So You Had to Build a Time Machine E-Book

Jason Offutt

• Herausgeber: CamCat Books
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020

Seitenzahl: 512

Beschreibung

So You Had to Build a Time Machine

Leseprobe

Contents

Books by Jason Offutt

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

The Stuff at the End

Acknowledgments

About the Author

CamCat Books

Books by Jason Offutt

Fiction

So You Had to Build a Time Machine

Bad Day for the Apocalypse

Bad Day for a Road Trip

A Funeral Story

Road Closed

Nonfiction

How to Kill Monsters Using Common Household Items

Chasing American Monsters

What Lurks Beyond

Haunted Missouri

Darkness Walks

Paranormal Missouri

CamCat Publishing, LLC

Brentwood, Tennessee 37027

camcatpublishing.com

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

© 2020 by Jason Offutt

All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information, address 101 Creekside Crossing, Suite 280, Brentwood, TN 37027.

Hardcover ISBN 9780744300147

Paperback ISBN 9780744300161

Large-Print Paperback ISBN 9780744300352

eBook ISBN 9780744300178

Audiobook ISBN 9780744300208

Library of Congress Control Number 2020935371

Cover design by Devin Watson

5 3 1 2 4

So You Had to Build a Time Machine

Jason Offutt

For my wife,

who has supported me through everything.

“Today’s leading scientists grew up on Doctor Who and Star Trek. Every one of us has dreamed of stepping inside the TARDIS or transporting into a parallel dimension. We're close to making that happen.”

—Karl Miller, theoretical physicist

“The days are strange. I’m not sure why, but something’s not right. Has anyone else noticed an odd feeling?”

—Big Chuck, Kansas City radio host

“Issa blass foo gibbidy hoom.”

—Gordon Gilstrap, gnarly dude

Chapter One

September 1

1

It was a warm, pleasant Kansas City evening, the sun dropping below the skyline as Skid walked home from work. A drink in a friendly quiet place to unwind, she thought, would be nice. Slap Happy’s Dance Club was not that place. It was crowded, loud, and for whatever reason Skid liked it. Sitting at the bar, she ordered a vodka tonic, smiling at the people on the dance floor. People she had no interest in talking to. That was a headache she could do without, not that anyone would bother her tonight. She hadn’t washed her hair in two days, and she was sporting a sweat-stained T-shirt.

Then some moron sat next to her.

“Hey,” he said, startling Skid. That barstool had been empty a second ago. The guy was about forty and dressed in Dockers. A whiff of ozone hung in the air around him. I hope that’s not his cologne.

Skid nodded. “Hey.”

He looked nice enough, but lots of people looked nice. Her father Randall wouldn’t approve of him, but Randall didn’t approve of anyone.

“I’m Dave,” Dockers guy said. “Let me buy you a drink.”

Skid froze. Let me buy you a drink wouldn’t fly tonight. No, sir. Her plans were: Drink. Relax. Go home. Do not repeat. I shouldn’t have come in here.

“I’m Skid and thanks, but no th—” The bartender set a Bud Light in front of her. “—anks.”

“You’re welcome,” Dave said through the neck of his bottle, and Skid knew this conversation wasn’t going to end well.

A frown pulled on the corners of her mouth as she turned away from Dave and looked across the dance floor. A big hairy guy in red flannel stood next to the bathrooms. He could have stepped off the side of a Brawny Paper Towel package. Yikes.

“Is Skid your Christian name?” Dave asked, laughing, “The Book of Marks, right?”

Don’t do it. Don’t talk to him. Her last relationship ended two months ago when a thirty-two-year-old fool who acted like a teenager thought dating a nineteen-year-old behind Skid’s back was a good idea. Spoiler alert, it wasn’t. She’d successfully avoided men in her life since that one (Guy? Jerk? Loser?) and planned to keep it that way. She wanted a quiet life of watering plants, reading, and sitting in coffee shops ignoring everyone, especially those pretentious types who thought they were poets. She also wanted to find a couple of women who liked to binge watch online baking shows and didn’t make her want to jump out a window. Of course, that would mean getting close to someone.

Now there was this guy.

She turned to him. Dave who drank Bud Light grinned at her like he’d just won twenty bucks on a scratchers ticket. Skid never bought scratchers tickets.

