Chapter 4

“Iknew it!” It felt good to have my suspicions confirmed.

In my excitement, I managed to whack my broken wrist on the back of the loveseat and knock my cane over, sending it rolling across the floor. “Ow, fuck.” Rubbing the cast, I slumped back against the arm of the loveseat and muttered, “I knew it.”

Dash rubbed my un-booted shin. “Why are you happy about the fact that someone is trying to kill you?”

“Because either someone’s trying to kill me or I’m going crazy.”

“Why not both?” DT offered.

“Maybe.” Dash grinned at me and shook that damn ball again. “Is Harlan crazy?”

He snorted and then held the ball out for me to read.

Most likely.

I snorted, too. “Well, obviously. I’m here, aren’t I?” Our eyes met and I couldn’t hold back the laughter. Dash always could make me laugh with nothing more than the lift of an eyebrow. We’d been forcibly separated in briefings on at least three different continents.

Dash snorted again, louder, and covered his mouth with his free hand. His damn eyes sparkled with joy. Who did that in real life?

God, I’d missed him so much.

When our laughter finally wound down, I sighed and dropped my head back against the couch. Wow. That was a nice ceiling. “Are those the original tin tiles?”

“Yep.” DT snapped his laptop closed, placed it on his lap, then pushed his rolling office chair away from his desk. He slid easily across the hardwood but came to an abrupt stop at the edge of the carpet. Grabbing the underside of the seat with both hands, he hopped the chair onto the carpet and then scooted across the carpet using both feet. Dash and I silently watched the whole process.

He stopped an inch from the loveseat and opened the laptop lid with a decisive snap of his wrist. After doing something with the touchpad, he held his hands in a ready position over the keyboard. “Okay.” He pecked at the keys using only the index fingers of each hand. “Harlan. H-A-R-L-A-N, right? Last name?”

Dash kicked the chair, sending DT back an entire two inches. “Cut it out.”

DT’s chuckle was surprisingly deep for such a slender man. “But it’s so fun fucking with people. Fine. Harlan, tell me why you think—excuse me, tell me what attempts have been made on your life so far.”

“Well, first I slipped on a bar of soap.” I lifted my cast to display the results.

“They do say the bathroom is the most dangerous room in the house,” DT said.

Dash looked thoughtful. “It is? I would have thought the kitchen. All those knives.”

I tried to get the conversation back on track. “It was a bathroom at SPAM HQ.”

“What’s suspicious about that?” Dash sked.

“They don’t have bar soap at SPAM. It’s all cheap-ass liquid soap from the dollar store.”

Dash lifted my legs, knocked the pillow to the floor, and slithered down the arm of the loveseat to the cushion. The way he gently lowered my legs onto his lap made my heart lurch with hope. Maybe he was open to forgiving me, or at least setting the hurt aside for the time being.

DT nodded his head and typed something. “What else?”

What came next? Oh, yeah. “I was almost electrocuted by an electric eel. In my bathtub.”

Dash whistled. “I guess the bathroom really is the most dangerous room in the house. Can an eel kill a person?”

Jesus. Both of them needed Adderall. “That’s what you’re focusing on? Not how the eel got into my bathtub?”

“Oh, they absolutely can.” DT rocked back on the chair, looking up at the ceiling the way people do when they’re watching a memory unspool in their head. “When I was on this absolutely insane disaster of an expedition up the Amazon, one of our fellows was delirious with yellow fever. Well, most of them were delirious with yellow fever, malaria, or god knows what other tropical horrors. You’d be impressed by how many ways one can find to die on a seven-year expedition through hell. Anyway, one day the baron—a dear friend of mine and mad from the fever—jumped into the river. He was convinced that if he could swim across it, he would leave the sickness on the boat. I couldn’t hold him. He leaped off”—DT whistled as he traced an arc in the air with his hand—“directly onto an eight-foot eel. His hair stuck straight up and then he sunk like a stone.” DT got a distant look in his eye and shook his head. “I’ve never gone back to South America since. Damn river.”

I had so many questions. None of which were relevant right now.

