Sleuthing for a Living (Mackenzie & Mackenzie PI Mysteries Book 1) (2 page)

"So you're a military brat?" he teased.

"Recovering military brat," I corrected with a smile. "He's been retired for ten years." I didn't mention that I'd moved out of my parents' house long before that.

The lights flicked back on, and I blinked like a baby bat up at my new neighbor.

"Let me get a look at your eyes." Hunter leaned in close, presumably to examine my face. He smelled woodsy, like campfires and fresh air and pine boughs. The clean scent cut through my stinging nostrils and raw throat, and it took all of my energy not to sigh as he examined my eyes.

"Pretty," he whispered, so low that I thought I was imagining it.

"Mom?" Mac had returned, and we sprang apart like a couple of guilty teenagers.

Hunter rose from the couch and backed toward the door. "Pretty much standard. Do you have any honey? It will help with the raw throat."

"We subsist mostly on frozen dinners and takeout." Mac gestured to the bag of Thai congealing on the counter.

He headed for the door and murmured, "Let me check with Nona. She might have some."

Mac chucked her thumb at the still open door to the hall. "Did I interrupt something? Because you know you're supposed to hang a sock on the doorknob when you have a boy over."

"It's not like that." I struggled up off the couch. "Besides, I'd have to be an idiot to start macking on the tenants."

My daughter rolled her eyes. "Mom, like you could help yourself."

"What's that supposed to mean?"

Before she could answer there was a tentative knock on the door, and Nona Burkowitz shuffled in, carrying a jar of organic honey. She was a short, heavy-set woman in her late sixties with silver hair that she wore in a tight perm. Her housecoat was floral, her stockings pink, and her glasses thick as her Queens accent. "Hunter said you needed some honey, bubala."

"Yeah, it'll go awesome with my larb." I peeked in the bag. "You want to stay for dinner, Nona? There's plenty."

Nona wrinkled her beaklike nose. "I can't eat that spicy foreign stuff. It gives me gas. Besides, I had a nosh with my book club ladies earlier. Though I could do with a cup of tea."

"Do we have tea?" I asked Mac, who was in charge of the grocery shopping. I did too much impulse buying.

She opened one of the boxes that clogged up the counter. "Maybe from Grams?"

"Don't trouble yourself, dolly. I don't mean to be a nuisance." Nona parked herself on one of the barstools, making no move to leave. "So, Miss Mackenzie, what do you think of our good detective? He's single, you know."

When I'd first encountered Nona the week before, she'd proudly introduced herself as the neighborhood's
yenta
—what non-Yiddish speakers referred to as a matchmaking busybody. Even through the teary afterburn of pepper spray I saw the speculative gleam in her eye.

"Maybe he bats for the home team?" I suggested, just to be a smartass.

Nona looked confused. "You mean the Red Sox?"

Mac made an exasperated sound. "She means maybe he's gay. And he isn't. I caught him ogling Mom's cleavage earlier."

Nona crossed her arms over her ample bosom. "He's schtupped plenty of women, but none of them are repeaters, if you know what I mean."

"I do." Mac was fighting laughter, her cute little elven, goth-princess face tight from holding her jubilation in. "Mom's a hit-it-and-quit-it kinda girl too."

"Hey, I resemble that remark. Besides I'm swearing off men."

"What about you, dolly?" Nona turned her focus on Mac.

I bit my lip and studied the honey jar. Mac didn't date, and I liked it that way. According to her, boys her age were too immature. I trusted her judgment as it was a far cry better than my own. Of course, I didn't want her getting knocked up at sixteen the same way her mother had, either. It was my own personal tightrope, and I had crummy balance.

My daughter made a disgusted noise as she settled in front of her open laptop, a bowl full of peanut rice noodles perched on one knee and deadpanned, "I'm saving myself for Justin Bieber."

I made a dramatic grab for my chest. "You hurt Mommy when you say such things."

Mac swirled noodles around the tines of her fork. "And why is this all about you?"

