Yeah.
He arched that brow again but didn’t look up as he typed my address into his phone. In the meantime, my attention wandered to the Bunn of steel. So inviting. So seductive. The aroma wafting off it lured me like a caffeinated Casanova. Like Romeo below the balcony. Coffee by any other name —
“Ms. Davidson?”
I snapped back to the father.
“Are you okay?”
“I’m fine!” I yelled. No idea why.
He eased away from me.
I cleared my throat and tried again. “I’m fine. I just – I’m trying to quit caffeine.” When he raised that same brow, only this time questioningly, I explained. “Bun in the oven.”
“Ah.” He nodded. “Last time I had a bun in the oven, I had to give up whiskey. Worst twelve minutes of my life. Thank goodness those brown-and-serve rolls bake fast.”
I chuckled and stood as he pocketed his phone and rose to leave.
“When would be a good time for you to meet our guest?”
“I’m pretty open and very intrigued.”
“How about Friday morning. Around nine?”
“Perfect.” I wrote the appointment in my calendar, but only so I could rip the page out and tell Cookie not to let me forget.
He shook my hand, then started to leave.
“Oh, you left your envelope,” I said, picking it up to hand to him.
“No, that’s for you. Consider it a down payment.”
“Works for me.”
I opened it after he left. The thick envelope held about ten photocopied pages of what amounted to the file the Vatican had on me. They had pictures, dates of strange occurrences with which I’d been involved, a short description of what part the investigator believed I’d played in those strange occurrences, and his final thoughts, which always read, “‘Further investigation recommended.’”
Now, wasn’t that interesting.
5
Of course I’m an organ donor.
Who wouldn’t want a piece of this?
— T-SHIRT
I set Cookie to finding out everything she could on the missing suicide-note victims. There had to be a connection between them somewhere in their pasts. In the meantime, I would go talk to their closests, but first I needed to know if the victims were still alive. If they’d been abducted, this would quickly become a much different case. We would probably have to get the FBI involved, if they weren’t on to it already.
Reyes was still working, so I decided to cut out alone. I knew he’d freak. He wasn’t about to leave me alone for long, and neither would he put up with my running off without him, so I decided to pick up a passenger. Well, another passenger. The one I had at the moment would be of no help in a fight against hounds from hell, should they spot me in a crowd.
Jessica was harping again, this time about how her friends were at the restaurant, fawning over Reyes as though she had never died. She’d called dibs the moment she saw him, and they seemed almost relieved she was out of the way. I refrained from reminding her that (1) I’d had dibs long before that, and (2) she was as dead as the Twizzler I was gnawing on in an attempt to forget about my extreme caffeine depletion. Poor little Twizzler.
“She said that!” Jessica shouted. “Like, she said it. Right to Reyes’s face.”
“Wait, what?” I almost slammed on the brakes, then realized my foot was already on the brake, as we were idling at a stoplight. “Who said what to Reyes’s face?”
“Oh… my god. Have you heard a word I’ve said?”
“Not especially. Who said what?”
“She said she’d do anything, any… thing, for an interview.”
I turned to her. “Are you telling me you heard what Reyes and Jolene – I mean, that hooch – were talking about?”
“Duh. I was so upset with Joanie and the girls that I started to walk out when that – that ho practically assaulted our man.”
I’d just taken a sip of water, because Cookie had told me water would be good for the bun. Who would’ve guessed? I sucked in a quick gulp of air, sending water down the wrong pipe, at which point I sputtered and coughed until the car behind me honked. I honked back, then put the pedal to the custom Bugs Bunny floor mat and booked it to my on-ramp.
“First of all,” I said, my voice sounding like Dobby’s from Harry Potter, “you actually have a friend named Joanie?”
Ignoring me, she crossed her arms over her chest to pout.
“And second – ‘our’ man? Really?”
She shrugged one noncommittal shoulder. “I think he likes me.”
“It’s amazing you’re still single.”
“Right? I just have so much love to give. If I were still alive, Reyes would see that.”
“Yeah,” I said with a snort and another light bout of coughs, “and then he’d run in the opposite direction.”
“That’s so uncalled for.”
“Do you even remember how you treated me in high school? How you’ve treated me since? Why are you here? Why don’t you just… go… away?”
“You are the worst greeter in the history of greeters ever. In the history. Of time. And greeters.”
“Okay, what?”
“You heard me.” She turned to pout out the window this time.
“Greeter? You think I’m a greeter?” Talk about a demotion.
“Yes. To the other side?” She pointed up.