Dash’s hand rubbed up and down my leg. It was extremely distracting, and I wasn’t sure if he was aware he was doing it. He cleared his throat and tapped lightly on the foot cast. “What about the, ah, ankle?”

“That’s the newest one. I got this by falling into an open manhole that hadn’t been open a second before. I saw it swivel.”

“Oh, yeah.” DT nodded, eyes wide, the picture of innocence. “Those manholes can be deadly. I fell into one last Saturday and didn’t come out for days.”

“You do have to be careful around them.” Dash’s plush lips tightened in the expression he made when he was trying not to laugh.

Idiot. Idiots, the both of them. I leveled my best glare at them.

Dash grinned at me and cleared his throat. “So, when did this start?”

“Not long after I moved here. It started with small things. Paper cuts, a box falling on my head. I tripped down the stairs multiple times. All at work.”

“And you moved here when?” Dash’s voice was pointedly neutral but he removed his hand from my leg, lifted my legs, and stood up. He crossed the room to look out the large bay windows. I missed him immediately.

DT swiveled his chair to watch Dash.

“Two weeks ago. I got reassigned from Tulsa.” April, a terrible efficient woman with an unspecified position high up in SPAM had called me on a Thursday evening and told me I was reassigned as of the following Monday. I’d had the weekend to get my shit together and get to San Francisco.

San Francisco.

The news had hit me like a two-by-four to the back of the head. My heart stuttered. Worry, joy, and fear fought a battle for dominance in my stomach. Worry because my transfer orders hadn’t come through official channels, but directly from April instead. Which meant she thought something was rotten in the state of California.

The idea that I was going to be in the same city as Dash after all these years was the cause of the joy and the fear.

Dash. After all this time.

Since I’d be keeping an eye on him since he left the Army, I knew was still in San Francisco. Despite what some may claim, it wasn’t stalking. I had to make sure he was safe, taking care of himself. There was a difference.

April had sent equally efficient people to pack my things. They gave me a padded envelope that held keys to a SPAM-owned apartment complex and actual paper airplane tickets. By Monday afternoon, I was in a small efficiency apartment in San Francisco, staring at a thick red folder labeled A Guide to San Francisco for the Powered, which I was not, and a one-page, tri-folded pamphlet entitled SF for SPAM Agents, which I was. On the back of the pamphlet was a yellow happy face with the words “Good Luck” printed below it in the faux-Egyptian Papyrus font.

On Tuesday, I was standing in front of thirty people and presenting a PowerPoint presentation entitled “Minor Miracles 101: Navigating Life with a Sprinkle of Super,” pretending that I knew what I was doing.

I’d had very good reasons for not calling Dash and, honestly, if it hadn’t been life or death for me, he still wouldn’t have known I was in town. Not until I was sure it was safe for me to contact him. “I was going to call.” Eventually.

Dash stopped shaking the ball and turned to face me. Narrowing his eyes, he held the ball up near his mouth.

What would he ask it? How would it answer? The SPAM agent in me couldn’t help but spare a little thought to how much his...relationship...with that ball had grown in the years we’d been apart.

I’d asked about it when we’d met in boot camp, and he told me his godmother had given it to him for his thirteenth birthday. It took me almost a year to realize that the ball’s answers were uncannily prescient. When the answer to one of Dash’s questions was a definite yes or no, it always worked out for the best if we took the ball’s advice.

But the ball seemed to be touchy, and the noncommittal ones like Ask again later or Answer unclear came up more often than not. If he tried to rephrase the question, the ball would keep returning the same response, which in itself was pretty damning evidence that there was something out of the ordinary going on between Dash and the ball.

A continuing source of contention between us was whether the uncanniness was due to the ball itself or the power Dash denied having.

One day soon we were going to have to sit down and determine the answer once and for all. But we had more important things to worry about now. Including convincing Dash that I truly had been going to contact him after ten years of being an asshole. “Honest, Dash, I was going to call you. Things just got crazy really quickly. And when they did, the first one I thought of was you.”

“Because you knew I was in the city and a PI.” It wasn’t a question.

