Chapter 10
CHAPTER TEN
Rue
Hugo’s communing with his roses when I get home from work the following Friday, and I head straight to him, bypassing my right-to-the-mailbox routine.
“Howdy, neighbor guy,” I chirp.
He straightens, clutching his rose clippers and saying to no one in particular, “She stole my line.”
“You were too slow today.” I tilt my chin at the bushes. “What are you working on? Tell me your secrets.” When he blinks at me, I quickly add, “Your gardening secrets only. The rest are yours to keep.”
“Oh. Well.” He adjusts his glasses. “It only took you five hundred and seventy days to ask.”
That stops me in my tracks. “What an incredibly precise figure, Dr. Mohr.”
He blinks, then laughs. “Estimating! As a”—he waves the clippers in a small circle, and I lean away from those wicked blades—“a joke.”
It’s not a joke, though. I’ve noticed his roses a million times, but I’ve never once stopped to ask about them. God, I’m an asshole.
But I’m an asshole who’s been in an uncommonly good mood since my encounter with Gomez last week, and it’s making me more exuberant than usual—so much so that Felicity threatened to tranq me if I didn’t stop humming the theme to The Addams Family during our kill-Navarro planning session last night.
My sunny new disposition’s spilling over onto Hugo now too.
“You really want to know about my system?” Excitement bleeds into his voice.
“Somebody ought to benefit from your knowledge.” I shrug. “And I’ve got a few minutes before I have to get changed and head out.”
“Back-to-back ladies’ nights?”
“Ah, no. Just… meeting someone.”
“Oh.” His rock-solid smile doesn’t waver. “A date, then.”
“God no.” I say it too fast, then make it worse by adding, “Just a… work thing.” Work thing, finalizing murder plans. Potato, potahto.
Hugo’s face is blank until he snaps the clippers in midair, and Dr. Bore emerges.
“So. My roses,” he says in full lecture voice. “The trick is compost in the spring and fall, and then fertilizer every five weeks through the summer.”
I lean over a bush to rub one of the velvety, blood-red petals. “Aren’t most roses done growing by now? I mean, look at mine.”
I nod toward the fading blooms on my half of the property.
“Oh gosh.” He winces. “After you moved in, I didn’t want to invade your privacy, so I kind of let them go.” He looks almost mournfully from his vibrant bushes to my punier ones. “If you’d like, I could give you a winterizing treatment. See if we can get our halves to match next year.”
I look at him before I answer, my fussy neighbor in that lumpy cardigan, his dress shirt tightly buttoned at the wrists and neck.
“I’d like that,” I say. “If it’s not too much trouble.”
“It’s no trouble at all.”
His warm eyes land on my face, and in response, I turn to sniff a lush red bloom nestled into the bush next to me.
“Do you want to know my secret weapon?” He almost whispers it, and I straighten, unwillingly drawn in by his conspiratorial tone.
“Obviously.”
He makes a show of looking left, then right, then left again. “Bone meal plus a chemical additive a friend of mine makes for me, specifically tailored to the soil, sunlight, and aeration for our property.”
“Bone like…?”
“Yes,” he says almost defensively. “It’s really common in gardening.”
My lips twitch as I consider offering to source some for him, but he keeps talking, oblivious.
“Anyway, my friend’s a scientist, and she made a—”
“She?”
“Yes?” His brow creases at my sharp tone.
Annoyed that I felt… something… I make a carry-on gesture that’s a little more curt than I meant it to be.
“My friend’s compound interacts with the, uh, type of bone meal I favor to change the soil chemistry in a way that extends the blooming season. And voilà.” He gestures in front of us with his clippers. “Thanks to her, I’m the only one on the block with roses well into fall.”
“How nice for you,” I say crisply before making a show of checking my phone. “I need to start getting ready. Wouldn’t want to keep him waiting, you know?”
He watches me not make a move toward the front door.
“No. You wouldn’t want that.” His voice is friendly as ever.
“Well, he’s a busy guy. I try to be considerate of his time.” Why am I still standing here? Why am I still talking about this?
There’s a metallic ping, and Hugo frowns down at the spring now dangling from one side of the clippers still gripped in his fist.
“Rue—”
“Okay, so thanks for sharing your secrets with me,” I say brightly. “I should’ve known you’d be an open book if I just asked.”
A laugh cracks out of him. “That’s me.” He drops the broken clippers at his feet. “An open book.”
“Um. I should…” I point toward my front door, then spin and walk toward it. Not flustered, just running late.
His voice reaches me when I’m a mere three steps from safety.
“Enjoy your date, Rue.”
I don’t correct him as I shut the door.
“Howdy, neighbor girl.”
