by A. J. Downey
Eating Asphalt
Sacred Hearts PNW Chapter - Book V
A.J. Downey
Contents
BOOK FIVE
COPYRIGHT
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Epilogue
Also by A.J. Downey
About A.J. Downey
Published 2021 by Second Circle Press
Text Copyright © 2021 A.J. Downey
All Rights Reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by an electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
This is a work of fiction. The names, characters, businesses, places, events, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner and are not to be construed as real except where noted and authorized. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events are purely coincidental. Any trademarks, service marks, product names, or names featured are assumed to be the property of their respective owners, and are used only for reference. There is no implied endorsement if any of these terms are used.
The author acknowledges the trademarked status and trademark owners of various products referenced in this work, which have been used without permission. The publication/use of these trademarks is not authorized, associated with or sponsored by the trademark owners.
Editing & book design by Maggie Kern @ Ms.K Edits
Cover art by Dar Albert at Wicked Smart Designs
Dedication
To Carrie, I couldn’t do any of this without you. Thank you for being my bestie – even from so many miles away. Love you lots.
1
Glass Jaw…
“Gah! Damnit!” Mace cried, and I frowned, looking up from my call with one of my suppliers.
“Alright now, thanks,” I said and hung up the phone. I called out from the kitchen down the basement stairs, “What’s the problem?”
Laughter filtered up, and I rolled my eyes.
“Quit fuckin’ around down there and get it done!” I yelled. “The home buyer’s coming today, and I don’t need you all making us look like a bunch of fucking jackasses!”
We were working in the basement of a house built in the 1940s. It was a multi-tier repair, some foundational shit, new sump pump installation, mold removal – that sort of thing. The current homeowner? What a fucking bitch. I hoped the buyer, who was coming in from across the country, would be easier to deal with since the repairs were going to overlap and go past closing, which was supposed to be tomorrow.
I mean, honestly – who the fuck bought a house sight unseen from across the fuckin’ country like that?
“Hey, boss!” Mace called. “Come and look at this and tell me what you want me to do.”
“Fuck,” I muttered and went down the stairs into the unfinished basement. That wasn’t good. That was never good.
I went down to deal with whatever bullshit had come up and sighed.
“This cheap-ass white-trash fucking cunt ain’t gonna pay for it,” I said, looking up under the fireplace at the severely rotted wood. It wasn’t too bad of a repair, not bad at all, but I wasn’t about to do any more shit for this woman.
“What do you think?” Mace asked. “Point it out to the buyer after closing and go from there?”
“Yeah, maybe.” I rubbed my chin and closed one eye, looking up at the flaking dry rot. The whole corner of the beam was starting to come apart.
“Man,” Mace said, shaking his head. “I don’t know what show this bitch watched to make her think flipping houses was a good idea, but she watched the wrong fucking one.”
I barked a laugh and said, “Who you telling?” Finally, I sighed and said, “Let me look at this inspection report again. The buyer’s inspector was really fuckin’ thorough – I don’t see how he could have missed this.”
“Yeah.” Mace nodded.
It was a really odd situation, this whole job. The buyer’s agent had reached out to me for one – which that almost never happened and after meeting the current homeowner, I understood why.
She wasn’t interested in anything except getting her money, period – gold digging hooker. She’d even had the nerve to get up in my face about shit and I was fuckin’ trying to help her ass – giving her options. Not my fault she wanted top-tier everything at bargain-basement prices. That wasn’t how this fucking shit worked.
“Jared?” a female voice called from upstairs, and I frowned and looked at my watch.
“Yeah, just a sec!” I called back.
“Holly?” Mace asked.
“Sounds like it. Also sounds like she’s early.”
“Fuckin’ great.”
I huffed a laugh and slapped him on the back.
“Time to be the bearer of bad news,” I said, and turned toward the stairs. Holly was the buyer’s agent – and thus, she was on our side.
“Hey, Holly,” I said as I came up the stairs.
Holly was the quintessential bubbly blonde, buxom, too – which I could appreciate both. She blinked wide blue eyes at me and said, “Uh oh, you don’t look happy. Homeowner or…?”
That was the other thing I appreciated about Holly – she was sharp as a tack. Today, that worked against me, some.
“I don’t know yet. Give me half a second here,” I said and went over to the kitchen counter. That was the one thing they’d done right in this place – or at least on the surface. Granite countertops, gleaming white cabinetry, and brick facing for the backsplash, the kitchen looked sharp, all except for the shitty, half-assed paint job in the same unrelieved gray throughout the whole fucking house.
