his chair and in the process knocked over his World’s Okayist Boss mug, spilling cold coffee over his desktop.
“I say Nature Girls and you go into hunted chipmunk mode,” Nick said as the man jumped to his feet.
“Ha. Chipmunk.” Walt choked out the laugh nervously. “Let me just run out and grab some paper towels.”
He hustled out the door. Nick sat and watched the coffee form a brown waterfall over the edge of the laminate.
It was a small, cramped office with about as much personality as its occupant. Files were stacked on top of ancient filing cabinets. A red rubber Fail stamp had a place of honor on the desktop. Where family photos should have been, Nick saw a framed shot of good ol’ Walt in front of a shiny red two-seater sports car. Pretty fancy car for a civil servant.
Behind the desk, Nick spotted a roll of paper towels.
Shit.
“Why do they always have to run?” He sighed. He pulled out his badge and jogged out of the office.
“Excuse me,” he said, dodging a guy pushing a cart full of files and sprinting past two aisles of cubicles.
There was a birthday celebration happening in one of the departments.
“Happy Birthday, dear Maaaaaarshaaaaaa,” the clump of staffers sang, and Nick sprinted through their midst.
“Sorry. Excuse me. Happy birthday, Marsha,” he called as he cleared the clump. The stairwell door on the other wall was just clicking shut.
“Thank you,” a cute redhead holding a piece of cake with a 50 candle in it chirped. “Want some cake?”
“Maybe later!” He shoved the door open and paused to listen. His quarry was heading down. Nick hit the stairs, which smelled like decades of old smoke had baked into the walls and industrial green stair treads.
Good ol’ Walt had a head start on him, but Nick was faster… and less asthmatic. Plus, he lived for this shit.
The health inspector had just cleared the exterior door when Nick broke out his old high school defensive tackle moves.
They both went down into a hedgerow, landing on a cushion of mulch and low-growing, spiny greenery.
“Please don’t arrest me,” Walt blubbered, his face still in the mulch.
They’d crashlanded outside a large window cut into the ugly gray stone facade. On the other side of the glass was a conference room. A full conference room. The suited spectators gaped at them. It was probably the most excitement they’d seen all month, Nick guessed.
God, he loved his job. He could have easily been one of those gray-suited hamsters shuffling from meeting to meeting in their little hamster balls, complaining about parking and supervisors. Adhering to the rigid schedules of overlords who didn’t trust them to do their jobs without being micromanaged into submission.
In comparison, he just got to chase someone out of a building and tackle them.
He held up his badge to the glass in case any of them felt like doing their civic duty and called the cops.
“I’m not arresting you, dumbass. I told you. I’m
a PI. Not a cop.”
“I panicked. I’m sorry,” Walt wailed.
Hauling Walt to his feet, he took inventory. Nick had a rip in the knee of his favorite jeans. His arm was scraped and bleeding from the stupid bush, and his t-shirt was smeared with dirt and berries from the shrub they’d smashed through. His jaw stung a bit from the health inspector’s pointy elbow. Walt was worse. He’d landed face down in a puddle left from the sprinkler system. It looked like he’d shit himself from the front. The berry stains stood out on his urine yellow shirt, making it look like he’d been slashed open by an angry bear claw.
“Come on, man,” Nick said, slapping him on the back. “I need a beer.”
Once Walt understood Nick wasn’t going to arrest him and didn’t give a rat’s ass about a health inspector on the take, he stopped sweating.
They hit up a bar on Union Deposit Road. The bartender eyed them nervously when they grabbed neighboring stools. They made quite the picture, Nick imagined. Especially Walt with his sweaty pits and berry-blood front. The missing buttons on his shirt showed off his undershirt and mid-life paunch. There was mulch in his combover.
Despite his appearance, Walt gave the guy an imperious look. “How’s that exhaust fan over the grill?” he asked ominously.
“All fixed,” the bartender said, bobbing his head and swallowing hard. While Walt studied the cocktail menu, the guy hurled his filthy bar towel to the floor and grabbed a clean one.
“I’ll take the Troegs DreamWeaver Wheat,” Nick said, pointing at a local beer.
“And I’ll have a mai tai with extra cherry syrup,” Walt decided.
A server cracking gum and playing with a head of wild, curly hair wandered up and leaned against the bar. “Yo, what’s the special today?” she asked the bartender.
He looked up from where he was scrubbing the register screen and must have given her the death glare while nodding not-so-subtly in their direction.