by Max Hudson
Simon resisted the urge to groan and drop his head into his hands. Oh my God, he’s actually sucking me into this. I’m starting to think he might be right.
“Even if all that is true,” he muttered after a moment, “I still don’t get why it means the police aren’t a viable option.”
“Dove, Minnie is the police. Or was, maybe. I don’t know yet. But!” Adrian thrust his finger into the air so enthusiastically that he nearly tossed his flurry against the windshield. Simon lurched forward on instinct, wrapping his hands around the cup of ice cream in an effort to keep Adrian’s grip on it.
Vaguely, as if he hardly noticed, Adrian hurried on with, “Thanks. But! If Minnie thought the police could be trusted with this, she would have let us know somehow. The fact that she didn’t means that she didn’t trust them, which means we should not either.”
“God.” Simon just stared at him. How does he come up with this stuff?
And why is it starting to make sense?
“Okay, so what do you propose we do?” he sighed.
“We should—” Adrian suddenly paused, his eyes flicking back from whatever puzzle he had been solving in his brain to see Simon leaning in rather close to him. At about the same moment, Simon realized he still had his hands wrapped around the flurry cup—and, consequently, Adrian’s own hand.
“You can, uh…let go now.”
“Uh, right! Sorry.”
Simon sat back quickly and had to power through the almost instinctive urge to just sit on his hands. He was fairly certain someone could have gotten a suntan from the heat radiating off his cheeks.
He wasn’t an idiot. And he wasn’t blind. On a purely physical level—sure. Adrian was pretty attractive. He would admit that. He had even admit to being attracted to him every once in a while, when he wasn’t being a complete pain in the ass.
When they’d first met he remembered thinking for a split second that it was Minnie’s idea of setting him up with someone—they’d been joking about finding dates for each other just days earlier, after all.
Then, of course, he had actually had a conversation with the guy who lasted longer than several seconds, and that particular consideration had gone out the window with a firm toss.
Apparently, that didn’t stop the instinctive attraction from flaring up every once in a while.
He gave himself a quick mental shake and refocused on what was in front of him. Adrian was still staring at him, eyes perhaps just a touch wider than they were normally. For just the barest second, Simon thought he saw those blue eyes drop down to his hands and back up, almost considering…
To his relief it didn’t seem to be all that long if he had. After another brief moment, Adrian cleared his throat and continued. “Ahem. Well, uh, what I was saying—what we should do is regroup.”
Simon returned the stare, feeling rather at a loss. “Regroup?” he repeated blankly. “So…do nothing?”
“No.” Adrian rolled his eyes at him and whatever strange tension that might have been building between them scattered into the air. “Not do nothing. Regroup. As in head someplace calm and safe and take a look at what we have. Start compiling the facts.”
“Riiiiiight,” Simon replied slowly, settling fully back into his seat. “The facts. Which you’re convinced are that Minnie is missing and the police can’t be trusted.”
“At the moment? Yeah.” Adrian looked over at him again, popping another spoonful of ice cream into his mouth and just chewing thoughtfully for a moment. Then he dropped the cup onto the dashboard and twisted in his seat to better face him with a sharp exhale, brow furrowed. “Listen. I know you think I’m being paranoid. But let’s just for a minute say that I’m not.”
Simon found himself caught up in that bright blue stare, and for just a second his breath actually hitched in his throat. The weight of severity had settled into the air around them, pressing at his skin and making him feel more alert than he had before.
“Minnie might be in trouble,” Adrian continued in a murmur. “I know you’re not exactly my biggest fan, Dove—but I think we both care about her too much to do nothing. If there’s even a chance I’m right, we have to play this careful, yeah?”
Simon stared at him for several long moments, eyes searching his face. He really believes this, Simon thought.
He supposed somewhere in the back of his mind he had sort of thought—or rather hoped—that Adrian might be blowing this whole thing out of proportion for the love of the sheer drama of it. That seemed like a pretty typical Adrian thing to do. But looking into his eyes, any part of him that had believed that shriveled and shrank away.