“I had a wreck when I was a kid,” she said, pausing for a drink. “Russian dancing bear, clown car, motorcycle, and tire skids. The usual. Now, if you—”

“Your last name’s Roe, isn’t it?” Bud Light Dave said.

“Maybe.” Skid cut him a side look then elaborately looked around the bar for someone, anyone else, to talk to besides Bud Light Dave. There were no good prospects, so she decided to finish her drink, leave, and pick up Thai food on the way home. Stopping at Slap Happy’s Dance Club was looking like a bad idea. Her eyes briefly met those of Brawny Man, who quickly turned away. The giant stood scanning the room with his back to the wall.

She sucked the last bit of vodka tonic from her highball glass, slurping around the ice. The bartender set down his lemon-cutting knife (absolutely the wrong knife for the job, Skid noted) and motioned to her empty glass. She shook her head.

“I’m a doctor,” Bud Light Dave suddenly said, which seemed as likely as him being Mr. Spock from Star Trek.

She squinted at him. “Sorry. I don’t have any pain. Unless I count you.”

Bud Light Dave took a long suck off his bottle. “I’m not that kind of doctor. I’m a theoretical physicist. I spend most of my day postulating space-time.”

Maybe, she considered, he actually thought he was Spock. She’d dated worse.

“Where?” Skid asked.

Bud Light Dave gazed at a beer poster, the guy holding a can of cheap brew and way too old for the bikini model next to him. “A little place south of town. Probably never heard of it.”

“Try me.”

“Lemaître Labs,” he said, turning to face her. “But I probably shouldn’t have mentioned that,” his voice suddenly a whisper lost in the music.

She had heard of the place, a government weapons lab. Skid lifted her empty glass and swirled, ice clanking the sides. Leave. Leave, Skid. Go home.

But Skid couldn’t resist two things: one, knee-jerk self-defense, and, two, proving someone wrong.

“Okay, science boy,” she said, setting down the glass. “What’s the underlying problem with the Schrödinger’s cat scenario nobody talks about?”

A smile broke across Bud Light Dave’s face. He smiled a lot. “I knew there was a reason I sat by you.” He leaned back on his bar stool. “It’s not so much of a problem as it is an ethical dilemma. We don’t know if the cat inside the box is alive or dead, but we do know looking inside will kill it if it still is alive. At this point, the cat isn’t alive, and it isn’t dead. It’s alive and dead. The would-be observer has to ask himself a question: should I, or should I not open the box, therefore preventing, or perhaps causing, the zombie catpocalypse?”

For a moment, just a moment, Skid considered she may have misjudged this guy. “Yes, but I was going more for chastising Erwin Schrödinger for being a bad pet owner.”

This brought out a laugh, and Skid realized Bud Light Dave’s smile was kind of nice, and, maybe the way his eyes looked in the dim bar light was kind of nice, too. She shook her head. No. Go home, now.

“What about you?” he said. “What was all that about the Russian dancing bear and the clown car? You don’t look like the type.”

“Excuse me?” Her eyes flashed. She’d dealt with this kind of bullshit all her life and hated it. “What do you mean by ‘type’?”

He took a drink and shrugged. “If I may perpetuate a probably unrealistic stereotype: four teeth, gang tattoos, rap sheet, the usual. You seem too well-educated to be a carney.”

Standing, she jammed her glass onto the bar coaster. “My father had a master’s degree in chemical engineering and worked at Los Alamos National Laboratory before he ran the family business.”

Bud Light Dave nodded. “Los Alamos? Daddy was not a lightweight. What’s the family business?”

Skid stretched over the bar and plucked the knife from its citrus-stained cutting board. “Hey,” the bartender barked. She ignored him.

“A circus,” she said. “I grew up in a fucking circus.” Skid took a deep breath and drew the knife behind her ear, holding it by the tip of the blade.

Bud Light Dave was motionless. Someone behind Skid shouted, and Brawny Man took a step toward her but stopped. Skid lined up the too-attractive fake-boob model in the Dos Equis poster at the end of the bar.

“Skid,” someone said. Bud Light Dave probably, but she couldn’t be distracted. Why are you doing this, idiot? Just walk away.

