3. Parker #2
“Hells bells, Edna! That’s perfect. You should have seen this lady who was stuck in traffic next to me.
She had so much makeup on it looked like her face was melting after we all turned our cars off and it started getting hot.
I swear to you, she was frowning so hard it had started cracking like her whole face was about to fall off.
All I could think about was that she’d been on the way to bust somebody so she could fire them and was pissed that she lost the chance.
While she’s stuck in traffic, she starts coming up with all these ideas for random accidents, like the guy just having a run of bad luck.
Then one day—bam!—catastrophic incident, and the rest of his crew gets to figure out if it was intentional or an unforeseen mishap. ”
“You should make them bike messengers,” Phoenix muttered as he reclined on the couch, propped up enough by the cushions that he could comfortably eat and drink.
“Those guys are always getting creamed, even around here. Last week a dude in a pickup truck backed into a messenger in the parking lot behind Vintage Vinyl. Not only did he knock the guy down, but he started to back over him and the bike got wedged; that was literally the only thing that saved the guy’s life.
The dude in the pickup must have thought it was just a branch or something.
By the time a bunch of us rushed over and beat on the hood and sides of his truck, he’d pulled the damned thing forward and shifted back into reverse, four-wheel drive engaged and everything. ”
All I could do was whistle and shake my head because damn, some people’s children needed to be whooped with a flip-flop. Holy shit. “Fuck.”
“He popped out of the cab and stormed to the back cussing, then completely flipped his shit when he saw the gouge he’d put on his own truck when he’d backed into the guy.
He immediately starts asking the guy for his insurance.
Meanwhile, the bike messenger is bleeding and groaning.
We’re all waiting for the EMTs to show up, and of course, they’re so used to seeing me at the club that one of them asked if I had to make trouble everywhere I went.
It was a whole thing, since they didn’t want to believe me when I said I was just a good Samaritan who tried to help so the guy wouldn’t get crunched.
By the time they scooped him up and took off, I’d forgotten what I’d stopped at that shopping plaza to get.
I still don’t know what the hell I went there to pick up, but it must not have been too important ‘cause I haven’t missed it yet. ”
“After all that, I’ll go with bike messenger then,” I replied, jotting that down beneath the header I’d already set up.
Besides Edna and the guy who would eventually bite the bullet, I needed a motley crew of misfits, four, maybe even five of them, to look into the accident after the dearly departed had been carted away, especially if he’d already been the victim of a suspicious string of incidents.
Like, maybe some of them already had theories about who was responsible or had made cracks about who they were going to tell the cops to look at if he wound up dead.
Scribbling away, I didn’t notice that Aspen had joined us and covered the coffee table with an assortment of treats until he nudged my knee and offered me a paper plate and utensils.
“Are you still working on the rival underwear models in Paris story, or is this something new?” Aspen asked when I took them from him.
“I sent the underwear models to my betas last Tuesday,” I replied. “And I’ve been collecting idea fragments ever since. This is the first one that felt like it had legs, though I’m still working out how many characters and their names at the moment.”
“You mean all the bike messengers, right?” Phoenix asked.
“Yup.”
“Then you have to have some dude named Swift,” Phoenix declared.
“It can either be his last name or his nickname; hell, it can even be his real name if he’s got granola parents.
But everyone calls him Swifty, only he’s the slowest fuckin’ guy on two wheels and always droppin’ or misplacing deliveries and having to backtrack to see if he can find them. ”
“I can picture him arguing with some homeless guy over a package he accidentally left on a bench and him having to pay the guy to give it back or get in an outright brawl with him over it,” I replied, scribbling everything on the lines as fast as I dared to still be able to read it.
“Okay, wait,” Aspen said. “He’s got to be the guy who gets killed.
There are so many options built into the story, not just the manager but also some pissed-off customer because he lost something irreplaceable or a homeless dude who thinks the messenger ripped him off.
He’s the perfect corpse, because they’d have a bunch of ready-made suspects. ”
Nodding, I muttered, “Nice,” as I strove to get it all down before I forgot any of the details.