Pell smirks up at me from where he’s sprawled across the worn vinyl of his favorite booth in his favorite diner in his favorite part of the city, a fork in one hand and an ancient baseball in the other.
“Your driveway cameras have audio now?” I ask as I slide onto the bench opposite the best fixer in the business.
“Correct. Makes things more entertaining.” The words emerge like molasses as Pell—white, early thirties, first name unknown to me—twirls the baseball in his palm before sliding it into his pocket.
After adjusting the backward ball cap over his black hair, he jabs his fork into one of the three untouched slices of pie in front of him.
“So now you’re keeping tabs on Hugo, too?”
“Yep. And I ain’t gonna stop, no matter how much you beg, darlin’.”
Well, aren’t we full of wackadoo Southern Gothic charm today? Pell’s accent is the rustle of kudzu vines on a rusted-out pickup truck in a front yard, and it goes hand-in-hand with his pretty eyes and loose-limbed grace.
“That act doesn’t work on me, darlin’,” I remind the scariest motherfucker in the room as he inhales a forkful of cherries and crust. “I’m well aware of the evil that lurks under… all of that.”
I gesture toward his black cargo pants, black hoodie, and deep-cut black tank top. He glances down as if he’s surprised by his exposed sternum, then straightens the battered, braided leather cuff around his wrist and gifts me with one of his slow smiles.
“Don’t hate me ’cause I’m beautiful.”
He is, but that’s beside the point.
“I hate you,” I say, “because you charge me an arm and a leg and insist on monitoring my comings and goings.”
I give him a steely glare, then drop my gaze to the remaining pie slices. The peach crumb looks amazing.
“Just keepin’ an eye on my clients.” He shrugs, which supports my hypothesis that he’s got a wall of monitors showing live feeds of the dozens of killers, assassins, mobsters, and other scary humans he does business with.
Fi and I moved to Chicago when I got the job with the ME’s office, and Pell contacted her a few months later with a menu of the services he offers.
How he found us remains a mystery, but he’s been a valuable asset ever since, especially after he made Chicago his permanent home base a few years ago.
I’m not even that bothered by his driveway surveillance; I kind of like knowing that if somebody snatches me or Fi off our front doorsteps, there’ll be a record of it.
Still, I’d like him to stay away from my neighbor.
“Leave Hugo alone, please. He’s a good guy.”
Pell drops his hands to the table in overly dramatic shock, clenching the fork in his teeth as he speaks around the tines. “C’mon now, neighbor girl. You know there’s not a single soul on this earth that’s purely good.”
“Quit calling me that.”
He doesn’t apologize or even acknowledge my demand, but he does nudge one of the pie slices over to me.
“I don’t like coconut.”
“You’ll like this coconut. Barb’s a magician.” He twists in the booth to holler at a server pouring coffee on the opposite side of the diner. “Ain’t that right, Barb?”
The hatchet-faced sixtysomething white woman dimples as she waves off Pell’s compliments. Not only can he be charming as hell when he wants to be, he’s also right about the dessert.
“Holy shit,” I say around my mouthful of coconut cream. “How’d you know?”
“I know pie.” To his credit, there’s no innuendo in it. That’s how serious he is about the topic. He’s also serious about his business, which he turns to after polishing off his slice of cherry.
“Here’s your stuff.” He sets a gift bag on the table, not bothering to check if anyone’s moved into earshot while we’ve been talking. They haven’t, but still.
The bag’s decorated with raccoons in party hats, and when I hold it up in a silent question, Pell grins at me. “In our line of work, shouldn’t we be treatin’ every day like it’s our birthday?”
“I… guess so. Yeah.” God, my day’s gone fully sideways if Pell’s logic sounds at all logical.
I set the bag in my lap and pull out the sparkly tissue paper so I can rummage through the contents.
First up is a purse-sized breath spray bottle full of NCU compound—as in “Natural Causes, Undetermined.” That’s what’ll appear on the autopsy report after I hit someone in the eyes, nose, or throat with it.
Since it can take up to five minutes to stop a heart, it’s my murder weapon of choice for a sleeping mark, and I was running low.
Next up is my new toy. I bounce in my seat as I pick up the pink spray bottle, like the kind you’d fill with hairspray to satisfy the TSA, and twist the nozzle to open.
“Careful.” Pell taps his fork against the back of my hand. “All it takes is one snootful.”
“Really?” I ask, delighted.
He snags his next plate and rotates it until the point of the pie slice is aimed at his center mass.
“Immediate effects. You’ll be conscious but compliant.
Movin’ with help but not puttin’ up a fight.
Lasts about twenty minutes.” His eyes flutter shut at the first bite of peach crumb.
“Plenty of time for an industrious little killer to get a person into whatever position she wants.”