Chapter Four #3
King's office was much like the front room.
The wall to the back of the building was the lime-wash brick, the floors were the same, the champagne was painted on the other walls.
His desk was oversized, but all neat lines.
In front of it were two wide, dark brown chairs, the kind you could picture yourself folding yourself into with a blanket and cup of hot chocolate on a cool fall day.
The TV was huge—Kingston was a guy, after all—taking up most of the wall across from the desk.
The framed picture on the wall behind where he likely sat many long days and nights wasn't local.
It was the inside of what looked to be a very small apartment building, sparsely furnished, neat.
There was no real focal point, but my eyes were drawn immediately to the line of shoes set up near the door.
A pair of low heels, four sets of boys' sneakers in varying sizes from biggest to smallest, and a little pair of girls' sneakers.
The whole Rivers family.
Before they lost their mom.
It was sweet, yet somehow sad at the same time.
I wondered if clients asked about it, if he was willing to tell them the truth, or if it was just background noise to whatever crisis existed in their lives to send them to Kingston's office in the first place.
An oversized brown and tan speckled clay mug sat on the desk, the contents cold beside a giant pile of paperwork, each section flagged with different tasks.
Fax.
File.
Mail.
Well, I decided flipping through the papers, at least I could help him out a bit in exchange for all the work he was doing for me.
I washed out his cup, refilling it for myself, taking a somewhat unnatural, perverse sort of pleasure in using his daily work cup, and got to filing, faxing, and packaging things up to be picked up by the mail person.
"Savvs, what are you doing?" Kingston's voice broke through my concentration as I held up one sheet of paper to the light, trying to decide if the number on the sticky note was a two or a seven.
My body jolted violently, even though his voice had been low, calm. My arm dropped as my heart sped up. Turning in the chair, I found him standing there in a simple dark gray tee and jeans, his eyes a little hooded, tired, his brows scrunched in confusion.
"You have the worst handwriting of anyone I have ever seen," I declared, shaking my head while sending him a small smile.
"I saw your pile of paperwork that needed to be dealt with, so I decided to handle it for you, lighten your load a little.
I know how hard it can be to get to the paperwork when you have other things to handle too. "
"That's really sweet of you," he told me, moving into the room, the door automatically sliding closed behind him with a quiet click. "Nixon told me on his way out that you were in here watching TV."
"Leave it to him to confuse me constantly coming out to use the fax machine and ask where the stamps were for watching TV. Are the pups still sleeping?" I asked, having heard a complete lack of yipping or playful growling over an hour ago.
"Didn't even hear me come in. What, did you tranquilize them?"
"I think Paddy would like a buddy," I told him. "He and Hannibal wore each other out all day. None of the whining to go for walks like you told me he usually does."
"Feel bad having more than one when I don't have a yard right now," he told me, rolling out the tension in his neck as he came over toward me, sitting off the edge of the desk, trapping me in.
"You take him for like four walks a day. And Scotti has a yard. As do most of the Mallicks. You could totally let them hang there on occasion."
His lips tipped up as he looked down at me, eyes warm. "You're a bad influence."
"I'd have five of them if I could," I admitted. "I have the yard. I just don't have the time. Two Hearts would give you another one in a heartbeat. But you have to make sure it will grow up to be around Paddy's size. He couldn't roughhouse with a little dog."
"How about when the time comes, you come and help me pick one out?"
My belly wobbled as my brain tried hard to reason with it, remind myself that he meant it as a friend, not anything else. Even if picking out puppies was absolutely something couples did.
"I'm sure I could arrange that. If I am out of hiding by then."
Kingston's chest deflated on a sigh, letting me know instantly he hadn't had any more luck today than the day before.
"We'll get you out of hiding, sweetheart. It's just proving harder than expected. Harry, it seemed, had no family left. And not a friend in the world."
"That sadly doesn't surprise me. He wasn't exactly pleasant to get along with most of the time."
"I'll get there. Just have to start looking in other directions. So what are you having trouble with?" he asked, gesturing toward my hand.
