Chapter 37
When I woke up the next morning, I had the pain at the back of my neck that always lingered after a migraine. BB was gone, but someone in my living room was speaking in a low voice.
Immediately, I was out of bed, looking for a weapon, remembering that my Taser was in the drawer of the coffee table.
Judo alone it would have to be.
“Feeling better?” he asked.
BB had settled into his lap and must’ve been the creature he was talking to.
I closed the phone app. “Why are you here?”
He frowned. “I was worried about you. Especially when I saw you hadn’t shut the apartment door behind you. I decided to camp out here to make sure you were okay.”
My heart melted ever so slightly, but that melting was followed by an ache.
Ice cream melted, too. And folks might take you for ice cream every now and again, but ultimately they would leave you.
Sometimes they might even tell you you’re not enough while your ice cream is melting because you’ve lost your appetite.
“I’m fine.”
He chuckled. “This is not my first rodeo, Stark. Never once has a woman ever been fine when saying ‘I’m fine.’ Let’s start with the migraine. How’s that?”
“Down to the pain in the back of my neck.”
He patted a spot on the love seat beside him, and I sat. He began massaging my shoulders and my neck, and I made an indecent sound.
He stopped. “Is that a bad cry or a good cry?”
“Good cry.”
He continued massaging. “So what happened yesterday?”
“I only got the title to my car after I sorted all Ken’s mail and threatened to sic the IRS on him if he didn’t sign it over to me.
Then he told me that he hired Trista to spy on me.
After getting my tags renewed, I went to see her.
She wasn’t as remorseful as I might have hoped. Then I saw the moving van, and—”
The thought of you leaving hurt so badly that I wanted to rip off the Band-Aid and get it over with then and there.
Only I didn’t say that last part.
Instead, Malone filled in the gap. “You thought I was leaving?”
“Yes.”
“Do you really think I would leave without saying goodbye?”
My migraine threatened to return. Those weren’t the words I would’ve chosen to hear. I’d been hoping for something along the lines of “I like you as a person, not just a booty call.”
“C’mon, Stark, I wouldn’t do that,” he finally said.
I turned around so I could face him. “But you are leaving soon, aren’t you?”
He sighed deeply. “Chateau wants me to start a case in Denver after the July fourth holiday. Then I have to get back home to California to make sure no one’s burned down the office while I’ve been gone.”
“I see.”
“I figured out what Blake did and where he stashed the money. The only thing left to do was to find him, and you did that for me.”
“About that . . .” I absently rubbed my breastbone since an ache bloomed underneath. By helping Malone find his cousin, I’d hastened his departure.
He looked at me expectantly.
“Hand me a dollar and pretend you gave it to me yesterday morning.”
“I don’t have a dollar.”
“Do you have any money on you?”
He reached into his back pocket for his wallet and handed me a twenty.
“Thank you. This is for that case I took. You know, the one where I searched for your cousin?”
He tapped his chin. “Oh, yes! I absolutely remember hiring you to do that.”
“Was I right about Selena?”
He sighed. “Yes. Knowing Blake’s accomplice helped me find those missing pieces to the puzzle. Both of them were arrested earlier this morning.”
“Good,” I said.
He stood and started pacing. “But I feel like such a fool for not even considering her. She is smart enough to know about Liechtenstein. She had access to anything Blake could’ve ever wanted.”
“That was my thinking as well,” I said in a soft voice.
“And convincing her to string me along and then dump me had to be a bonus for Blake.”
“You know for sure she did that?”
His eyes met mine, one fire and one ice. “The dates don’t lie. He hired someone to do the initial attack, but not long after we started dating, Blake suddenly knew what I was going to do before I did it.”
“I’m sorry, Malone.”
“Could’ve been worse. We could’ve married.”
I winced.
“I guess I didn’t want to believe she’d do that to me. They didn’t interact at all at the gala.” He scratched the back of his head.
“I noticed that, too. When you have that much money on the line, you can rationalize avoiding each other until you’re safely out of the country.”
“I still can’t believe she would do something like that!”
I braced myself. Here was the point where he would turn on me, as people seemed so frequently to do.
Instead, he went back to the love seat and sat down beside me. “You’re a genius, Stark. It was right under our noses, but you are the one who figured it out.”
“Because you don’t want to believe the worst in people.”
He read between the lines I’d just spoken. “I’m not as good as you make me out to be, Stark.”
“That may be true, but I’m far more cynical than you think.”
His phone rang, and he cursed colorfully. “This had best be the last work call I ever have to take while we’re together.”
After mere seconds he turned to me. “Gotta go in.”
“You go.” I checked my watch. “I have to go to the bank before they close at noon.”
“Then we’ll meet back here to celebrate.”
I forced a smile. “Something like that.”
He walked over to kiss me on the cheek and then walked to the door. I trailed behind him. When his hand touched the knob, he stopped. “Oh! I almost forgot. Addie came by before you woke up. She brought something for us.”