But it was too late, she’d put herself in The Zone. Skid’s arm shot forward and the knife flew from her fingertips. A blink later the knife was buried an inch into the wood paneling behind the poster, the blade pinned between Fake-Boob’s baby blues.

Skid uncurled her hands toward Bud Light Dave and wiggled her fingers. “Ta-da.”

A couple nearby clapped, but she didn’t notice. She was proving some kind of point.

“So, you were raised in a circus, huh?” Bud Light Dave said, still grinning. “What’s your rap sheet look like?”

Good people worked in the circus. Nice people. Sometimes even honest people. Family worked in the circus. Randall’s mantra ran through her head—If something needs done, do it—and before Skid knew what was happening, she’d pulled her right hand back in a fist and let it fly at Bud Light Dave’s stupid face.

The connection was solid. He fell backward in slow motion, the best way to fall, like Dumbledore from the Astronomy Tower, or Martin Riggs from the freeway. Blood splattered from Bud Light Dave’s nose as if he’d caught a red cold. A smell, like a doctor’s office, flooded Skid’s nostrils as he dropped. She twisted her shoulders for a follow-through with her left if she needed it, just like Carlito the strongman had taught her, but she didn’t need it. Bud Light Dave was there, on his way down, falling through air that suddenly felt thick and heavy.

He was right there. But he never hit the floor; he simply vanished.

2

The girl was hot. Problem was, her boyfriend was hot, too. He worked out, a lot, or was just naturally ripped like those TV vampires. Maybe the guy was a vampire. Damn it, vampires are so hot. Cord hated good-looking couples. He was in this business for the money, sure, but he flirted with the cute women as a bonus. A pretty boyfriend complicated matters.

“Why’s it so hot in here?” asked a man built like the Muppets’ Telly Monster.

Cord didn’t stop at the question. He held up his left hand, his eyes focused on the EMF meter in his right.

EMF meters were useless. These devices measure AC electromagnetic fields, which are everywhere, even in nature, but especially in the kind of wiring in houses and definitely the Sanderson Murder House Cord bought because it was haunted. Supposedly. He’d installed a few extra devices in the walls to make the EMF meters ghost hunters brought with them light up like they’d discovered something. “Ghosts create electromagnetic fields,” he told the skeptical ones who sometimes come through. If someone doubted him, it always made Cord smile. “You forget the Law of Conservation of Energy. Energy can neither be created nor destroyed; it can only be transformed. So, if ghosts exist, they’re made of invisible energy, such as, oh, I don’t know, a magnetic field. You can prove me wrong, if you’d like.”

This would garner some “oohs” from the crowd, and the skeptic usually shut up.

“It’s easier to tell when you walk into a cold spot if the central air’s not on,” Court said over his shoulder. “A cold spot is a sure sign of paranormal activity.”

Or not. He didn’t know and didn’t care. Cord only cared that the people who paid him to walk into a cold spot cared.

Someone in the group of twenty grumbled behind him. The rest of them gathered in tightly to look at the meter Cord held like he was studying it. He wasn’t. His eyes were mostly on the meter, but enough on the hot girl in front of him to see her leaning over to get a better look at the readout.

“You see this number here,” he told the hot girl, his voice soft, confident, in control. Cord, you got it goin’ tonight. “Higher than ten milli-Gauss or lower than two milli-Gauss is a background electromagnetic reading in any normal house,” he said, then paused for effect and whispered, “but this isn’t a normal house.”

Cord smiled as he looked up into her eyes, hazel but leaning toward blue. His eyes quickly dropped back to the meter. The show must go on, and Vampire boy could seriously kick his ass.

“The meter fluctuates,” he said loud enough for the entire group to hear, “depending on what appliances are on in the house. The central air, the oven, even a hair dryer can send the number higher.” He paused again, holding up the meter so everyone could get a peek. “But a ghost. Oh, a ghost will not only hit a number higher or lower than that—” His right index finger pointed to a yellow light that was not on—yet. “This warning light will start flashing.” His finger moved expertly to a red indicator. “But when something really nasty shows up, this baby starts blinking.”

A hand raised in the back. “Yes,” Cord said, knowing what was coming. “It has blinked red in the house once.”

A slight “oooh” came from the group, except hot vampire boyfriend, who stood with his tattooed arms across his chest.

