Chapter 5

Four years later

Zazie

“Are you seriously smoking right now?”

I stopped mid-step, my shoe dangling above a cache of unopened mail and dusty, old laminate flooring, crunching my keys into my hands as I paused at the noise.

“No…” I replied to the ghost of my grandmother, and then I grinned when I realized it was only Zach, my older brother, talking to me from the kitchen as he seemed to be cleaning it for me with a face contorted in disgust.

Well, at least if he was cleaning, it must have been a good day. Four months ago, he had been diagnosed with cancer, and it was kicking his ass. He didn’t have a lot of weight to lose, but it seemed like every time I saw him, which was reasonably often, he was skinnier than the last time. Because of his tall frame, he reminded me of a sophisticated caricature of Death, only wearing a sweater vest.

I had a vape pen sticking out of my mouth that I had clenched between my teeth, so I was obviously lying to him. He was raising an eyebrow at me, and so I shrugged and added, “I vape occasionally under stress.”

“You vape more when you’ve been doing jobs you shouldn’t be doing and you feel ashamed,” Zach reminded me. His wisdom was that of a wintered psychologist, despite the fact that he was only thirty-two. “And when you feel guilty for being a lying, thieving bitch who has her nose where it doesn’t belong. But more obviously, because I called on these,” he lifted up a new stack of bills with my new name on it, ‘Zarah McCoy’, “and they were paid.”

He said this like paying bills was only something hookers did; his words were dripping with suspicion.

I snorted and hung up my keys on a hook next to my door. “Aw, were you gonna pay to keep my electricity on?” I asked, fluttering my eyelashes at him.

“No,” he replied peevishly, his hands settled on his narrow hips. “Ryan was. Now, apparently, you don’t need him for that. But don’t worry! He’ll be far more useful in defending you when you eventually get caught doing your skeevy Dick Tracy shit.”

“I’m not skeevy. I’m a private investigator,” I reminded him. I liked the sound of ‘private investigator’. It made me feel like I was the main hero in a 1930’s mobster movie.

I felt obligated to help him clean and picked up a nearby trashcan. I found it full, so I abandoned it and went to the sink to find an empty bag and began to start putting trash inside of it. No hard task to find trash for the bag; it was all over the place.

“You keep peeping in windows and breaking into apartments and you’re gonna get arrested or shot. And why? Four hundred dollars here? Two hundred dollars there?” he whined, waving his hands around with frustration.

“What? Do you want me to start working at Starbucks or something?” I asked smartly, wobbling my head like I was a teenager trying to pull her mom into a fight. After all, Zach was sort of a mom. He had certainly elevated himself beyond the simple role of ‘brother’ ages ago.

He made a tsking sound by snapping his tongue against the back of his teeth as he turned back to the sink, looking like he was going to wage war on an old frying pan that was probably beyond saving. “I’d appreciate it if you stopped being a sass-mouth and stopped self-destructing. And Starbucks isn’t going to hire you, because obviously,” he pointed at our surroundings, “consistency isn’t your strong suit. You’d actually need to show up every day and do what you need to do every day.”

“I had a job for a while,” I prompted him peevishly, reminding him of the job I’d had as soon as we’d moved to Baton Rouge after Grandma died.

“And you got fired from it for robbery. Don’t even.” He put up his hand flat in the air, and I pursed my lips together.

“Well, my bills are paid now,” I said after a moment of silence, bringing the conversation back to a point where I was somewhat functional. I pointed at the trail of unopened mail that ran twenty feet from the front door to the kitchen. “I’m not doing too bad.”

“Ryan’s offering you a job. Take it this time.” Finally, he had gotten to the point. I wasn’t living up to his standards, yet again. “He’s coming over, by the way, so move your ass and start cleaning.”

I groaned and began to slam the trash into my trash bag once again, cleaning off my countertops with a swipe of my forearm. “I didn’t even invite you dicks over!”

“No, you didn’t, but you keep saying you’re gonna come over to my place, and you don’t. You’ve no-showed three times. Including last night. Oh, don’t apologize. It’s okay,” he seethed before I even had time to feel bad about it, his words dripping with sarcasm.

