by Julie Kriss
Crashed
Mason Brothers, Book 2
Julie Kriss
Copyright © 2019 by Julie Kriss
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any 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.
In case you missed it:
Spite Club (Mason Brothers, Book 1)
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Contents
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
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Also by Julie Kriss
One
Andrew
* * *
“This summer is going to be hot,” my brother said.
I flipped the page in my sketchbook and started a new drawing. “Uh huh.”
“They say it’ll break records.” Nick came out of the back bedroom and into the living room. “It’s only the first week of July and it’s already off the charts. I checked the air conditioner,” he said, looking at me. “Looks like it works fine. You won’t have a problem.”
“Right,” I said, putting my pencil to paper. I drew a sandy beach, the sand winding away in perspective. Low, white-capped waves rolling gently in. Palm trees.
“There will be storms and other shit like that,” Nick said, dropping onto the sofa across from me. “Power outages maybe.”
My pencil put a lounge chair on the beach, an umbrella. “I’ll be fine.”
“Not if the power goes out. I left an emergency number on the fridge. Keep your fucking phone charged for the next two weeks while I’m gone.”
On the beach chair appeared Lightning Man, the superhero Nick and I wrote about in our comics. That is, Nick wrote the stories and I drew the panels. Lightning Man was wearing a cutoff version of his usual black tights and a sleeveless version of his black superhero shirt. His cape was hanging on a nearby palm tree branch and he had sunglasses on. His arms were laced behind his head and he was grinning.
“You know,” I told Nick as I drew, “I would keep my phone charged if I was the kind of person who liked talking to people. Which I very much am fucking not.”
“Keep it charged,” Nick growled in a voice that would intimidate anyone who wasn’t his big brother. “I might want to call you.”
“To check up on me?” I asked. Lightning Man wasn’t alone on this beach. “I’m not helpless without you, asshole. You just think I am. Besides, you shouldn’t be calling me while you’re on your honeymoon. You’re supposed to be there with Evie, remember?”
“Evie will want me to call you,” Nick said with pissed-off logic. “Besides, it’s my honeymoon. I’ll call whoever I want, whenever I want. And you better pick up the fucking phone.”
I lowered the drawing pad just enough to look at him. My little brother—my only brother—was sprawled on the sofa in the living room of my small bungalow in suburban Millwood, Michigan, glaring across the room at me. Nick Mason was dark-haired, muscled, and what the women liked to call gorgeous, even wearing ratty old jeans and a T-shirt. Since I looked in the mirror every day, I knew he looked a lot like me, except that I was a few years older, my face was thinner, and my hair was a shade darker. I had muscles in my arms and shoulders that were leaner and tighter than his, and my eyes had darkness behind them born of experience he didn’t have. But there was no doubt we were brothers.
From the waist down, of course, we didn’t look alike at all. Because I was in a wheelchair and he wasn’t.
Seven years I’d been like this, ever since a drunk driving accident when I was twenty-three. My buddy was drunk. So was I. He drove. We crashed.
He died. I lived.
That’s all I’m going to say about it.
Nick had been my rock through good and bad for those seven years. But now he was married, happy, and taking his new wife on a two-week honeymoon. And it was giving him stress fits to leave me, which pissed me off and warmed my cold, cold heart in equal measures.
I chose option one. “Would you be happier if you could put me in a kennel?” I asked him.
“Shut up,” he replied. “I’m looking out for you. I’ll have my phone on in Hawaii. You can text me if you need me. Evie, too.”
“I won’t be texting you, because I’ll probably be interrupting something porny, and I don’t need that in my life.”
“Jesus, I don’t know why I bother,” Nick said.
My gaze moved to the window. This was standard conversation for Nick and me. We really did piss each other off, though for some reason it didn’t keep us from seeing or talking to each other every day. Some things in life are mysterious.
Two weeks. He’s going to be gone for two weeks.
I wasn’t panicking.
My non-panic was distracted by the sight of a car pulling into the driveway across the street. Being a pathetic shut-in, I knew that Mrs. Welland, the seventy-year-old lady who’d lived in that house, had died two months ago, so it wasn’t her. And she’d lived alone, so this was a stranger.
Mrs. Welland hadn’t died in the house itself. She’d passed out at Safeway, someone had called 911, and she’d never come home.
I was pretty glad that if Mrs. Welland had to go, she hadn’t died alone in her house with no one to find her. Because I kept an eye on her without her knowing, and I would have figured it out when she didn’t pick up her mail. And then I would have had to call 911. And that seemed way too involved for me.
Mrs. Welland didn’t have any family that I knew of, so it was a surprise to see the car. It was a Civic, with no logos for cleaning companies or anything on the sides. I saw a California license plate, and I knew that my security cameras would get a record of the number.