Cord smiled as he inspected the paranormal enthusiasts who’d given him $20 a pop to attend the 9 p.m. Sanderson Murder House Ghost Tour. Six of them had also opted for the $428 group overnight tour (with a non-refundable $200 deposit) where they got to sleep in the beds of the Sanderson family. Replica, of course, but they didn’t know that. The Sanderson daughter off at college during Daddy’s killing spree had had anything drenched with blood carted off to the landfill after the cops were through with it.

“That one occasion was on the second floor where Delbert Sanderson butchered his wife with a samurai sword in 1984.”

A collective gasp filled the room.

“Has there ever been anything right here?” asked a teenage blond kid there with his mother.

“Yes,” Cord said, not hesitating, nodding his head from the parlor area toward a darkened archway. “Just down this hall.” He didn’t like to take groups into that hallway until they’d toured the kitchen where Mrs. Sanderson once made county fair award-winning pies, and the sink where Mr. Sanderson washed the blood from his arms and face as best he could. But Cord played each group how they felt, and this group felt like it wanted action.

He slid his left hand into his front pants pocket and triggered the remote control to an enormous stereo system in a locked closet, its volume turned to 0. You want EMF, you got EMF. When Cord pulled his hand out it bore a tube of ChapStick. He popped the cap, applied the lip balm, capped the tube and slid it back into his pocket all with one hand. Misdirection was the shyster’s best friend.

“Please tell everyone what happened in the hallway.” A tall man of about seventy stood in the back of the group, well dressed and smart looking, but eyeglasses made everyone look smart. “I lived next door when the murders happened.”

The tour “oohed” again. Oh, shit. Shut up, dude. Cord wore a grim smile when his eyes worked the people who’d paid good money to hear the grizzly details of the Sanderson crime. “This is where Delbert Sanderson chased down his thirty-two-year-old son screaming, ‘This is why I never got your teeth fixed,’ before he hacked him to death.”

The man shook his head.

Goddamnit.

“No, son, that’s not quite right,” the old guy said. Cord began looking for a reason to kick the man the hell out of his haunted house. He assessed his paying customers, who were all looking at the tall old guy with his air of dignified authority and ‘I lived next door’ attitude. No one looked at Cord. His stomach tightened.

“I heard the whole thing,” the man said. “In fact, I’m the one who called the police that night.” The “oohs” turned to “whoas,” and Cord’s hands turned to fists. “It was hot that Thursday, but not so hot Cecilia—that was his wife—Cecilia had the air conditioning on. She was a bit of a penny pincher.” He paused for a second, whether for tension’s sake or if the guy just forgot where he was going with this, Cord couldn’t tell.

“Well, what did he say?” a woman in nurse’s scrubs asked.

The old guy chewed his lip before his eyes widened. “Straightened. Yes, Delbert screamed, ‘This is why I never got your teeth straightened.’ Then he hacked poor Tommy to bits in the hallway.”

Cord relaxed, a muffled sigh slowing escaped his lips. Time to take back control. Your show’s over. “Thank you, Mr.?”

“Wanker,” the man said.

Damn straight.

“So, after Delbert Sanderson screamed, ‘This is why I never got your teeth straightened,’ he chased Thomas Sanderson into this very hallway,” Cord said, then took a step forward into the hall, pretending to concentrate on the meter again, even though without his ace-in-the-hole EMF-blasting stereo playing Iron Maiden in complete silence, all he would get was a normal background reading. He waved at his tour group to follow him anyway; it was all part of the show.

The sixty-watt bulb in the ceiling fixture didn’t shed a lot of light, but it showed all Cord wanted it to. Although the house had been cleaned and spit polished more times than he cared to count (the house had seemed to be always on the market before Cord realized what gold mine potential it had), there were stains in the hallway’s hardwood floor. There weren’t any stains when Cord bought the place two years ago, he just thought the suggestion of decades-old samurai sword murder blood helped with the ambiance.

Cord stepped over the carefully applied splatter of cherry wood finish stain ($8.49 per quart and damn well worth it) and stopped. “This is where it happened.”

Silence. A heavy oppression sank into the hallway, like everyone had just seen a made-for-TLC movie. And the smell. What was that?Is somebody using Febreze? He looked from face to face. Everyone’s eyes were wide, their mouths agape.