"Did you hear that? It was my soul shriveling to blackened husk."

Mac shook her head. "Always so dramatic."

I waggled a finger at her. "Hey, I'm just as invested in your future mate as you are. After all, he'll be changing my bedpan when you're out taking the world by storm."

One pierced eyebrow went up. "If I haven't put you in the home already."

I faux gasped. "You'd do that to me, the woman who gave you life?"

She shrugged. "Hey, you can still reconsider the whole swearing off men shtick. Find yourself a wealthy husband. Preferably younger."

"Never. Besides, you called dibs on Bieber."

Nona looked a little lost by our banter, and Mac took pity on her. "I'm not really looking for a relationship right now, thanks."

Big freaking sigh of relief.

Nona took her glasses off and rubbed them on her apron. "Well, you know where I am if you change your mind. Now I better get upstairs.
Castle
is on in ten minutes. That Nathan Fillion sure can fill out a bullet proof vest."

I shook my head when the door shut behind her then turned to look at my offspring. "How come I get the feeling that she gave up too easily?"

Mac thought about it for a beat. "Because you're used to Grandma's bullying? Some people actually can accept the word
no
."

"You are wise beyond your years." I grinned at her, and she grunted. Maybe she hadn't wanted to encourage Nona, but just to be sure I asked, "Seriously though, what about Pete?"

She snorted. "Pete the Pervert? Come on."

"He's not a pervert. He's a sixteen-year-old boy. They're all like that." As I well knew.

"Mom," she said in her
get real
voice. "He put a camera in our bathroom."

Okay, that was sort of creepy, even if he said it had been just a test run of his new motion-activated camera thingy. Still, Pete and Mac had been friends since preschool, and he'd had a crush on her about as long. I was sure he had a good heart and was relatively harmless, and really, what more could a mother of a teenage girl ask for? "Look, I'm not saying you have to date Pete. Just hang out with him once in a while. It'd do you some good to break out of your cyber shell and fly from the nest."

Mac took her dish to the sink. "How about you worry a little less about my love life and a little more about your job hunt. How's that going, by the way?"

"Fine." I poked at the congealing mess of takeout, my appetite gone.

"By fine do you mean not at all?" She raised an eyebrow.

"No, by fine I mean fine. I have a few irons in the fire."

Mac sat down next to me. "Are we in trouble financially? Is that why we had to move in here?"

"No," I flat-out lied.

"Mom." She cast me a disbelieving look.

I pushed my plate away. "Mac, this isn't anything you need to worry about. I know I don't act like it very often, but I am your mother. Have you ever had to go without food or shelter or even the best in vintage computer parts?"

"No," she admitted.

I reached out and ran a hand down her arm. "I'll find a new job—promise. Look, it's been a bear of a day, and I don't think Detective Hottie is coming back tonight. I'm going to take a shower and hit the hay. Will you keep an eye on the breathing dust mop?"

Snickers picked her head up and growled at me.

"Sure." Mac lifted the dog and got a lick for her efforts.

I made it to the door before she called after me. "Mom, you'd tell me if we were in real trouble, right?"

"Of course I would." I gave her my best reassuring smile and shuffled down the hall. The bedroom door shut with a snick, and I leaned against it, barely resisting the urge to bang my head into it repeatedly.

How was it possible that I was both under- and overqualified for every decent job in Boston? I hadn't been BS-ing Mac when I said I'd been scouring LinkedIn and pounding the pavement ever since the boutique dress shop I'd worked for went under three months ago. I'd been working odd jobs since I'd left my parent's place at sixteen and wasn't qualified for much else. Sure I could pick up a few part-time shifts, but that would be without benefits or much of a regular income. Besides, most retailers liked hiring kids Mac's age instead of a sad sack thirty-two-year-old. They worked for less money.

I headed into the bathroom and turned on the shower. Tomorrow I would expand my search and find something that I was good at. Waitressing maybe. I liked food as long as I didn't have to cook it. And the tips would help us put gas in the ever-needy Fillmore.

