“I could use some Earthly riches,” I grunted, reaching for the correct button. “Not to mention some pleasures of the flesh…”
It had been a while since I’d had either. I wasn’t a virgin or anything like that: I’d had my share of girlfriends. It had just...well. I was going through a rough patch, alright?
“He is real!” The preacher’s spiel reached a crescendo. “His name is Satan, Beelzebub, the great—”
Click.
“-Deceiver!” Better audio quality told me I’d gotten the right station this time. “That was ‘The Great Deceiver’ by King Crimson, part of K106’s No-Commercials Rawk Block! Next up, we’ve got Van Halen’s Running With the Devil…”
Even my shitty van’s speakers could rumble from that bassline. “That’s more like it,” I said, giving the dashboard a little slap.
By the time David Lee Roth got finished warning me about living at a ‘pace that kills’, I’d pulled up in front of the client’s house. The homes on this end had an air of age and grandeur that the McMansions in the rest of it couldn’t match—built of bricks and stones instead of drywall. Six Sixty Seven was only two stories tall instead of the usual three, but it made the most of it. High, narrow windows on the second story stared down at me like interested eyes.
The engine shuddered and died as I put the van into park. Fuck. Not a good sign.
“Hope you start back up, little buddy,” I growled, stepping out of the van. I walked to the back, passing the big painted “Bell Computer Repairs” sign pasted to the vehicle’s side door, and threw open the trunk.
Normally you wouldn’t have thought that an IT guy needed a lot of gear. The image people usually had of us involved being behind a keyboard, maybe sticking a USB drive full of hacker tools into a client’s desktop or laptop. But for house calls, I’d learned that I was just as much a cable guy as I was a computer fixer. The first time I’d had to dismantle part of a house’s plumbing to get to a router in a crawlspace, I learned the value of a good wrench.
Is anybody home? I wondered as I walked up the driveway. No car in front of the house, though there was a small, detached garage it could be hiding in. Windows dark, except for a couple on the second floor that shined with...red light? Huh. Whatever. I just needed to get paid.
I rang the doorbell, praying this wasn’t some kind of no-show. Otherwise, I’d just burned a bunch of gas and maybe killed my engine getting out here. There was still no telling until I put the key back in the ignition whether my van would start at all.
It took so long to get a response that I began to wonder if I hadn’t been pranked. Eventually, the sounds of someone coming downstairs reached my ears. “Hold on a second,” a voice yelled curtly. My ears pricked up—that voice was female. I felt like I recognized it.
The door opened and my jaw hit the floor. The woman on the side made a similar expression.
“Luke?” The woman’s eyes widened as she looked me up and down, her eyes filling with interest at the sight of my uniform. “What are you doing here?”
“Um, you called me?” Suddenly conscious of my appearance, I tucked a stray lock of hair behind my ear. “I think, anyway. This is 667 Morningstar, right? Computer trouble?”
I hadn’t known the client was female. And I damn sure hadn’t known it was Christina Herbert. Otherwise I might have showered. Not to mention borrowed a nicer car…
Christina and I knew each other, though not well. I’d admired her from afar since high school, where she’d been one of the super-popular girls on the cheerleading squad. She’d even made it to the local college on a cheer scholarship, while I’d worked part-time to pay for books and try to put a dent in my student loans. We’d had a couple of classes together—mostly math, a prerequisite for both of our majors—but she’d never really looked my way.
God, she was gorgeous. It had been maybe five years since the last time I saw her, and she’d just gotten more beautiful. She’d never gone pro with the cheerleading, but parlayed it into a gig managing the CrossFit gym all the bored, rich soccer moms in this side of town went to. She looked like she’d come from there not long ago, in form-fitting exercise clothes that hugged her sleek curves and made her look even hotter. The long blonde hair I remembered in sexy cheerleader pigtails had been wrapped into a long braid that went all the way down to her ass, and her clear blue eyes still sparkled like sapphires.
Suddenly I realized I was staring. Hell.
“I didn’t realize ‘Bell’ Computer Repair meant Luke Bell,” Christina said, a faint smile tugging at the corner of her mouth. “You look good, Luke. Like, really good.”
The compliment went right to my dick. I had been working out quite a bit lately, though not at Christina’s gym. I wasn’t into CrossFit—more of a weightlifting guy. One of my friends gifted me a twelve-month membership for Christmas, and I’d fallen face-first into it as a way to relieve stress after a long day of being complained at by office drones. I’d been kind of surprised at just how much I enjoyed it; and I had the figure to match.
“Thanks,” I said. “You too.”
There was a hell of a lot more I could have said, like holy shit you’re a goddess and how do you look even better than you did at twenty, but I wasn’t an idiot. Trying to play things that way was what had kept Christina out of my reach in