“Didn’t you say the red light flashing was bad?” the hot girl asked, her voice shaky, her shoulder pressed into vampire-boy’s chest.

Red light? Cord looked at the EMF meter, the red indicator flashed like a bulb had gone bad on a cheap string of Christmas lights. The numbers on the readout changed so quickly they became a blur.

“Oh, shit,” he whispered. This hadn’t happened. This never happened. The meter only changed when Cord wanted it to change. He didn’t think the house was haunted, not really. A scream split the hallway. Cord would have been satisfied to know it came from the hot girl’s boyfriend, but everything happened too fast.

A man—who hadn’t even paid admission—popped into existence about two feet off the floor, a look of shock on his bloody-nosed face. He fell like he’d been shoved and hit the floor with an “oof.”

“What the hell?” came from someone, but Cord didn’t look to see who. His eyes were on the man in the white shirt and gray Dockers who smelled like cheap beer and ozone. For a second, only a second, Cord thought he heard dance music. The guy tried to suck air into his lungs and failed the first couple of tries but was soon breathing again.

Something between a gut punch and the first drop on a roller coaster grabbed Cord’s insides in a fist. This was a ghost. A real ghost. No chains, no floating and no Scooby-Doo “whooooos,” but still, a ghost had appeared in Cord’s haunted house. Cord stared at it because his eyes refused to do anything else.

But the ghost didn’t look like a ghost. The white oxford shirt was wrong, and so was the blood coming from his nose. If Delbert Sanderson had sliced up his boy Tommy with a samurai sword, why did the splatter on the man come from a bloody nose?

Cord reached out his right index finger and poked the Amazing Appearing Man in the leg just to make sure. The leg was solid.

The man glared at him, confused. “Where’s Skid?” he asked before, pop, he vanished again, Cord’s meter flashing and spinning like he’d just hit a jackpot at a casino. Maybe he had.

Skid? nearly squeaked out, but Cord clamped down on that momentum-spoiler fast.

“Was that Tommy Sanderson?” the nurse asked. Not to Cord, to the old man.

The old guy adjusted his glasses and frowned.

Oh, please. Oh, please. Oh, please don’t ruin this for me you Wanker.

“Well, I wish I’d gotten a longer look at him,” the former neighbor said. Cord didn’t realize it, but he was holding his breath. “But, Tommy Sanderson? It looked like him. Yeah, it looked just like him.”

The breath whooshed from Cord and he sucked in another one, a big one, through a smile. “If anyone in the group is still skeptical about the paranormal,” he said. “Please get your disbelief out now.” Cord raised his hand to his ear in a bit of stage play overacting and waited one beat, two, three. This is the best night of my life. “All righty then. Would anyone like to upgrade their tour tickets to overnight tickets?”

Hands shot up faster than dandelions. Oh, yeah,the best.

Cord had no idea what had happened, and he didn’t care. As he pocketed the extra $1,500 on top of the $828 he’d already made off this group, he silently thanked the Amazing Appearing Man. Cord didn’t realize until morning he hadn’t even gotten the hot girl’s name.

To hell with it. He had a haunted house to run.

3

Brick leaned against the back wall of Slap Happy’s Dance Club next to a sign that that read “Hookers and Johns” and tried not to stand out. But Brick always stood out. Growing up, it was his job on field trips to stand in the parking lot so his classmates would know where to gather. And he wasn’t just tall, he was big, professional-wrestler big. This made him seem intimidating even when he told people in a soft voice that he baked muffins for a living.

He checked his phone. Beverly had been in the bathroom twenty minutes. At least a dozen women had come and gone through that door in twenty minutes. Did she come out and I missed her? But he knew that was more wish than reality. He scanned the club. It was full of people dancing to loud music hoping to hook up. He didn’t want that; he’d just met Beverly, sure, but he kind of liked her.

Beverly seemed like a nice girl when she walked up to him at their mutually-decided first date meeting spot—in the bar area at Il Palazzo Bianco. “Oh, you just have to be Chauncey,” she said in a voice that didn’t sound like it could ever get on his nerves.

“Yep,” he said. “Chauncey Hall.” He almost followed that with, “My friends call me Brick,” but stopped before the words came out. Being a Chauncey was enough of a burden. He didn’t want to explain Brick.