He swallowed thickly and nodded, once. “Okay,” he breathed softly. Reaching up to rub at his temples, he closed his eyes and swallowed back a groan. He had no idea what to do. “Okay,” he repeated, a little more firmly this time, and lifted his head to meet Adrian’s eyes again. “So. Where do we go?”
Adrian exhaled heavily. Rather abruptly, Simon realized that the journalist had thought he wasn’t going to agree. He didn’t quite know how to feel about the relief that slumped the other man’s shoulders when he had given in.
“I figured my place,” Adrian replied briskly, and reached forward to turn the key in the ignition. The car rumbled to life around them and he started to peel out of the parking lot, forgetting about the mostly empty sundae cup he had left sitting on the dash.
Once again Simon found himself lurching forward awkwardly to keep the cup from going airborne. “Why your place?” he asked as he settled back, depositing the offending carboard receptacle into the cupholder beside him.
“Because it’s further from Minnie’s than yours. Plus I bring my work home a lot, so I’ve got some job stuff lying around.”
“Job stuff?”
“Yeah.” Adrian shrugged as he pulled out onto the main road and accelerated. Sharply. Simon found himself instinctively clutching at his seat for a moment as the world abruptly whipped by through the window. “You know, like fingerprinting, a master key type of thing, voice recognition software. That kind of stuff.”
Simon’s eyes widened with every word. “Yeah. Right. Job stuff.”
He saw one side of Adrian’s mouth quirk up into a lopsided smirk and he tilted his head just enough to throw him a quick wink. “Well, we can’t all be bank tellers, Dove. Some of us need a little extra stuff to get the job done.”
Simon resisted the urge to grumble something impolite at him and settled for scowling at the windshield. “My job’s not that boring, you know,” he muttered eventually, then winced.
“I never said it was,” Adrian replied evenly.
They lapsed into silence for pretty much the rest of the ride. One or the other occasionally tossing out a few words, but mostly content to ride in quiet.
Simon did try to call Minnie again. Adrian told him not to, but he ignored him. If all of this was really some massive misunderstanding, or even just an exaggeration of what was really going on. He figured he should at least try one more time to see it straightened out. The phone rang once, then right to voicemail. Her phone wasn’t even on.
His stomach sank. Feeling at this point like it was a desperate effort to cling to normalcy, he fired off a quick text: Call me back. We’re worried. Then he pocketed his phone again with a sigh and let his head thump against the window. He closed his eyes and just breathed. She’s fine. It’s going to be fine.
“Voicemail?”
“Yeah.”
“Figured.” He almost felt Adrian’s sigh more than heard it, felt the subtle shift in the energy around them. The other man was getting just as tired as he was.
Under normal circumstances, that might have been a little funny. Adrian was never out of energy.
Now, it just felt like yet another rug pulled out from under his feet.
He was quiet again as they pulled into the parking lot for Adrian’s apartment building, kept his piece while the journalist routed around in the backseat for the few “clues” he had
snatched from Minnie’s and while they walked to the door, silent even the whole elevator ride up to Adrian’s apartment itself.
When the door dinged open and Adrian gestured for him to follow, he finally muttered, “Is it always like this? Just worrying?”
Adrian paused before a door that read 5E, keys out, and looked back over his shoulder at him. “What?”
Simon shrugged and gestured vaguely. “This. The whole investigation thing. It’s just not knowing. Not knowing and worrying.”
Something flickered in Adrian’s eyes, something he could not quite identify. His lips went a little tight around the edges as he turned the key and shrugged the door open. For a few moments he thought he just wasn’t going to answer.
“It’s not usually someone I care about.” Adrian sighed, tossing his armful of “intel” onto the small green couch just left of the door and added wryly, “Fuck, Dove, it’s not even usually actual missing people. I dig into companies doing unethical bullshit and I call them on it. That’s my job.”