I swear to God, the woman selling this place was painfully fuckin’ cheap. She probably had her fuckin’ kids paint the place.
Holly waited while I flipped through the fifty-four-page printout that the fuckin’ inspector had handed her on the house. Yeah, it seemed like a lot, but a lot of it was penny-ante shit. Nothing to write home about when just about every fuckin’ house in the history of ever had the same shit going on.
I tapped the third page and said, “Gah…”
“What is it?” Holly asked, looking over my shoulder.
“Your guy was maybe a little too thorough. This is a problem that really needs to be addressed but he’s got so much penny-ante shit packed into this report it got overlooked.”
“Oh no,” Holly said, dismayed. “Show me.”
I took her down into the basement and showed her. She covered her mouth with her hand and shook her head.
“Jared, this is really bad… the negotiations have been made, and the contract has been signed. How immediate of a repair is this?” she asked.
“It’s bad,” I agreed. “It really shouldn’t wait.
”
“How much are we looking at, though?” she asked.
“There’s the good news,” I said with a sigh. “I mean, I could do it for…” I ran the calculations through my brain and shrugged. “Five-seventy-five, maybe.”
Holly let out her breath in a whoosh. “Okay, that’s not completely awful, but, Jared, I don’t know if my client can do it,” she said. She looked worried, and that was weird. Like, who was this woman that was buying that Holly was this invested?
“What’s going on, Hols?” I asked her.
“She’s a really nice lady,” Holly said with a sigh. “And she’s really been through it. Single mom, husband left her and tried to leave her cold. It’s just her and her son. She got a job out here, but they weren’t going to pay for her relocation fees. She’s spent just about everything she’s had on securing this house. Of course, we get so far into the process and the woman that owns this place—” I raised my hand to stop her.
“Say no more on that last one,” I said.
Holly looked at her watch and said, “She’s supposed to be here any minute.”
“The seller?” I asked. “Or the buyer?”
“Oh, God no! The buyer! The seller was warned away from the walk-through. My client doesn’t want to have anything to do with her. She’s been jerked around so much. Between you and me.” Holly made a cringy sort of face.
“Always, Hols. You know I take care of you,” I said, and it was true; in a business sense, I did. Always had and always would. That was why she and her real estate group were one of my best repeat customers.
“Jared, she’s really been through it, and I don’t know that she can take much more bad news,” Holly said. She genuinely sounded like her heart went out to this lady.
“Got pretty close with her, huh?” I asked.
Holly nodded. “She’s an amazing person.” She sighed, chewed her bottom lip, and drew herself up to her full height, which was only like five foot six, which to my six one, looked adorable.
“I’ll pay for it,” she said. “Out of my finder’s fee.”
“Shit, you’re fuckin’ serious,” I said, wide-eyed and surprised as fuck. I’d never seen her do anything like this.
“As a heart attack,” she said solemnly.
I sniffed. “You know, you’ve brought me a lot of business and shit over the years, but I can’t do it for free. I’ll go halves with you. Two seventy-five.” I stuck out my hand, and she smiled and shook it.
“Thank you. I’m glad you’re here,” she said, and then her eyes went wide as her phone went off in her hand. “Oh!” She looked at the screen and smiled. “She’s here!”
“Well, go on,” I said. “I got some shit to handle down here. I’ll be up in a bit.”
“Okay.”
She went up the stairs, and I put my hands on my hips and shook my head. Well, that was something.
“Hi!” I heard Holly’s enthusiastic voice at the back door and a peal of feminine laughter.
“It’s so good to finally meet you!” another woman’s voice cried.
“Hi,” a boy’s voice said, cracking – so a teenager maybe.
Hm.
I went around looking at my crew’s work, nodded and finally took myself upstairs. I had no idea where the women had got to, but there was a teen in the kitchen. Skinny, tall, hadn’t equaled out yet, but maybe, sixteen? Seventeen?
“Hi,” he said, and waved.
“Hey, how’s it going?” I asked.
He tossed back his brown hair that was getting too long in the front, bangs sweeping into his brown eyes.
“Good to be stopped,” he said with a reckless grin.
“Aw, yeah? Where you come from?” I asked.
“East coast,” he said.
“Shit, that is a long way away,” I agreed.
“Marc, who are you talking to?” a woman’s voice called from the stairwell up to the second floor. Her flats hit the hardwood floor, and she stepped around the corner into the dining room where I could see her and holy shit… she left me eating asphalt.
She was fucking gorgeous.