"You know twos and sevens are completely different looking," I told him with a smirk. "If you need some help with it, I'm sure one of the Mallick children can drag out some of that fancy lined paper from second grade and give you a quick lesson."
"Smartass," he said with a smile as he reached for the paper.
His hand closed over mine, shocking, unexpected, the contact making a warmness glide through my stomach as each of my nerve endings set to high alert, taking in the callouses on the pads of his hands, the length of his fingers, the warmth of his skin.
"Five-two-two," he mumbled off the number.
"Wait wait wait," I said, surprise making it possible to focus on something other than the feel of his hand on mine. "How are they both twos? They look nothing alike."
"You're looking at me like you're expecting a rational answer, Savvs. I 'm afraid I don't have one. I just write like a toddler."
"I, ah," I was too distracted by his closeness, his scent, the warmth emanating off him to remember what I was going to say. "What time is it?"
"Just after five," he offered. "You've been working a long time."
"Once I figured out how everything worked, it was easy. A receptionist might be a good idea in the future. This was a lot of paperwork."
It was a lot of paperwork about a lot of scary things. I tried not to look. I knew the files were confidential. But sometimes your eye honed in on something. Or sometimes words jumped out at you.
Words like stalker, rapist, abusive ex tended to be leaping words.
It wasn't like I didn't know Kingston was often involved with difficult, dangerous things.
People didn't often look for private security when their lives were just status quo.
They came to people like King when a wrench was thrown in the works, when something scary happened and they didn't know how to handle it.
While a lot of his jobs handled basic, mundane things such as installing surveillance systems or teaching big corporations how to handle an active shooter situation or a disgruntled employee—or both—many of the other cases seemed to involve him being a bodyguard, someone who was supposed to be there to catch the bullets or tips of knives or whatever else anyone might use to hurt one of his clients.
The paper in my hand belonged to a case where the ex-wife was sure her ex-husband was showing up in the middle of the night to aerate and treat her lawn.
He was, apparently, anal about such things even though he didn't live on the property anymore and, what's more, she had a restraining order to explicitly keep him from being there.
Okay, so maybe there were no leaping words in the file, but when you saw that the subject matter was Lawn Care Criminal, you kind of had to look. I was sure an actual receptionist at the company would do the same, so I didn't feel too guilty.
Besides, I got a nice little chuckle at the vision of a middle-aged man with thinning hair and a hangover waist parking his car down the block then sneaking up the street like a prowler dressed all in black, slipping on spiked shoes, then carefully walking every foot of the front lawn before spraying it down with some contraption he had strapped to his back, all the while starting at every rustling leaf or wandering outdoor cat.
That was some funny stuff.
I hoped Kingston got to see it that way as well.
That the job didn't harden him too much, put him too on-edge to be able to appreciate a story such as that.
"I know. My brothers always get on my ass about it when I ask if one of them wants to lend me a hand.
I was thinking of offering the job to one of the older Mallick kids to get some extra income.
But some of the shit that comes through here," he said, shaking his head, refusing eye contact.
"I know they know about it. But that doesn't mean I personally want to expose them to some of the uglier aspects of life.
The awful things some human beings do to other people. It's not the place for a kid."
"I'm sure you can find someone in town who would be good at the job.
Anyone who grows up in Navesink Bank is used to gruesome, uncomfortable things.
I mean I came of age in this town when that guy was still kidnapping women off the streets and holding them and abusing them for weeks or months at a time.
Everyone knew he did it, no one ever brought him in on charges. "
"I think that was a little before my time," Kingston said, reminding me that he was a transplant, that he hadn't grown up in the weird counterculture that was our town by the river.
"Did you take all the pictures?" I blurted out suddenly. The question was spring-loaded, like it had been waiting all day to burst out.
"What?" His gaze slid from the wall over to me, curious.
"The ones in the lobby. Of Navesink Bank," I clarified.
"Oh, yeah. I got a good camera to do security work. I wanted to test it out. So I rolled to some of my favorite places around. I found them all when I was setting up the office. Decided to get them blown up and framed."
"They're really pretty. What about this one?" I asked, gesturing to the one on the wall behind me.