“What?” Patrick dried his hands on a dish towel. “Don’t enjoy cooking?”
She shook her head, miming a shudder with her lips pursed in a moue of distaste. “Not really. I mean, I do cook. You can’t eat out every meal, right?”
“You could try.”
“Not on my salary.” Joyce circled the kitchen, heading toward the open bottle of wine she’d left on the counter earlier. She poured herself a full glass, and shrugged. “So I cook when I have to. Just very badly, is all.”
Patrick fetched a tumbler from the cabinet and reached for the wine bottle. “Mind if I . . . ?” He glanced in Joyce’s direction.
“Be my guest,” she said, with a welcoming gesture like a hostess showing a restaurant patron to their table.
“I’m a decent cook at best,” Patrick admitted as he splashed wine into the tumbler. “But I had good teachers.”
Joyce leaned over the stove and took in a deep breath through her nostrils.
“I didn’t think I was all that hungry, but smelling this . . . ?” She turned to look back over her shoulder at him. “I think I could just about eat the whole pot by myself.”
“Well, don’t get too eager,” Patrick said, leaning his hip against the counter and taking a sip of the wine. “It needs to stew for at least another hour. My mother would smack me with a wooden spoon for cooking it even that quickly. She’d start a pot of stew simmering over a low flame in the morning and wouldn’t let anyone touch it until sundown. The house was filled with the smell of her cooking almost every day, for hours and hours.”
He put the tumbler down on the counter and bent down to pull another pan out of the cupboard.
“I usually serve the stew over rice, if that’s okay with everybody.” He set the pan next to the sink and then headed for the pantry to get out a bag of rice.
“Your slumber party, your rules,” Joyce said, raising her glass and smiling.
Patrick put the rice and the empty pan on the counter, and set a timer on his phone to remind him to start the rice cooking when the stew was almost finished. Then he picked up his tumbler from the counter and nodded toward the living room.
“Let’s go sit down. I want to hear about these test results you were talking about.”
“Right.” The smile faded from Joyce’s face, and a more serious expression settled into place. She nodded toward the wine bottle as she walked to the door, her cane tonking against the kitchen floor like a drumbeat with each step. “Bring the wine. We’re going to need it, I think.”
Joyce was joining Patrick on the couch, having gone to grab some files from her bag in his bedroom, when they could hear the sound of footsteps coming down the stairs, and Izzie and Daphne rounded the corner, each of them carrying shopping bags.
“What’s that?” Patrick glanced at the bag Izzie was carrying.
“Arts and crafts,” Daphne answered for her.
Izzie elbowed her in the ribs and then dropped the bag on the far end of the coffee table. “I’ll explain after we eat. I’m starving.”
“And here I thought I was the one obsessed with food,” Patrick said, smirking.
“I forgot to eat, okay?” Izzie rolled her eyes. “And I could smell whatever that is in the kitchen all the way from upstairs, which only made matters worse.”
“Well, you’ll have to wait, I’m afraid,” Patrick answered. “Needs to simmer for a while longer.”
“I could settle for that in the meantime.” Daphne pointed at the wine bottle on the coffee table.
Izzie started for the kitchen, waving Daphne toward an empty chair.
“Sit,” she said, “I’ll get us a couple of glasses.”
As she eased into the chair with a weary sigh, Daphne turned to Patrick and Joyce. “It doesn’t seem like anyone tried to kill either of you today, then?”
Patrick sat forward, raising an eyebrow.
“I’ll take that as a no.” Daphne glanced over at the kitchen door. “Izzie says that she nearly got run over by a truck in the street, right in front of the RA offices.”
“Did she get the plates?” Patrick asked, putting his glass down on the coffee table. “I could run them through the system and see if . . .”
He trailed off when Daphne shook her head, lips pursed.
“No markings, either,” she went on. “She did get the plates of a car she thought was being used as a spotter up the street, that took off as soon as the truck drove by.”
“But when I ran the license number I came up empty,” Izzie said as she walked back into the room from the kitchen carrying a glass in either hand. “Stolen last month from an old guy down in San Diego.”
She put the glasses down on the table, filled each from the wine bottle, then handed one to Daphne and carried the other to the only remaining chair in the room.
“But you think this spotter was involved in all of this?” Joyce asked, looking worried. “That they were targeting you specifically?”
“It tracks.” Izzie took a sip of wine, and lifted her shoulders in a slight shrug. “If Zotovic and his people know that we’re onto them, a hit-and-run would be a good way of getting rid of one of us. Even if he does have people that can walk around in the daylight, Ridden or otherwise, they can’t just go around killing federal agents in the street without raising a few eyebrows. But a garden-variety traffic accident? That’s a little easier to get away with.”
“I did some digging on Zotovic’s background,” Patrick said, leaning back on the couch. “News accounts, public records, law enforcement databases, you name it.”
“Find anything useful?” Izzie asked. “Or interesting, at least.”
“Not really.” Patrick shook his head. “Only that he is part of a secret cabal of lizard people using phone apps to brainwash the human population.”
All three
