Lawrence busts up laughing instead of questioning Matteo further. “I bet she did.”
Somehow they are buying it. After giving me a good once-over, Lawrence opens his arm to let Matteo past. “Best not keep a woman waiting, son.” He goes so far as to clap him soundly on the shoulder.
“It’s nothing. Seriously, guys. Just go do whatever you were doing.” I comport myself with every ounce of dignity I can muster until Matteo and I are safely in my room. I leave the door wide open.
“That went well,” I mutter, glancing around my room. In my head I’m cursing myself for not cleaning up. I didn’t really plan on bringing him in here. I see the rubble of my room with fresh eyes. Not too much laundry. The bed is half-made. Some papers and drawings on the floor and on my nightstand. I walk over to the dresser, stuff a pair of undies back in, and shut all the drawers.
Trog trots in and hops on my bed with a jingle. The white duvet is peppered with the copper-and-white hairs that incessantly fall from my dog, and when he lies down, a cloud of them fly into the air.
Matteo must decide that looks like a good idea because he walks over to my bed and sits next to the dog. I’m left to fend for myself and end up sitting awkwardly facing them in the wooden chair that holds a plant near the window.
“Now what?” I ask, looking at the man and dog on my bed. Matteo looks far too at home with my dog. On. My. Bed. Can I even count the months—nay, years—it’s been since I’ve had a guy in my room other than Ryan or Lawrence? Voldemort—the guy who filmed our dates for profit—was the last one, so two years? Quite the dry spell. I have the insane urge to push him back onto my bed and sink my hands into those artfully disheveled locks of his, fake relationship or no.
“I guess we could always do what your roommates are expecting and . . .” Matteo purrs as if reading my mind. For the briefest of seconds, something sparks in his gaze that looks suspiciously like desire, but it’s gone in a blink. “Look at comic books?” he finishes.
I let out a small chuckle, and it breaks the tension, though my stomach has yet to unclench from my vision of us rolling around on my duvet.
“Fair point. Work. The case.” My closet is a disaster area, and I want to shield him from too much of the mess, so I open the sliding door farthest from him and reach in to look for my stack of comics. “They’re here. I just have to find—whoops.” I knock over a stack of watercolor sketches. I’m not the most neat and tidy of women. I cultivate the “creative chaos” style of housekeeping.
I dig for a few more minutes. “That’s weird. I swear I thought I’d put them in here.” I look around my room in hopes of inspiration and spy the comics on the top of my bookshelf. I guess I moved them at some point. Yet I could have sworn I put them in my closet. Maybe Ryan wanted to look at them as reference material for the video game? He’s the only one who ever comes in here. I shrug my unease off, anxious to get to the business of looking through comics so I can stop sneaking glances at Matteo petting my dog on my bed.
Nabbing the comics off the shelf, I sit in front of Matteo. Trog is now on his back, laying it all out for the world to see. He has zero modesty.
“So this is the first of the new ones, and I thought we could look at where Casey Junior picked up and Senior left off. Show you the difference between the two comics just so you have an operating knowledge of the series as a whole.”
It’s incredibly awkward for me to turn the comic book halfway between us. We’re both craning our necks at angles that aren’t comfortable, and I let out a huff of frustration before picking up the stack of comics and plopping myself between Trog and Matteo. My hip presses into Matteo’s, but I imagine a stone wall there. Partners don’t focus on how aware they are of other partners’ legs, right?
I look up and our eyes meet. I should say something about the comic book. I reach for another, and instead, I end up sliding back a fraction of an inch when my weight lands on the issue instead of grabbing it. Something flicks in his eyes, a switch going from cool to hot. He helps me to sit up again, heat searing through my shirt sleeve where his hand rests like a lightsaber. He’s close. He’s too close. Matteo leans forward, his eyes on my lips. It feels like I’m standing on the edge of a cliff, like this is something big, exciting, and suddenly scary. My heart stutters to an absolute halt in my chest. Frozen. It’s Castle Black in there. Something thaws, a trickle at first but picking up speed until it’s a torrent. My body automatically returns his lean. Matteo is so close, his face is blurry. Then his breath is on my cheek, and . . . he reaches right across me and grabs the framed picture off the bedside table.