If you’re going to rob or murder someone, the worst place you can do it is on my fucking street. I’m always home, I never sleep, and I have a ton of very advanced electronic surveillance.
“Hey, asshole,” Nick said from the sofa. “Remember me?”
I looked back at him. He was scowling at me. He and Evie had gotten married at City Hall, which was wheelchair accessible. I’d worn a suit. Our mother came—she’d been out of our lives for a long time, but now she was back. Our father didn’t, because no one had invited him. As far as I knew, he hadn’t even been told that the wedding happened.
We were a fucked-up family. Nick should go to Hawaii if he wanted to, be happy if he wanted to. He’d dropped out of college when I had my accident and he’d never gone back. I was a selfish asshole. It was only two weeks. I was thirty fucking years old. I could do without him.
“Don’t you have a plane to catch?” I asked him.
“Not for a few hours yet.”
There was hesitation in his voice, and I hated to hear it. In that moment, I fucking hated it.
“Go,” I said. “Go sit on a beach, snorkel in the ocean, climb a volcano. Drink fruity drinks. Get laid. Just
go.”
I wasn’t going to do any of those things. Technically I could drink a fruity drink if I wanted, but that would be pretty lame sitting alone in my house in Michigan. As for getting laid, even though the equipment worked just fine, there was no chance in hell. To get laid you generally have to leave the house and have a working body. You also have to have a personality that even slightly attracts women. All of which crossed me out.
I couldn’t do those things, but Nick could.
“Go,” I said again. “I’ll be fine.”
He reluctantly got off the couch, found his baseball cap, and put it on. “The schedule is on the fridge, with the phone numbers,” he said.
“Yes, Mom.”
“I’ll call you later, asshole,” he said, and I heard the door close behind him.
I tried not to feel the hollowness in my chest, the tightness in my throat at the sound. I just sat there and took one breath, and then another. That was how I got through a lot of the harder things. One breath after another. If you can take one breath, then you can take another and another after that. If that’s all you can do, then you do it.
I looked out the window again. Nick’s car pulled out of the driveway and drove off. The Civic was still across the street.
As I watched, the driver’s door opened and a woman got out. She had blonde hair cut just below her chin. She was wearing jeans, a tight black T-shirt, and flip-flops. when she closed the door and turned, I saw a long sweep of bangs falling over her forehead to her cheekbones and big, dark sunglasses that took up half her face, movie-star style. Below the sunglasses, her nose was perfect and her lips were full and glossy. The T-shirt said Get the fuck out of my business in bold white letters.
She hitched a purse up on her shoulder and slammed the car door like she owned the whole block. She glanced up and down the street and then tilted her head back in a kill me now dramatic gesture. Then she rounded the car, walked to the door of Mrs. Welland’s house, opened it with a key from her purse, and was gone.
I watched for a while longer, but she didn’t come out again.
Had she bought the house? It hadn’t been listed for sale; it was too soon. Or was she an inside buyer?
If she wasn’t, then who the hell was she?
Two
Andrew
* * *
It was none of my business. And it didn’t even matter. I didn’t know any of my neighbors because I never left my house. I wouldn’t know this one either.
I moved my hands to wheel away from the window and realized I still had the sketch pad in my lap. It had the unfinished drawing of Lightning Man on the beach, grinning in his lounge chair with his hands locked behind his head. I’d started the outline of a woman standing next to him—I’d planned to draw Judy Gravity, the heroine of the comics, who was brainy and wore dark-framed glasses. Judy was a bit uptight, so from time to time I’d draw her naked or scantily clad just to amuse myself. It always got a rise out of Nick when I did it. I’d planned to draw Judy standing next to Lightning Man’s chaise, about to take her bikini top off, as a goodbye present to Nick, but I’d gotten distracted and he’d left before I could finish it.
Now I looked at the drawing and pictured a different woman instead. A real one instead of the made-up Judy. One with bobbed blonde hair, sunglasses, pouting lips, and attitude.
Desperate much, Mason?
I put the sketch pad aside and wheeled to the bank of computer monitors I had set up in my living room. Even though Nick and I were independently wealthy—our parents’ trust funds saw to that—I’d worked for years as a freelance computer programmer. I was good at it, it was something I could do from home, and it kept me busy.
Lately I’d been turning down programming work to draw the Lightning Man comics more and more. Nick and I had a Lightning Man website now, where we sold downloads of all the issues as well as print copies. It had started small, but every month we saw more and more downloads. It was pretty fucking awesome, seeing readers enjoy something you made. It was much better than spending my days dry-eyed, staring at PHP.
