Chapter 5 Reid
FIVE
Reid
“Remind me again how this isn’t a stakeout?”
“It’s a casual drive by,” Hazel said, pushing off her car and waving at me.
A few days ago, when she gave me her address at the salon and said she’d drive, I’d almost told her there was no way in hell I’d be tagging along.
But then she’d looked at me, with those glassy, wide, helpless eyes, and I’d caved.
This whole thing was so far outside my comfort zone it was ridiculous, but I’d said yes anyway.
It wasn’t that I couldn’t say no—though, sure, I usually didn’t—it was that I didn’t want to. We’d just met, and yet I felt compelled to help her. She seemed so defeated, like she didn’t have much left. I couldn’t stand the idea of being one more letdown.
“And what information are we going to glean?” I asked, approaching her ancient-looking sedan. Seriously, this thing could have been in a museum.
“I don’t know? A brazenly guilty expression?
A stray orange cat hair on his black shirt?
We’ll know it when we see it.” She gave me a small smile and handed me one of the coffees teetering inside the holder in her hands.
“It’s a vanilla lavender soy latte. Hopefully that’s okay.
It was the special at the café down the street. ”
I tried not to turn my nose up at the strange sounding drink. “Interesting,” I said, taking the cup from her.
Despite this being one of the strangest mornings of my life—meeting a girl I hardly knew, sipping a coffee I’d never usually try, about to drive to her old place of work to spy on her boss in search of clues for a kidnapped cat—I felt kind of…
excited. Or maybe it was anxiety. I once read that the two felt almost identical, and I hadn’t been able to unlearn that since.
That fluttery, flippy sensation deep in your gut?
It showed up for both. The main difference was that anxiety usually only preluded the unknown.
“Your hair looks great, by the way,” Hazel said, opening her driver’s side door and waving for me to get in.
“Thanks. It’s grown on me.” Not even a lie, either.
At first, I’d had to bite my tongue when I realized she hadn’t taken enough length off the top.
I’d forced myself to be polite and leave, figuring I could always go back to Ruby to fix it at a time when Hazel wasn’t there.
But after looking in the mirror for a day, I had to accept that Hazel had been right. The shape did suit my face better.
The passenger side door handle stuck when I tried to open it.
“You have to yank a little,” Hazel said, her voice muffled by the car window.
I pulled harder on the handle, but the door still didn’t budge.
“Okay, you have to yank a lot. Really put your shoulder into it.”
I braced one hand on the frame of the door and yanked—hard. It opened, almost whacking the glasses clean off my face. I jerked backward and shot her an accusatory glare.
“I’ve been meaning to get that fixed.” The way she said it made me feel like she had absolutely zero intention of getting that fixed.
I started to slide into the seat but froze.
Her car was a disaster. Not just slightly messy—a full-blown catastrophe.
If I thought Ruby was cluttered, Hazel was on a whole different level.
Clothes were scattered across nearly every seat, an open CD case lay on the floor, and random papers were strewn everywhere like a tiny tornado had blown through.
“Sorry, it’s a little messy.” Hazel piled up the sweatshirt and receipts from the passenger seat and dumped them into the back.
It was almost physically painful to get into her car. My entire being rejected clutter, and it seemed, from my very limited knowledge of her, that Hazel’s entire being was clutter.
“It’s fine.” I urged my voice not to go up an octave. As soon as I closed the door, the claustrophobia hit me right in the face. My fingers searched for the button to roll down the window.
“Oh, you have to roll it down, like actually roll it.” Hazel held out her hand and made a turning motion with her fist before pointing to the door.
“Got it,” I said, before urgently cranking the window down.
She gave me a funny look, likely because it was only forty degrees outside, but I hoped she didn’t ask me to put it back up.
My skin was blazing hot, as it typically was any time I found myself in an uncomfortable or new social situation, and the icy air was the only thing keeping me sane.
“Thanks again for coming with me,” she said, throwing the car into reverse. It made a loud creaking noise as she peeled out of the parking spot.
“Are you sure you don’t want me to drive?”
“Nah, this is easier. I know where we’re going.”
“My phone—like many this day and age—has GPS,” I said, wishing I had forced her to consider this alternate plan before I became a hostage in her passenger seat. Nothing about Hazel screamed ‘safe and responsible driver.’
