16. “Therefore I Am”
SIXTEEN
“THEREFORE I AM”
(BILLIE EILISH)
W hen Javi drove us up to the storage units, I saw Cap’s Porsche Panamera was there, Gabe’s Jeep was there, and Luna’s Prius was there.
Cap and Gabe were leaning against Gabe’s Jeep, but none of the women were visible, which I read as them being behind the closed door to the unit that was Angels Headquarters.
I also read this as Raye being pissed at Cap for horning in on our investigation action.
Javi stopped his truck, and we both got out.
After he dropped a kiss on my lips, he moved toward Cap and Gabe, I moved to the door.
I hefted it up and the awesomeness of our Headquarters confronted me.
Thick, white carpeting. A curved red couch with black piping, which faced a big black desk that had an old-fashioned speaker in the center of it.
Panels over the cinderblock walls covered in swirly red, orange, pink and black on a white background.
On these were portraits of all the Angels done in Warhol style.
Behind the desk, a large screen. And a recent edition, a beverage fridge stocked with waters and sodas (Arthur, we’d found, liked to surprise us with fun, new goodies).
There was more, and obviously the rest of it was as awesome as described.
And yes, I know what you’re thinking.
A kick-butt headquarters in a storage unit in Phoenix? Wasn’t it two hundred degrees in there?
No.
Arthur didn’t scrimp.
He never scrimped.
So even the units that just held the cars were temperature controlled.
I heard Javi whistle low, and I turned to him.
“And I thought NI&S had it going on,” he remarked.
I shot him a sunny smile.
Luna glared at him and tugged down the door so its edge hit the cement with a crash.
I heard Javi’s roar of laughter through the steel door.
“We’re mad at the guys,” Luna announced when I looked to her.
“I’m not mad at Javi,” I returned.
“The collective guys,” she amended. “Not one in particular.”
“Except Cap,” Raye put in. “I’m particularly mad at him.”
I wanted to know what was going on, but while Javi and I were essentially moving me into his townhome, I’d made some decisions.
Okay, so, backing up a bit, I was minorly freaking that Javi encouraged me to unpack at his place, giving me closet and drawer space and everything.
But I did.
At my place, I then repacked both cases and a workout duffle, all of the perishable food in my kitchen, some of the non-perishable stuff, my yoga mat and all my exercise stuff, my nutribullet and my blender.
We’d lugged all that to his place (more full disclosure, Javi did most of the lugging, I’d been ordered to unpack, so I did).
And…yeah.
I was minorly freaking about this.
Again, I wanted to know what was going on with Raye and Cap, etc.
But I had bigger fish to fry.
Therefore, moving away from the door so Javi couldn’t overhear, I stated, “I want all the updates, but first, Javi’s dad showed last night.”
There were shocked sounds all around because everyone knew Javi’s dad was a rich deadbeat loser.
“You are joking,” Jessie said angrily.
“I am not,” I confirmed. “Apparently, he’s divorced his wife so she can no longer bust his hump about cheating on her when she was pregnant, doing it making another woman pregnant, and now he wants to, as Javi puts it, ‘play dad.’”
“Oh my God!” Jessie snapped. “What a colossal dick .”
“I know!” I cried and collapsed on our red sofa as all the girls gathered around. “So obviously, we have to do something about this.”
They all recoiled.
I got this. Sticking your nose in family business was rarely a smart thing go do. Sticking your nose into two alphas clashing about something important was courting a death wish.
But this was Javi.
This was my guy (yeah, I’d made that official in my head too).
So we had to do something .
“What are we gonna do about it?” Luna asked cautiously.
“Track him down and make him promise to lay off Javi,” I answered. “I told him last night, he needs to let Javi reach out when…and if …he wants to. But Javi says he’s blowing up his phone, so even though his dad left, I’m not sure he was listening to me.”
“You talked to the guy?” Raye inquired.
I nodded. “Javi was losing it, so I got between them. And by the way, Javi looks just like his dad, except his dad is blond.”
“I can’t envision it,” Shanti said.
“I can. I Googled him,” Luna said. “He was a heartbreaker back in the day, no pun intended. He married an up-and-coming actress who supposedly quit her dream to be a wife and mother. Though, I looked at her filmography and it’s probably more she quit because she’s a shit actress and she found her meal ticket.
