The Sweetheart Game

by Cheryl Ann Smith

  Thank goodness for excellent gutter installation, fitness training, and decent upper body strength. Still, she couldn’t hold on forever. What would 007 do?

  As if on cue, her fingers twitched. A solution had to come quickly before her friends found her in a crumpled heap of bloody gore in the morning!

  Her phone! As with any good twenty-something addicted to electronics, it was always either attached to her hand as a semipermanent part of her anatomy, or in her pocket.

  Reaching over with her free hand, she felt the welcome bump in her PJ bottoms pocket and fished it out.

  Thankfully, she didn’t drop the darn thing. Then she’d be toast.

  There was only one person who lived close by and was strong enough to save her. She bit back her reservations, swiped the phone open, and dialed. When he answered, relief flooded through her. “This is Summer. I need help.” She rattled off her address and shouted, “Hurry!”

  For a moment, when outright panic rose to a crescendo and her life passed through her mind—or rather the imaginary life she wanted to have—Summer fantasized that she’d called the Ann Arbor fire department for rescue and a hunky fireman with bulging biceps had arrived to save her. He’d back his fire truck over the killer next door—and she’d receive full credit for the capture—raise his ladder, and her internal temperature, and race up to save her. He’d cradle her against his rock-hard chest, confess that his name was Poefan7, and they’d ride off into the sunset on his shiny red fire truck.

  Happy sigh.

  “Are we going to do this?” came an impatient male voice out of the darkness and startled her. “I was in the middle of something important.”

  She glanced down at the face staring up at her. The something important was probably eating puppies, she guessed. He looked the type.

  From his place below, Alvin the Ape, as she, Taryn, and Jess had called the hairy behemoth of a man when he’d been the bodyguard of her old boss, Willard, stood with his large arms crossed as he scowled up at her. After he’d been hired to kill Taryn and somehow ended up guarding the body of her new boss, Irving, she’d chosen to ignore his existence.

  Now he was waiting, looking very un-fireman-like, for her instructions, and grinning a hungry shark grin while she was rapidly losing her grip on the gutter.

  “Nice PJs. Are those bunny slippers?”

  “Shut up.” He was likely looking up her shirt.

  The frozen claws that were once her perfectly manicured hands were shaking under the downward drag of gravity on her curvy body. There was no time to worry about modesty.

  “Do something,” she hissed quietly through gritted teeth. She should be grateful that he’d come at all, but now was not the time to show her appreciation. It was time to cheat death. “I. Can’t. Hold. On.”

  “Say please.”

  “Oh, for P-Pete’s s-sake.” A chill ripped through her. This was the one time in her life that she wished she knew a lot of swear words. But he was her only savior, so she managed a tight smile and said, “Please.”

  “See that didn’t hurt.” He chuckled and lifted his grizzly bear arms. “Jump.”

  “Are you crazy?” Her pinky fingers gave way with knuckle cracks. She wasn’t sure the appendages were still attached. The bunny slipper on the shutter had fallen off and was now on top of a bush. “You’re twenty feet down. Can’t you come up and out the window like a normal person?”

  “You call this situation normal?” He curled his finger in a come-hither motion. “And it’s closer to fifteen feet.”

  Her ring finger slipped and both hands gave up the fight. With a gasp, Summer dropped like one of Wile E. Coyote’s anvils, into Alvin’s arms. He didn’t even grunt when she slammed into him. The guy was a freaking redwood tree.

  Instead, teeth flashed again from the depths of a tangled black beard. “Was that so difficult?”

  If she didn’t hate him for almost ruining her life once, she might have kissed him. Shoot, she still might. Then she looked at his bushy black beard, suspected that bits of his previous meals were still in there, and nixed that idea. “You can put me down now.”

  “Say thank you.”

  “Thank you.” He slowly eased her down to her feet. “Did you just grab my butt?” she said, her lids narrowing as she flexed life back into her numb hands.

  “Nope.”

  Even if he did, she was grateful enough to extend that one small payment for saving that same butt. If not for him, she might have broken more than a few bones. Or worse.

