by Roxie Noir
He’d go to the grocery store and see someone he could swear he’d seen before, but he didn’t know where.
If someone’s watching me, I don’t want them knowing what I’m doing right now, he thought. At least I haven’t gone completely over the edge and started wearing tinfoil hats.
He watched the numbers on the shops.
1718. 1716.
I haven’t started wearing them yet, anyway, he thought.
1712.
Garrett stopped and glared, then looked around very, very carefully. 1716 was a candy shop that claimed, in big letters painted on its glass windows, to have the best fudge in Grand Junction, Colorado.
1712 was a small women’s clothing boutique that looked like it specialized in flowy, tie-dyed garments.
Neither of them were the private investigator’s office he was looking for.
Garrett stood and glared, folding his arms over his chest.
Maybe his website was a fake, he thought. Just to get me to give up some of my information so they can find out where I am.
Then, he finally spotted a small notecard propped up underneath a mannequin.
Looking for 1714?
Around the corner
<———
Garrett followed the small, handwritten arrow to a narrow alley that ran between two buildings. In the alley, at last, was the frosted glass door he’d been searching for.
Elliott Velasquez
Private Investigator
1714 W. Main
Shouldn’t this be 1716 and the boutique should be 1714? Garrett thought, but he pushed the door open and mounted the creaky wooden stairs, trying not to stomp too much.
At the top was another frosted glass door with the same thing written on it.
You could turn back, Garrett thought. You’ve got one last chance not to involve someone else and just let this die here.
Inside, he could hear a woman’s voice laughing, a bubbly, melodious voice. Something about it gripped him, calling to him even through the thick glass.
She sounds pretty, Garrett thought.
He opened the door, and blinked.
He wasn’t sure what he’d been expecting from a private investigator’s office — dark, cramped, and smoky, maybe? — but it wasn’t this, a sun-drenched room with plants in the window and sleek, modern office furniture.
Not to mention the girl standing behind the desk, her back to Garrett, talking on the phone.
She had one hand on her hip, staring at a large, blank whiteboard, and Garrett paused for a moment, just staring at her silhouette.
It was killer, almost like she’d stepped out of a noir movie: small waist and lush hips, a long neck leading up to a low bun.
Then she turned to look at him, and his mouth went dry.
She was even prettier than she sounded.
Elliott’s secretary is super hot, he thought.
She had long black hair pulled into a bun, skin the color of dulce de leche, and deep brown eyes that gave him a long, searching look, taking Garrett in from head to toe.
He wished he’d worn a pair of jeans without holes in the knees.
She, on the other hand, wore no-nonsense black pants and a button down white shirt that fit the curves of her body perfectly, nipping in at her narrow waist and following the line of her perfect ass.
Turn around again, Garrett thought. Come on, just one more look.
As if to compromise, she turned and faced the wall, giving Garrett the side view, still listening to the phone.
He forced himself not to tilt his head as he followed the perfect curve of her ass with his eyes, practically able to feel it underneath his hands.
Maybe Elliott is running late, he thought, looking at the wide, clean desk. I wonder if she’s ever gotten up to any fun on that desk, you know, between clients—
“Yes, Mrs. Smith. I’ll let you know of any developments with your case as soon as possible.”
She paused for a moment, making eye contact with Garrett. He stepped inside and let the door close, finally.
“Thank you very much, Mrs. Smith. I’ll talk to you soon.”
The person on the other end was still talking as the girl put the phone down and turned her full attention to Garrett.
“Sorry about that,” she said, walking around the huge desk.
Garrett was nearly mesmerized by the swing of her hips, the way they moved beneath the black fabric, like her body was begging him to touch it.
“Not a problem,” he said, still ogling. “Is Elliott Velasquez in?”
She stopped in front of him and held out one hand authoritatively. Garrett guessed that he was nearly a foot taller than her, but she locked eyes with him as he took her hand, her gaze bold and unafraid.
“I’m Elliott Velasquez,” she said. “You can call me Ellie.”
Garrett raised one eyebrow and took her hand in his, squeezing it.
“You don’t look like a private investigator,” he said.
“You don’t look like a femme fatale, but here you are, bringing trouble to my door,” she said, and then smiled politely.
She squeezed his hand back. The handshake was surprisingly strong, and something deep inside Garrett growled in response.
“What makes you think I brought trouble?” he asked.
He didn’t let her hand go. Not yet.
“Why, are you here to tell me I’ve won a million dollars?” she asked. “I don’t see the giant check anywhere.”
Garrett watched her lips as she spoke. They were full and plump and a dusky rose color, and he fought not to bend down and kiss them.
“It might be a regular sized check,” he said. He could feel a smile forming on his lips, despite himself. “Today could be your lucky day.”
Finally he let her hand go, but Ellie didn’t move back.
“You ever heard the phrase, ‘One man’s luck is another man’s misfortune’?” she asked.
“You’re not a man,” Garrett said. “Even if you’re named like one.”