He joined the bundle on the couch, letting his head sag back and closing his eyes. Simon hovered awkwardly by the door, looking around. He had never actually been in Adrian’s apartment—for obvious reasons. It was cozy, he supposed was an appropriate word. A smallish living room with a sort of kitchen alcove on the far wall, one door just next to that which he assumed led to a bathroom, and then another door in the wall opposite him that had been left slightly cracked open, revealing a glimpse of a surprisingly tidy bedroom.
“I’m good at what I do.”
Adrian’s voice abruptly jerked his attention back to the man on the couch. He hadn’t expected him to keep talking. Slowly, almost warily, he edged a step closer to hover near the arm of the couch.
“I’m good at this,” Adrian repeated, eyes still closed as his head lulled against the back of the furniture, “which means yeah, sometimes it gets a little dangerous. Corrupt CEOs don’t exactly want you to publicize just how much of an asshole they are.” He shrugged. “But this? I know the steps here, I know what I’m supposed to do, but I’ve never dealt with a missing person before, Dove. Especially not someone I care about.”
Simon was quiet for a while longer. Then, cautiously, and maybe a little awkwardly, he reached out and placed his hand on Adrian’s shoulder.
The other man started, opening his eyes and twisting his head slightly to look first at Simon’s hand, then up to his face.
Simon felt his cheek growing warm under that surprised stare. He withdrew his hand quickly. “Sorry, I—”
“No, no, it’s fine, you just—”
They both stopped, staring at each other. Then, slowly, they both smiled. Simon felt a tiny fraction of the tension that had been coiling tight in his chest since Minnie’s doorstep begin to release.
“Great.” Adrian gave himself a brisk shake and sat forward, elbows on his knees and hands clasped in front of him. He jerked his head toward the chair on the other side of the small coffee table. “Sit down, we should try to talk through this.”
“Oh. Uh, right.”
For some reason, the commanding tone didn’t bother him so much this time. He supposed on one level it was nice not to be the one “in charge”, as it were. Like Adrian had said, even if this was close to home and still fairly new to him, he at least knew what they should be doing.
Simon sank down into the indicated chair, arms folded loosely over his chest. As he took his seat, Adrian set about spreading out what they’d found in Minnie’s house on the coffee table between them.
It really wasn’t much. The note Adrian had found under the desk, a “closed cases” file Simon had unearthed from the downstairs bookcase on their second sweep through the house, and a couple of pictures of the interior that Adrian had taken before they left—which he evidently felt the need to symbolize by laying his phone on the table next to the papers.
“147,” he muttered, staring at the little slip of paper so intently Simon thought that it might spontaneously combust. “147… That’s a code for something, but I don’t remember what.”
His eyes suddenly snapped up, and that “spontaneous combustion” intensity was quite abruptly fixed on Simon, who found himself swallowing and telling himself quite firmly that had not been a flash of heat jolting through his body. He didn’t really believe it.
“Do you know?”
“Uh…no. No, I don’t, sorry. I can look it up?”
“Mm.”
Simon stared at him for a moment. Adrian seemed utterly absorbed in the files now, so he decided to just take that as a “go ahead”. He pulled out his phone and tapped in the search quickly: police code 147
It was easy to find. That didn’t make him feel much better about it.
“Found something?”
Without looking up, he answered, “Uh, yeah. It’s ‘suspect armed.’”
Adrian finally lifted his head. His eyes had gone just a little wide. He held his hand out. “Let me see.”
Simon almost wanted to point out that Adrian had a perfectly serviceable phone capable of doing just the same as his right there on the coffee table—but now didn’t exactly seem like the time. He just handed his phone over silently and gave a sort of helpless shrug.
While Adrian hunched over the tiny screen, Simon allowed his eyes to flicker over their other “gathered evidence,” as the journalist had been insisting on calling it. His attention was drawn inevitably to the crumbled note.
“Mina. 147?”