I’m getting whiplash. First I think he’s going to ask me out; then he asks me to pretend to date him. Then an almost-kiss, but now he’s studying this picture frame like it’s a clue to the damn mystery. It’s a picture of Ryan, Trog, and me at Halloween. Looking at it through his eyes, I realize how cozy we look. Like I fancy my roommate, even though to me he’s family. Aren’t you allowed to have pictures of your family next to your bed?
I swear the muscle in his jaw tightens ever so slightly.
“It’s my favorite picture of Trog,” I say by way of explanation. It’s probably best to get back to business. “Anyway, this first issue of the new reboot is the only issue that addresses the old story line with the smugglers and the double agent—”
“Is Trogdor in a box?”
I blink. “Yes.”
“Is that another one of the jokes I don’t get? Like a Japanese cartoon thing? Or an online meme?” He says “meh-muh,” and I stifle a laugh.
“It’s anime, and a meme,” I say, correcting his pronunciation. “And no. That was his costume. He was a box.”
“A box of . . .”
I shrug. “Just a box. This year he’s going to be the demo-corgan from Stranger Things . . .”
Matteo throws his head back and laughs, interrupting me. Trog gives an indignant snort and sneeze, wiggles on his back, then slides off the bed and trots out the door. Fuzz-butt traitor. “So you’re saying that you’re a comic book writer, have purple hair and a million inside jokes from movies and books I’ve never seen or read, and that your dog was a plain ol’ box for Halloween?”
“I thought it was funny.” I’m defensive now, and not a little put out.
“It is funny. You just keep surprising me is all.” His face is warm, open, and inarguably magnetic right now.
“Oh.” I refuse to return his grin. We’re dangerously off the rails here.
I open the comic and scan the pages. Instead of the beautiful yellows and greens the originals were drawn with, these are an in-your-face, gratuitous riot. I love me some colors—just look at my hair—but after years of having rainbow-hued locks, I’ve learned an important lesson: judicious use of color is key. “Here,” I say, pointing at a page. “This is where they return to the warehouse and fight with his partner. And here”—I open the first of the new issues—“here’s where it moves away from the old story line. It’s also where they find the secret portal to the alien planet, and . . . Are you listening to me?”
Matteo replaces the picture on the table and leafs through the stack of drawings. “Did you draw these? And yes, of course I’m listening. They find the lair, tie up the double agent. And I have a question about that. But I also want to know if you drew these.”
I reach out, snag them, and stuff the drawings for L’s new costume into my desk drawer. I’d rather have him rifling through my underwear. My drawings are private. “Yes, I drew them. And why don’t you go ahead and ask your question about the comic book and leave off snooping.”
He wears an innocent look that I’m not buying. “Fine. Touchy. I thought you said the other day that we didn’t know what happened to the double agent.” The words “double agent” send a tingle up my spine. A dirty cop. Brewing drug wars. White Rabbit. There are too many odd coincidences these days between The Hooded Falcon and real life.
I wiggle forward so my feet dangle off the edge of my bed, trying to e
xtricate myself from the force of gravity that Matteo’s larger person exerts on my smaller frame. I fail miserably and seem to only draw attention to the fact that we’re pressed together in the middle of the bed for no reason now that Trogdor is gone.
“That’s what I’m getting at. The story line was basically dropped in the new series. In the old ones, it’s set up as a big reveal. They find the drugs. Falcon is going to unmask him. They’re going to expose him to the public. Then the new ones”—I flop my hand around, searching for a word—“tie it up in a matter of pages. They simply go to a warehouse owned by the double agent, find the stash of drugs, and capture him for the police. They never reveal in the comic who the superhero was to Space City, even though we’re told he was a double agent. We know he was someone important to the book. This cliffhanger has always bothered true followers of the Falcon. And now we know why. Casey Senior died before his final comics could be run.” I pause, still feeling guilty about revealing L’s secret to Matteo. “Lawrence’s journal proves that Casey Senior planned to unmask the double agent, end the comic, and retire the Falcon.”