“Yes. And I knew I could trust you. Besides, don’t pretend like you weren’t keeping track of me, too.” We were both investigators. Keeping tabs on people was what we did.

Dash scoffed. “Obviously not well enough. I didn’t know you were transferred here.” He turned to DT. “How did we not know? Don’t I have a Google alert or something?”

DT shrugged. “You do. But even though SPAM may be kind of a joke, they are an actual government agency. It’s not like they send out press releases.”

I held out a hand to him. “Come on, Wheels. Help me out this time, and if it’s what you want, you’ll never have to see me again.” Heart in my stomach, I studied his face while he weighed how much he hated me against how much he had once loved me.

DT mouthed Wheels and shook his head. I guess he didn’t like it.

Now that the initial shock of seeing him again had worn off, I could better catalogue the changes. He was thinner, having lost the bulk he’d developed in the Army, making his high cheekbones more pronounced than they had been, but his eyes were still the same. I think I could recognize him from his eyes alone—big and expressive, with a fringe of dark eyelashes.

Dash walked slowly towards me as if fighting himself at every step. When he got close enough for me to touch, he stuck his free hand in his pocket. “And if that’s not what I want?”

I pulled Dash’s hand out of his pocket and clasped it in mine. “Then I’ll stick around and we’ll talk, and we can see what happens from there.”

He stared down as I reeled him in until his knees bumped into the loveseat. “Are you sticking around, Jaws, or is this just a temporary position for you?”

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw DT mouth Jaws and nodded his head in approval.

Dash asked the question as if the answer didn’t matter to him, but we both knew what he was asking. Hell, DT knew what he was asking. Was I going to use him and ditch him again?

I didn’t need a Magic 8-Ball to know the answer to that was no. Dash was an adult and capable of taking care of himself. If I felt his safety was as stake, instead of assuming I knew the best way to handle it, I’d lay all my cards on the table and we’d play the hand together. Saying the words didn’t mean he’d believe me, but it was where I had to start. “I’m all in. Not going anywhere. I even moved my houseplants.”

He raised one eyebrow, something he’d begun practicing when were stationed in Okinawa, much to the delight of the gaggle of kids who’d taken to hanging around us when we went into town. “You have houseplants? Live ones? You?”

A smile played around his mouth as we shared a moment of silence for all the plants that had died under my care in the past.

“My therapist suggested it. I have a few different ones.”

“Plants or therapist?”

“Plants. Just the one therapist. Dr. Rasmussen. She’s Swedish but lives in the States now. Obviously. I don’t go to Sweden for therapy.” Damn it. Babbling under pressure was just one of my many fine character traits.

For the sake of my heart, I chose to interpret the look in his eyes as fond amusement rather than barely contained humor at my expense. “Mine suggested knitting. He’s not Swedish. I think he’s from Hoboken.”

“New Jersey?” He nodded. “How’s that going?”

“As far as I know, Jersey is doing fine.”

“The knitting.”

“Not well. I’ve made a lot of lopsided rectangles.”

DT snorted and then feigned surprise when we turned to him. “Oh, am I interrupting your foreplay, I mean flirty banter? Sorry.” Dash frowned at him, but DT only rolled his eyes. “Some of us have actual work to do today, so can we move this meeting along?”

Reluctantly, I dropped Dash’s hand.

He immediately started tossing the 8-Ball from hand to hand as he paced back and forth across the office. “Okay. Any suspects?”

“Not specifically, but I have a hunch that it’s one of the new recruits in my SPAM class.” While not as specific as the 8-Ball’s answers, my hunches often pointed me in the right direction, especially when it concerned people doing things they should not be doing. You could trace a direct line from the results of me following one of those hunches to me sitting in Dash’s office today.

Dash studied the ceiling and I studied him. He had that look in his eye I’d always loved, a spark that said he was three steps ahead of everyone else in the room. “Do the newly recruited agents live in the same building as you?”

“No.” Thank god.

