After Xander’s rallying speech, I didn’t feel any different—just a little more frustrated with my incompetence as of late. Had I really allowed him to blunder through three consecutive sentences without interrupting once? What was my life coming to? Maybe he—and it kills me to say this—was right. Maybe I needed to take up a hobby like brewing craft beer or quilting or hooking, and not even the fun kind of hooking. I pushed those thoughts to the back of my mind, deciding it was more comfortable to be miserable with someone else than miserable with a hobby.
Twenty minutes later, dressed and ready to impress, we strolled up to Mather Investigative Services—a rundown office complex in the heart of downtown Sacramento. A tired security guard lumbered around the perimeter of the building. She kicked a rock and followed its path as she moved at a speed somewhere between that of a tortoise and a snail. It was almost inspiring to watch how hard she worked not to work at all. Goals. Two agents disguised as bums sat near the front door of the agency. A tattered blanket covered one man, and the other wore a ski jacket and a thick beanie with a little fuzzy ball on top. After I’d humiliated them a couple days ago, they had both worked on growing out their scraggly beards and laying off the perfumes. I actually half-believed they were homeless.
As Xander opened the building’s front door, I paused before the two men. “Hopefully my suggestions didn’t affect your love life. I can’t tell if the sour stench or the pubic growth on your face is more off-putting.”
“Can you spare some change?” one of the men asked, pretending like he didn’t recognize me, though he had narrowed his eyes with the patented squint of hate.
“You know what?” I asked, adjusting my duffle bag away from my thigh and shoving a hand into my pocket.
“Let’s go,” Xander said.
“Hold on.” I ruffled around a bit, drawing the scene out longer than I should have. That’s the thing about jokes—it’s all about timing. I tended to over-time them, or overdo them, or something like that. After a few seconds, I removed my hand and formed it into a fist. “Ah. Here you go.” I uncurled my middle finger and grinned. “Please, use it wisely. I would hate to contribute to your drug addiction.”
“Joey. Now,” Xander said.
I bolted through the front door that he held open. “One of these days, I’ll have to get those guys’ names. They’re awesome. Maybe I’ll have them over for a poker night. You think they’d like that?”
Xander ignored me as we stepped into the waiting area of the building. It smelled like microwave dinner and cheap candles. Two customers sat in the faded chairs that wrapped around a corner of the lobby. One was a woman, about forty. She clutched her necklace with one hand and rubbed her thigh with the other. She had thinning gray hair despite her age, and clouded eyes that worked in parallel with her murmuring lips. The other customer was a man of anywhere between twenty-two and a thousand. He had thick shoulders and a broad chest, and while I’m still drooling over him, I’ll go on to say that he had a perfect chin with a perfect amount of stubble over his perfect face. He had striking green eyes that contrasted beautifully against his darker complexion, and a full head of hair that Xander could only dream about.
Averting my eyes from staring too long at the man and sending the wrong—maybe the right—message, I saw my favorite receptionist. A skinny man-boy with long fingers and hairy knuckles and blue-painted fingernails.
“Janson,” I said, greeting him and reaching my hand into the bowl of hard candies that sat on the counter between us. “You’re looking fine as ever. Have you been working out? Or did you do something new with your hair?” I tossed him one of the wrapped goodies. He wasn’t prepared, and it smacked him square in the chest, bouncing onto the floor.
“It’s… Chris, sir,” Janson said.
“I apologize,” Xander said, gripping my wrist and dragging me around the counter. He led me through a back door and down a hallway filled with offices on either side. “Are you doing this just to spite me?”
“Maybe only a little,” I said. “And maybe because you make it so easy to spite you—whatever that means.”
“Detective Shells,” Chris—not Janson—said from behind us.
Xander and I turned to the baby-faced, keyboard-wielding, phone-answering, note-taking son of a bitch—a true superhero in the making, if you ask me.
“I forgot to mention. The gentleman in the waiting area claimed that you scheduled an appointment this morning to meet with him. I didn’t see anything on your calendar, so I turned him away. But he insisted on waiting for you.”
Xander curled his lips, pondering the information. “I called him last night and left a message, asking him to call back to set up a meeting. Tell him I’ll be available in about an hour. Send him in around nine.”
Chris agreed and disappeared.
Xander and I shuffled to Xander’s office door—a spectacular thing with a window set in the upper section and miniature blinds to keep his privacy from all the hallway lurkers. Below the tiny window, a golden placard was set against the wood. It read, in all capital letters, DETECTIVE ALEXANDER SHELLS.
Detective Alexander Shells unlocked the office door, and we entered.
Now, I already described his boring-ass work room before. I don’t want to suffer through that elucidation again. So, for both our sakes, I’ll keep it brief and simple—painting by the numbers here.
There was a bookshelf with lots of half-empty (because the glass half-full mentality is for suckers and children—who are mostly all suckers, anyway) paper cups stacked on the shelves, along with a globe. The globe was actually a combination lock that activated a secret door behind the bookshelf, leading into a prison for monsters. Yeah, very James Bond-y around here. Um, let’s see here.