Case in point, a few years ago, she tried to get a Real Housewives of the Valley of the Sun thing going, but it didn’t take off. ”
My lip curled. “Gross.”
“Mm-hmm,” Luna agreed.
“I am so down with finding this guy and laying some truth on him,” Jessie said.
“I’m in,” Shanti said.
“Me too,” Willow said.
“It’s agreed,” Raye put in. “We’ll add that to our caseload. I’ll ask Arthur for his deets and we’ll plan.”
Excellent.
“Okay, before we get into Raye sharing why she’s mad at Cap, I have another dilemma,” I said.
“And this would be?” Willow prompted.
“I told Javi I wanted to take the physical part of our relationship slow, and now every time it gets really good, he stops it so we can take it slow.”
No one said anything, they just stared at me.
“It should be said,” I added, “that every time he kisses me, it’s good. Actually, it’s great. But I mean, this morning, we were all over each other, and then, with no warning, I no longer had my hands in Javi’s jeans, and he wasn’t grinding between my legs.”
Still, no one said anything, but now Luna and Shanti had faraway looks in their eyes, probably because they were wondering what it would feel like to have their hands in Javi’s jeans.
I didn’t mind this, because they’d never know, and I already did.
And it felt awesome !
But we had a time limit on our briefing so we could go meet Shanti’s cousin, so they needed to snap out of it.
“Hello!” I called. “I mean, stupid me for saying I wanted to take it slow, I see I made a woeful mistake, but now I want to speed it up, and it’s not like I’m being quiet about it, but Javi refuses to take us there.”
“Has it occurred to you that he wants to take it slow?” Jessie asked.
“No. This did not occur to me,” I replied. “Seeing as he was grinding between my legs, and I felt how ready he was for me.”
“Oh my God, I haven’t been laid in a while and this is torture,” Luna groaned.
“I hear that, sis,” Shanti muttered.
“You know you could—” Raye started, aiming this at Luna, but I knew she was going to mention Knox, so I cut in.
“And he even said he wanted to ef me hard on the couch.”
“Babe,” Jessie said, but spoke no more.
“What?” I asked.
“It can be special for guys too,” she said.
I went statue still.
Because…
Oh.
My.
God .
It wasn’t just because I told Javi I wanted to take it slow.
It was because he wanted me so bad, he wanted our first time to be special.
“I think I’m going cry,” I whispered.
“I think I am too,” Willow whispered with me.
“I think she’s so over putting him off,” Luna said.
“I think she is too,” Jessie agreed.
“I think I’m going to let Javi set the pace,’ I said.
“I think that’s a good idea,” Raye affirmed.
Well, one thing to say about all of that, my minor freakout at kinda-sorta moving in with Javi was a whole lot more minor because more evidence had just been laid out for me about him being more amazing.
“Okay, fill me in,” I urged. “What’s going on with you and Cap?” I asked Raye.
She threw a hand toward the steel door. “What more do you need to know with him standing out there, ready to horn in on our action?”
I knew it was that.
“They just want to keep us safe,” I explained.
“That’s what I said,” Willow put in.
“We have tasers. We have brains,” Raye returned. “The last two cases we worked, did we go barreling in guns a’blazin’ to take down the bad guys?” She asked this but didn’t let any of us answer. “No! We called them in, and they took care of it.”
“You confronted that pedophile who had Elsie Fay,” Luna pointed out.
“I had no choice. He was walking to the room where he was holding her,” Raye retorted.
“She really did have no choice,” Jessie put in her vote.
“I probably would have confronted him too,” I said.
“I totally would have,” Shanti added.
“No one could walk away from that.” Willow brought up the rear.
Luna huffed.
“And that’s not gonna happen here,” Raye went on. “We’re just looking into things.”
“Can’t we do that with a couple of guys following us?” Willow asked.
Before Raye could say anything, Shanti said, “Listen, I hear you. It’s invasive, and it comes off as them thinking we don’t know what we’re doing.
But take Cap for example. He’s been training with these guys since he was a teenager.
This is Willow and my first rodeo. And none of us has any formal training.
Maybe our first few cases, we have backup just in case? ”
“I’ve read the Rock Chick books,” I announced.