“Feel free to prove me wrong by handing me a check any moment now,” Ellie said. She crossed her arms again, but her eyes were sparkling.
Forget the car crash, he thought. How do I get her on that desk?
“Okay, you win,” Garrett said. “I brought trouble.”
“Good,” Ellie said. “Trouble is my business.”
“Now you sound like a private investigator,” Garrett said.
“I ought to start smoking, drinking whiskey, and chasing skirts all day,” she said, walking back around the desk. Garrett watched her ass as it moved from side to side.
“Maybe then I’d seem more like a PI,” Ellie said.
She waved a hand at a tasteful leather chair in front of her desk, and Garrett dropped into it.
Quit staring at her and tell her your problem, he thought. You’re terrible at flirting.
“You’re Garrett with no last name whose IP address was routed through Bangkok, right?” she asked, looking at the computer screen.
Good, he thought. She traced my IP.
He just nodded, folding his hands in his lap.
“Well, Garrett No Last Name,” she said, leaning forward, elbows on the desk. “What brings you all the way from Thailand?”
Garrett rubbed his hands together, then leaned forward, his elbows on his knees.
He took a deep breath. What he was about to tell Elliott he’d never told anyone before. Not out loud, anyway.
“I think my parents were murdered,” he said.
Elliott stared at him for a moment, tapping one finger on the desk.
“That’s a matter for the police,” she finally said, and shook her head. “I don’t do murder cases.”
“It’s not really a murder case,” Garrett said.
“You just think they were murdered?”
“Yeah,” he said, and looked at his hands.
This sounds crazy when you say it out loud, he thought. Don’t just barrel in with an opener like that, you h
ave to explain things first—
“Have you filed a missing persons report?” she asked, her voice gentler this time.
Garrett ran one hand through his shaggy, chin-length hair, then shook his head.
“I started at the wrong place,” he said.
“Mind re-starting at the right one?” Ellie said.
“My parents died fifteen years ago,” he said. “They drove off a cliff in a rain storm coming home when I was fifteen. It got ruled an accident, for obvious reasons.”
“I’m sorry,” Elliott said, her face softening.
Garrett waved it away with a shrug. I’m sorry had to be the most useless phrase in the English language, or at least it was up there.
He hated having to tell people about his parents, because the moment he did, he could practically feel himself shrinking from adult man to orphaned teenager, and he never wanted to feel like that again.
So, he usually avoided it at all costs. But right now, it was actually crucial.
“The police never investigated it,” he said.
“Did they have a reason?” Ellie asked. “Not to be cruel, but it’s not that strange for someone to drive off a cliff in a rainstorm.”
You’re telling it wrong again, Garrett thought. Stop skipping ahead and just tell her everything.
So he did.
He’d been at home with his two brothers: Seth, two years older, and Zach, two years younger, in the tiny town of Obsidian, Utah. Smack dab in the middle of nowhere.
His parents had driven two hours to Blanding, the closest town with a real grocery store, to do some errands. The fastest road was Piñon Gulch Road, a small, narrow, winding gravel track through the mountains, but they drove it all the time. They could have driven that road in their sleep.
They’d never come home.
The three brothers had stayed up all night, getting more and more worried, until they’d finally gone to the police station first thing the next morning.
Garrett took a deep breath, still staring at his hands. He’d gone over it a thousand times in the past few years, but he’d never said it out loud to anyone before.
“Things get a little spotty after that,” he said.
“Just tell me what you can,” Elliott said. He could hear the sound of a pen on paper, but Garrett didn’t look up.
He and his brothers had never seen the crash site. Before he knew it — by the end of that second day, Garrett thought — the car had been hauled up out of the canyon and taken to a wrecking yard back in Blanding. By the time he and his brothers found out where the car had gone, it had been reduced to scrap metal already, and the Sheriff had just shrugged their questions off.
“How about your parents themselves?” Elliott asked.
Garrett looked up, right into her big, soft, brown eyes.
“Was there any evidence of foul play on their bodies?”
Garrett shoved his hair out of his face again.
“We never found out,” he said. “They were taken back to Blanding for an autopsy, since there was no facility in Obsidian, but apparently the hospital had some kind of mix-up and cremated them instead.”
Elliott stopped writing for a moment and pursed her lips.
“Weird, right?” Garrett asked.
“It does happen,” she said, and tapped the end of the pen against the paper. “Doctors and hospitals fuck up way, way more than people want to believe.”
She paused for a moment, then narrowed her eyes.
“Who identified their bodies?” she asked.
“The Sheriff,” Garrett said. “It’s a very small town. He knew who they were.”
“You never saw them?”
“I saw a picture,” he said.
Even now, remembering it made his stomach turn. It had been in the small Sheriff’s station in Obsidian, and the Kane County Sheriff, an overweight man named Raymond Tusk, had slapped the photo down on his desk in front of him, Seth, and Zach. Then Tusk had just walked away, like he didn’t give a damn.
Over the years, Garrett had chalked that up to Tusk’s own incompetence. It was probably easier for Tusk to get angry at three teenagers demanding evidence that their parents were really dead than admit that he’d fucked up.
