Chapter 2

Sunlight slid gently through damp, grey air, chasing away the fog from the top down. Even as those monuments to capitalism in the financial district began to sparkle in the sun, the fog lingered in the doorways and allies of the streets I called my own. The City by the Bay was less a cosmopolitan monolith and more a collection of small neighborhoods, the superiority of which was stridently defended by its denizens.

All fifty blocks of the Richmond District were my stomping grounds. The youngest of three kids whose parents both worked long hours, my childhood and youth were spent crawling over every inch of the neighborhood. From the cliffs at Land’s End, I’d watched humpback whales breaching in the shadow of the Golden Gate Bridge, flirted with tourists on the wide green stretches of Golden Gate Park, and had my first blow job under the bleachers of Washington High School. I knew it inside and out.

It was the only area I had considered when I decided to start my own agency. My office in an old building was a seven-minute walk from the Cornor Mart and a twenty-five-minute one from my parents’ house. When I’d come back to The City after I’d gotten out of the Army, I’d taken one look at the cost of rent and moved back in with them. They’d been thrilled.

A medical equipment store and a beauty supply store occupied the commercial space on the ground floor. The second floor belonged to a pediatric orthopedist and a CPA. My office was on the third floor along with that of a lawyer who occasionally threw some work my way, and a large suite of rooms that had been unoccupied for the last two years. I had my eye on it, but whenever I asked the property management about a possible lease, they said it wasn’t available. So far, I’d resisted the temptation to break in and see what was behind those locked doors.

Entry to my domain was through a reasonably shabby door at the end of a reasonably shabby hallway. I’d searched high and low for that door. Made of solid wood, it was darkened with the patina of age and had a brass handle and a frosted glass window. Dashiell Bucur, Private Investigator was hand-painted on the window. Maybe it was a little corny, but I loved it. I was an old-school PI. Stake-outs and shake-downs were my specialty. Most of the information I collected came from pounding the pavement and talking to people. Talking was my strong point. I left the computer stuff to DT.

I pushed the door open. “Honey, I’m home.”

“It’s about time.” A paper airplane sailed over my head and into the hallway.

“Nice shot.” I shut the door behind me and hung my jacket and hat on the old-fashioned wooden coat rack that had come with the office.

The reception area of the two-room office space was as old-fashioned as the door. My godmother had donated a big Persian rug and some furniture from her mansion on the hill, and the walls were a pale yellow above white wainscoting that was original to the building. Even in the gloom of a June morning, the big bay window let in enough light to make the room glow.

DT, my business partner and best friend, lay sprawled across the loveseat, his legs hanging over the arm. He had one arm draped dramatically over his eyes, and his long white hair spread across the throw pillow like he was the Lady of Shallot drifting to her doom.

“Is it still that bad?”

He waved a languid arm. “Some of us have hearts.”

“It’s been fifty...three years? Fifty-four?”

Somehow the sniff he gave me managed to convey his disappointment in my failure to remember the exact number of years since a breakup that had occurred not just before I knew him but before I was born.

“Fifty-four years.” I dug the Almond Joy out of my coat pocket and tossed it at DT. “This might help.” It landed lightly on his stomach.

DT slowly dragged his arm off his face and reached for the chocolate bar. A smile spread across his face. “My favorite. Oh, Dashie, you do love me.”

Yes. Point to Dashiell Bucur.

I shoved the Mounds bar and bags of Gummi bears into my pants pocket. The 8-Ball I held, tossing it gently from hand to hand. “I’ll love you more if you have some good news for me about that embezzlement case.”

“Of course I do.” He swung his legs around and sat up, his hair wafting around his shoulders like he had an invisible fan pointed at him. I’d never been able to get him to confirm or deny if he did it intentionally, but it happened too often to be natural.

“Looking good, Dash.”