Beverly smiled and looked like her profile picture; she even talked about the things she’d listed:

BEVERLY GIBSON

Likes: Journalism, “Lord of the Rings” (books and movies!), old-fashioned gentlemen and muffins. I love muffins.

Dislikes: Bad grammar, the color Alabaster (It’s called white, people!) and shoes.

Quote: “I’m happy with who I am.”

Looking for: A nice guy.

Brick decided she was the one he liked out of the four girls whose profiles matched his best. He was happy Beverly liked Lord of the Rings, which were his favorite books. Maybe she likes Dungeons and Dragons, he thought, then stopped as the words of his mother poured through his head. Don’t tell girls you still play Dungeons and Dragons, Chaunce. It’s like telling them you have leprosy.

During their date, Beverly smiled at him over her wine glass and didn’t once talk about eating her sister’s placenta like last week’s H. P. Lovecraft date Jayna. After dinner, Beverly wanted to stop in across the street at Slap Happy’s, then she disappeared into the bathroom.

He pushed open the door to the hallway a crack. A red, glowing EXIT sign hovered over a metal-reinforced door at the far end just past the entrances to “Hookers” and “Johns.” She’d had an escape plan. A rock sank in his stomach.

“Not again,” he mumbled.

Then the door to “Johns” slammed open and a man spilled into the hallway, slapping into the far wall.

“Hey,” Brick said, stepping forward, the spring-operated door to the dance floor snapped shut behind him.

The man leaned against the wall, his white button-down shirt stained yellowish-brown, his face streaked with filth. From the smell, Brick guessed it was hydraulic fluid, but there was another smell mingled in. He sniffed. Ozone? Yeah, ozone, like someone had turned on a room freshener. A crust of dried blood stained the skin under the man’s nose.

“That was some dump, huh?” Brick said.

The man craned his neck to stare up at Brick and a light of recognition popped on. He pushed himself from the wall and lurched forward, the smell of hydraulic fluid grew stronger.

“Brick?” the man wheezed. “Are you Brick?”

Brick stepped away from him, studying the oily face.

This oily man took another step, planting his weight on his left foot and nearly dropping to the chipped tile floor.

“Oh, no,” he whispered. Blood stained the left leg of the Oilyman’s gray Dockers he’d apparently tried to bandage with a rag. “What happened to you?”

The man forced himself upward and grabbed Brick by his shirt, hydraulic fluid soaking into the material.

“Watch her, Brick,” the man wheezed. “Watch out for Skid. She’s not what she seems.”

Skid? Brick looked down at the man, trying to place that face. Was he from high school? The gym? A customer?

“I don’t know you, but you need a doctor.” He started to reach into his pocket for his cell phone, but Oilyman pulled hard on his shirt.

“Skid’s going to kill us all,” he said, his voice as close to a shout as he could muster.

“Who’s Sk—”

The door to the hallway opened and three drunk girls bounced against the far wall and laughed before righting themselves and stumbling into the bathroom marked “Hookers.” The dance music, loud only for a moment, was muted again by the closed door. When Brick turned back, the man was gone.

“Hey.”

Bloody, oily prints from flat-soled shoes were all that remained in a trail from the bathroom that ended at Brick. He swung around, but he was alone.

“Hey, buddy,” Brick said into the empty hall. Nobody responded. He has to be somewhere. But the man hadn’t gone out into the bar or out the back. That left only one place. He pushed open the door to “Johns.”

Oilyman’s bloody footprints started in the middle of the floor, facing the hallway like he’d simply appeared there. A smell filled the bathroom, hospital sanitizer. Brick let the door swing shut and walked back into the bar.

“People don’t just disappear,” Brick muttered, standing just off the dance floor. The Oilyman had gone, of that much Brick was certain. But he couldn’t have gotten far on that leg. He leaned against the wall, his eyes roaming the room.

“No way.”

A pretty brunette in a T-shirt looked toward him, then turned away. The man next to her said something the woman probably heard but saw no reason to answer. Her eyes met Brick’s, and she frowned. His gut clenched. He turned his head. No,it can’t be. Brick counted to five, then glanced back. He didn’t care about the woman; his attention went to man. It was the man from the bathroom, but it wasn’t. This man’s hair was combed, his white shirt clean. And his leg? No wound. But it was the same guy.