Everyone looked at me.
“And, just saying, we want backup,” I concluded.
“It isn’t the backup,” Raye said. “It’s Cap telling me we were going to have backup, rather than asking me if we wanted backup. The answer to which would have been yes.”
“Ahhhhhh,” we all said in unison.
“Yeah, that wasn’t the way to go,” Jessie mumbled.
“And yeah, that’s why we’re collectively mad at the guys, because between that and Mace et al coming in and confiscating Kev, this isn’t cool,” Luna explained.
I had to agree with that.
“Well, we have no choice. They’re going to trail us. So did you guys find anything at Kev’s place yesterday?” I asked.
Luna shook her head. “Negatory. But then we went to Trev’s place.”
Oh boy , I thought.
“Oh boy,” Willow said.
“What’d you find there?” Shanti asked.
“Well, first, seeing as he was murdered there, we found crime scene tape and a big sticker sealing the door, so even if someone could tear down the crime scene tape, they couldn’t get in without the cops knowing,” Raye shared.
“So you didn’t get in?” Willow asked.
“No, we got in, because Tex is a wild-ass motherfucker,” Luna stated. “He just opened his army knife, slit that bitch, then popped the lock and we went in.”
Although I feared this might be all kinds of illegal, I couldn’t help but giggle.
Tex was such a stitch.
“The place was a wreck,” Raye told us.
“Trev was never all that much of a homemaker,” Willow put in.
“No, Willow,” Raye said. “Tex was right about how easy they took it on Harlow’s digs. His place was torn apart.”
That gave me a little shiver and put me in the confusing position of feeling gratitude to whoever broke into my home that they didn’t do more damage.
“Did you see…?” Willow let that trail but communicated by stretching out her lips.
“Yeah,” Luna said quietly. “A body bleeds a lot when an artery is cut.”
“Like… a lot ,’ Raye added.
We all sat with that, and the vibe was not sunshiny goodness.
Jessie snapped us out of it. “Did you find anything else?”
“If there was something to find, whoever was looking for it didn’t find it,” Luna said. “Our guess is, they tried there first, then went to Harlow’s. But even if they didn’t find it, the cops would have. There was fingerprint powder everywhere. They went through it pretty thoroughly.”
“Obviously, this boils down to someone looking for something,” I noted. “We just don’t know what.”
“Well, while on house arrest yesterday, I did some calling around,” Willow told us. “A few of Trev’s exes. A couple of Kev and Trev’s buds.”
“Anything?” Shanti asked.
She shook her head but said, “It won’t shock you to learn, with the exes, Trev was a burn-his-bridges type of guy. None of them had heard from him since they scraped him off, and they weren’t sad about it.”
We all nodded at this intel, completely unshocked.
Willow kept going.
“With the friends, all of them were cagey, probably mostly because I was calling, and they know I’m out of the loop.
Only one of them would say Trev was into something hinky, but he didn’t know what it was.
Though he did say he wasn’t surprised it came to that.
He’d cut ties with both Trev and Kev because, his words, ‘assholes made an art of calling us all to the bar and conveniently forgetting their wallets.’ Something else I’m sure you’re not shocked to learn. ”
No, again, we weren’t shocked at all.
“You know, men should journal more, so when they do stupid stuff and get their throats slit, we could just find their journal and it’d tell us all we need to know,” I groused.
“That would be optimal, but Trev wasn’t a journal guy,” Raye said.
“I’m not even sure how his body remained functioning with what was strewn all over his kitchen.
We can just say, the dude was not about sticking to lean proteins.
We didn’t make more mess than was already there, but Tex is good at a search, and we were all over that place. Nada.”
“Unless the cops got something,” Jessie remarked.
“Unless the cops got something,” Raye agreed.
“Time to have a chat with Jayden,” Shanti said.
“Time to recruit a cop informant,” Luna decreed.
“Me, Shanti, Willow and Harlow in the Merc. Luna and Jess in the Kia,” Raye ordered.
“Only if we switch around so Jess and I get the Merc on our next ride,” Luna stated.
“Obviously,” Raye replied.
That sorted, we all walked to the door.
After Luna tugged it open, I saw Javi’s truck was gone.
Cap and Gabe came alert, then got in Gabe’s Jeep.
And we headed out.