“Look, Zach, the reason I don’t like working for Ryan is because he’s a dick-boss who’s on me to start at nine in the morning!” I whined. “Nine! Like what the fuck?”

“Most jobs start at nine,” he replied tersely. “It’s time to grow up and stop working stripper hours.”

“Why even be an investigator if I have to start at nine?” I asked wearily. “I like to move in the shadows,” I added, moving my hand up like I was trying to paint the grandiose life of a superhero. I ignored the fact that I had my camera currently full of photos of a husband who was banging all three of his secretaries, two of whom were very pregnant. Probably by him.

Zach rolled his eyes. “You’re never gonna settle down, never gonna have a happy life…” he moaned. He had been doing that with enthusiasm since he was diagnosed with cancer. He didn’t feel like he was going to make it, and he was going to leave me on this planet to die alone.

And I got it. I was also slightly concerned that I was going to die alone. I really had no prospects at all.

Honestly, the first and last person I was even attracted to was Murtagh, and I’d burned the shit out of that bridge. I’d left, leaving behind no note, no clues, no two-weeks notice, and my old phone number. Like a good girl, I went to restart in another city when I moved in with my brother and his then-boyfriend, Ryan, who quickly after became his husband. I lived with them for around three years before I moved out on my own.

“You need structure, Zazie,” Zach continued, apparently confusing my life with a stray alley cat’s. “You need firm routines.” He turned around as he was drying off the miraculously clean frying pan now. “Routines will make you feel safe, they’ll make you feel comfortable, and they’ll help ground you.”

“I don’t need a routine,” I sighed, puffing some hair out of my face. “I’m not a two-year-old, Zach.”

“No, two-year-olds are way cleaner than you,” Zach replied, as if that was the only thing that separated me from that age group, thereby concluding our conversation for five minutes. I could feel Zach silently judging me for completely trashing my apartment, too, but he had to have been used to it by now. I used to live with him, after all, and so my lifestyle habits should have come to him as no surprise.

Just after I went out to drop the trash down the chute, Zach’s husband showed up, hauling his tall body up the stairs with his briefcase hanging over his shoulder and wearing his tie out of order.

Despite how he acted when he was cleaning my apartment, my brother was a ray of sunshine on most days. Even when he was diagnosed with cancer, he was still very sweet and optimistic. Zach was a pediatric psychiatrist and was well-suited for the job. He always seemed to be uncannily aware of how everyone in the room felt at any given time. It was as if he could see the inner person inside, the person they were, and the person they wanted to be.

In fact, I think I was the only person in the entire world that Zach actually did judge…

I think that was what attracted him to Ryan. Or maybe that was what Ryan was attracted to about Zach. Ryan was normally the grumpiest man in the universe. I didn’t think I’d ever seen that man actually laugh, and I’d known him for ages now. His countenance was downright frightening and ominous. He fought with other lawyers all day and loved it. But Zach saw right through all of that and saw that Ryan was calm, intelligent, wise, generous, and that he had nothing but love for Zach. When I realized this, I finally came around to appreciating Ryan myself.

I also liked jumping on him to give him hugs, because he made a sound like a grumpy Muppet-bear until he was able to pry me off him.

“So, you’re going into work with me tomorrow, Piglet,” Ryan informed me in his usual gruff, no-nonsense way that he probably used at work so that people didn’t argue with him.

“I paid my bills!” I announced, throwing up my arms with frustration.

Ryan pulled off his coat. When he looked at the coat rack and found about forty tote bags hanging off it, he grunted and threw his blazer onto the back of my sofa instead. “It’s not about bills,” he told me. “I need your skills for a job. I want other people to see that you have skills. I want you to not embarrass me and stop rifling through trash cans like a hungry raccoon. We have a big case coming up, and I need your nose.” He walked up to Zach and said ‘hello’, with his lips.

I ducked my head into the refrigerator and found a hard cider inside. When I came back out, snapping it open, I saw that Ryan and my brother were still kissing. Urgh.

“Whose case are you trying to put me on?” I asked, interrupting.

“Caspian Dagon,” Ryan announced, putting his arm around my brother and looking over at me.