Long, sleek-brown hair waved around her face, which was angular and supermodel perfect. Wide brown eyes swept over me uncertainly and softened when Holly came around from behind her and introduced us.
“Oh, Cadence, this is Jared. Jared, this is our buyer, Cadence.”
“Hi.” My brain finally caught up to what I was supposed to be doing versus what I was doing, which was staring gobsmacked at the woman.
“Jared Ronald Allen Smith,” I said. She hesitantly put her soft hand in mine and barely gripped it, shaking it weakly.
“Oh, like the trucks outside,” her boy said, and I startled slightly, forgetting he was even there.
“Yeah, I own the contracting company,” I said.
“It’s nice to meet you,” Cadence murmured and without any more preamble, said, “How bad is my house?”
Direct. I liked that.
Shit, I was in trouble here.
2
Glass Jaw…
“Come on down to the basement if you’d like, I’ll show you what we’re doing.” There was some flinching around her eyes.
“The basement?” she echoed.
“I’ll go,” her boy said, rolling his eyes. “Mom’s afraid of basements and attics. That’s why the attic room is gonna be mine.” He grinned and his mother smiled behind his back. Damn, that small smile turned her from something beautiful into something out of this world. I was going to keep eating asphalt and start stumbling over my words – tripping over my own damn tongue if I didn’t get away from her for a minute.
“Cool, come on downstairs, Marc.”
Marc pushed off the granite countertop, and with a grin and a wink at his mom, turned toward the basement door which was standing open.
I nodded at Holly and Cadence and followed the boy down the stairs.
“Clean it up, fellas,” I warned as we entered the basement. “Quit leaving your shit all over the place.” I kicked a trowel lightly back, closer to the bucket of mortar where some of my guys were shoring up a janky set of blocks serving as part of the back of the foundation.
“What happened down here?” Marc asked, wrinkling his nose at the chemical smell.
“Previous owner let a busted sump pump go too long, and mold proliferated the basement and crawl spaces, but y’all got lucky,” I said. “Up here we get something called black mold. Highly toxic, causes all sorts of breathing and neurological issues in a person if they live around it too long.”
“This mold looks yellow,” Marc said, peering at some of the timbers underneath the house up under the floor. I nodded.
“Same kind of mold they make penicillin out of,” Mace said. “You get sick, you can just come down here and lick one of these beams here.”
“Really?” Marc asked, looking skeptical. Mace laughed.
“No! I’m just fu— messin’ with you, kid.”
“Oh, it’s alright. You can swear around me, I don’t care,” Marc said.
“I do. It’s unprofessional,” I said. I shook my head, grinning with Mace though. That’d been cute.
“What else are you guys doing down here?” Marc asked with mild interest, looking around.
I took him through all that we’d accomplished and had yet to accomplish down here.
“Well, we dug out this new trench, here. Put in this new sump pump,” I tapped the top of the thing lightly with the sole of my work boot, “and the boys are back up in there, mortaring some bricks all the same size and shape in place for your foundation.”
“What else needs to be done?” he asked. The kid was pretty shrewd. I liked that. Seemed his mamma didn’t raise no fool. Also seemed his mamma had him pretty young. She didn’t look much older than me – if she was even older than me – she could be a few years younger or even the same age. I was terrible at guessing a lady’s age which had landed me in some hot water back when—
I stopped my ment
al meandering and focused on what the kid was asking me. “Gotta replace the wood up under here,” I said, touching the rotting specimen, the wood flaking and shredding under my fingertips. “But no worries, there. That’s already paid for. I just have to come in and do it.”
“Okay, what isn’t paid for that needs to be done.”
“A few things. Those windows down here need replacing, but to be honest with you, I wouldn’t replace ‘em with windows. In my professional opinion – which is what I’m here for, right –? I would put in some open grating to ventilate things down here. Keep the critters out but promote some airflow. I’d also look at a few other things, but not right now, maybe in the future when your mom’s flush. You know?”
“Things like what?” he asked, and I smiled.
“Insulation up under these floorboards for one. Replacing all these galvanized pipes – but I’d wait a minute. The water heater was put in eight years or so ago, so when it needs to be replaced, that’s when I would do the pipes.”
“Okay.” Kid looked like he was mentally taking all of this down. “Isn’t there supposed to be plastic on these piles of dirt or something?”
“Don’t worry!” Mace called. “It’s on our list of shi—” I shot Mace a warning look over my shoulder. “Stuff to do.” He changed what he was going to say in the nick of fucking time.
“He’s right, it’ll get done too. I didn’t forget. I just forgot to mention it.”
“Anything else we should know about?” the kid asked.