Chapter 8 Arrow
ARROW
By eight, I’m at my desk and wondering if I should check on Annie. I know I should let her sleep. She’s a full-time student, something I’ve never been, so for all I know, she sleeps until noon and works through the night. I walk over to the coffeemaker I keep in my office and brew up a full pot.
I feel like I hardly slept a wink last night. When I wasn’t checking my phone for texts, my dreams were more than stimulating. It’s unnerving, the effect Annie has had on me. I have other clients and other work to do, so I put the golden-legged artist out of my mind and log in to my email.
Yeah, scratch that. I have no other clients. No other work. More of the same. Empty inbox. I do have a message from one of the guys I work with at an insurance company, but the news is worse than just the usual—no, we don’t have any new cases right now.
Mike tells me the insurance company he works for is going to start using more in-house investigators for their suspected workers’ comp fraud cases. Something about standardizing training and procedures to ensure more consistent investigation methods across the open cases.
Great.
That’s corporate speak that means they want to roll what I do into the jobs of overworked guys who are already on the payroll. It’s a cost-cutting measure. That’s all that is.
I do good work. Honest work. Some of the cases I’ve handled have saved the company hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Claim payments weren’t made—didn’t go out the door to people milking their injuries or trying to extend benefits longer than they were entitled to.
Those are big wins for the company, considering they don’t pay me a percentage of what I save them.
They pay me my flat hourly rate plus expenses, which still nets them big gains.
But they don’t see it like that.
I storm over to the coffeepot and fill the biggest mug I’ve got. Looks like there’s no reason not to put all my time and energy into Annie.
She’s literally all I’ve got now.
I decide to start my day with research. While I down my coffee, I look up everything I can find, starting with Annie herself.
But after an hour, I find very little that I didn’t already know.
All of her social media profiles are discreet and art-related.
She doesn’t have any weird engagements on her posts, and even a search of her followers and people who have communicated with her publicly online reveals most are female artists.
Which brings me back to my original line of thinking.
The school is the logical tie to what’s happening.
I spend another hour researching the school, complaints about the school, crime stats, but nothing.
The school is small and doesn’t have much of an online footprint.
June, her thesis adviser, has a website, so I learn what I can about her.
She definitely has had an interesting career.
She started out as a sculptor but has been teaching in some capacity for more than twenty years.
She has sold work to a number of businesses and hotels but, otherwise, nothing remarkable or revealing.
That brings me to Annie’s resident adviser, Neveah. I don’t know her last name so I can’t do much more than search for information about her on the school site. I don’t find anything.
My phone rings, and my heart practically leaps out of my chest. I expect to see Annie’s name on the caller ID, but it’s just Alice, one of the owners of the building.
“Alice,” I say, picking up after the first ring.
“Josh, hon, are you busy this morning? I wanted to drop by with a copy of the new lease. Go over a couple of the terms with you.” She sounds like she’s got me on speaker.
I imagine her husband Morris is with her.
I’m due to renew my lease, and I’m sure the rate’s going up.
When Morris and Alice bought this strip mall, they needed to fill it, so they put a lot of tenant-friendly terms in the initial lease.
But they warned me that could change. And like anything that’s going to cost me money, these changes are not ones I’m ready for.
My lease renews in ninety days, and if I can’t turn things around, I’m not sure I can re-sign. I don’t have to provide any notice if I decide not to renew, but Alice and Morris have to give me notice of the changes coming.
I guess right now is my notice.
“Come on by,” I tell Alice, feeling the coffee slosh around in my gut. “I’ll be here.”
I hang up the phone and walk into the tiny office bathroom to dump the last of my now-cold coffee down the sink. I splash water on my face, wash my hands, and smooth back my hair. The guy looking back at me has one thing going for him—he works.
I’m tenacious and smart, but that means fuck all if I don’t have any clients. Well, more than just Annie.
Morris and Alice arrive a few minutes later. I clap Morris on the back and shake his hand while I give Alice a smile.
She’s a sweet lady. I’m the only tenant they have who isn’t somehow in the MC that her husband runs with Tiny.
Alice never makes me feel like an outsider.
I’m friends with Leo, who’s not fully patched in, as well as Lia, Tiny’s daughter.