I began to choke on my drink. Was he fucking nuts?

“Dagon? Sure! Why not?” I asked, leaning my back against the counter. “Scold me for being this dangerous investigator and then throw me to the skeeviest dude in the whole city the first chance you get.” Before either man could reply, I threw my hands into the air, waving them around wildly. “I mean, you’re saying it’s dangerous to peep through windows, but you don’t know what they say about him on the streets!”

“On the streets,” Ryan repeated in his ever-exhausted tone. “You’re not the Artful Dodger,” he reminded me wearily. “We’ve been over this. Besides, he’s just an art dealer. He’s not a mob-boss or anything.”

“Art dealers normally aren’t that shrouded in mystery, okay? He gives everyone the creeps!” I assured. “People disappear around that dude! There’re so many weird rumors about him, you have no idea! He’s in with not just the mafia, but the Luminati, and the reptile people and?—”

Zach gave me a firm look that I assumed meant I should get serious and stop embarrassing him. I knew the look well.

“Well, the mafia, at least,” I repeated with a grumble. “No matter what you say.”

“There’s no evidence that he’s with the mafia. He’s just a businessman,” Ryan assured me wearily.

“Shady. As. Fuck.” Still, I straightened and said, “Fine. What do you need from me?”

“My client is in the middle of a libel lawsuit with Dagon, and that guy’s throwing the book at him. We have to fight back, and you have that supernatural ability to find shit people don’t want you to find.”

“That’s not my power,” I reminded, hoisting myself up on my counter. “But okay.”

For the life of me, I had no idea why Ryan couldn’t understand that my superpower was finding specific things. If I was looking for something particular, no problem. Other than that, I would have to go hunt through garbage like anyone else.

Like right now, I had no idea what garbage on Dagon I was even looking for. I was just going to have to go in blind. Which was fine; it was the job.

It wasn’t like I could just get a job at a gem store like before. There was a watch list now for people like me. You know, people who tried to steal something too expensive and fucked it up. Honestly, I knew I was lucky that I wasn’t in jail. Going through trashcans was just penance.

“I think if you poke around, you’ll figure out what you’re looking for,” Ryan assured me with confidence. “And then you can go do your dog-with-a-bone thing.”

“It’s a gift and a curse,” I admitted, hiking my shoulders up nearly to my ears. I finally sighed. “I mean, how much does the job pay?”

“I’ll give you some commission on my retainer and a full-time starting salary at seventy-grand,” he told me, and Zach clapped his hands with enthusiasm.

“That’s amazing, babe!” Zach told him with a grateful snuggle.

I just groaned. “I don’t want a permanent job! I’m a free agent!”

Zach’s happy expression dropped as he looked at me. “Zazie…” He put his hands on his hips and used a tone like he was going to put me in time-out any second.

“I’m a free agent,” I assured crisply. “And I assume you want everything above-board. So let me think.” I stared up at the ceiling. “Twenty thou for three months of work, and that’s if I don’t find anything. Literally anything. Dagon’s got a bad rep. And if I do find anything, then it’s extra. I’ll adjust to what I find. The better it is, the more money.”

“Nobody can make deals this way, Zazie girl,” Ryan argued wearily, pinching the bridge of his nose. “How the hell can I make a contract with that?”

“I don’t know.” I bounced my shoulders up and down. “It’s a handshake. You’re my brother-in-law; write it on the back of a napkin for all the fuck I care.” I waved my hand through the air, dismissing any of his concerns. “Beer?” I offered.

“Whiskey’s better,” Ryan replied, rolling his eyes.

“Only if you don’t mind backwash,” I warned, pointing to the bottle that was standing by itself, on top of my microwave, very far from where I kept the glasses.

There was a loud sigh, and Ryan and Zach exchanged a look that communicated their shared exasperation with me. I was so used to this look that it no longer had any sting.

“Beer will do,” Ryan grumbled.

“Well, you fucked up the one thing I asked you to do: show up on fucking time. How are you just coming into work now?” Ryan pulled up his sleeve to have me stare at the Rolex he wore, where I was sure the time of one o’clock was glaring back at me. I knew he was furious, because he looked slightly purple even though he wasn’t behaving any grumpier than he did any other day.