“Thanks.” I wore a suit to work most days—People took you more seriously when you wore a suit—but this morning, I was moved to reach for an even higher level of sartorial elegance. A few years ago, I’d caught a dog-napping case for a ridiculously rich old lady, and she’d paid me like I’d returned the Lindbergh baby. I splurged some of the bonus money on a navy-blue wool suit from Dior and had my father’s tailor alter it to fit me like a glove. Claiming any PI worth their shoe leather needed a hat, DT had gifted me a dark grey fedora. Paired with a silk shirt in an all-over floral print, I looked like a million bucks, if I did say so myself.

DT stood up gracefully and crossed the floor like the dancer he claimed to have been in the 1960s in London.

Normally, I would at least pretend not to be staring at someone’s ass, especially if that person was my employee, but DT had a perfect bubble butt, and he worked so hard to find the tightest pants in San Francisco that it felt as if it would be ruder not to stare. “Nice pants. Interesting style.”

He twirled around and gave me a coy smile. “Why these old things? They were a gift from a Russian sailor in Villefranche-sur-Mer.”

“When?”

He put his hands on his hips and stared up and to the right as he searched his memory. “Eighteen eighty-four or -five, I think.”

“Well, kudos to whoever wove that fabric or however they made pants a hundred and fifty years ago.” Did I believe DT’s claim that he was 237 years old? Maybe. I’d had a lot of practice believing impossible things. Much like Alice, there had been days I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast. That was just the way of the world lately.

I dumped my bounty on the small side table next to the loveseat. Travel mug, Mounds bar, and a bag of Gummi bears.

“Gummi bears? I don’t think I’ve ever seen you eat them.” He climbed on top of his desk, completely ignoring the very expensive chair we’d bought after we’d closed our first case.

“They”re not for me.” That SPAM recruiting poster nagged at my mind, reminding me of roads not taken, and forcing me to think about the future, something I’d been trying hard not to do. When I looked into that future, all I saw were lonely days stretching out ahead of me with nothing to show for it at the end but a hat, a trench coat and a bad back from all the stakeouts in my twelve-year-old Prius.

Regrets, well, I had a few. Hiding those International Male catalogs under my mattress when my mother was still making my bed. My emo phase. That time I decided to give women a try—though I’m sure that poor woman had more regrets than I did.

But even though I knew better, sometimes I couldn’t help but wonder if I had made the right career choice. Though I loved working for myself, and I was a damn good PI, the closer I got to forty, the better a government pension and paid benefits sounded. Fuck it. What could it hurt? Holding the 8-Ball up to my face, I whispered to it. “Should I have taken a job with SPAM?”

Cannot predict now. Then the die flipped on its own. Ask again later.

When I’d left the Army, I’d been broken in more ways than one. Twenty-five years old, heartsick and lost, I’d been ripe for recruitment in anything that could give me the structure and routine that I’d had in the army, even though I’d hated it at the time. I’d almost applied for SPAM then, but my parents told me to think about for a while first.

Thank God for my parents. They’d welcomed me back to my home with open arms, and given me time and space to mourn all the things I’d lost. Then they’d gently encouraged me to use my veteran’s benefits and go to college.

Why was the past haunting me today? Stupid. What was done was done. Life didn’t give you do-overs. Unless you had some kind of time-travel power, of course, but those were rare and tended to only work for minutes rather than years.

DT’s voice jolted me out of my increasingly maudlin thoughts. “So who are they for then?”

“Who are what for?”

“The Gummi bears.”

“Oh. Right.” Why had I bought them? I didn’t even like sugary candy. I was a baked goods man through and through. As I pondered the purchase, the office door flew open, and the past that had been haunting me all day finally caught up to me in the form of one Harlan Dean. The once and future love of my life, who had broken my heart when he’d chosen the Army over the future together we had planned.

He looked like shit. His left arm was in sling with a cast extending to the second knuckles of his hand. The cut on his forehead had taken stitches to close, and his right foot was in a boot to just below the knee. His under-eye bags were as deep as I’d ever seen them, and we’d spent plenty of sleepless nights together. For good reasons and bad.

Well. I tossed the of candy toward the door. “They’re for him.”