To his relief, the woman stopped in her tracks. Even better, she turned to face him.
God help him, she was even more gorgeous under real, actual sunlight.
When he had first met her, Ajax had thought that, had she not been in her ridiculous pajamas, Tessa would have dressed tough and no-nonsense. Well, she’d gone home and changed in the time that they were apart. And while she certainly looked no-nonsense with her glorious hair braided and pinned up so that only the medium brown hair at the top of her head was easily visible, there was nothing punk about her current appearance. The only remnants of last night’s girliness were her lime green fingernails and the tiny chip of a diamond set in the side of her upturned nose. If anything, she looked like Rosie the Riveter.
And with all her luscious curves and even her lovely breasts hidden in her baggy jumpsuit, Ajax found his attention drawn to the delicate line of her throat, her clear, golden brown skin, and her large, lime green eyes. Without all the rest of it to distract from her, hers was a more natural beauty.
Ajax found that he liked it.
“Are you okay?” she asked, the concern evident in her gin-smooth voice and her very mobile face warming Ajax from the top of his head to the tips of his toes.
“Fine,” he said carelessly. At least, he hoped that it sounded careless. Truthfully, he was feeling a little bit less than fine. Quickly, he sent up a prayer that he didn’t have to call Derek to come cart him home. Derek would never let him live it down. To Tessa, he said “Earlier, you said that all those little, annoying things started only a few days ago, so I was wondering when you’d have time to sit down and go over your last week or two with me? Maybe we can figure out what might have started it and go from there.”
“Well, I’ve got to get to work – I’m already late for that – but maybe this afternoon? Say around six thirty?”
“Sure, that’d be great,” said Ajax. He’d probably be recovered from his walk by then.
“All right, I’ll drop by your place after work.” She started to move away then but came back to stare at him very, very hard. It might have been awkward, if Ajax had been even a smidge less tired. Finally, Tessa said “Do you need help getting back to your place?”
“No, I’ll be fine, thanks,” said Ajax. Being lugged home by Tessa would be even more embarrassing than being carried home by Derek. He didn’t daydream about making out with Derek. “Besides, I need to talk to the front office about changing my locks.”
It was a small chore, but just thinking about it made Ajax feel even more tired. Going into that office would mean walking a whole ten, maybe even fifteen, feet further away from his apartment.
Truthfully, he wasn’t sure that he was up for that.
Tessa got a mulish look.
“I’m already late. I could wait and walk you back afterwards,” she offered.
“I’ll be fine,” Ajax assured her. Why was everyone so worried about him? She didn’t look convinced, though, so he added “I’ll call Derek, if I run into any problems.”
Tessa’s expression cleared.
“Well, then I’ll catch you later,” she said cheerfully and, with a little wave, she left him there.
Despite the high potential for personal embarrassment if she stayed, Ajax found that he wasn’t happy to see Tessa go. From behind, those coveralls did her no favors.
When Tessa was gone, Ajax turned and went into the property manager’s office. Fortunately for him, there was a nice square chair, one that was cushioned and everything, planted right in front of the relevant desk. Even better, it was currently empty.
Gratefully, Ajax sank down into the seat.
From across her desk, the representative of the apartment complex’s management company was looking at him with wide eyes. She looked both surprised and concerned.
“So,” said Ajax. “I’d like to change my locks.”
Once he explained who he was and why he wanted the change, getting what he wanted was surprisingly easy. The woman at the desk not only promised to put in the work order immediately, she even offered to walk him back to his apartment.
Ajax politely declined – he could probably manage – but he was beginning to wonder if he looked as bad as he felt – or possibly worse.
Getting home was… interesting, but somehow, he made it under his own power, shouldering the front door open and heading straight to the nearest horizontal surface, which happened to be his couch. Gratefully, Ajax collapsed onto it.
Recovering from a concussion really took it out of a man.
Behind him, Gabriela shut the front door.
“Did you catch up with her?”