“I’m not. I’ve been working all day,” I replied, plopping into his desk chair and letting it spin me around a few times before he walked over, pulled the top of the seat backwards with his hands, and pointed to the two smaller chairs on the other side of the desk where I was apparently supposed to sit, and then he snapped his fingers at me like I was a naughty little puppy who wasn’t doing the tricks that I’d been taught.

I grumbled and got up to take one of the other seats as he asked, “What do you mean you’ve been working?”

“People can work outside of buildings, you know,” I educated. “It’s the twenty-first century. It’s time to buckle up, Ryan, because this century still has a lot left to go.” I rummaged through my briefcase, which was really just a multi-colored, stiff, cheap bag that was made mostly out of hemp. It made everything smell deliciously of weed. I found a manila folder and slapped it on his desk. “Now, here’s what I got. This dude definitely has something. I’m just not sure what until I get in there.”

“Get in there?” He shook his head. “Nope. No getting in there, wherever this particular ‘in’ and ‘there’ might be. I don’t need to bail you out for breaking into his house.”

I looked at the ceiling, exhausted by him. “Why must we do everything the hard way?”

He looked up at me with a no-nonsense look and chided lowly, “Zazie.”

I rolled my eyes. “Fine. Let me continue.” I took a deep breath and dramatically exhaled. “Lately, he’s been taking a lot of meetings with a few billionaires—which isn’t weird. Maybe they saw Squid Games and are wondering how to set up their own version of that. Who knows? But check it out—his office has been taking calls with two separate mafioso groups. One is straight-up Bratva. Goes by Gregor Drekov. Drekov is the forerunner of getting coke into Russia. And vodka, too, which is weird to me because I thought it was mostly made in Russia? But there you go.” I waved my fingers around the envelope like it was a magic trick, and then I pushed it across the desk to Ryan. “And it’s said that things between them did not end well. Some part of a deal went very south.”

He picked it up and opened it. “You already have art?” he asked, beginning to move through the contents.

“Yeah, well, I know a guy that’s been following Drekov, anyway. Been talking to him all morning. He sent some pics to me in exchange for pictures of my boobs,” I answered, pulling a toothpick out of my pocket.

Ryan’s head jerked up. “Pictures of your boobs?” he repeated like I hadn’t said ‘pictures’ and that I’d had to pull my boobs off and put them into a box and bring them to the post office.

I shrugged. “Yeah. He loves boobs. I offered to buy him a drink, and he said the boobs would do.” I looked up at him, taking in his expression for the first time and seeming confused. “I made sure it was artful.”

He grumbled, very much like a dad who’d just learned his daughter’s first job out of high school was as an underwear model. “Let’s keep that one to ourselves so Zach doesn’t murder me,” Ryan said as he continued to rifle through the envelope.

“Sure,” I said with an easy tone, crossing one of my legs over the other. “Also, I’m getting into his house tomorrow, so?—”

Ryan’s eyes found mine in an instant, his expression stern. “No, you’re not.”

“I’m not breaking in,” I assured, putting up my hands to disarm his concern. “I’m following a friend who’s doing an interview with him tomorrow.”

He blinked at me. “Sorry? An interview?”

“Oh, yeah. One of my drinking buddies works for Business Insider and was going to interview him anyway for this article on Antiquity sales. I said, ‘No way, because I’m actually trying to get some dirt on this dude!’ And he said, ‘Well, if you don’t embarrass me, and you give me an Old Fashioned, you can totes come along!’ And I said?—”

Ryan put his hands out and said, “Please God, tell me that an Old Fashioned in this conversation is a drink.”

I rolled my eyes and said, “Sure, Dad. It’s a drink.”

He didn’t look satisfied by my admittance. “It wasn’t a drink, was it?” he asked with a blank expression.

I stared at him for a long second and said, “Nope.”

There was a loud sigh. “You need to actually make a weekly appointment with a therapist. Whatever you’re doing now isn’t working.”