That hadn’t made his parents’ pale, bloody faces any easier to stomach. He’d had nightmares for years afterward. When Tusk had died a few years ago, Garrett hadn’t been sorry.
“You’re sure it was them in the picture?” Elliott asked.
“I’m sure,” Garrett said.
“So someone did take photos, at least of the bodies,” Elliott said. “What about the accident scene?”
“I only ever saw two pictures,” Garrett said. “One of the bodies in the morgue, and one of the car after they found it the next day.”
“Do you know if more exist?”
“I haven’t found them.”
She nodded, writing.
“There were no witnesses, I’m assuming,” she said.
“No,” Garrett said.
Tell her, he thought.
She was looking at him, brown eyes sharp.
“What is it?” she asked.
Garrett swallowed.
“There was another car that night,” he said. “The gravel road went right past our property, and at night, especially, we’d know if someone was coming down it.”
“Was that unusual?” she asked.
Garrett just nodded.
“Yeah,” he said. “Hardly anyone but us used that road. There was another road right in the middle of town that most everyone else used. Most nights there was nobody on that little dirt road off the mountain.”
He paused.
“I remember it because I thought it was our parents,” he said. “It was a sedan. I couldn’t see what color, but it looked like the car they had. It turned onto the highway and went into town, and I remember thinking, wow, two cars in one day.”
“Did you ever find out who it was?” she asked.
“No,” Garrett said. “The police didn’t believe me, so they never tried to find it.”
Elliott flicked him a skeptical glance.
“I know it was a long time ago,” Garrett said. “And I know you probably think that I’m confused, or my eyes were playing tricks on me, but I know what I saw.”
She blinked.
“Okay,” she said softly. “I believe you.”
She glanced over her notes for a moment, then looked back up at him.
“This could be suspicious, or it could be a case of a few screw-ups in a small town,” she said.
Ellie pushed the paper away, then looked at Garett again.
He thought about her hips under his hands, tearing off her sensible shirt and swiping his tongue past one erect nipple —
“Is there any reason someone might want your parents dead?” she asked.
This was where things got very, very tricky.
Garrett had had insomnia for as long as he could remember, even as a kid. One night, lying awake in bed, he’d looked out of his window.
In the yard below had been his mother, walking away from the house. They lived on the edge of town, there were no other houses behind theirs — just the vast, unspoiled Utah wilderness.
As he watched, she’d turned into a giant bird and taken off.
He’d assumed he was dreaming.
That is, until he saw it again. And again.
There was no way he was telling Ellie about that part.
“They were very unpopular in town,” he said slowly. “Most of the people in town kind of closed themselves off from my mother’s family, and my father, when they got married.”
Ellie listened.
“Over a hundred years ago, in the 1870s, I think, there was a drought. And the only person who had a good harvest was my ancestor,” Garrett said. “The rest of the town decided that he’s made some kind of deal with the devil, even though it’s just because he was smart enough to stake his claim next to the river.”
Ellie fr
owned.
“People are still mad about that?” she said, incredulously.
Garrett shrugged.
“There has to be some other reason,” she said, her eyes narrowed.
“If there is, I wish I knew it,” Garrett said.
Ellie looked at her note paper like she wasn’t sure what to write down.
“Were they mad enough to murder your parents?” she asked, skeptically.
“I don’t think so,” Garrett said. “But it’s all I’ve got.”
She leaned her head on one hand and tapped the pen on the desk again.
“I’ll see if I can turn up some evidence,” she said. “A police report, a hospital file, something. But don’t get your hopes up, okay?”
Garrett reached into his pocket and pulled out a flash drive, then placed it on the desk in front of Ellie.
“That’s got everything I’ve been able to find,” he said. “Maps to the crash site, articles, press releases from the police, the hospital, the whole thing.”
Ellie closed it in her hand.
“The password is ‘Obsidian15,’ but the O is a zero,” he said.
“Thanks,” she said. “Very secure.”
“I try,” Garrett said.
“I’m not sure how long this will take, but I think at least two days,” Ellie said. “I charge fifty dollars an hour, plus expenses.”
“Sounds good,” Garrett said. He stood from his chair and stretched. “Let me know what you find.”
Ellie tore a post-it note from a pad on her desk and handed it to him.
“Give me your number,” she said.
Garrett wrote it down, then tossed the pen on the desk and pushed his hair out of his face again.
“It was nice meeting you, private investigator Ellie,” he said.
“Same,” Ellie said, and stuck out her hand.
Garrett shook it again, fighting the urge to pull her toward him, to feel her body underneath his hands.
Then he let go, turned, and walked back down her stairs.
2. Ellie
As he closed the door, Garrett turned and, Ellie could swear, gave her a little half-smile before closing it. Then she heard his steps retreating down the stairs until they were gone.
Ellie flopped back into her chair, the force of it rolling the big leather thing a couple feet backwards. For a few seconds she just stayed there, motionless.