  The wall of hatred and outright hostility around her heart for Alvin cracked a little. Not enough to trust him or let him off the hook for all of his other misdeeds, but he didn’t have to come over in the middle of the night to rescue her.

  This time her appreciation was genuine. “Thank you. Really. I owe you.”

  “Yes, you do.” With that, he vanished into the night as silently as he came.

  The hint of a smile touched her mouth. Maybe he wasn’t all bad. Maybe. The jury was still out.

  Glancing at the Nealys’ garden, she was gleefully happy that the midnight prowler wasn’t watching the embarrassing fiasco from the shadows. He’d know she’d been spying. And if he was dangerous what would keep him from offing the witness to his body dump?

  With that in mind, she resisted the urge to explore the grave. She’d had enough excitement for one evening and wasn’t feeling up to tangling with a killer. Besides, until she found any reason to suspect that her neighbor was doing anything criminal, she’d chalk the incident up to him burying a beloved pet and leave it at that.

  Summer tried not to think of the stranger as she painfully brushed and flossed her teeth and put on clean Minnie Mouse PJs. She tried not to think about him when she crawled under the covers and set her alarm for eight a.m.

  And she tried not to let the mystery of the midnight burial worry her as she drifted to sleep, with the vision of the poor unfortunate and murdered Mr. Nealy filling her dreams.

  * * *

  Jason washed his hands and lowered the blinds. He couldn’t shake the feeling of being spied on while he was outside. As a former Chicago detective and Army Ranger, he’d spent many years guarding his back during dangerous situations. Now he was retired and still couldn’t dismiss the feeling that someone had watched him in the garden. If so, what had they thought as he lurked around in shadow with a garbage bag and shovel?

  That Freddie Kruger lived next door?

  With one last look out between the blind slats, he let it go. No glowing red eyes peered back at him in the darkness. No flashlight beam skipped across the yard. If he had a spy, and he or she didn’t call the cops on him, then they obviously weren’t worth worrying about now.

  Why not put those unsettled feelings in his new book? He was bearing down on a tight deadline with not much to show for three months’ work. The next Mick Malone book was dying a slow death, similar to the tragic heroines wearing low-cut tops and fainting in Mick’s arms on his book covers.

  His publisher did love the whole fifties vintage setting of his books and took it to the extreme. Still, those campy covers, and his tough, hardscrabble hero Mick made him heaps of money, so who was he to complain?

  With determination to get a solid chapter completed, he grabbed a beer from the fridge and walked into the spare bedroom that he’d set up as his office.

  “Ho Dasher, Dancer, and Prancer,” he said to the row of three deer heads staring down at him through glassy eyes from their perch high on the wall. It had taken several days to get past the feeling that they were judging him; for what, he wasn’t sure: his laziness, his need of a shave, the ripped sweat pants he wore around the house and didn’t wash nearly enough? The list was endless.

  Dancer, the one in the middle, even looked a bit sad. Of course, losing its head would make any deer blue.

  “Anyone like a beer? No? Then talk amongst yourselves.” He sat and reached for the wireless mouse. “I have work to do, so I’d appreciate if you kept the
noise down.”

  He really needed new friends.

  “Okay, let’s see what Mick is up to today. Murder, espionage, or grand theft of yard gnomes?” The middle-aged lady behind him had quite the disturbing collection of those.

  “We’ll go with murder.”

  Fresh off the feeling of eyes staring from the darkness, he managed to get three hours of work done before finally giving in to eyestrain and logging off. Satisfied that Mick was on the cusp of death with no visible way out, he saluted the deer and left the office.

  “Night, guys.”

  If someone from Mick’s past had found him and was waiting to put a bullet in him, he or she would have to wait until tomorrow and the next chapter to do the deed. Jason was dead tired and losing creative energy.

  As he dropped flat on his face onto the bed, his mind went back to the burial, and he couldn’t shake the feeling that trouble was brewing in the darkness outside.