Nick had left a bunch of potential stories in our shared online file, and while he was away I may as well start drawing. But first I switched on one of the side monitors to show the feed from one of my front-of-house cameras. This was the one I’d originally set up so I could keep an eye on the house across the street, just in case Mrs. Welland fell down her front steps or her mail started ominously piling up. After Mrs. Welland died, there was no need to monitor that feed anymore—until now.
I started drawing, and half an hour later the blonde came out of the house again. She opened the Civic’s hatchback, leaned all the way in—her ass was perfect in those jeans—and came out with two duffel bags, then some boxes, and finally a couple of black garbage bags. So she was moving in, then, at least for a while. But she didn’t have much stuff—no furniture, no moving van. Just her little car.
Who moved all the way from California with only a few bags and boxes?
Who was she?
None of your business.
I turned off the camera feed and went back to work.
I lasted until midnight. Lying in bed, in the dark and the quiet, my work done and my meds taken, I finally gave in.
I sat up and pulled out my laptop, woke it up. Most people would have difficulty finding out who their new neighbor was. Not me. I logged into a few different sites I knew, typed in a few lines of code, ran some queries.
You could just introduce yourself and ask her name, like a normal person.
I snorted to myself. It wasn’t going to happen. I didn’t do small talk. I didn’t do polite introductions, especially to gorgeous women. Hell, I didn’t even do anything that required me to wheel out the front door, even though the doorway and the front ramp were modified so that I could. This was what I did: learn things I wasn’t supposed to know, late at night so I could avoid lying alone in the dark.
I hated the dark.
That wasn’t a fact I shared with anyone. Not even my therapist. But I had my worst anxiety attacks in the dark, my deepest depressions. The dark was when the things I fought every day came out and won.
So instead of thinking about the dark, I looked up my neighbor.
It was easy because of the Civic, of course. There were a dozen ways I could have found her, but a basic hack into the DMV database with the make, model, and license plate gave me everything I wanted to know.
Her name was Tessa Hartigan. She was twenty-seven. Her permanent address was in California, so either she was visiting or she hadn’t changed her address yet. Judging by her luggage, it could be either one.
I could have stopped there, but I didn’t. I opened another browser and did a Google search. She had no Facebook account, no social media at all except Instagram. The avatar was her face, and the description said Model. Sagittarius. Chocolate chip cookie lover. Contact me for bookings!
A model? I clicked into her feed.
And froze.
Oh, sweet Jesus.
There was my neighbor, posed with her hands on her hips, a pleasant smile on her face. She had sheer pink lipstick on and darkly made-up eyes. Her blonde bob was tucked behind her ears. She was wearing black lace panties, a black lace bra, and nothing else.
The caption said, Check out the sexy winter line from LoveIt Lingerie in LA! Link in my bio!
The next photo was from the same shoot, except the bra and panties were hot pink. Tessa Hartigan had only one hand on her hip and she was laughing. The caption said, Outtake from yesterday’s shoot. We had so much fun!
There were more. Lots more. The shots weren’t erotic—they were catalog shots, meant to sell a product.
My new neighbor was a lingerie model.
“Great,” I said out loud to no one, my voice a croak. “That’s just fucking great.”
Instead of the elderly Mrs. Welland, I now had a hot-as-fuck woman living across the street. One who took most of her clothes off for a living. One who I could look at i
n lingerie anytime I wanted to.
And all I could feel was panic. My blood pounded in my head, inside my ears. My throat was dry. She’s none of your business, the voice in my head said. She’ll never come near you. Never talk to you. You’ll never have a fucking thing to do with her, and you know it.
I clicked the browser with Instagram closed. Then I clicked into the database sites and logged out, closed them too.
My hands were icy. I closed my laptop, put it on the bedside table. “None of my fucking business,” I said aloud, to no one. Because I was alone.
I picked up my phone and swiped through my security apps. I controlled the lights, the locks, and all the appliances in my house through the dashboard, and I checked to make sure everything was as it should be. Then I clicked to turn out the bedroom lights. I put the phone down and lay back in the dark.
I closed my eyes and saw Tessa Hartigan in the pink lingerie on the backs of my eyelids. Then in the black lingerie.
“Fuck,” I said aloud.
It was a long time before I fell asleep.
Three
Tessa
* * *
“Nancy,” I said, “I’m begging you. You have to help me. I’m stuck in goddamned Michigan.”
On the other end of the phone, my agent laughed. “Well, I told you,” she said. “You should have stayed in L.A.”
I sighed. I was in my bedroom, still wet from the shower and wearing a bathrobe. I fiddled with the thermostat, trying to make it go colder. It was hot in here. “What was I supposed to do?” I said. “My grandmother died and left me a house. A free house. What would you do if you were given a free house?”