“Who’s Mina?” he muttered quietly.
“Her ex-partner.”
Simon started. He hadn’t realized he had said that loud enough to be overheard, or that Adrian was even paying attention. When he lifted his head, he found Adrian’s eyes on his face, his lips a tight, thin line. Simon blinked. “What?”
Adrian rolled his head and reached across the coffee table to hand his phone back. Simon took it automatically, wracking his brain for any mention Minnie had ever made of a “Mina” while Adrian supplied, “Yeah, they worked together for a couple of months. You don’t remember?”
Simon shook his head slowly. “She never even mentioned her. I never knew she had a partner.”
Adrian shrugged. “I mean, it didn’t last long. I don’t think they really got along all that well, and you know Minnie—better not to say anything about someone than to say something mean.”
Simon found himself nodding sort of vaguely. He supposed that made sense. “How’d you know about her, then?” he asked abruptly, a slight frown working its way into a furrow between his brows.
Adrian gave him a rather droll look. “Oh, don’t get jealous. She didn’t tell me anything she wouldn’t tell you. I just spent a lot of time down at the station around that time, that’s all. I’d sometimes catch them heading in or out.”
A faint flush worked its way up Simon’s neck as he realized he had been getting a little jealous. Which was ridiculous. Just because he and Minnie had known each other since they were kids didn’t mean they had to tell each other everything, or that they could not have other friends, other confidants. The evidence of that was sitting across the little table from him, his attention drawn back to the thick manila folder that rested beside his phone.
Quite determinedly putting that unfortunate realization from his mind, he huffed out a sharp breath and leaned forward a bit, pocketing his phone again. “Okay, so. Mina. Suspect armed? That’s basically what the note means, right?”
Adrian sighed in turn with a brisk little nod. “Yeah. Problem is that doesn’t exactly make anything clearer. Why bother writing in code if the message itself is so cryptic? Better yet, why write the message at all?”
Simon’s frown deepened. “Are we sure it’s a message?” He knew that he and Minnie both had the habit of writing things down and leaving them around the house, they’d been doing it since middle school. More often than not, in those days, one or the other’s notes would wind up at the wrong house, considering how much time they’d spent together.
“It might just have been for her.”
“A reminder?” Adrian was frowning too when he looked up at him, though the expression seemed to be more of consideration than anything else. “Minnie doesn’t exactly have a bad memory, Dove. She can’t afford to. And she knew something was up, if she hasn’t been home in days. Maybe she didn’t think her house was safe.”
The very idea of that set Simon’s stomach roiling, but he pushed it aside. “No, not a reminder,” he said quickly. “More like something to think about. We used to do that, when we were kids. Leave notes for ourselves. Sometimes seeing it written down can get the idea out of your head and help it make sense, you know?”
Adrian blinked as he glanced up at him again. He seemed almost taken aback. “Yeah,” he replied slowly. “Yeah, I do know, actually.” Then he frowned again and dropped his eyes back to the table. Snatching up the folder with a quick exhale that was something between a huff and a sigh, he added, “But why would she risk writing it down? If she really thought something was going on. She had to know that was too much evidence to risk leaving a physical copy of—”
“Well, she usually shreds them,” Simon cut in, almost eagerly. His brain was turning, trying to approach the situation from a new angle, as if he wasn’t Simon Dove. Just some random investigator looking into the suspicious absence of Minerva Jones.
Is this what he feels like all the time? The question flitted quietly through the back of his mind as his eyes came to land on Adrian’s face again.
It was an interesting consideration. But one he didn’t exactly have time for at the moment. Seeing that he had actually managed to grab Adrian’s full attention, he continued, “We were having kind of a laugh about it one night a while back. I was telling her that I’d gotten back into the habit of it recently. She said she hadn’t done it in years, but one of her cases was taking up too much brain space and she had started trying to get the thoughts on paper. But she said she didn’t want to leave those lying around, because it tended to be sensitive information. So, she always shredded them.”