Deconstructed(59)

Juke was drunk, but he wasn’t stupid. His ears might as well have twitched. “What do you mean bigger?”

“You know, no. I’m not going over this with you. I’m terminating your services. You can keep the deposit. I’m done with waiting on someone to help me. I can see that I will have to help myself. Good day, Mr. Jefferson.”

He tried to stand too quickly. Throwing his hands onto the desk to steady himself, he called out at me as I opened the door, letting blessed fresh air inside. “Wait. Don’t go.”

“Sorry. These are business hours. You should be sober and working. Not sleeping one off. Done, Mr. Jefferson.” I shut the door and angrily stomped down the metal steps toward my van. This time no Griffin Moon stood near my door. No one seemed to be in the area, and normally, I would have felt in some sort of danger in an area like this, but I didn’t. Mostly because I was fuming. If someone had tried to jerk my Louis Vuitton from my arm, I would have ripped his head off and used it for a kickball.

I nearly dropped the bakery box on the last step. “Stupid son of a—”

“Hey!” Juke called down. “Don’t fire me.”

“Too late.” I jammed the box under my arm, stomped to my van, climbed inside, and cranked it. I said a lot of bad words under my breath while I did it, too. I enjoyed saying every single one because they were justified. I jerked the van into reverse and, with my tires squealing, backed out of the parking lot. Shifting into drive, I left an exasperated and barefoot Juke standing in the parking lot. In the rearview mirror, he threw up his arms and then dropped them.

I pulled my eyes away from my fired private investigator and trained them on the road ahead.

What was I going to do now?

“Screw it,” I said, digging a cinnamon roll from the box and biting into it. I had vowed to resist them, but Juke’s idiocy had me stress eating. “Mother of God, these are amazing.”

I chewed and told myself I would only have half of the pastry, knowing I was a liar. I would eat the whole dang thing. But that didn’t fix my current problem.

Hiring a third investigator seemed ridiculous. I mean, jeez, how did a gal get a good dick in this town? And that thought made me laugh. But it wasn’t the good kind of laugh. It was the “I’m so tired of bull crap, but that’s still sorta funny” laugh. Yep, I was at the end of my rope, and it wasn’t even five hours into the workweek. Time to turn this over to my attorney. Should have done that in the first place.

When I got to Printemps, I dropped the remaining cinnamon rolls with Jade and Ruby and retreated to my office. Plunking down into my swivel chair, I kicked my feet up on my desk. I never do that. It was a novelty. But sometimes a woman needs to feel in charge of something even if it’s merely her desk. My action knocked the small stack of books to the floor, and one fell open.

“Dang it,” I muttered, leaning forward to pick it up.

It was the 1950s detective book, and the page was open to “Chapter Nine: The Art of Surveillance.”

Thirty minutes later I had an idea that was nuts but also sort of exciting. As an only child, I had watched a lot of syndicated television shows growing up. My mother had tried like heck to get me overinvolved in ballet, piano, violin, and watercolors, but I had balked around middle school. Thankfully, my father had finally told Marguerite to leave me the hell alone. They’d been in the process of marriage counseling, so she’d shifted her focus to that, letting me quit swim team and getting the deposit back from ballet camp. I sat on the couch and watched I Dream of Jeannie, Full House, and tons of other shows, including my favorite kind—detective shows. Maybe growing up in the nineties—a time of grunge and angst—but watching all those seventies and eighties shows had injected me with just enough zaniness and optimism that I was fairly certain my idea would work. No one was more motivated than a soon-to-be single mother with little savings.

Ruby was sitting in the kitchen on her lunch break, eating a cinnamon roll and riffling through a list of mechanics. Or that’s what it looked to be as I snuck a peek over her shoulder.

“Car trouble?” I asked her.

She jumped. “Oh, I didn’t know you were there.”

See? I was good at detective stuff. As long as there were no little fluffballs nipping my ankles or fancy cameras to work. “Wait. Doesn’t your cousin own a garage?”

“Yeah, one of them does. But if you’re talking about Griff, that’s a towing service.”

I slapped the detective book on the kitchen table. “I need your help.”

“What’s this?” she asked, gazing at the cover with the blonde wearing a cocktail dress and heels beneath her trench coat.

“The answer to my problems,” I said, tapping the cover for extra emphasis.

“A book?”

“Not just a book, but a book about how to be a private investigator. Like on your own,” I said, crossing my arms and giving her a confident smile.

“Oh no. That’s a bad idea,” Ruby said, sucking at the cinnamon roll or whatever was in her teeth. Which was sort of gross, but not grosser than gummy flour stuck in one’s teeth. “You need to let an expert do this.”

“Have you ever watched Remington Steele?”

She wrinkled her adorable little nose. “Is that, like, a new streaming series or something?”