Page 5 of Blind Luck

“Off Cole? Why? In case you get caught in the crossfire again?”

“Crossfire?” Jerry scoffed. “I’m not worried about crossfire. I’m just not a fan of commitment.”

Ari tilted her head to one side. “Really? You were committed enough to fly me here from California in a hurry.”

If looks could kill, Ari would have been clutching her chest.

“I was just doing my civic duty,” Jerry hissed.

Ari ignored the danger. She was a braver woman than me.

“Well, can you carry on doing it for a while longer? I need to understand what makes Cole tick, and you’re in a better position than me to dig out that information.”

“That man is fine,” I added. “There’s a picture of him on his boat website, and he isn’t wearing a shirt.”

Oops. Now I was getting the eye-daggers.

“Down, girl,” Ari said, laughing.

“Just do your damn job.” Jerry got to her feet and hobbled away, cursing her crutches as she went. “Find me a suspect, and I’ll do the rest.”

She was leaving? Huh? “Wait, isn’t this your apartment?”

Jerry didn’t answer, and she didn’t come back either. After five minutes, Ari shrugged and ambled over to the small kitchen that was separated from the living room by a counter rather than a wall.

“This isn’t Jerry’s apartment.”

“How do you know?”

“The only things in the cupboard are a box of coffee pods, a package of pasta, and a bag of granola.” Ari checked the refrigerator. “Beer, pickles, bread, butter, an egg.” She sniffed the milk and wrinkled her nose. “This is bad. Guess we’re having our coffee black.”

“Shouldn’t we leave? I mean, this isn’t our place.”

“Jerry wouldn’t have walked out and left us here if she cared. Do you want espresso, lungo, or vanilla? This is a pretty nice coffee machine.”

Strong coffee killed my tastebuds and gave me the shakes. Caffeine was banned in the Promised Land, and the first time I drank an espresso—in Texas after I escaped my old home—I thought I was having a stroke. Science was banned in the Promised Land too. Even when I got pregnant, I still didn’t understand how babies were made. The Prophet said they were gifts from God, and until I ended up with one inside me, I assumed they came, like, wrapped in a box or something. Talking about childbirth was forbidden too.

“I’ll just have water.”

As we sat at the cosy dining table in the questionable apartment, sipping our drinks, Ari laid out the plan. We’d head to the Galaxy—yay, another lunch, because it wouldbe weird if we didn’t eat anything, right?—and find a suitable surveillance spot. Then I’d keep an eye out for Jimmy while Ari worked other angles. The picture Jerry had supplied wasn’t good enough for facial recognition software, apparently, but was adequate for me to tag a guy as a possible suspect for further investigation.

“I hate cases like this,” Ari said. “Scenario one, Cole is the target. Scenario two, Jerry and the MC are the targets, and there’s no crossover between the two matters.”

“Which option are you hoping for?”

“The first. Better to be hunting a guy who has a beef with a reluctant casino owner than go head-to-head with the kind of enemies Jerry or the Diamondback Devils might make. Plus we’d have one case instead of two. What we really need is a better picture of this guy, one Alexa can feed into her computer.”

All of which had led us to the Library bar, a table with the perfect view of the “staff only” door that led to the executive offices, and two dudes who loved the sound of their own voices. Right now, they were complaining that people just didn’t want to work these days. Youngsters had no drive. No ambition. I thought that was rich coming from men day-drinking in a hotel bar, but telling them that wouldn’t have fit with Ari’s “fly under the radar” directive, so I bit my tongue. Which hurt.

I’d brought a notebook and ordered an afternoon snack—chicken wings and the previously mentioned fries. In the Promised Land, unhealthy food was forbidden, although the Prophet determined what counted as healthy, so pineapple was banned while butter was fine. I hadn’t tried chocolate until I escaped, and honestly, I’d dreamed of sneaking back to Riverside County and tossing Hershey’s Kisses over the fence because those girls didn’t know what they were missing. I wished I could have brought them all with me, shown them that the world beyond the gateswasn’t as terrifying as they thought, but most of them were too brainwashed to leave. If anyone had breathed a word of my plan, my husband would have shackled me to the bed.

Anyhow, I was making up for lost time, and Ari was eating a salad. She seemed happy with that.

“Try to keep this table,” she said. “And tip the bartender well. If you tip more than anyone else, they’ll let you take a table for four, especially when the place is quiet.” Ari looked around. “Which I suspect is most of the time.”

“I think everyone else is at the all-you-can-eat buffet downstairs. Did I tell you about the year we had the Ascension buffet at the Promised Land and everyone got food poisoning? Literally everyone. The line for the bathroom was unreal. Only one person died, though.”

“Only one person? Gee, that’s fine then.”

---