Sure enough, the small, plain room housed a washer and dryer, along with an overhead shelf for supplies. No hoarding quarters and hauling bags of dirty clothes to the laundromat? Roxy walked in and hugged the washing machine.
Her prospective landlord held up the key. “Does it check all the boxes?”
“This place checks boxes I didn’t even know I had.” Roxy reached for the key and then hesitated. “Do you need first week’s rent, or a security deposit, or, I don’t know…a kidney?”
“Nah.” Addy placed the key in her hand. “I know where you work.”
It seemed too good to be true. Then again, wasn’t she due for a little good luck? “Thank you.”
“Thank you, Roxy. Think you can be comfy here?”
“I’ll be more than comfy.” She glanced toward the door at the other end of the laundry room. “What’s through there?”
“Oh. These are shared machines. The upstairs tenant accesses the laundry through there. That door locks from the other side. You can lock this one”—she pointed to the door they’d entered through—“so everyone has their privacy.”
Addy’s smile turned slightly…something. Roxy didn’t know her well enough to say for sure, but her new boss-slash-landlord looked like she was enjoying a private joke.
“Is there anything else I should know?”
“Nope. I’ll help you unload your things. I think you’re going to be really happy here.”
…
God save him from redneck Cheech and Chong. West hauled his ass home at midnight and fell face down on his bed—uniform, shoes, and all. The only thing he’d removed was his duty belt. That’s how tired he was.
Not that Dobie and Kenny hadn’t been right. They had, indeed, stumbled across a dead body then run back to the roadside—and cell service—to call it in. Thereafter they’d self-medicated with what West speculated to be at least a dime bag’s worth of herbal anxiety relief and consequently had a hard time staying sufficiently “focused” to find their way back to the DB. Unsurprisingly, they’d been the only ones to find the situation piss-your-pants hilarious.
After hiking in circles for an hour, the baker brothers had managed to retrace their steps to an old—but not skeletal old—corpse in a duck blind near Potter’s Pond. At this point, his former SEAL teammate and current boss, Chief Shaun Buchanan, had identified the DB as one Elton Nixon. A driver’s license located in the wallet found in the back pocket of the corpse’s hunting camos supported said conclusion. Sixty-seven-year-old Elton went MIA just before West joined the force, but his history of heart problems coupled with his fondness for hunting made it likely the man had died of natural causes doing what he loved. Killing innocent, unarmed creatures.
He’d kept that last part to himself as it was a NYC opinion not necessarily popular here, but after relying on his gun to keep him alive more than once over his career, he had no interest in a pastime involving shooting things for sport. He did have an interest in solving crimes, but the evidence at the scene suggested no foul play. The coroner would conduct an autopsy, of course, but Buchanan and the other local experts believed Elton had gone duck hunting on his own one February morning, lined up the shot of his life, and suffered a coronary.
Instant Karma. Or utter coincidence, if one preferred.
And speaking of coincidences, it seemed the second Route 9 incident of his day was completely unrelated to the first. Even so, he couldn’t help taking it as some kind of confirmation of his gut reaction. Roxy Goodhart stirred up trouble. Thankfully nothing held her in Bluelick. She’d move on in a couple days and take her penchant for bending rules with her. Not a moment too soon, because her departure might be the only thing that relieved the irritating push-pull between his cop instincts, which warned she was hiding something, and his baser instincts, which kept getting distracted by all the things she put on full display. In half a day, she’d gotten under his skin in ways none of the locals had managed in almost half a year. But since he had no guarantee scratching the itch would make it go away, he intended to resist his baser instincts.
Hell, he’d just steer clear of her.
Music filtered into his room.
What the…?
Notes progressed to chords, and then a soft voice layered over the music. It drifted like smoke through the floor vent, too low, at first, for him to distinguish the words, but steadily rising and strengthening as she set fire to “Louisiana Rain.”
And his blood.
Fuuuuck.
There was only one person the husky, lonely-heart vocal could belong to. His exhausted mind found the energy to picture Roxy cross-legged on the bed in the little apartment downstairs, guitar perched on her lap, fingers dancing their way up and down the frets as she finessed the melody out of the instrument. His dick drilled into the mattress, and he nearly groaned. A short trip down a flight of stairs was all it would take to see if he imagined correctly. How badly he actually wanted to do it worried him. He considered texting Addy to find out how long she expected his new neighbor to remain in residence, but his landlord probably didn’t respond to messages at midnight. Besides, the duration of Roxy’s tenancy wasn’t really the issue. The issue centered around how in God’s name he was supposed to keep his distance, and sanity, with her living under him.
“Louisiana Rain” segued into something slow and bluesy. He didn’t recognize the melody, but her straight-up sexy voice begged him for things he couldn’t make out yet couldn’t refuse.
He rolled onto his back, toed his shoes off, and unfastened his pants while his one-track mind wrote explicit lyrics to match her music. Eyes closed, he took full creative license with her performance. It wasn’t hard to imagine her playing him instead of the guitar, touching and stroking as she pleased. When the song
