Page 5 of Smokescreen (Knight & Daywalker)
Unless I was preoccupied by thoughts of my mother trying to force me into business with strange dinner-eating vampires. Because Davin had proceeded to eat all of his soup, three dinner rolls, the main course of chicken cordon bleu with crispy roasted brussels sprouts with bacon and balsamic glaze, and then a plate with scoops of pistachio, almond, and peach mousses arranged like the Irish flag for dessert.
The man had cleaned every plate like he was starving to death, and I’d almost been surprised he hadn’t picked up the last one and licked it clean, he’d been so enthusiastic about the dessert.
I’d barely managed to hide one dinner roll in my pocket to toss to my raven friend on the way out, and I’d actually felt a little bad about that. Maybe Davin had a...condition, or something. Maybe he needed all that food for something. How the hell would I know? He’d nodded along with everything mymother had said and answered the odd question she had asked, but for the most part he’d been silent throughout dinner.
He was like a freaking rock.
A rock who was apparently my new business partner.
Plus I had to raise eighty thousand dollars.
Eighty.
Thousand.
Dollars.
I’d never evenseeneighty-thousand dollars.
Okay, I wasn’t going to pretend, even to myself, that I’d grown up anything but rich and privileged. My mother hadn’t simply home-schooled me; she’d hired a literal teacher just for me. I’d been a classroom of one, and I’d learned everything I would have learned at a public school and then some. If I’d needed a thing, it was provided. If I’d wanted a thing, chances were my mother had gotten it for me, with rare exceptions.
When I passed my test to become a private investigator, she literally gave me a multi-million dollar building. Just like that.
I did not have a hard life.
I was not poor, and I never had been.
But...I also didn’t actually make much money. For instance, my mother’s friend Bethany had indeed contracted me to investigate the theft of her Picasso almost a year earlier. With the help of a flock of magpies and some industrious rats, I’d tracked the painting to a warehouse on the docks, where they were going to send it overseas to be auctioned off—an unknown painting clearly by the great master that might be worth millions.
Bethany had—quite generously, I’d thought—given me twenty thousand dollars for the weeks of work I’d put in on the case.
And then I hadn’t gotten another job for six months, so that twenty grand had fed me for a long time.
Sure, I could probably ask my mother for money, but who wanted to do that? Besides, Ihada job. I was a private investigator. It just wasn’t a regular job with steady income, and I hadn’t managed to build up a reputation or regular clientele yet.
Probably because I hadn’t been trying all that hard.
I’d also had a string of random other jobs through my twenties, before becoming an investigator. I’d worked everywhere from the local frozen yogurt place one summer as a teenager, to the Avalon Aquarium for the three months I thought I wanted to be a marine biologist. I hadn’t ever managed more than three months in any one place, and I’d made a whole lot—or rather, little—of minimum wage.
Fortunately, you could survive on minimum wage in California, if not live particularly well, especially if you didn’t have to pay rent.
It sure wasn’t going to result in eighty-thousand dollars that I could give the state, not even if I could manage to keep a job for the whole year instead of three months. Not even if I could split myself into two people and work two full-time minimum wage jobs for the whole year.
And even if that were a thing, I still had to eat. I’d probably need four full-time jobs in order to make the eighty grand and also eat and buy gas for my bike.
So what the hell was I going to do? If I did what she said and started a business with Davin Byrne, he’d be the one bringing in all the steady money with the whole monitored security system thing. How could I keep any of that cash if it was only coming in because of him? That wasn’t okay.
I didn’t want to take advantage of some stranger.
A muscle car being driven by a jackass swerved its way around me—apparently the speed limit was not fast enough for him on the winding downhill road into town. I kept an eye onhim as he whipped past, since I knew well that was the sort of driver who ran people like me off the road and didn’t so much as stop to call for an ambulance.
Once he was past me I went back to my musing, but just a few seconds later, noise and motion grabbed my full attention back to the road: the squealing of brakes, and the asshole car who’d just swerved around me stopping in the lane right in front of me.
I had plenty of time to slow down, since you know, I actually followed the rules of traffic while driving, and left plenty of room between myself and other vehicles. My mother had freaked out enough about me having a motorcycle, I wasn’t going to drive recklessly on top of that.
Whoever the guy was, he laid a trail of rubber on the road behind him, came to a near stop, then did a weird little swerve maneuver and sped off again.
What the hell?
