Page 16 of Blind Luck

“Wish I had those kinds of friends.”

“If you want to run surveillance on Kelsey, I’ll gladly put in a word.”

He was joking, but Ari played along while I watched Rusty in the rear-view.

“Okay, we can do that.”

“Huh?”

“How many bedrooms does that place have? Five? Six?”

“Five.”

“If we can borrow one of them, then we’ll help you out.”

Ari was just going for it. Wow. Although Rusty struck me as a straight-talking kind of guy, so maybe that was the right approach to take?

“I was joking.”

Or maybe it wasn’t?

“I know you’re joking, but I’m not. Think about it—we have experience with surveillance, and please don’t take offence at this, but you stick out like a sore thumb. Nobody wears sunglasses indoors.”

“She might recognise me otherwise.”

“The two of you know each other?”

“We met at a party a while back.”

“Even if she doesn’t recognise your face, she’ll start to wonder why a big guy with sunglasses and a ball cap keeps following her. Objectively speaking, women are better at surveillance.”

“Your friend got into a fight, and I had to drive her to the emergency room.”

Oh, he just had to bring that up. “They tried to kick me out of my freaking seat. What was I meant to do? Let them get away with it?”

Rusty cracked a smile. “Nah, it was kinda hot the way you laid into them.”

Hot?

No, no. It hadn’t been hot. The AC was one place the Galaxy didn’t skimp.

“That was a one-off,” Ari said. “Usually, we fly under the radar, and women don’t come across as threatening to other women.”

Rusty looked at her curiously. Under the sunglasses, he had eyes the colour of chocolate frosting. “Do private investigators even take cases like this one? I figured they’d call me crazy if I went to them with the story.”

“A woman once hired me to prove her neighbour was an alien.”

“And were they?”

“Of course not, but I made sure she paid up front.”

“Why would she even think he was an alien?”

“He made weird screeching noises at night. But it turned out he just had insomnia and a violin.”

“I guess that makes sense,” Rusty said slowly. “But I can’t invite you into somebody else’s home while he’s away on a trip. How about I hire you the regular way? Or I could get you a room at a hotel? Not the Galaxy, somewhere good.”

“That won’t work for us. It just so happens that your crash pad is near one of our surveillance targets. If we had a base nearby, it would free up some time for other things.”

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