I'd just finished stripping and happened to glance up in the mirror when something unusual caught my eye. I turned around and reached for the book someone had wedged between a couple of towels on the top shelf. The cover was a nice leather quality, and the thing looked valuable. I opened it to the first page and read the handwritten letters.

The first page had only two sentences.
Working Man's Guide to Sleuthing for a Living
. And beneath that,
By Albert Taylor, PI.

What interesting reading material Uncle Al had kept in the bathroom. My eyes were still itchy, but I decided that the shower could wait. After shutting off the water I headed for the bedroom and settled in to read.

Chain of Custody—applies to the documentation, custody, control, and handling of evidence in order to preserve its integrity
.

From the
Working Man's Guide to Sleuthing for a Living
by Albert Taylor, PI

The journal was a fascinating read. I stayed up until two in the morning, engrossed with Uncle Al's pearls of PI wisdom. By the time the coffee had finished brewing I had a plan of attack.

"I know what I want to be when I grow up," I announced, pouncing on my sleeping daughter. Snickers, who had had been laying across her feet, snarled at the disturbance.

"Great," Mac mumbled and buried her face deeper into the pillows.

"Nice doggie." I backed off. "Wanna go outside?"
The dog, obviously familiar with New England weather, laid her head back down.

Snagging Mac's pillow so she had to pay attention to me, I announced. "I'm going to be a private investigator!"

One eyelid cracked open. "Mom, get real."

"I am being real. It's not that hard, at least according to Uncle Al."

Mac yawned and sat up on the couch. "Did he come to you in a dream or something?"

"No, I found one of his old journals." I held out the
Working Man's Guide.
"He says, and this is a direct quote, 'If you think you would be good at being a private investigator, then you probably will be
.
'
And I know I will be freaking fabulous!"

Mac took the book without much enthusiasm. "Don't you need like a license or a certificate or something?"

I moved over to Ol' Trusty, the coffeepot I'd scored for a dollar at a garage sale the year Mac was five. "Eventually. But the journal says I could go to work for a law firm right away as an unlicensed PI. They would give me cases and stuff."

"Cases and stuff." My daughter shook her head. "So you need a lawyer to hire you?"

Someone rapped on the front door, and I moved to answer it. "Don't sound so skeptical. I can do this. And take that creature outside before she piddles on the rug."

I pulled the door open with the chain still attached and peeked out in the hall. Hunter Black stood there looking scrumptious and bearing a cardboard takeout tray full of coffee and a bag of doughnuts.

"Be still my heart," I breathed.

"What was that?" he asked. He wasn't much of a smiler, though the spark of amusement in his gaze indicated that he'd heard me perfectly well.

"Coffee is my drug of choice. You're enabling an addict."

"It's just my way of apologizing for the mishap last night. May I come in?"

I shut the door, slid the chain free, and then opened it all the way. "If I tell you that the apology is unnecessary, do I still get the coffee?"

"I wouldn't want to be held responsible for your withdrawal," he murmured and handed it over.

"Hiya, detective." Mac waved from the couch. She was adorably rumpled, and her short red-gold hair stuck out every which way. "When you didn't come back, Mom thought she'd run you off for good."

"Yeah, sorry I disappeared so suddenly, but when I get called, I have to go." Those amused eyes turned back to focus on me.

I was too busy making sweet
amour
to French-pressed delight to pay much attention to their exchange. "Oh holy hoochie mamma, Batman. Mac, you have got to try this."

"You drink coffee too?" Hunter raised an eyebrow at my offspring.

"Is the pope Catholic?" Mac reached for a cup. "And don't mind Mom. She gets a little excited over her first cup of coffee. And her second and her fifteenth."

"You weren't kidding about the addiction, were you?" The detective set the bag of doughnuts down on the kitchen counter and shucked his jacket.

"I never joke about coffee," I told him, "or shoe sales. Everything else is fair game though."