Last thing I needed was some recruit tracking me down while I was doing my laundry. They were all just so...enthusiastic. “They have dorms somewhere else because they’ll be reassigned after training. The apartments are for people who’ll be staying in the city for a while. So, while it could still be someone in the building, I think that whoever it is just figured out where I live.”

DT paused his typing. “How did you get rid of the eel?”

“Animal control. Do you know how hard it is to explain an eight-foot-long eel in your tub? I told them it was super related. They didn’t ask any questions.”

“They’ve probably learned it’s better not to in this town,” Dash said. “So just to be clear, you have a gut feeling that it’s someone in your newest SPAM class?”

“I do.” It hadn’t been there the first day, but by day three, I’d gotten this itch in my skull that something was up.

“Is that your power? Gut feelings?” DT asked me.

“No, I don’t have any powers.” I didn’t. Not officially.

Dash wasn’t going to let it go. “I don’t know. I always wondered about those ‘feelings’ of yours. Remember that staff sergeant in Kandahar? The one that had set up that fuel-stealing ring? You had a bad feeling about him from day one.”

“That’s because he was a douchebag. You hated him, too.”

Dash shook his head. “Yeah, I hated him, but you knew he was up to something.”

“Everyone knew he was up to something.” A blind man would have been able to tell. The guy’s aura was slimy.

“And what about that sheriff’s department in Alabama? Didn’t you get the entire department closed down?” His look said he knew damn well I had so I better answer truthfully.

“You know about that?” My involvement with that was supposed to have been off the record. Then again, he was a private investigator now, ferreting out secrets was his bread and butter.

He waved a hand as if to stay that wasn’t important right now. “Anyway, let’s see what the ball has to say. Is someone in Harlan’s current class of recruits trying to kill him?” He read the answer out loud. “Concentrate and ask again.”

“Well, that’s helpful.”

The throbbing pain from my broken wrist was making me cranky. Not having anything in my stomach but coffee wasn’t helping, even if it was some of the best coffee I’d ever had.

“Patience, young Harlan. This is an art, not a science. The art of deduction.” He sat back on the arm of the loveseat and shook the ball again. “Let me rephrase the question. Is someone in Harlan’s class of new recruits responsible for the accidents he has had over the last few days?” He clicked his tongue as he waited for the bubbles to clear. “’Signs point to yes’.”

“Fantastic.” The answer wasn’t unexpected, but that didn’t mean I was happy about it. Well, at least it narrowed down the pool of suspects to a mere forty rather than the entire population of San Francisco.

It was too early for this. “Is there more coffee?”

“Did you finish mine?” He grabbed for the cup.

I got to it first and yanked it out of his reach. “Maybe?”

“And I bought you Gummi bears. Traitor.”

The betrayal in his eyes almost made me feel bad. Almost. “I’ll buy you more coffee after this.” Then he’d have to tell me where he got it, right?

He snorted. “Right. Like I’m going to tell you where I get this literal nectar of the gods.”

“The Cornor Store down the block.” DT didn’t bother looking up from his computer. Dash gasped at DT’s betrayal and was ignored.

That was bringing back memories. “Oh yeah, I remember that place. I don’t remember the coffee being this good, though.”

“New supplier,” Dash said.

“You know, I never knew why it was spelled that way.”

“The guy who painted the first sign was illiterate. Nice guy. Could copy anything. No one could be bothered to change it and after a while, the name stuck,” DT explained.

Dash stared at DT. “You never told me that before. Do you like him better than me already?”

DT blew him a kiss. “You never asked. And you know I love you best of all.”

“You’d better.” Dash clicked his fingernails on the 8-Ball. “Do you have anything you want me to ask it? Can you think of anything that might help us?”

I was surprised by how many times he’d consulted the 8-Ball in the short period of time I’d been here. It used to be more of a game for us than a tool. Should we go out drinking or stay in and play video games? Does the lieutenant have the hots for Dash? The answer to that last one had been a definite yes.

“Do you consult the 8-Ball often? For all your cases?”

DT scoffed. “He uses it to decide what to wear in the morning. I think he has a problem.”

“I can quit any time I want, but why would I want to?”