“Yeah,” croaked Ajax. “Can you get me a drink? Water, maybe?”
To cinch the deal, Ajax favored Gabriela with his most piteous look. It worked on his mother, his grandmother, and most of his aunt. It also worked on Gabriela.
Her expression visibly softening, Gabriela said “Of course. You just lie there and recover.”
By the time that Derek ambled into the apartment a few minutes later, Ajax was drowsing on the couch, having gotten a tall glass of water, an after-breakfast snack of cheese crackers, and a blanket spread over him by Gabriela. The blanket, which had been neatly folded over an arm of the couch, smelled like gunpowder, some other chemicals, and, very faintly, something that smelled so good that it made Ajax melt into the couch with perfect contentment.
“Where’d you go?” slurred Ajax, trying to sound alert and take an interest.
“To make a few calls,” said Derek vaguely.
“You were following me, weren’t you?” asked Ajax sleepily. He was too tired and too content to get worked up over it.
“And to make a few calls,” said Derek. “You look sleepy.”
“Mhmmm,” hummed Ajax.
“Get some sleep,” said Derek. “We’ll talk later.”
“Mhmmmm,” agreed Ajax.
If there was any more to the conversation, he missed it. But that was okay. He had the best dreams.
It was much later when Ajax awoke, the ambient light softer and slanting at a much longer angle through the windows. From the direction of the bedrooms came the soft clicks of typing fingers and voices speaking softly.
Gabriela, thought Ajax sleepily.
Apparently, she was working out of his spare bedroom.
He wondered where Derek was, if he was lurking somewhere around the apartment or even the apartment complex or if he had gone into work.
In the other room, the voices ceased, and a moment later, the guest room’s door creaked open. The carpeting muffled the sound of Gabriela’s approaching heels.
“Ah! You’re already awake!” she exclaimed. “Good. I was coming to wake you up again.”
“What time is it?” asked Ajax, as he pushed himself into sitting upright.
“Half past five,” said Gabriela.
“Oh, good. Tessa will be here in an hour. I have time for a shower.”
Gabriela flushed prettily. “Okay, um, I don’t suppose – I guess I can sit on the toilet lid.”
Ajax gaped at her, shocked. “What? No! Why would – No!”
She was a very good friend, and he loved her fiancé Derek like a brother, but it could only make things awkward between all three of them, if she saw him naked.
Gabriela narrowed her pretty eyes at him.
“Well, you can’t shower alone. You’re recovering from a head injury. What if you pass out?”
“I’m not going to pass out!”
“Well, I’m not going to let you drown!”
“I’m not going to drown!” How pathetic did she think he was? “Where’s Derek?”
“At work.”
Ajax cursed Derek’s hard-working nature.
“Look, if I’m humming, I can’t be dead, right?” bargained Ajax.
“Humming loudly,” Gabriela demanded. “And you can’t lock the door. Or shut it.”
“All right, but you can’t look.”
“I wouldn’t!” exclaimed Gab
riela indignantly. A beat later, she added “Unless you were drowning, of course.”
“What? Why not?” demanded Ajax, now indignant himself. And offended. “I don’t look bad naked. I look great naked! My birthday suit is my best suit!”
Gabriela laughed.
“I’m going to pretend that’s your head injury talking,” said Gabriela, “and not your vanity.”
“Then the joke’s on you,” he informed her loftily, making Gabriela laugh again.
Some men blew their hard-earned pay checks on video games, Ajax blew a large chunk of his disposable income at the annual clothing sales held by the various local formal occasions boutiques for men. And what wasn’t blown there was spent getting any alterations necessary to help him look his best in his new clothes.
When it came to how he presented himself, Ajax was the antithesis of Colombo. He admired a lot of things about the man, but never his professional attire.
But as unashamed as he was of both his body and the clothes that he put on it, Ajax didn’t really want Gabriela to see him naked either. She was a friend, but not that kind of friend, and moreover, she was his partner’s fiancée. Only the lowest of the low would seriously go after his partner’s girl.