The brunette’s face grew grim, and she pulled the bartender’s knife from the cutting board.

“Hey,” Brick saw the bartender mouth as she lifted behind her ear.

“Oh, no,” Brick whispered and stepped away from the wall, the door crashing open behind him, but he didn’t turn to see what happened. Probably the drunk girls. He started to launch himself through the crowded dance floor, but he was too late. The woman threw the knife like she knew what she was doing. It impaled the model in a beer poster.

Two seconds later the man at the bar said something, and the woman punched him in the nose. He fell under a sea of dancers who didn’t have a clue what had just happened.

4

Skid stood with fists clenched staring at the spot where Bud Light Dave disappeared two feet above the floor. A few people clapped. One man patted her on the back and pushed something into her grip. Not a smart thing to do until Skid realized it was $20. “It was worth it,” he shouted over the music, escorting a woman toward the dance floor. “You’ve got talent.”

I’m sorry.I’m sorry. I’m sorry. Bud Light Dave had vanished. Not in a blizzard of fuzzy 1960s special effects, and not like D. B. Cooper. Vanished, vanished. Like Harry Potter.

“I’m so sorry,” she whispered.

She had to run. Skid pivoted, pointing herself toward the door when the bartender stopped her, “Hey!”

She spun again. “Yes?”

“Your boyfriend didn’t pay for that last round.”

“What? Here,” she fumbled the $20 across the bar, nodded and walked straight into a red flannel wall. Brawny Man. Hipster Dan Haggerty. He was huge.

“Back off, Grizzly Adams,” she said.

The man shoved his hands in his pockets awkwardly like he didn’t know what else to do with them. “What happened to him?” he asked, his voice surprisingly soft and kind for someone who looked like he could cut down trees by flexing at them.

“What?” Skid said, the word squeaking like air out of a balloon.

“The guy at the bar,” the big man said. “He had on a white shirt and gray slacks. Where did he go? I have to talk to him.”

Skid stopped and looked up at him; his eyes were clear, but his expression was confused. The man looked, well, he looked nice.

“I don’t know where he is,” Skid said, the shock starting to wear off. “He disappeared.”

The man frowned under his neatly trimmed beard. “What do you mean disappeared?”

“The guy went all Frodo Baggins on me.” Then she flared her fingers for effect. “Poof. Disappeared.”

“Damn it,” he hissed, one meat hook absentmindedly pulling at his chin. “He did the same thing to me. We gotta find him.”

Hipster Dan Haggerty turned to scan the dance floor. When he turned back, Skid had gone for Beverly’s Plan B.

“Well, crap,” he whispered.

Chapter Two

September 2

1

Sweat trickled down Skid’s back, soaking her T-shirt. It was nearly 8 a.m.; she’d left her apartment for a run at 6, hours before the nice Thai family that operated The Dumpling King below her began prepping for lunch by screaming at each other. Not that she ever got up that early, but seeing a man vanish into nothingness will do that to a person. Last night was pinned to her mind, no matter how much she tried to ignore it.

She turned left onto Gerry Avenue, a residential area, mostly because the traffic light on Baltimore and Gerry had turned red and she hated it when runners stopped at the light and jogged in place until it turned green. Showoffs. The houses here were big, nicely kept for the most part, and apparently not good enough for joggers who stopped at red lights, because Skid was the only one out.

Bud Light Dave. Damn it. He’d gotten into her head, and she didn’t like it. Not one bit. A man, any man, had no place in her life. At least not right now. But that lab Bud Light Dave said he worked for, she had heard of it. She just couldn’t remember the name.

Skid slowed as she approached an intersection without a light. A black Ford Escape with a magnetic sticker that read NEWS on the door turned onto Gerry. For what? A crime, probably. That was the only time the wonks came out of their newsrooms. Unless maybe it was for a feature story, but it was about 7:45 a.m. on a Saturday.

Skid jogged across the street. She didn’t run this route often, just when the light on Baltimore was red, but the number of cars compared to the houses was wrong. Some cars had Kansas license plates and one was from Nebraska. It was like someone had a party last night and no one went home.