“But the new one didn’t.”
“No.”
I’m starting to recognize the super intense gaze as Matteo’s thinking face. “Why change the new one so drastically?”
“I suspect because either Edward Casey Junior didn’t know what his father had planned or more than likely didn’t care. I told you that it was in this episode that they launched the new cycle. New villains, new weapons. Even the costumes changed drastically. Being a Robin Hood character isn’t cool anymore; kids aren’t interested in social justice. If you don’t have aliens and stun guns, you aren’t selling, I guess. Really the only thing he kept was Swoosh, the sidekick, and the fact that the Hooded Falcon uses a bow and arrow.”
I bite my lip, a thought occurring to me. “You don’t think that Casey Junior . . .” I can’t even finish my sentence. Son killing father certainly isn’t an unheard-of story line in comics.
Matteo frowns, picking up my thought anyhow. “Hurt his father to keep the comic running? Possibly. Your friend Lawrence said that Casey Junior was pretty bent out of shape about his father’s death, right? I don’t really see him murdering his father in cold blood, but we’ll have to add it to our list of possibilities. I’m not sure that we have enough to question him yet, though, anything to tie him to the real reason we’re investigating these comics.” He rubs his hand over his stubbled chin, making a rasping noise.
“I guess,” I say, not convinced. Casey Junior is my number-one suspect, internally. Kill your father in cold blood to keep him from ruining the empire he’s built and take it over to reap fame and fortune? Add a few capes and some spandex, and it seems like a Hollywood blockbuster plot to me.
“It doesn’t help my theory if the story line never really got finished for our masked avenger to replicate or follow.” Matteo glances over the comics, then up at me. “Can we go over the order of events in the issue that we’re loosely following? Let’s try to get ahead of our misguided superhero before he gets killed in the crossfire.”
“Yeah, sure. I think I have that one, actually. Well, half of it. It’s old. It fell apart years ago.” I dig around in the pile I brought over and hand some papers to Matteo to hold while I sort through issues. My copy is battered compared to the pristine one in the work library, but I love it just the same.
I flip to the page. “Okay, so if I were to guess about what were to happen next? It would be something in a warehouse. Or on a boat. We already know that our suspect was in the warehouse district. We could guess he tracked these guys to where they stash their drugs, either when they get them in or when they’re being sent out.”
Matteo nods, flicking through the papers I handed him. He’s not paying attention again. “Warehouse or boat. I’ll look into those. Can I borrow that issue from you?” He’s still focused on the pile of papers, frowning like he’s looking for something right in front of his face.
I’m kind of offended that he’s brushing off my predictions. That’s the whole reason he’s here, right? I’m starting to think that maybe he has superhuman powers to focus on two things at one time, and he’s very interested in my papers for some reason. I hesitate. He’s not asking for the original series, but it’s still against my rules. “Yeah, no problem. Just get them back to me.”
“What is this?”
I eyeball the pile of papers. “My research for my article on the thirtieth anniversary of THF.” It’s about the LA heroin war that framed the backdrop for the rise of The Hooded Falcon’s popularity, and I can tell the eerie similarity to the comic isn’t lost on Matteo. He flips to the next papers in the bunch. “And these?”
My heart flip-flops, recognizing the acceptance letter I received in the mail. I still can’t believe it is true. “Information on San Diego Comic-Con. I entered a costuming contest held there.” I stop short of telling him all about the biggest geek-girl fashion design competition in the country and how excited I am. Matteo seems to inspire conversational tangents, making me want to prattle on like a schoolgirl. I have to keep course correcting my brain if this is a business meeting. I am an LAPD consultant now, after all.
“This.” He sits up straighter and nearly throws the paper at me. “This we can go in with.”
“What on earth are you talking about?” I pick up the folded printout of the list of memorabilia for the charity auction. Casey Junior’s face smiles from the too-polished-to-be-candid picture of him sitting at his father’s desk in their LA mansion. “The charity auction?”