So, it was without much more trouble that Ajax let Gabriela bully him into her terms. Not much of a singer himself, Ajax was surprised by how much he liked the sound of his own voice echoing around his tiled shower stall.
I wonder what it’d be like to have sex in here, he mused, his mind flashing to color-streaked hair, virulently green eyes, and a bangin’ bod hidden by a set of coveralls. Her voice was as smooth as gin every day. Having sex in his shower, she’d probably come out sounding like a siren, Ajax was sure.
Not that he allowed himself much time to ruminate on sirens of the coverall wearing variety or otherwise, not with the woman in question due to show up sooner rather than later and with Gabriela’s sharp ears listening for the first sign of distress from him. To have her hear that – or worse, walk in on it, because there was no way that he could wank and carry a tune at the same time – would have been impossible to bear. Ajax kept his shower strictly business, getting in and getting out as quickly as possible, much to Gabriela’s very vocal relief.
By the time that there came a knock on the front door, he was dressed and ready to answer it.
Tessa, now wearing a pair of jeans that clung to all her lovely curves and a low-cut V-necked t-shirt, was standing there with her date book in hand.
Had she lived three quarters of a century earlier, Tessa could have been a pin up girl, Ajax was sure of it.
“Hello again!” said Ajax, opening the door wider. “Come on in!”
With a nod, Tessa slipped past him, trailing the scents of some sort of flowery body spray and motor oil in her wake. It was an odd combination, one that tickled at Ajax’s nose and made him sneeze as he closed the door behind her.
Gabriela had retreated back into the spare room, but not before giving him the new key to his front door. Apparently, that had been changed while he was sleeping. And so, while Gabriela attended some sort of big corporate meeting with the west coast via the internet, Ajax was on his own with Tessa, she of the stunning good looks.
He hoped that he still had enough of his wits to keep himself from looking too foolish or awkward to her. She was gorgeous, and she exuded cool. If this were high school, she would have been entirely out of his league.
Fortunately, he had grown up – and grown into – himself a bit since then.
As they covered the short distance to the living room and its couch, Ajax channeled all of his mother’s attempts to drill something resembling manners into him. He asked Tessa first if he could get her anything and then, after she had refused his offers of drinks and snacks, if she’d had a good day at work.
“So-so,” said Tessa, while wobbling a flattened hand between them.
“What do you do?” asked Ajax, curious. He was always curious. “I don’t think I asked you before.”
“You didn’t,” said Tessa. “I’m a mechanic.”
“Yeah?” he asked, surprised and intrigued. Not a lot of female mechanics; for himself, Ajax had nothing beyond the most basic idea of what happened under a car’s hood. It’d probably be hot to watch her fix it, though. “Do you like it?”
Tessa flashed him a quick, bright smile. “I love it,” she said. “I get to move around and work with my hands all day. If school had been a lot more like that, I probably would have paid more attention.” There Ajax smiled. He was still smiling when she asked “You’re a detective, aren’t you? Do you like it?”
“Yes, very much,” he said. “Some cases are… hard, but I like knowing that what I do makes a difference. I like trying to make the world better, even if it’s only one small part of it. And I like that it lets me exercise the full range of my insatiable curiosity.”
Tessa laughed. “Be careful that you don’t end up like the elephant’s child,” she teased.
“I haven’t heard that one,” admitted Ajax. By then, they were sitting close together on the couch, the blanket that first she and then he had slept under neatly folded over the arm of it, probably by Gabriela. “Tell it to me?”
“Rudyard Kipling tells it better,” said Tessa dismissively. “Funnier too.” She waved her date book at him. “You’ll see. I’m not nearly funny enough to tell you about the elephant’s child.”
“Well, there’s probably not much funny about that,” said Ajax. “Should we get started?”
“Sure,” said Tessa, as she began to flip through her book’s pages. Ajax scooted closer so that he could look over her shoulder. He tried to breathe shallowly, tried not to sneeze on her despite the way that the chemical scents that wreathed her tickled at his nose.