"Good to know." He did that amused crinkling thing with his eyes again. If he ever did actually smile, or even laugh, my heart might stop.

We stared at each other, letting the moment stretch out between us. He seemed to fit the space well, looking completely comfortable perched on a barstool.

Mac rolled her eyes. "I better get ready for school."

"Have fun with that," I called, not taking my gaze from Hunter's. Oh this was Bad with a capitol
B
.

"You have to get ready too," she reminded me. "You're driving me, remember?"

Rats, I hadn't. "First day, new school. Oh, but shoot, Fillmore's oil light came on last night when we were on our way back from the Thai place. I have to stop and get some more liquid gold for him."

"You could take Al's car," Hunter offered.

"His what now?" Mac and I said in unison.

A slow smile spread across his face and I was right, the effect was devastating "You don't know? The keys should be in his desk." He strode purposefully down the hall toward Uncle Al's office.

Mac put down her empty coffee cup. "Did you know about a car?"

I shook my head. "Mom never mentioned it."

She worried her bottom lip. "So, is it okay if we just take it?"

"Not like Al's got much use for it. Besides, it can't be worse than Fillmore."

Mac nodded, obviously torn over the idea of using a car we didn't have permission from a dead man to drive. Time to say something parental. What would my mother, Agnes Taylor, say in this situation?

"Go get ready," I said. "You're going to be late." There, that sounded about right.

"Don't look at it without me," she begged, her curiosity obviously building as Hunter returned with a set of keys.

"She seems like a good kid." Hunter's low voice startled me.

Eerie, I had just been thinking the same thing. "She really is. Exceptional even. Not sure where she gets it from."

He focused those intense dark eyes on me again. "I could make an educated guess."

I wasn't a blusher. No way no how, blushing was not my thing. But I found heat creeping up my neck and was having a hard time holding his gaze, as if the compliment weighed me down somehow. Warning claxons reverberated in my head. I really liked our new tenant, like stupid liked him. And I had a strict
don't date the ones you could fall for
policy. Last time I had, I'd ended up with two pink lines on a pregnancy test the same week as my Civil War midterm.

Lesson learned.

"So is Mac short for something?" Hunter asked.

"Yup, she's a Mackenzie too. Unfortunately, I hadn't decided on her name before she was born and no one told me how freaking painful childbirth would be or how exhausted I'd be afterword. In utero I called her Mini-Me. I blame it on my fascination with
Austin Powers
."

Hunter was doing that thing where he looked like he was about to smile but it hadn't broken free yet. I wanted to see that moment when emotion overrode his considerable restraint.

"So there I was, whacked out on Demerol and more tired than I'd ever been in my entire life, and someone shoves a stack of papers in front of me and tells me it's for my daughter's birth certificate. So I see a space for a name, right? And I fill in
Mackenzie Elizabeth Taylor
because even in my doped-up state, I knew how to spell that one. So she became Mackenzie Elizabeth Taylor 2.0, the new and improved edition."

Bingo, there went the smile. And it was well worth the effort. "And her father?"

"He's not in the picture." I slid off the barstool and started fussing with things in the kitchen.

"I didn't mean to pry."

"It's a natural question. He's just not father material." I prayed he'd leave it at that.

Mac returned exactly five minutes later, backpack strap over one shoulder. "All set."

I eyeballed the hallway. "Where's Snickers?"

"In the bathroom."

Visions of the cranky little mongrel leaping up to bite my jugular assailed me. "What if I have to pee while you're at school?"

"You have lawyers to coerce into hiring you. Use their bathrooms."

"This is just a ploy so I set up your room sooner." I sent her a knowing smirk.

"Would I do that to you? My own mother?"

"Um, let me think about that for a second…hell, yeah."

Her quicksilver smile flashed. "You know me so well."

