by SP Durnin
After giving Jake a look overflowing with venom, Anna swished her way quickly up the aisle and grabbed a few boxes of over-the-counter motion sickness pills. She turned back to voice a scathing remark at the little people who had just completely ruined her day because of their unwillingness to defer to her on general principals. Jake looked at her with a raised eyebrow and whatever she'd planned to say died on her lips. He had to be bluffing, didn't he?
He spread his arms as if to say, was there something? causing the merry Mrs. Bessendorfer to spin on her heel and set sail for the register at the far end of the Supercenter.
Jake watched her go as Mr. Pavek handed Kat Gertrude's pain medication. He hated people like that. People who would shit all over somebody just because they believed what prep school they went to or how much money they made entitled them to act like a five year old.
Kat beamed at him as she rang up the medication.
"That was brilliant," she said, as Joe gave him a thumbs up on his way back to fill the toddler's prescription. "She nearly lost it when you mentioned your publisher. I wish I could've gotten a shot of her face for the break room!"
"Yeah, well…" Jake rubbed the back of his neck with a sheepish grin. "I am a journalist, but I work freelance. I get published a few times a year, but mostly I ghostwrite and proofread novels. I don't know what any of the local TV station phone numbers are unless I borrowed your Yellow-pages, either."
"You were bluffing? Oh, that's priceless!" Kat's eyes and smile widening with mirth. She scribbled her phone number on one of the store fliers and pressed it into his hand. "Look, give me a call later. I'm going to see a performance at Bueno Dave's tonight. I'd love to talk when I'm not hip deep in Mary Kay psychos."
Jake tried not to blush as he folded the paper and shoved it into his back pocket. "Okay. I don't know if I'll be available though. I have to finish the cookbook I've been editing which is due next Tuesday, but we'll see what happens."
Her eyebrows rose.
"Smart, gutsy, nice to old ladies, and you can cook?" she marveled. "No one's that good. Are you secretly a serial killer?"
"Nope."
"An alien bent on global domination?"
Jake shook his head.
"Girlfriend?"
"Just Mrs. Jennings," he said, "but she's not the jealous type."
Gertrude rolled her eyes. Then the pretty young woman cocked her head and squinted at him thoughtfully. "Boyfriend?"
Jake chuckled. "Nope. I just don't have much luck with relationships. I think it's because I have a weakness for vintage punk rock. I never hit any clubs. That bass-loaded garbage gives me migraines."
Kat laughed as the toddler's mother swiped her credit card through the reader.
"Well, let's see what happens then," she said as he paced Mrs. Jennings past the counter. "Nice guys are still out there. Good to know."
"I think that's part of my problem," Jake mumbled to himself and followed Gertrude up the aisle.
"What problem is that, Jacob?" Gertrude asked. He hadn't meant for her to hear his comment and was reluctant to discuss the topic. Right up until she threatened to ram him with the scooter as they moved through the parking lot to his car.
"Being a nice guy," he said. "It's not beneficial to your social life when it comes to dating."
"I never understood what women today see in men that treat them badly," Gertrude said dryly. "When I was young, a man had to be nice to you. I wouldn't give someone who was more concerned with getting in my bloomers than what was on my mind the time of day."
Jake shrugged and held open the door of his Jeep for her. It was genuine US Government Issue, which he'd purchased just after his return from England. Best three hundred dollars he'd ever spent, in his opinion. Granted it had been in a box. Unassembled. But his friend Allen Ryker's father had offered to put the monster together for another two hundred. He'd done a bang up job too. In about two weeks Jake had received a call to pick it up. Allen's dad adjusted the carburetor for a minute then shut the hood, smile plastered wide across his Greek mug as Jake walked in. He proclaimed that he'd never had so much fun as he did putting the Jeep together and the olive green vehicle's engine rumbled to life on the first try.
He also told Jake he'd decided to buy a couple more to sell, along with a third for himself.
So far, he'd assembled and sold almost a dozen.