“I’m scared to ask,” I said.
“Don’t be,” he said with a smile. “Hold out your hand.”
I did as he said, and he slid a friendship bracelet on my wrist. Addie had made it with elastic, using both colored beads and white ones with black letters. My bracelet said A N T I - H E R O.
As if Little Miss Petty would be anything but.
Then my eyes caught Malone’s bracelet, one he’d put on his wrist, no doubt without thinking twice about whether it was manly or not. His said K I N G O F M Y H E A R T.
I sucked in a breath, dizzy at the memory of how flippant I had been while standing in the Waffle House parking lot saying that wearing a friendship bracelet unironically would be a sign that—
Oh, what did the universe know about anything?
“Really sweet of her, don’t you think?” Malone was saying.
“Yeah, she’s a good kid.”
“Okay, I hate to leave you, but I need to take care of this. Then I’m going to turn off my phone when we reconvene this evening.”
“Yeah, same,” I said, even though I knew I was prolonging the inevitable.
“I’ll get new champagne,” he said. “I’m afraid the bottle I opened last night went flat.”
There would be no need for champagne, but I didn’t say so.
Going to the bank felt like such a 1990s thing to do. While almost all my clients had paid me through Cash App (yes, my username was $LittleMissPetty), a few paid me in cash. I also had the hundy from Jackie and what Havisham had loaned me.
If the teller thought I had obtained the cash through nefarious means, she didn’t mention it.
I made a deposit and then went home to log on to the portal for my student loans and pay off everything I could.
I took care of fees, got current with my payments, and then frowned at the principal. How could I possibly still owe so much?
I shook my head, then made sure my rent was paid for the month. That left me with . . . not a lot.
But, hey, the car was mine. More jobs were headed my way. On the whole, I’d done a good job of making something out of nothing. At least, as the Beatles once sang, I’d done some with some help from my friends.
I felt both heavy and light. Light because I’d somehow managed to pay off my late fees but heavy because I knew I needed to talk to Malone.
I’d give him a chance to say it first. If he could say it first, then I would reciprocate.
If he couldn’t say it first, then I would know he’d never looked at our arrangement as anything other than temporary.
That decided, I could check my mail without fearing another form letter threatening me with some kind of penalty. Outside I went, smiling at the memory of running into Malone and then pretending to look at that Lands’ End catalog.
As if it would ever be cold enough to wear flannel pajamas in Georgia.
The mailbox creaked open, and I took out a stack. Some was actually addressed to me, but much of it was marked “Current Resident” or had the name of a previous tenant. Then there was a white envelope addressed to me.
From the Georgia Board of Private Detectives and Security Agencies.
What the heck could they be sending me? I was up to date on my license.
I hadn’t even made it back into my apartment before the phrases “reviewed a complaint” and “non-disciplinary private admonition” had me sitting on the second-to-the-bottom step. My heart pounded. My mouth ran dry.
Up until that moment, I don’t think I had realized how much I enjoyed my job. For a while it had been too intertwined with my relationship and carried all those negative associations. Now that I had even more freedom to pursue the jobs I wanted to pursue, I had begun to enjoy it.
Well, other than the camping.
But the threat of having my license suspended made me rethink crickets and flamingos and sewing the flaps shut on tighty-whities.
Someone—and I had a pretty good idea who—had submitted an anonymous complaint to the board suggesting that I had been trespassing on Dobbs’s lawn and harassing him with the flamingos. Based on the timing of this letter, the Douchecanoe had tattled on me immediately.
And he knew he had when we spoke.
Fortunately, the board had a sense of humor and had chalked the entire incident up to “poor judgment,” but it all added up to “unprofessional conduct” nonetheless.
Ken had to have been the one to have submitted the complaint because he was the only one who knew about my day job.
Also, Trista’s delight that day had been genuine.
Well, best I could tell. But even Trista probably didn’t have the first clue that Georgia had a regulation board for private investigators.
Nor would she think to connect the flamingos to being a private investigator.
Once again, Ken had proven himself far pettier than I’d ever been.
Until now.
Heart pounding with rage, I took out my phone and searched for a number for the IRS.
A quick search of the website showed no number to call. I couldn’t email to refer someone for an audit, either. Uncle Sam wanted paper. I found an official form called an “Information Referral” that would have to be printed, placed in an envelope, stamped, and sent.
Okay then.
Little Miss Petty would pretend it was 1994 and conduct her business old-school—as soon as she remembered where, other than the post office, she could buy some stamps.
Well, that and if she could coax her printer into actually working.
But this would be her last official act of pettiness.
If I’d learned anything these past few weeks, it was that I didn’t need to be in charge of meting out consequences, logical or otherwise. Collecting evidence? Absolutely. But I would have to effect change from the right side of the law—spirit or otherwise—from this point on.