But being friends doesn’t bring me close enough to feel like they ever fully trust me.
“How’s business, man?” Morris looks comically suburban in his tight black golf shirt. He’s got kids now—Zoey, Alice’s daughter from a previous relationship—and they recently added another little one to the family, another girl just a few months younger than Leo and Lia’s son, Rider.
Morris stretches his thick legs out in front of him and pushes the chair back a few feet from the desk.
“Business as usual,” I tell him, not willing to reveal anything that will make my landlords worry about my ability to renew. We’ll all cross that bridge when and if we have to.
“Glad to hear it.” Morris has a file folder in his heavily tattooed hands. He sets it on the desk, but I’m not quite ready to get the bad news yet.
“How’re the kids?” I ask, not really directing the question to him or Alice, but both. “I saw Rider yesterday.” I shake my head. “They grow up fast.”
I don’t know what the hell to say to parents. They grow up fast. The kids are cute. I don’t have much in the way of family anymore, and none of my buddies have kids.
To me, Rider’s a cute, screaming mess of juice and snot. Half the time when I see the kid, he’s waddling like he’s got a diaper full of shit. The rest of the time, he’s moving so fast, I don’t get how legs that tiny can propel a body that quickly.
It’s not that I don’t like kids. There’s nothing wrong with them—they’re just not my people.
Morris’s grizzled beard softens as he grins. He laces his fingers together behind his head and smiles. “Girl dad, best job on earth,” he says.
“And you’re the best at what you do.” Alice leans down and kisses Morris’s cheek.
I lean forward and reach for the file folder. “So, what’s the damage?” I ask, moving on to the business at hand.
Before any of us can start talking, the front door to my office flies open.
“Josh! Josh!”
I recognize the voice and leap from my chair. “Excuse me one sec.”
I hurry into the lobby where Annie is clutching a piece of paper in her hands. She’s pale, and soft smudges under her eyes make her look like she’s slept about as much as I did.
“Annie.” I rush up to her and instinctively take hold of her arms. “What happened? Are you okay?”
She’s trembling so hard, I can’t imagine what the fuck has got her so worked up. And worse, why she didn’t fucking call.
“Talk to me,” I say, peering down into her face. “Whatever it is, I’ll take care of you. Just tell me what happened.”
“They found me,” she squeaks out, the hand that’s gripping the letter trembling. “But it’s so much worse. Josh, they found you.”
I release her arms and take the letter from her hand. In the same printing I remember from the other letters is a simple message.
Annie, you’re pathetic. Josh can’t stop what’s coming for you.
I start to see red as rage erupts from my gut. “Where was this? Where did you find this?”
“Tucked under my wipers,” she says. “That’s why I didn’t call. I went out to my car after I checked out. I was planning on texting you and heading into school, but I saw this under my wipers and freaked the fuck out.”
“Fuck,” I curse and press at the splitting pain behind my brows with two fingers. “Tell me everything. What happened last night. Who you’ve talked to, where you’ve been.”
She tells me in a shaky voice about Neveah, texting and calling at the hotel last night. How she went to sleep but kept dreaming that Neveah would show up at the door looking for her.
“And then this morning, my father called me.” She looks so young and so scared, I want to pull her close, protect her from whatever shitstain is tormenting her.
“What’d your dad say?” I demand. “Does he know what happened in the dorm?” I realize Alice and Morris are waiting for me, but this can’t wait.
“It was so weird, Josh,” she tells me, sounding lost. “He asked me if everything was okay at school. I told him, yeah, everything was great. I didn’t say anything about the dorm or the letters.
Nothing. He said he was between meetings, but before he hung up, he told me he slept better at night knowing I’m safe at school.
He sounded weird. Like he wasn’t alone. It just left me with the weirdest feeling.
” She looks up at me, tears in her eyes.
“Josh, do you think my dad put a tracker on my car? Why would he do that? But how did the letter get on my car in the hotel lot? How do they know your name?”
She’s full-body trembling now, and I have to admit, I have all the same questions.
If they know who I am, that means they know she’s hired me. That means not only the hotel, but my office, my home… Any place that I once considered secure might be compromised.
“Fuck,” I say, and when the reality of what I’m feeling crosses my face, Annie bursts into tears.