Other buyers had ordered four more too, and Allen's father was having the time of his life putting Jeep after Jeep together in a bay at Ryker's Auto Body.
"Really, Jacob," Gertrude said, "you need to find yourself a nice girl. Not like the last one. What was her name?"
"Nichole."
"I told you she was nothing but a floozy," she chided. "No self-respecting woman would wear a miniskirt that short. And made of leather? Besides, she worked in a brothel for heaven's sake."
"She was an exotic dancer."
Gertrude sniffed. "Don't split hairs, dear. You need someone that uses her head for more than something to keep her hair on."
True enough, Jake thought.
He and Nichole had met through Allen. Their relationship, if you could call it that, had begun that same night at a bar. Jake learned that the bar was only three blocks from where Nichole worked. She'd strutted in, moving like the High Priestess of Naughtiness, and every guy there had instantly hated him. The evening ended with a marathon of sex beginning at his doorway, through the living room, and finally ending in his bed where her fingernails left little half-moon slices in his shoulder blades. Saying Nichole was addicted to sex was like saying a heroin addict needed a fix. Theirs had been a brief, tumultuous affair that, not to Jake's surprise, ended like a train wreck. Worse yet, he knew the breakup was due to his lack of, what she termed, sexual open mindedness. What Nichole wanted just wasn't in his genetic make-up. Sappy as it was, he'd always believed that sex was a way to express affection, not just push the human body to fornication extremes. When she started talking about bringing other women home, he realized the downward spiral had begun.
Jake knew that most men would jump at the idea of a threesome with two smoking hot women, but he wasn't one of them. After two months of her pleading, both verbally and physically, he'd finally had enough and broke the news to her over dinner. She had taken it well. Kind of. He had to toss the shirt he'd worn that night. Merlot just doesn't come out of a tan shirt. Neither does mustard, as it turned out. It did however prove, without a shadow of a doubt, that you couldn't base a relationship on sex alone.
"Yeah well. Sometimes I think I was born in the wrong era." Jake slipped into the driver's seat and brought the Jeep to life. "Maybe I should take a correspondence course in jerkism."
"What?"
"Sure! That's what I need," he replied, grinning. "New wardrobe, crappy attitude, ditch any kind of values I have. The ladies will be lining up."
Mrs. Jennings looked at him with her you're full of it gaze and latched her seat belt, wincing as her arthritic hands twinged. "That would bring your supply of corned beef and cabbage to a swift end, young man."
"Forget I said it." Jake swung his Jeep out of the parking lot. "I'd never risk depriving my belly of corned-beefy goodness."
The drive back to their building was uneventful, with the exception of stopping every few blocks or so to allow yet another ambulance to go by. Jake began to frown when the fifth one almost broadsided a classic MGB, and then narrowly missed a tubby guy on a vintage ten-speed. Gertrude noticed his expression and looked around.
"What is it, Jacob?" Gertrude asked.
"Probably nothing," he said, still frowning. "I just can't remember seeing this many ambulances. At least, not in a while."
Mrs. Jennings followed the latest one's course up the ramp to the 670 freeway.
"Do you think something's happened? A fire or some kind of terrorist attack?" she asked.
"No, nothing like that." Jake shook his head and checked the surrounding skyline for smoke. "They were all going in different directions.
If something that big had happened we'd definitely see the smoke, and emergency vehicles in thirty-one flavors would be streaming to the same location."
Gertrude looked half-convinced as she raised her eyebrows. "Sure about that, are you?"
Jake nodded and accelerated, bringing them back into traffic. "Reasonably sure. Those years I spent with Britain's SAS. I picked up quite a bit about how to recognize real danger through close observation of my surroundings. Well, that and my brilliant journalistic intuition."
Gertrude smiled, nodded, and gently smacked him in the back of his head.
"Hey! Don't mess with the driver!"
"Oh, you're the driver?" she asked. "I thought you were a comedian."
Jake sighed as he pulled into the tenant parking lot behind their building. He punched his code in and the solid steel gate slid open smoothly, allowing him to move the Jeep through. After the vehicle was clear, well-disguised motion sensors inside the lot activated pneumatic hinges on the gate and the massive door closed with a pronounced clank.