We followed Hunter out the door and were bitch-slapped by the chill autumn wind. October had copped-a-squat over Boston, and my hair whipped into my face in a sharp stinging sensation. Times like this made me envy Mac's short 'do. Hunter circled in front of our apartment and strode to the small gravel drive and the rickety shed behind.

"The anticipation is killing me," I grumbled while checking out our neighbor's stellar glutes.

"Down girl," Mac grumbled. "I forbid you to get naked with the good detective."

I scowled at her. "Who said anything about getting naked?"

Mac rolled her eyes. "Seriously? I'm choking on your pheromones over here. And it would make for dicey living conditions if he started giving us parking tickets because you nailed and bailed, so just say no."

"Remind me again who the parent is in this little duo? Because for a second I was sure it was me."

Mac actually snorted at that. "Says the woman who cried into her margarita and begged me not to let her make any more horrific life choices."

Damn, I'd forgotten about that. "You have a mind like a steel trap…hey, where did he go?"

Mac glanced around and did a palms-up. We'd been distracted by our verbal banter and somehow lost sight of Detective Black.

"Over here," a disembodied voice called from somewhere behind a row of rhododendron.

"Maybe he fell in the bushes," Mac hissed.

"Then shouldn't he be saying, 'I've fallen, and I can't get up'?"

"He's not eighty, Mom."

There was a scrape of wood on concrete as a door was dragged open. It seemed Hunter Black hadn't been waylaid by the shrubbery but instead was struggling with the door to the ancient shed. The thing looked ready to collapse in the next strong breeze.

"Is this the part where he shows us his collection of chainsaws and we are never heard from again?" I asked Mac.

"He's a cop. To protect and to serve, that whole shtick. Besides, if he was going to kill us he'd do it under cover of darkness." She eyeballed my purse, undermining her reassurance when she added, "On a totally unrelated matter, you still have that pepper spray, right?"

"Right here." All thoughts of grisly death scenes left me when I heard the roar of a massive engine firing to life. "Is that…?"

Hunter appeared, pushing the other shed door open to reveal the second most beautiful sight I have ever beheld, close behind the birth of my baby girl. "Judas Priest."

Mac blinked. "That's no old jalopy—it's a muscle car."

"Not just any muscle car," I breathed, moving over to put a hand over the growling hood. "This is a 2016 Dodge Challenger SRT Hellcat with a 6.2L V8 engine." And it came in pitch-black, my power color.

"It was delivered a few days after Al's passing," Hunter said. "He used to own one back when they first came out, and he'd been making noise about buying another one. I had no idea he was serious until the flatbed showed up. I just parked it in here and figured I'd hand the keys over to his next of kin." He tossed said keys in my direction.

I caught them reflexively, though my eyes were glued to the Hellcat. "Are you telling me it's never even been
driven
? Weren't you tempted?"

Hunter shrugged. "It wasn't mine to drive."

His sincere honesty kept me from saying something about how he should arrest himself on principle. I wouldn't have had the restraint not to slide inside such a sweet ride and take it for a spin up and down the eastern seaboard. It was all I could do not to scream
road trip
and burn rubber. Only the thought of our bare cabinets which could've given Old Mother Hubbard a run for her money reminded me I was a grown up and didn't have time to frolic.

But even driving Mac to school in the Hellcat was a boatload better than a morning of putt-putting down the streets of Boston in Fillmore, watching him belch smoke everywhere he went. I beamed up at our new neighbor. "Wow, this…this is incredible. Thank you."

His smile was slight, but his eyes spoke volumes. Again, the notion about still waters running deep played through my mind. I felt like a bubbling brook next to a vast river when I stood beside our new neighbor. But my daughter, who asked so little of me, had requested that I not get emotionally entangled with our new neighbor. I'd done it before, dated one of our landlords, and it hadn't ended well. And for her sake, as well as my own, I wouldn't pursue the detective. With considerable effort, I looked back at Mac. "You ready for school?"

Not one to wait for an engraved invitation, my mini tossed her backpack over the back seat and slipped into the passenger's side.