“Seriously, don’t worry about it. Drink your latte and relax. You’re the one doing me a favor, I’m not going to force you to drive me around, too.”
I didn’t say it out loud, but letting me drive in this situation would actually be the favor.
Although, I might have thought better of this plan halfway there and forced us to turn around.
I had tried to tell Hazel that the best plan for getting her cat back was to come up with a few carefully thought-out hypotheses and then look for proof.
The pool of suspects couldn’t be huge. But we’d have to be cautious.
Clearly, someone deranged enough to steal a cat wasn’t in a great state of mind.
“Remind me again why you’re so sure it’s your old boss,” I said, taking a tentative sip of my latte. It was shockingly delicious. I took another drawn-out sip.
“I kind of orchestrated a coup.” She winced as the car rolled to a stop at a red light. The streets were empty, given the early hour. Hazel had mentioned her old boss, Clinton, always got to work at least an hour before the salon opened.
“A coup,” I repeated. “As in a revolution? How does one do that at a hair salon?”
“He’s a dick, Reid. You don’t understand.
” Her tone grew more defensive. “He has this bullshit pay structure that I seriously doubt is even legal. He hires us under the guise that the salon itself is well known and going to bring in all this clientele, and then we’ll work on commission.
So if I brought in more clients one week, I’d get paid a bonus.
It’s bullshit, because we still had to find all our own clients and most of us were barely making minimum wage while Clinton was taking the majority of the earnings. ”
“That does sound shitty,” I said.
“I was working there for a few months when I’d had it. I started talking to some of the other girls, and we were all fed up. I said we could go on a strike and post about it on social media.”
“So you made a video on your social media dragging him?”
She licked her lips and glanced at me before returning her eyes to the road. “It’s a tiny bit worse than that.”
I slammed my foot against the floorboard instinctively as Hazel came a little too close to the truck in front of us.
“What did you do?”
“Well, I had access to the salon’s social media.”
“You didn’t.”
“I did. I posted from the main account, detailing how much he was screwing over the stylists. And it may have gone a teensy bit viral.”
I balked at her, kind of horrified, but also kind of impressed.
“It wasn’t crazy viral, but local-viral. His salon got bombarded with one-star reviews and he was livid. Said I ruined his business and fired me on the spot.”
A laugh escaped me. Hazel certainly wasn’t a pushover, that was for sure.
“So potentially a candidate for a severe grudge, but do you really think he’d blackmail you?”
“After I posted that I won the lottery—”
I shot her a disapproving glare.
“I know, I know, but you can’t keep holding that against me. It’s done. Anyway, he responded to my post, saying I should pay him back for everything I caused him to lose, or something like that. I took a screenshot if you want to see, but then I blocked him.”
“So it’s not outside the realm of possibility.”
“Right,” she said.
The car made another dying sound as if wheezing its last breath when she pulled into a parking lot. The salon was housed in a sleek white building at the far end of the plaza.
Hazel pulled into a spot, the brakes squealing when she stopped.
“Real discreet,” I muttered. “This isn’t exactly ideal for a stakeout, you know.” I pointed to her car, easily the loudest vehicle I’d ever ridden in. It practically announced its arrival a block ahead.
“If I don’t have to pay this psycho all of my winnings to get my cat back, maybe I can buy a new one.”
“You should buy a new one regardless. This one can’t be safe.”
She smiled playfully. “I’m sorry, but are we or are we not here in one piece?”
“I think the bumper might have fallen off at the last light.”
She rolled her eyes before unbuckling her seat belt and popping open the center console. I averted my gaze, figuring it best for my mental health to avoid seeing the unkempt state of that compartment.
I surveyed our surroundings. We had driven about fifteen minutes to get here.
It was arguably a better part of town than the salon where Hazel and Ruby currently worked.
Not that their salon was in a bad area, but this place was ritzy as hell.
No potholes in the parking lot, fresh paint on every building, manicured planters, and not a flickering neon sign in sight.
Rent here must cost a fortune. While her old boss sounded grimy for sure, my gut was telling me the person who was extorting Hazel would have a lot less to lose.
When I turned back to Hazel to relay this thought, I found her with binoculars pressed against her eyes as she leaned forward, looking through the windshield.
“What are you doing?” I asked, unable to keep the exasperation out of my voice.