That was one of the many good things you could say about their landlord, he mused, helping Gertrude out and grabbing her bags while ignoring her protest that she could at least carry the little one. He thanked the powers-that-be every day that he'd found the owner to be a standup guy.
After Jake viewed the vacant apartment, George Foster had handed him a three-page list of the current tenants' phone numbers and asked him to call any of them for an honest opinion of the building, its upkeep, or him in general before the writer made his decision. He also made it clear to Jake that drugs, wild parties, or any other shady activity would result in eviction by way of a size eleven boon-docker to the ass.
"Anyone screwing with my peace here only does it once. If you can accept that, welcome to the building. If you can't, have a nice day, quit wasting my time, and fuck you," Foster had said.
Jake signed the lease for his apartment, overlooking the dilapidated warehouse next door, right there.
When Foster asked him why, he admitted that the unit commander told him just about the same thing during his first day with the SAS. He brooked no shite, protected his men, and (after about a month) treated Jake just like one of them. It helped that the writer was CPR certified, could shoot almost as well as the rest of the brick, and didn't flinch every time a gun was fired.
Foster had chuckled telling him how his own unit cross-trained with the Limeys in '88 and that anyone who could hold his own with them was welcome in his building.
George Foster kept his property in top shape too. The building's utilities almost never went down (which was rare when renting), because he crawled around under floors and through air ducts with the repair crew so often. Nobody could get in without a pass code, which the residents made up themselves, or authorization from a resident. Then they had to get by a truly motivated ex-Navy security guard who knew all the residents by name. The elevators and stairways were kept absolutely perfect at Foster's specific request. The one time the elevator had broken, he'd actually run everyone's errands for the two days it had taken for repairs to be completed. He'd camped out in the lobby at night, disabled the external intercom, and walked every delivery up himself. He'd gone up with every resident when they'd come home, regardless of the hour, letting them know that he was dead serious about getting the elevator running ASAP. The following day, he contracted for a new and very expensive 24-hour repair service, after giving the building's now former service provider a large piece of his ex-Navy mind. He hated taking the stairs due to the fact they made the pins in his knee ache. He was damned if he'd ask them to do something he hated to do himself.
George was approaching seventy and lived alone in a tiny two-room he'd set up in the building's basement. The man didn't spend much time there, however, probably because he didn't have any family of his own. Gertrude informed Jake once that Foster did have a brother in California somewhere, but they only saw one another every few years or so. Evidently, his brother's wife didn't like the old soldier's sense of humor.
Their teenage daughter loved it, though.
He always seemed to be around, no matter the hour, working on one project or another. George usually kept his office door locked too, which Jake thought a bit odd. Another oddity was the way the aging man somehow just produced things, seemingly at will from within. George had once entered his little cell and, not five minutes later, come out with an RPG for Jake to examine. The writer honestly believed Foster had a wormhole to a National Guard armory under his desk or something.
The other residents believed he kept all his best porn in the office's many filing cabinets.
George was closing up the lobby intercom as Gertrude and Jake came in. He finished tightening the last plate screw, shoved the power drill he'd been using into his ever-present, side satchel and motioned for some of their bags. Knowing better than to decline, Jake handed over the four in his left hand and hit the call button for the elevator.
"Hey, Mr. Foster," Jake said. "What's up?"
"Damn it, O'Connor, I told you how many times now? My name's George. Not Mr. or Sir or any of that other horseshit," he grated. "If ya can't bring yerself to use my name, just call me Chief. Hiya, Gertie. Still cradle robbin' I see."
"Hello, George," she replied with a smile. "Well, Robert's been gone ten years now, so I thought I might get a more current model."
Foster laughed uproariously as the elevator doors opened and they stepped inside. He tended to treat his tenants like he'd treated the men in his unit when he was still on active duty in the Navy. His bawdy humor and can-do attitude endeared him to Gertrude and the older occupants (along with Jake who admired him for his blunt, if occasionally crass humor). The rest of the younger ones took his comments in stride because he was the best landlord any of them had ever encountered, and they didn't want to piss the man off.
