Chapter 1 #3
Who carries hundred-dollar bills in their back pockets?
This guy, apparently. I wasn’t going to do this.
It was dumb. He was laughing inside at my expense.
Make the pool boy do something stupid for money.
Of course that’s what this was. But you know, my bank balance was in the red, so I could really do with a hundred bucks, and all I had to do was walk across the yard and see if the neighbors had a pool.
Seemed easy. And so what if it cost me some pride?
“You’re gonna do it, or you’d already have left,” he said, voice all cocky.
I huffed, and kept my boots glued to the path, still pretending I wasn’t about to walk back there and take him up on his offer. What can I say? There wasn’t much I wouldn’t do these days for a hundred bucks.
“Why?” I asked.
He shrugged a shoulder. “I’m bored. And you can leave them your card.”
That was . . . a good idea. It didn’t make any sense, that he’d pay me to do this, but what was the worst that could happen?
I made my feet move and headed over to him. He stepped over the lounger and met me at the pool’s edge, holding the cash between two fingers, like a fishing hook I was about to bite. I had to look up a little to meet his gaze.
This close, I could see the little gleaming beads of sweat on his chest, caught the sunlight. His hair stuck up at an odd angle where he’d been resting on it, and he looked like a bad anime sketch, all angles and spikes, but stupid pretty with it.
“What’s the catch?” I asked.
“No catch.” Sunlight caught in his dark eyes, making their mischief shine.
“You want me to head next door and see if they have a pool? That’s it?” I glanced toward the neighbors’ property but couldn’t see beyond the towering palms and oversized hibiscus shrubs.
“Sure.” His teeth flashed white. Just normal-looking teeth, no fangs. But they had to be behind that smile somewhere, didn’t they?
I plucked the hundred-dollar bill from his fingers and shoved it into my pocket. Alright, better get it over with. Heading back around the pool, he fell into step beside me. So, he was the catch. He was coming along.
“What?” he asked, catching me looking sideways at him. “I gotta come along or you might lie and tell me you’ve seen the pool when you haven’t.”
“This is weird, man.”
He thrust his hands into his pockets and peered ahead, across the manicured lawns, sprinklers spreading water in fans, scattering rainbows. “You must have a real dull life if this is weird.”
I laughed, shaking my head.
“You should like this. Pools are your thing,” he said. “Pools, not people.”
He was definitely laughing on the inside. This was a big joke to him. Well, the joke was on him. All I had to do was cross the lawn, see the neighbors’ pool, and I was done here. Easiest hundred bucks ever.
“I don’t just do pools,” I said.
“Get out,” he said, with too much enthusiasm, his tone full of sparkling sarcasm.
“I clean cars too.”
His eyebrows lifted. “Wow. What a coincidence. I have a car.”
“Is that right?” I grinned. “Just one?”
“Yeah, just one . . . for every day of the week. Wanna see today’s?”
“Not really.” Now I really did laugh. He might actually be funny, when he wasn’t overdoing it.
He smiled too. His gaze lingered on mine, then skipped ahead. “Through the bushes there.”
The grass had been flattened ahead, between the shrubs, like he’d said.
I went first, following the trodden path, and through the palms, I finally spotted the neighbors’ house.
Where Witherborne Mansion screamed old money, the neighbors’ house was all new.
The enormous modern box house resembled a tumble of black blocks and glass.
I couldn’t decide if it was ugly or art.
The rough path led us toward a low brick wall topped with iron railings, and there, on the other side of the wall, overly manicured gardens guided my gaze straight to a huge pool. “There it is,” I said, triumphant.
I spotted someone by the pool, an older guy wearing a black bathrobe who was staring at some kind of inflatable floating on the surface of the water.
I should have stopped there. Kept the hundred bucks, turned around, job done, gone home, eaten snacks, watched Brooklyn Nine-Nine reruns.
But I stayed a little while longer and looked a little harder at the thing floating in the pool.
“Huh.”
“Huh?” Theo asked, but I wasn’t really paying attention to him because that thing in the pool . . .
“Wait . . . is that . . .?” I gripped the railings and pushed my face closer.
“So, uh . . . Just so you know, maybe don’t let that guy see me .
. .” Theo was saying, sounding far away now, because my gaze had glued itself to the suspicious floating thing and the guy standing at the pool’s edge in the black bathrobe and looking down at the body-shaped inflatable like it was just another Monday.
“Oh, shoot, that’s not good.” I pulled back, the weight of what I was seeing landing hard. It wasn’t an inflatable. A body floated in the pool, face down, likely very dead. “Theo, that’s—” I turned to ask Theo what he’d gotten me into.
Theo’s eyes rolled back, and he dropped to the ground as though someone had cut his strings. He landed with a loud thump.
What?!
The guy in the bathrobe looked over.
What in the what?!
A maybe murderer stared through the railings, right at me, and Theo Witherborne was on the ground at my feet.
I had about ten seconds to figure out what I was going to do.
“Well, this is a sticky predicament.”