Page 8 of Houston, We Have a Problem
I hold up my hands. “Okay, hey, give me some credit. Irescheduled. There’s a difference.”
“Why?”
“Because I need your help.” That’s not actually why I did it, but I’ll take advantage of his availability.
I’m never going to get the other side of the duplex cleaned up on my own before Sunday, and I know Jordan’s not opposed to hard labor. The man started his own landscaping company after all, and he’s quickly becoming one of the most coveted companies in Sun City. Granted, I did give his company a shout-out the other day in the hopes of getting him more business, but he’s built up a good reputation on his own.
That’s why I rescheduled all of his appointments today. He needs a break, and this will be the perfect thing to keep his mind off of work before he gets sucked back into his workaholic tendencies. The man never stops.
Wary, he follows me as I grab a set of keys and head outside, crossing the shared front porch to the other half of the house. I haven’t been in here since the last tenants left a couple of months ago, but I still have nightmares from what I saw. How anyone could make that much of a mess is beyond me, and it’s going to take more than a few Clorox wipes to get the house in rentable shape.
“I have renters moving in on Sunday,” I say as I unlock the door, “and I need to get this place ready.”
Jordan swears as soon as the door swings open, apparently forgetting Brook’s aversion to cursing as his jaw hangs open. “Dude, I thought this place was on the market.”
I snicker at his look of horror. “It is.”
“I saw the photos. They’re gorgeous.”
“The photos are of my place, just flipped,” I say with a shrug. “I haven’t had the time to get this side fixed up yet, so I had to improvise.”
“This looks like a murder scene.”
He’s not wrong. The last tenants—a husband and wife in their fifties—were painters, something I didn’t know until they moved out and left several paintings behind. Some of them weren’t bad, but most of them were, uh,questionable. They had an affinity for painting gruesome death scenes from moments in history, which meant a lot of splashes of red paint. And I’m talking literal splashes. If I hadn’t seen the paintings before chucking most of them in a dumpster, I would have been convinced there was a lot of stabbing and head slashing happening every time I was out of town for a game based on the splattered state of the walls.
If I’m being honest, I’m still a little convinced. I’m tempted to bring in a blacklight to see if there are any traces of actual blood in here, but I’m a little worried what else I might find. They were a strange couple all around.
“Why didn’t you just pay someone to come in and—”
“You know why,” I mutter, leaving it at that. Jordan knows that after the way I grew up, I hate my bank account almost as much as I hate being given the credit for all of my team’s wins. Well, credit from everyone but Tamlin Park. If it were up to her, she would have the world convinced that I’m the reason we’veonlymade it to the Series twice in the last eight years. Only she would overlook the fact that we won both times.
Reading my mind again, Jordan chuckles as he picks up an overturned, empty red paint bucket. Yes,bucket. The five-gallon kind. He flips it over and sits on the bottom, watchingme carefully as he says, “So, how long have you been afraid of Tamlin Park?”
I throw an old paintbrush at him. “I amnotafraid of her. She’s half my weight and always teetering on heels, so I’m pretty sure I could take her.”
He laughs. “That’s not what I meant, and you know it. You couldn’t get out of that interview fast enough.”
He’s spot on, but for some reason I haven’t been able to get the woman out of my head. It’s like she burrowed in there and set up camp, just waiting for me to do something wrong. She’s not even in Sun City, but I can’t shake the feeling that she’s nearby.
I do my best to ignore the unease building inside me and deflect Jordan’s accusation. “I was tired. Wanted to shower.”
“She called you old.”
“Iamold.” I huff a little as I grab a discarded garbage bag and start stuffing it with junk. “I’m, like, eighty in pitcher years.”
“You don’t look a day older than sixty-five,” Jordan says. He hops up, bringing his bucket with him to start loading up his own batch of garbage. “What I wanna know is why you don’t want anyone to know you’re retiring. If you know you can’t play, why keep up the charade?”
I wish I had an answer for that.
Even though I remain silent, Jordan keeps talking. He’s definitely the kind of guy who regularly has conversations with himself because he’s usually the most entertaining guy in the room, and I still haven’t figured out why he moved back into his parents’ house here in Sun City and started working in a fairly isolated job working landscape maintenance and design. He spent the last decade in California, working for a ridiculously elite PR firm up until a year ago when he randomly dropped his whole life and moved home.
He still hasn’t told me why he gave up everything he’d built out there, but I know it has something to do with him working too hard. He and I share that trait, which is not necessarily a good thing.
“But seriously, man,” he says, unaware of my concern for him, “you’re lucky you walked away from that interview in one piece. She looked like she was ready to eat you alive, and not in a good way. What did you do to get on her bad side?”
“I have no idea,” I admit, forcing myself to focus again. Then I groan as I peek into the kitchen. “We’re going to have to call in a dumpster for all of this. It’s like they turned this place into a demo zone before they left!”
Jordan already has his phone out. “I’ve got a guy,” he explains, reminding me why I have always trusted him with all my darkest secrets. He may not take life too seriously, but he’s always there when it matters.
