Page 30 of Fierce-Zander

“Hmmm,” she said.

“Am I right?”

“I’m thinking about it.”

“Meaning you aren’t sure?” he asked. He didn’t expect that.

“Just trying to see if there was some of that in there and you might be right, but I never thought of it.”

“Glad I got you to see it,” he said.

“You aren’t going to ask me what it is?” she asked.

“Nope. Might be too personal for spontaneous Chinese takeout.”

He was hoping maybe he could do this another night too and he could keep her on the hook for it.

“Probably true,” she said.

“So tell me why you think I’m a private investigator. I already told you I didn’t like to follow the rules.”

“And I believe I told you that I still think you follow them when they count. I think it’s more you don’t like the red tape that comes with the rules. The bureaucracy. You’re a no bull crap kind of guy.”

“I am that,” he said. “What you see is what you get.”

Her eyes moved over his chest and his arms slowly and then landed on his eyes.

“I can appreciate that.”

He wanted to take that to another level but told himself not to jump the line.

“You haven’t said why you think I went into this field.”

“I think you have your own code of justice. You want to right some wrongs too even if it’s not wrongs that happened to you. Maybe wrongs in society, not sure. It’s not for me to say. And though I’m not someone that talks openly about reincarnation, I believe if you were someone else in another life, you’d be a vigilante.”

He pursed his lips, his head going side to side. “That is slightly accurate,” he said. “If I believed in those things.”

“You’d be a modern-day Robin Hood. You’d go after the bad to help the good. That is what you get from your parents. Your mother is out for justice. Your father probably was too.”

“Yes to both,” he said.

“You still have a code of honor though.”

“Always,” he said. Which was why he wouldn’t push this night to be much more than a friendly dinner with a neighbor.

She came to him, and he used the opportunity to get to know her more.

He might have to make the next move, but it wouldn’t be tonight.

“Then here is to us fighting for what is right in our own way.”

She held her fork up to his with a piece of half eaten broccoli on it. “Guess it’s good we share a wall in the building. Maybe we can come up with some code to knock on the walls.”

“Your office in your suite is on the wall next to mine?” he asked.

“That is what Garrett said.”

“Garrett Fierce?” he asked.

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