She pulled the binoculars away and offered them to me. “Oh, sorry. You’re right. You’re the mystery solver. You should probably have these.”
She said it earnestly, something I might’ve found endearingly ridiculous under different circumstances.
But right now, I was on edge. There was pretty much a zero-percent chance we’d get out of this unnoticed.
Not in Hazel’s clunker of a car, and definitely not with her making it so painfully obvious we were snooping.
I placed a hand on the binoculars and lowered them. “No, I mean why did you bring them? Anyone walking by would probably call the police and say there are some stalking creeps in the parking lot.”
“There’s no one here.”
“Yet,” I pointed out.
“Fine.” She folded her arms across her chest and leaned back into the seat. “We probably have at least ten or twenty minutes before he shows up.”
“And when he does, we will stay very far away, observe from a distance, and then get the hell out of here,” I said, still in disbelief she had convinced me to join this wild goose chase.
In all of my time internet sleuthing, we rarely did anything that couldn’t be done from behind a screen.
While this was kind of exhilarating, it mostly made me feel nauseous.
“Right, of course.” Hazel reached for the binoculars that were now on the console between us, but I swatted her hand away.
“And no binoculars.”
“How am I supposed to discern a guilty expression or a stray piece of cat hair from this distance?” she huffed.
“You’ll have to judge it by the rhythm of his walk.”
“Why did we even come here if we’re not going to properly investigate?”
I threw my arms up. “I didn’t want to come here in the first place. In fact, I believe I insisted we didn’t. I told you we should be building a case—writing down facts and seeing what we can figure out from the original message.”
“Well, you’re here now, aren’t you?”
“Because—” My voice fell away.
Because you were insistent.
Because I couldn’t say no.
Because, maybe, a small part of me is having more fun with you this morning than I’ve had in recent memory.
“Let’s just get this over with so we can move on,” I said instead. Her large amber eyes settled on me. Even when I looked away to examine the parking lot, I could still feel them on me.
“What got you into investigations in the first place?” she asked.
That all-too-familiar wave of self-consciousness washed over me. “I’m not sure. I guess I’ve always been a little bit addicted to true crime. Especially cold cases. I found them infuriating. How justice could go unserved like that.”
My ex, Meghan, used to hate when I talked about this stuff. I believe her exact descriptors were “cringey and embarrassing.” Didn’t exactly do a whole lot for the old ego.
“And you decided you wanted to solve them?” Hazel asked. For a second, it was easy to forget the absurdity of where we were, and I faded into her question. I thought I caught a flicker of genuine interest beneath it, something more than just politeness.
“I was pretty active in some local online forums. I got talking to a few other users regularly. Honestly, we never thought we’d actually find something that could lead to a real-life arrest or anything like that.”
“But you did, right?” Hazel confirmed.
My chest puffed out. Did she seem impressed?
“We did, yeah. We found the camera footage that cracked open a lead suspect’s alibi. We sent it to the police, and they were able to make the arrest from there.”
“Wow, that’s impressive.”
“It felt good,” I admitted, prouder of that accomplishment than anything else I’d done.
“And you stay in touch with those people? The ones you solved it with.”
I nodded. “They’re my friends. We actually…we have a blog together.”
Hazel’s eyes went wide. “Seriously? That’s so cool.
What’s it called? I want to read it.” She was already pulling out her phone, poised to search.
I was so used to cringing away when I shared that fact, but she wasn’t making fun of me at all.
She was a sweet girl. Maybe a bit of a hot mess, but warm and friendly, and unafraid to be herself.
I decided I liked her. Maybe we could even be friends.
That theory was about to be tested.
A car pulled into the lot and Hazel sat straight up. “That’s him. That’s Clinton.”
The car came to a stop in an empty space in front of the white building and a middle-aged man with long blond hair got out and slammed the door shut. He was a small guy and very…well-groomed looking. Nothing about his all-white, perfectly pressed outfit read as seedy catnapper to me.
“You should send a text to that number,” I said. “We can see if he checks his phone…”
Before I could even finish my sentence, Hazel threw her shoulder into her door and pushed it open.
“What are you doing?!” I whisper-yelled, my heart already pounding in my throat.
But it was too late. Hazel was already outside the car and barreling toward Clinton with a fire in her eyes.