Before I could answer, my stomach rumbled loud enough to be heard across the office.

DT glared at Dash. “If only someone had picked up something for the office.”

Dash spread his hands. “I brought candy. Anyway, I think visiting the classroom is a good place to start. Do you have access to the students’ personnel files? Their SF86s?”

“I’m not sure. Doubt it.” Of course, all the baby agents filled out the forms. It was the only way to get a security clearance. That didn’t mean I had access to them, and I was too new in this field office to have the kind of connections I’d need to get the files through back channels.

Dash sighed and pushed his hair back from his face. “Okay. Find out what you can, uh, find out, and shoot me an email.”

“I can send you a class list.” That was probably the kind of thing that could get me fired, but I’d rather be unemployed and alive than have a tile with my name on it on the wall of agents killed in the line of duty.

“Okay. DT and I will see what we can dig up about them. Would it be possible for me to observe your class? See if anything or anyone jumps out at me?”

“Do you have to?” I’d managed to keep Dash off SPAM’s radar for the last ten years with a little behind-the-scenes help from a friend. Of course, Dash being Dash, he’d made my life more difficult by becoming the private investigator of choice for half of California’s supes.

I’d known he would probably need to get up close to the students, but I had hoped to put it off until I could find a way to explain to Dash why I was reluctant for him to go to the field office.

“Corrected me if I’m wrong, but did we not ascertain that one of them is trying to kill you not, oh, thirty seconds ago?”

“Yeah, but if that’s true, I think we should be discrete. I don’t want to spook whoever it is.” That was the truth.

Dash stood up, crossed his arms over his chest, and stared at me.

Shit. He always could read me like a book. I’d never been able to lie to him even by omission. I did my best to keep my expression neutral. As long as he didn’t ask me anything specific, I figured I might be okay.

His eyes narrowed. “Now I definitely need to be there.” He held out a palm to forestall my objections. “I’ll be discrete.”

“Do you have any ID with a different name?” We could do that much, at least.

“You want me to enter a government building with a fake ID? That would be illegal, Mr. Dean.” One corner of his mouth quirked up.

“I’ll take that as a yes. Just use that, okay?”

“Should I wear a fake mustache, too? Fake nose?”

“Just the ID. I have a class tomorrow afternoon. Does that work?” Today was a paperwork catch-up day. I also needed to walk around the building and get a feel for the people I’d be working with for the foreseeable future.

Dash shrugged. “I’ll be there when I need to be there.”

“Great.” With a complete absence of grace, I levered myself off the loveseat. Dash was being much kinder to me than I deserved and I didn’t want to push my luck. Besides, the lack of food was beginning to make me lightheaded. “Thank you so much for helping me. I wasn’t sure you’d want to see me. I was half-expecting you to say good and slam the door in my face.”

Dash gave me a half-grin. “I’m just watching out for my own interests. If anyone is going to kill you, it’s going to be me.”

“Are you going to kill me?”

“Jury’s still out.”

That was a start. Sometime very soon we were going to have that talk, but first I had to live long enough to have it.

We exchanged phone numbers and made plans to meet up in the lobby of the SPAM building tomorrow. I offered to sign a contract for his usual rate, but he was adamant about not letting me pay. “I might want to put a price on your head, but I won’t put one on your life.”

“Thank you.” My life had left me cynical and suspicious. I’d learned that everyone had secrets, and most people would sell out their grandmother if the price was right. But not Dash. Even after how I’d hurt him, I knew he’d do his best to help me get to the bottom of this clusterfuck.

I’d find a way to make it up to him if it took another ten years.

Dash hovered anxiously at the top of the three flights of linoleum-covered steps. “Are you sure you’ll be okay going down the stairs?”

“I’ll be fine.” I grasped the handrail with my free hand and carefully planted the cane on the first step. Dash watched me hobble down until I made the first turn. After a few seconds, I heard a door shut.

Fingers crossed, Dash could help me solve this mystery quickly. Now that I knew there was a chance I could reconnect with him, I had more reason to live than I’d had in a long, long time.

First things first. I needed to find some breakfast