* * *
“This is pathetic.”
Sullivan cracked open an eye and saw a tall brunette with fawn-colored skin wearing a red pantsuit staring down at him in disdain. She was perched on the battered steamer trunk that he used as a makeshift coffee table as if she were afraid she might catch anthrax from the surface. She was peering around at the streaks of paint on the ancient hardwood floor and the grimy windows with the expression of someone witnessing an autopsy. He blinked, the blankness in his brain slowly taking shape.
Raina.
“You live in a crack den,” she informed him.
“Why are you here?” Since he was almost flat on his face, the couch ate most of his words. Perplexed, he began to lift his head, and then froze. “What time is it?”
“Nearly noon.”
“Shit. I overslept.”
“Apparently.” She flicked him on the nose hard enough that tears sprang to his eyes, then sniffed him while he lay there wincing. “You don’t smell hungover.”
“I’m not.” He sat up, patting his aching nose gingerly.
“I thought perhaps you’d stumbled onto your concerned citizen’s dirty laundry and been murdered.”
“Your luck’s not that good. Bad night, that’s all. I’m sorry I didn’t call. Won’t happen again.”
Those sharp brown eyes picked at him like he was a tangled knot of string that she was determined to unravel. It was disconcerting and familiar at the same time. He’d gotten that look a lot last year. He hadn’t told Raina much about the Nick situation—he and Raina were a strange mixture of friendship and professionalism and cutthroat competition that didn’t exactly invite confidences—but she was a keen observer and it wasn’t like the signs of a bad breakup were hard to read. Getting dumped happened to everyone; the symptoms were universal.
Well, except to Raina. If the man who would dump Raina existed, he probably wouldn’t be alive for long after it happened. Sullivan certainly wouldn’t dare, not that he would make a move in the first place. No matter how much he appreciated her legs when she wasn’t looking, they worked together, and besides, Sullivan’s sexual tastes ran in a direction he was pretty sure would result in Raina extracting his intestines.
“I’m fine,” Sullivan insisted, and grabbed a packet of nicotine gum from the floor where he’d dropped it last night. “See? Not smoking. Awake. I’m good to go.”
She continued to stare at him. “If the case is too much for you...”
“It’s not. I’m fine. I just overslept.” He frowned at her. “Wait. How did you get in here?”
She stood, the ring of keys in her hand—which apparently held a copy of his house key that he definitely had not given her—jingling, and gave him a cold smirk. “The front door was unlocked.” She walked out of the living room, stepping carefully over the rotting boards piled in the entryway.
“It fucking was not,” he yelled after her. Her only response was to laugh as she left.
He supposed he shouldn’t be shocked that a professional snoop had broken in with an illegally obtained key.
He raked a hand over his face. He felt marginally better than he had earlier. More capable of handling the activities of the day, which meant finding his blackmailer, doing some investigating, and snitching his house key off of Raina’s key ring.
He needed to call Caty, too. Not today. Soon, though. She would probably yell. She liked to yell, and she was good at it.
He took a second to feel very put-upon by the demands of the women in his life. It occurred to him—not for the first time—that he needed to keep Caty and Lisbeth and Raina from meeting at all costs, because if they did, they would take over the world, creating some kind of amazon utopia, which wouldn’t bother him if not for the part where he—as a male—would be too dead to enjoy it.
* * *
He stopped for breakfast on the way to Tobias’s motel, getting a cup of coffee large enough to decimate his stomach lining by the end of the day, and pounded on the door with the flat side of his fist. It opened so swiftly that he felt a rush of air against his face.
“Where have you been?” Tobias asked, the words stiff and bitten-off.
“Hello, Tobias. I’m fine, thank you for asking. Yes, it is a lovely day, isn’t it?”
Tobias’s eyebrows crushed together, and Sullivan watched with growing, vindictive amusement as Tobias fought the urge to be polite. Finally, resignedly, he said, “Sorry. Hello, Sullivan. How are you?”
“Fine.”
“Great. Where have you been?”
Sullivan rolled his eyes and went inside. “Chill. I overslept.”
Tobias closed the door behind him with an air of such perfect control that Sullivan knew that he’d been tempted to slam it. “Half the day is gone.”
Sullivan put his bag of food on the table. “I have a life outside of following your every impulse, you know.”
Tobias’s shoulders tensed. “What are the plans for today?”
“Today we’re going to commit a crime.”
That crease between Tobias’s eyebrows deepened. “I—I don’t—”
“Don’t try to pretend that’s crossing some sort of line for you.” Sullivan eyed him darkly and crammed half of a greasy hash brown patty into his mouth.
Tobias’s next breath was pointed and slow, the breath of a parent trying not to lose his temper with an unruly child. “What kind of crime?”
“How much cash do you have on you?”
* * *
When they’d marked out the plan—such as it was, seeing as bribery wasn’t that complicated—they left the motel and headed for Sullivan’s car. Tobias paused beside the passenger door of the Buick. “This is your car?”
“Yeah.” Sullivan glanced at it, trying to see it the way Tobias would. It was dented and primer was showing in a couple places and the seats were kind of janky, which were all