I wasn’t in therapy at all anymore, and I just shrugged rather than inform him of it. He always made too big of deal of everything. I think Ryan, if he had his druthers and if society obliged, would have just arranged a marriage for me already and I would be working on making nieces and nephews for him and my brother. As it was, I hadn’t had an orgasm since Murtagh had given me one.

It wasn’t the same when it wasn’t Murtagh. Anyone else’s dick could have been an elbow for all the satisfaction I got from it. But Murtagh’s cock… Well, Murtagh’s cock had been a cock. And it had been so close, and so hard… And so deliciously off-limits. Mm. Just thinking about it…

Too bad I had dropped off the side of the earth. It was too awkward to go back to him now. There was no rebuilding that bridge.

Ryan was still looking at me with a look that crossed grumpy and headed towards alienated. He grimaced and stared me over. “Look, Zazie Girl, I just want to assure you that it is possible to have a career without doing any sexual favors whatsoever. I, for example,” he put out his hands as if presenting his body on a gameshow, “took no pictures of any part of my body nor gave any hand jobs, blowjobs, rim jobs, or sex to anyone to get to where I am today.”

“Well, I really draw the line before blowjobs and sex, if that makes you feel any better,” I enlightened him. “Hand jobs and pics mean nothing to me!” I combed my hand through the air. “Nothing. Hell, I could give you a hand job and feel fine about it.”

“Please don’t.” Ryan flatly begged in his gruff, nonsensical way. “Look, Zazie Girl, you and I need to have a chat.”

“Are you gonna scold me again?” I groaned, wincing. I had been scolded by Ryan countless times in my life, and they weren’t enjoyable. Ryan’s scoldings didn’t hold much pizazz in them or funny parts to look back on afterwards. He snapped his fingers and pointed back to the seat, and I puffed out a sigh and sat back down in it. “Lay it on me, Pops.”

He couldn’t be teased, because I had called him so many variants of ‘Dad’ over the last four years, it didn’t land anymore. “Look, I can’t understand what you’ve been through. I get that you’re completely damaged on the inside. The fact that you’re not in some sort of mental institution or heroin recovery program right now is a testament in itself. Most people who have had your history would have been broken. But you aren’t. That being said, you have people in this world who care about you, and for the sake of them, you should really try a little harder to be a functional person. If for no other reason, then just so Zach can point at you and assure his clients that it can be done.”

“Oh, another ‘Think of the children!’ scolding.” I nodded with understanding.

He frowned. “This isn’t just a ‘Think of the children’. This is a ‘Think of your brother’ one. He worries about you, and if the treatment doesn’t work like we hope it will—” He stopped talking there, and I quickly realized that was because he couldn’t. He opened and closed his mouth before croaking, “He wants you to be in an okay spot.”

I really wanted to divert this conversation. I didn’t like to think about Zach dying. As soon as I got into that mind-fuck of an idea, it messed up my whole day. “Look, I am in a good spot. You can settle it down.”

“You’re not in a good spot! You can’t show up for work on time, you have a criminal record that most hookers would be embarrassed by, you have a weird sexuality that can’t be explained by modern science, and you live in your apartment like you’re a human-sized packrat. You can’t survive on your own! You’re constantly calling us from the bar at 2 AM needing a ride, and?—”

I put up my hand so that he couldn’t think of more things. “I can survive on my own! If you don’t want to pick me up, fine. I’ll get an Uber.”

“You can’t get an Uber. You get so drunk that you can’t tie your shoes, let alone navigate an app! You have in no way demonstrated that you can take care of yourself. I need you to work on that.”

I sat back, looking and feeling guilty and beginning to see his point. There was quiet in the room while I pouted and he stared at me, obviously subtly waiting to see if any of his words were landing.

“Okay,” I finally groaned, picking at a piece of invisible fuzz on my coat. “I see what you mean. I’ll try to change myself so that I become more boring and predictable.”

“Thank you,” he sighed. “That’s all I ask. Now, try not to give anyone a hand-job on the way home.” He waved at the door in dismissal. “Try to behave tomorrow and don’t do anything weird that will fuck up your investigation with Dagon.”

I gave Ryan a thumbs-up, inwardly feeling that I’d had a very rough fifteen minutes at the office. “Alright. Take it easy, Grumps.”