Why don’t people ever just want to smell like themselves? Ajax wondered, annoyed. It would certainly be easier on his nose, and, at least to him, they’d smell better too.
As she flipped pages, he said “I guess the best place to start is this: have you got any bad blood with anyone?”
“No, not a single person,” said Tessa, without looking up from the pages that she was flipping through. “At least, not that I know of.”
“Ended things on bad terms with a previous boyfriend?”
“Nope.”
“Is there anything different in your life? Some new activity or person that wasn’t there a week or even two weeks ago?”
Tessa abruptly looked up from the book, startling Ajax. So close to her, Ajax couldn’t help but notice the tiny flicks of brown and blue in her eyes. Her full lips, so very kissable even at a distance, seemed particularly so now that all he had to do was dip his head to catch them with his own.
“No, not yet,” said Tessa, the low purr of her voice rattling through his bones. It went straight through him, arousal burning in its wake.
He was concussed, after all, not dead.
Ajax leaned in to kiss her, but Tessa turned away from him as abruptly as she had turned towards him. Instead of catching her lips with his, he had to settle for hooking his chin over her shoulder.
The better to see what she’s talking about, he told himself. It wasn’t much of a consolation.
Tessa had settled on a page that was three weeks back. Day by day, she took him through her daily schedule, using the notes jotted in her book to remind herself about band practices, gigs, work hours, and running times. Carefully, Ajax filed away the fact that she liked to go running, because he did too.
“I have to ask,” said Ajax, catching her eyes with his. “Are there any drugs at these practices or gigs?”
“No!” snapped Tessa, drawing away from him slightly.
“Not at all?”
“Never at the practices, and never for me,” averred Tessa. “I don’t party that way.”
Ajax inclined his head, and Tessa went on.
“And that’s it,” Tessa finally said, when they had reached their current Tuesday.
“What about thi
s?” asked Ajax, tapping a note that had been jotted on the upcoming Friday.
“Oh that? I’m expecting a delivery. It’s some stools that I picked up for my apartment’s pass-through counter. We like to eat there.”
“Where are the stools from? An internet site? A catalogue?” asked Ajax.
Normally, he might not have asked, but so far, her schedule had been fairly innocuous. There was a possibility that it had something to do with her music hobby – not drugs. Ajax believed her when she said that, but something – but otherwise, her life seemed fairly clean cut and ordinary. Of course, most people’s did until you really started digging into them. The devil was in the details, after all.
“A junk shop,” said Tessa. “People rent out a shelf or a case or whatever and use them to sell their dead grandma’s china and wedding dress and all the old odds and ends that they’d found in her attic.”
“Are the stools the only things that you bought there?”
“No, I bought a few things there,” said Tessa. “Some books, a painting, the stools, a set of china, and my lunch box. And that’s it. Why? Is that important?”
“Probably not,” Ajax conceded. “But it’s a place to start. And that’s the only thing out of the ordinary in your life?”
“It’s not out of the ordinary for me. I like rummaging around junk shops and pawn shops. I go at least once a month.”
“Have you bought anything else new? Gotten any odd letters or e-mails, maybe?”
“Aside from groceries? No, I haven’t bought anything; just those things from the junk shop. And no, I haven’t gotten any weird mail lately. It’s all just been the usual junk mail and spam. Why? Do you want to see it?”
“No, not particularly,” said Ajax, frowning. So far, she’d given him absolutely nothing to work with. “Can I see the stuff that you picked up at the junk shop?”
“Sure!”
It wasn’t a lead. It was far less than that, and poking into it probably wouldn’t even be productive. But it was all that he had, and Ajax liked to be thorough.
Maybe they were right down at the station, worried Ajax, as they rode the elevator down to the ground floor. Normally, he took the stairs, but Tessa had been pretty insistent. Maybe this is a waste of time. Maybe this was all in her head, and that’s all it ever was.
Her Detective Wolf Page 5