"I figured that," George said, as the lift rose to the fourth floor. "You always got me all frazzled before I enlisted. Almost swore off women altogether when I came back and learned you'd got hitched."
"What changed your mind?" Gertrude pulled out her keys as they trooped down the hall.
"Fell in forty-eight hour lust with a French girl named Claire two months into my second tour," George said with a smile. "Figured you couldn't all be bad after that."
Gertrude held the door for the two men as they lugged her bags into her kitchen, but shooed them both away when they tried to unpack.
"Oh, no," she said crisply. "I draw the line at males trying to put groceries away. You two will just shove things in wherever there's room, and I'll spend the next hour reorganizing the mess."
"You mean the cheddar cheese don't go up in the cupboard next ta the spaghetti?" Foster asked, straight-faced. Jake tried to cover his laugh by faking a cough, but Gertrude saw through him.
"Out, out!" Gertie grabbed the cane she kept hanging on her pantry door next to the spice rack and ump-teen different kinds of tea. "Go! I thank you, Jacob, George, but if you don't get a move on, you'll have some contusions!"
The two men ran for their lives.
After Gertrude shut her door, Foster stood in the hall smiling while Jake hugged his sides, nearly incapacitated with laughter. "Think we could've taken her?"
George shook his head, still grinning. "Not a chance. She'd a-handed us our asses."
"Kinda thought so."
"Heh. Well, I'm headin' down." George reached into his utility bag and pulled out a battered notepad. He leafed back a few pages, crossing off projects he'd completed with a grubby ballpoint. "Oh, almost forgot. Yer friend Allen left a message for ya. Said to remind ya to pick him up at Bolton Airfield at two o'clock, sharp."
Jake rolled his eyes, rode the elevator back to the lobby with Foster, and fished the keys from his coat pocket.
"Stop by when ya get back. Got something new ta show you boys," George said. "Make them shootin' games Allen's so fond of look like a pillow fight. I'll be in the mood to maybe take it to the range I think. Some
fool's coming to make me an offer on the warehouse. Again."
"Why do you hang on to that eyesore?"
Foster snorted. "It's like me. Old, tough an ugly. Besides, I might turn it into a garage fer the building one day. Thoughts on shootin' later?"
Jake shrugged. "Maybe. Al may not need any more adrenalin after today, though."
George gave him the Look. The one drill sergeants save for recruits who ask questions on the first day of basic training. It said, I can't believe yer dumb enough to let stupid shit like that drop out of your pie-hole. Gimme fifty more push-ups, dip-shit.
"We talking 'bout the same friend here?" George asked.
Jake smiled ruefully. "Let's just say Allen never lets a Friday go to waste without getting high."
George's expression turned homicidal. "Stoner?" he growled.
"No, no. Nothing like that." Jake assured him, then hit the bar to open the lot door. "Al's into a different kind of high."
* * *
Tracy Dickson was still in her apartment.
Rigor had come and gone over the course of the last twenty-four hours and the smell was getting more and more pronounced. A gray tinge had spread over her torso, giving her skin the dull, sickly look of a department store mannequin that hadn't seen any maintenance in the last thirty years.
Her coffee mug had tipped off the couch in the early hours of the morning, coating the rug with the tepid remains of Jamaican roast, which stained the hardwood floor beneath.
Tracy's answering machine displayed six messages, each one just a little more worried than the last, finally ending with Carly promising to come by to check on her with Nathan that evening if she hadn't heard from her by nine.
The corpse couldn't have cared less…
Chapter Two
Laurel was daydreaming of a weekend off when Kat arrived.
It was just after six, and most of her customers had already come and gone for the day, so she decided to knock of a whole three minutes early. She'd been able to open a holistic, supplement store of her own and believed that finally, after years of working in national-chain mega marts, she would have it made. Cater to a specific clientele, be her own boss, set her own hours, live the dream.