“No, the picture.”
I study it, then glance up at him, still baffled.
“Beside the desk,” Matteo nearly crows.
I look back and do a double take. It’s a glass cabinet tucked into the corner of the room housing a perfect replica of the Hooded Falcon’s costume—cape and all.
“You think . . . my boss?” I can’t imagine Casey Junior running through the streets in a cape.
Matteo shrugs, but his eyes sparkle. I’m pretty sure it’s the same look I get when a great idea strikes me at work. “It’s enough to question him. Let’s see if your friend’s information holds water. Thank you for your help, Michael-Grace. I’ll be in touch about the interview with Casey and let you know if I find anything on the warehouse front.”
I pad to the door behind him. He slips on his shoes and heads outside with a wave. A second later he sticks his head back in. I’m still standing there, fighting the insane urge I have to run after him like I don’t want him to leave.
“Oh, but I guess I’ll see you this weekend. I’ll call—er, text you about it. I’m looking forward to meeting your coworkers.” He winks.
I smile, relieved that this isn’t fully goodbye.
CHAPTER 11
I shut the door behind him and turn to find Ryan and Lawrence standing in the entry again. These guys are sneaky for large men.
Lawrence’s mouth hangs ajar. “He’s meeting your coworkers?”
“It’s not like that.” Then I realize that it is like that and that I sound stupid. “Well, I mean, he’s already met them.”
I might as well have announced I’m selling all my electronics and living an unplugged life—Ryan looks that weirded out.
“He already met them because I left my wallet at the coffee shop, and he returned it to me at my office. Then he fixed this chair, so Kyle has a man-crush on him now and invited him to a movie thing. It’s not a big deal.” I’m being disingenuous about more than just the wallet. I like Matteo. He’s funny and smart and makes me laugh, and even though he’s not my type, he just . . . sneaks up on you. I remember the flash of heat in Matteo’s eyes and wonder if after all this hoopla dies down, maybe I should invite him out for a drink. Sure, he wouldn’t know Trogdor from Smaug if they bit him in the butt, but he sure is cute. And now I’m thinking about his butt. Stop it. Stop it. Stop it.
Maybe it’s time to change the type of guys I date. I haven’t had s
uch great luck with the geek crowd. The last con party I attended, a guy walked up to me five or six times before finally telling me my Codex outfit was “neat,” then followed me into the bathroom, resulting in me threatening to beat him with my papier-mâché staff.
Ryan stares at me as I mull through my thoughts, then calls me on my bluff. “Right. No big deal. Because you always invite people over to read comics in your bedroom when they return your wallet at your office.”
Lawrence doesn’t look put out like Ryan does. He looks gleeful. “Girl, that man is Atlanta, Georgia, in Ju-ly, and he can come and build me a tower anytime.”
“Oh come on, give me a break. We’ll probably never see him again.” Lie. I seem to be lying to everyone these days.
“You didn’t see how he looked at you.” Ryan crosses his arms.
My pulse quickens in my veins, but a familiar anxiety washes over me, breaking down the hope spawning in my stomach. Dating a non-geek means they might want to normal-fy me. I am terrified of someone constantly telling me my shows or comics are dumb, wishing I’d “tone down my hair a bit,” or asking me to give up my job like my mom. I did the normal-guy thing once. It took a botched engagement to wake me up. No, it is better to continue flying solo, and far fewer entanglements for the police case this way.
I shove my reaction back into the padlocked box it belongs in. “Let’s all go back in the living room. I have something I want to show both of you.”
I reemerge from my room several minutes later with a stack of papers, which I present like a trophy on the coffee table while standing in front of the TV.
“You make a pretty crappy window—aw, sonofa, L! You’re supposed to kill the aliens, not our team members!” Ryan leans around me, and I hear the sound of video game gunfire at my back. More specifically crossbow fire.
The Frame-Up (The Golden Arrow Mysteries Book 1) Page 9