Greywalker - Kat Richardson [52]
It took only moments for the restaurant to find Will, who was still sitting at the table.
“Hi, Will, it’s Harper. Look, I’m sorry. Something work related came up and I had to go. I didn’t mean to leave you in the lurch like that.”
“Something work related,” he repeated.
“Yes. What? Do you think I just ran out on you? It was something I couldn’t control.”
“All right,” he said, but it didn’t sound all right.
“Will. Don’t be angry. My job is like this. Weird stuff comes out of nowhere and I have to chase it down when the opportunity arises. If I hadn’t wanted to have dinner with you, I wouldn’t have called you back.” There was a lot of silence at the other end of the line. “Will, I’m at the police station, so I can’t stay on the phone. I don’t know how much longer this is going to take. I’ll have to call you later. OK?”
“All right,” he said again. “If you call me later, we can talk about it.” Then he hung up.
Great. Well, there went that romance. This was not turning into the sort of evening I’d had in mind.
I’d been booked and fingerprinted and had gone through a carefully edited version of my story once. The owners of the property weren’t home when the alarm went off, and when they arrived to press charges, they wanted to hear what they’d missed.
I lied. I told them, as I had the cops, that I had been tailing an insurance fraud suspect from the restaurant and had stumbled through the remains of an old bootlegger’s run into their basement. The owners of the house—now a bed-and-breakfast—were kind of charmed by the idea that their house might have a secret past as a speakeasy. The cops, on the other hand, were not charmed by the discovery of a rotting tunnel behind a bit of broken plaster, but that thin evidence was a lot more comfortable than explaining that I’d somehow managed to get into a basement which was still locked from the outside.
It was after eleven p.m. when they decided they couldn’t hold me. The cops returned my stuff, including the pistol, and I went downstairs to call a cab and get my car back.
When I paid off the cab, I was relieved to see that Will’s truck was gone from Dan’s parking lot, and then I got angry with myself for feeling relieved. I damned Albert with catholic breadth as I slammed the truck door behind myself. I sat still for a good two minutes, calming down before starting the drive home.
I pounded up the back stairs to burn off my lingering fury. I slammed out of the stairwell onto my floor to see my front door standing open. I stopped and gaped, then bent down and snatched up the ferret as she tried to scamper past me.
I stared into my living room. Chaos dove out of my arms and raced across the floor in wild, ferret delight. She danced across the face of disaster. The burglar alarm was off and the living room was a wreck. The ferret’s cage was tilted on its side, the door hanging open. The surgeon’s cabinet had been knocked over and the chair was dribbling stuffing from the underside of the cushion. Books and paperwork drifted around like autumn leaves.
I caught the ferret one more time and stuffed her into my jacket before going to knock on my neighbor’s door. I left the place just as it was. It couldn’t get much worse, after all.
“May I use your phone?”
He let me in and I called the police, asking for a detective I knew, but was told he was off duty. I’d have to take potluck.
I slammed the phone down and waited for the cops while watching my neighbor’s half-breed pit bull sniff and whine in the direction of the lump of ferret moving around under my jacket. Once they showed up, my neighbor Rick let me wait in his living room eating cold pizza while the evidence crew found nothing. Once they were gone, I thanked Rick and his dog and went straight back to my place. I slammed the door, locked up, and headed to bed. And threw my damned, silly loafers against the bedroom door hard enough to dent it.
In the morning, I called Mara, my mood very little improved.
She answered the phone herself.
I started straight in. “Mara, I don’t know what’s going on, but Albert