  Chapter 3

  Summer dropped her tote on the chair next to hers and fired up her computers. When Irving had found her, Taryn, and Jess tottering down an empty dirt road almost three years ago, he’d hired her with the promise that she’d have the best of everything. He’d kept that promise. Her equipment was state-of-the-art, and updated frequently.

  Although, she really didn’t need anything quite so fancy for their PI cases, he’d insisted. Just because a lot of their work was local cheating spouses, or thefts, or other low-danger stuff, he vowed that if something big ever came their way, Summer should be ready.

  The reason she didn’t do her hunts on her work computers was that she liked to keep that part of her life separate and private. Outside of Jess and Taryn and Irving, no one knew what she was up to at night. It gave her an air of mystery that proper and sweet Summer didn’t have.

  She twirled her hair at thoughts of Poe. He was probably the guy who replaced those urinal cakes at rest stops, was pushing seventy, and had always lived with his mother. Even so, she liked the way he talked online. Despite the whole urinal cake thing, he knew how to spell. That elevated him in her mind.

  “You look beat,” Jess said, walking in and taking a seat on Summer’s wall-to-wall desk. “Were you hanging out with your cyber-dork friends all night?”

  Jess would be shocked to know what she’d been doing last night and with whom. She’d keep that to herself.

  “Nope, I was up all night making mad passionate love with my plumber.” Summer quipped and waggled her brows. “He knows how to use his drain snake on my pipes.”

  Jess scrubbed her hands through her cropped dark hair. The cut was adorable and she looked kick-ass. “If I thought you were serious, I’d cheer,” she said. “You can’t live your whole social life online. You’ll end up one of those people who grows pale and sickly from lack of vitamin D.”

  “Then it’s a good thing I have you and Taryn to get me out, isn’t it?” As if Jess should talk. The last time she’d had a date, he’d been so competitive that he’d almost decapitated her with a racquetball racket. And before him was the guy who wanted her to join his rock-collecting club. Jess had as little luck as she did with men.

  “Fine. But promise me you’ll at least go outside once a day for ten minutes of sunshine. I don’t want you to turn into a zombie.”

  “I will. If you promise not to tease me about the new guy I met last week.” She watched Jess sit up straight.

  “What guy?”

  “His name is Poefan7 and he’s awesome.” He was only online that first day long enough to give a brief generic bio and answer a few simple questions about himself, but he seemed very cool. They were not allowed to get personal. Yet in the days since, she’d developed a nice fantasy life surrounding him. “He’s smart and funny. You’d like him.”

  Jess slumped back. “I thought he was a real guy. I hoped. The last guy you met in a chat room turned out to be a prisoner.”

  Summer frowned. “Poe is real. And not a prisoner. Prisoners are not allowed to be a Hunter. Our leader makes sure.”

  Their leader was also anonymous and the only person who knew their real identities.

  “Great. Invite me to your cyber wedding and the cyber christening of your cyber children,” Jess said, and seemed to dig for patience. “He isn’t real if you’ll never meet him in person.”

  Summer flinched.

  “That hurt.” The one thing she could count on with Jess is that she didn’t hold back on her opinions. Over that last couple of weeks she’d been cranky, too. Summer tried to find out why but Jess just shut down. Still, she didn’t deserve the hit. She never judged Jess’s life choices. “Why can’t you be happy for me?”

  Okay, Summer had met several men online who turned out to be duds, but did she need her failures thrown in her face?

  Jess reached out and laid a hand on her knee. Cranky left and compassion replaced her earlier attitude. “Honey, I know it’s hard for you to find someone who likes you for you and not just for your packaging. And I know you have trust issues with men, and why. But meeting men on an online cyber-criminal-hunting site isn’t the way. You need a nice man who takes you to movies and rubs your feet. A cyber guy can’t do that.”

  “Maybe not, but at least I try.” Still smarting, she spun back to her computer. “Excuse me, I have work to do.”

  Jess squeezed her knee and left the room. Summer knew her friends wanted the best for her. She couldn’t fault them for that. However, meeting men was harder than anyone could imagine, and in her case, could be dangerous.