“What if there’s a whole domino thing in play,” Phoenix pondered.
“Like, this chick is new at her job, and she’s trying to impress her boss.
She arranges to have this package delivered to him right before a presentation to give him the information he needs to make a huge decision, and that’s what Swifty loses and spends a bunch of time looking for without knowing how time-sensitive it is.
So by the time he reports it lost in transit, the boss has made the opposite decision of the one he would have if he’d gotten the package and takes it out on the employee, firing her from her foot-in-the-door, literal dream job.
You can even have her threaten to make Swifty pay for ruining her life.
They look at her harder than they do Edna in the beginning and create a bunch of hilarious near disasters for her along the way. ”
“If we’re coming up with suspects, one of them has to be a jilted lover,” Aspen declared.
“But once they start digging into Swifty’s life, they realize he was a real piece of shit, which comes as a total shock to all of them, but it changes the way they look at the ex.
Maybe whatever the ex did, cutting up photos and burning them on the seat of Swifty’s car, shit like that, isn’t so bad when they start to learn how Swifty treated the people he went out with. ”
“It’s gotta be a nice car too,” Phoenix added. “Something classic and completely badass. Otherwise, dude rides a fuckin’ twelve-speed every day; he’s got to drive something to make up for that.”
“I can see him weaving in and out of traffic the way they do on those bikes,” I said, even as I kept writing. “And someone deliberately opening the door when they see him coming.”
“It could be any one of them or none of them,” Aspen said. “The killer could totally be someone who’s amused by watching them head in all the wrong directions, only to be satisfied that he or she has managed to throw the group off their trail, until the cops to show up at their door.”
“That’s perfect right there,” I declared, my writing growing frantic now as I raced my imagination, which constantly tried to insert more details, fleshing out scenes before I could capture the bones of them. “Pick a movie, will you, and give me a minute to catch up.”
“The Day after Tomorrow,” Phoenix said, pointing to the frozen cover displayed on the streaming service webpage. “I’ve been meaning to watch that one and still haven’t gotten around to it.”
“Perfect,” Aspen replied, clicking play before settling back in his seat. “I haven’t seen it either.”
“Neither have I.”
“And you still won’t have seen it even after we watch it, so hush up over there and write your notes. You’ve got to hurry up and write this now so I can buy a copy.”
“Or I could make you a member of my arc team,” I offered.
“Nope,” Aspen declared, wagging his finger at me.
“I don’t want to read a story that isn’t set in stone yet.
I want a hardcover, the same as every other time, with the sprayed edges and personalized bookmark and inscription, and I will happily wait until you have it ready so I can order it.
I have a special shelf set aside for your books and the merch you’ve put out to go with the novels, so don’t go trying to shortchange me. ”
“Shortchange?” I said, staring him in the eye. “Dude, every time you get one of the bundles, you’re dropping a hundred to a hundred and fifty bucks. Wouldn’t you rather know you’re going to enjoy the book before you shell out that much cash?”
“Like I’ve hated a single goddamn thing you’ve written yet,” I reminded him. “Now shut up and get to work.”
Phoenix made a sound like a whip cracking, while I turned my attention back to my notes, glancing up at them every now and again as flashes of ideas pieced themselves together in my head.
I could picture Phoenix, focused and determined; his one goal was to get through the day without getting into a fight with someone, despite how many times his patience was tested along the way.
Little snippets of someone pushing his buttons would make great comic relief.
Oh goddess, I had to include the sheer and utter aggravation of trying to find an address when there was a street, terrace, boulevard, and court all named the same thing.
Aspen was easy to weave into the cast too, since there would have to be someone the messenger crew received their instructions from, like a dispatcher, who spent much of his free time gossiping with the other dispatchers, which would ultimately lead to him ferreting out some interesting and completely unreliable things relating to their investigation.
With me on one couch, Phoenix on the other, and Aspen in the easy chair between us, the evening was as close to peacefully perfect as an evening could get.
Until Aspen’s phone rang.