  Even the good guys only wanted to get in her pants and few cared to get to know her first. Then when she did speak, she’d nervously go off on some boring topic or another and drive them off. She was an awkward geek in a pretty package.

  Besides, she had tried other hobbies as a way to meet nice men: making origami animals out of gum wrappers, extreme ironing, and even planking for sport. The first gave her a cavity from all the gum chewing, the second was just not fun, and the third made her back hurt. Thus, she’d unapologetically gone back to something she did love: hunting criminals.

  Pushing aside Jess’s comments, she looked at the clock. She wasn’t on duty for eight minutes so she pulled her coffee cup over and clicked to her favorite most-wanted terrorists website. It was a compilation of all current international felons wanted for all sorts of crimes.

  Each day, new faces were added and Summer and her online friends would pick a couple of suspects to hunt. If they found anything new about the men, or women, they’d send off the info to an appropriate agency and get a point on their chart. If their searches found and located the wanted person, through facial recognition or other means, they’d call it a win and get fifty points. At the end of the month, whoever had the most points won the game. Although there were no actual prizes, they had bragging rights for the month.

  Summer scanned the mugshots and stills from videos and sipped her coffee. There were always dozens to pick from.

  “You’re obsessed.”

  Summer turned to see Taryn leaning against the door frame. She clicked off the site. Taryn was tanned beneath her blondish brown hair from a recent trip to LA with her DEA boyfriend Rick. It was a vacation and a chance to pack him for his move to Michigan.

  Their long-distance relationship had hit a wall and they wanted to be in the same place. An opportunity had opened up and he decided to make Ann Arbor his home.

  She jumped up for a hug. “When did you get back?”

  “Yesterday.” Taryn grinned. She was in love. “We still have to unload half the truck but he’s already getting settled in. He starts working in Detroit on Monday.”

  “Good.” Summer envied her friend and Taryn and Rick’s relationship. They were a perfect for each other.

  Jess was right. A real boyfriend was much better than a cyber one. Summer wanted what they had.

  “Look, I have to run,” Taryn said. “We’ll talk later.”

  Summer returned to sleuthing. She still had a few minutes. The pho
tos blurred. She was too distracted by Jess’s comments to focus. Just as she was about to give up, a face caught her attention. She paused the frame and reached for her magnifying glass. The photo had been taken by airport security cameras in Vienna. The man was wearing a ball cap and a NY Giants t-shirt. But it wasn’t his clothing that caught her attention and caused her heart to race.

  “I know that face,” she said aloud. But from where?

  “You know what face?”

  She started. Irving and his bodyguard—and former assassin—Alvin stood in the open doorway. Irving was in plaid golf pants as usual, and Alvin was in all black. The senior citizen and the hairy giant made an odd-looking pair.

  Alvin sent her a knowing wink but said nothing. If the Paleolithic knuckle dragger planned to out her for the humiliating adventure last night, he kept his mouth shut in front of their boss. He’d probably save the ammo for optimal impact at a later date.

  Her face burned. It sucked to be a blusher.

  She really needed to start locking her office door behind her. She smiled at Irving. “It’s nothing.” She clicked down the site. “I’m just talking out loud.”

  “And they call me senile.” Irving smiled and he and Alvin moved on.

  As soon as they were gone, she hurried to the door and quietly closed it. Back in her chair, she pulled up the face again and her stomach knotted. This time she was ninety-nine percent sure she was right. That wasn’t just any old criminal.

  Nope. He was her new next-door neighbor.

  Chapter 4

  There were several ways to meet her international arms dealer neighbor without ending up in the wood chipper in his garden shed. But none of them made more sense, or would have more of an impact, than using what God gave her.

  Baked goods. Nope. Too cliché.

  Tuna casserole. Nope. She wasn’t much of a cook. Besides, casseroles were boring and she needed a “meet-cute,” something he’d never forget. So, she’d use what a mix-up of O’Keefe and Henry genes produced one sweaty and mosquito-filled night in the back seat of an old seventy-two gold Plymouth.