The news car stopped a block ahead of her. A woman in a blue skirt and yellow blouse stepped from the passenger side. She held what looked like an iPhone and a reporter’s notebook. Another woman slid from the driver’s side and walked to the back of the vehicle, popping the hatch. By the time the driver had pulled out a camera bag and started taking photographs of the exterior of a two-story house probably built in the early 1900s, Skid realized why they were there, at least superficially. The news people were at the Sanderson Murder House.

Skid hadn’t been born when the Sanderson man slaughtered his family in that house and wouldn’t have heard about the killings if she had. Her father had left the science life and taken over the family business in the early 1980s. The Roe Bros. circus made the circuit from Washington state across the northern US to Pennsylvania from May to September, moving down the East Coast and swinging from Georgia through the Southern states to winter in Prescott, Arizona. Roe Bros. never touched the interior parts of the country and never would have heard the news. That’s why Skid had picked Kansas City, Missouri, to settle in; she didn’t have to worry about running into family. She knew of the murder house by the tacky blood-splattered sign in the front yard.

A man rushed from the Sanderson house to greet the journalists as Skid jogged by, shooting her a glance and a grin even as he extended a hand toward the first reporter.

Take a picture, jerk.

Blank faces stared into the yard from the windows like the place really was haunted. She’d read somewhere the house rented out for overnight ghost tours, and this must have been a doozy. A few people, including a nurse in scrubs, spilled out onto the lawn, the photographer snapping away. Skid turned her head and picked up the pace, not that she had anywhere to go. Work didn’t start until 4 p.m. and it was halfway across town. Security at a Doobie Brothers concert wasn’t tough, just a matter of making sure all the stoned Baby Boomers didn’t start a riot during “Keep This Train A-Rollin’.” Somebody might lose their dentures.

She needed a shower and probably a nap because some asshole had blinked out of existence right in front of her last night, and she hadn’t had any coffee. She reached a thumb up to pull a sweat-soaked bra strap back into place.

“Coffee first.”

2

The reporter from The Kansas City Star stood in the yard next to a sign that read Sanderson Murder House, in blood-dripping letters. Cord’s stomach wrestled itself into a knot. Last night had been perfect for business and he had twenty witnesses. Who cared if the ghost wasn’t really a ghost? If it appeared like a ghost, vanished like a ghost, and made him money like a ghost, it was a ghost. The people at The Star certainly jumped on it. Thank God for slow news days.

He’d excused himself from the tour at about 10 p.m. to put fresh batteries in his stereo remote, which came in handy around 3 a.m. when the tour went back into the downstairs hallway to see if Thomas Sanderson fell on the floor again during the Witching Hour. He didn’t, at least visually, but Cord triggered the hidden stereo and the EMF meters he handed out went crazy at the right time. His customers needed to get their money’s worth.

But 11 p.m. had been Cord’s favorite time of the night. After he bought the Sanderson house, he’d heavily insulated the closet of the master bedroom on the second floor and lined it with refrigeration coils, the motor that circulated the coolant hidden deep in the walls surrounded by sound dampening panels so no one could hear it running. The result was a cold spot in the closet, unexplainable except as a sign of spiritual activity. It didn’t hurt that poor Cecilia Sanderson had attempted to escape her crazed husband by barricading herself in that closet and failed miserably. The psychological impact of the death spot coupled with a mystery chill was as powerful as a punch to the face.

Cord steered the hot girl and Vampire Boy into that closet at 11 p.m., and Vampire Boy couldn’t take it anymore. He’d been jittery most of the night, and he’d finally started to crack. All he’d needed was a little push. As soon as his girlfriend shivered and said, “Don’t you feel that? It’s a cold spot,” he rushed back out into the master bedroom, leaning himself on the bed the Muppet man had paid $50 extra to sleep on. Yep, it was that cold in the closet; not cold enough to store leftovers, but cold enough to make an impression.

“Fuck this,” Vampire Boy said, pushing himself away from the bed and moving his feet like he’d forgotten how to stand. He pointed at Cord. “And fuck you. I’m going home.”

“Come on, Roman,” the hot girl said, her voice pleading.

Roman? I thought Romans only existed in soap operas.

“No,” Roman shouted. Footsteps began to clomp from down the hall. People had paid for a show and this shouting was part of it. Roman moved to face Cord and jabbed a finger toward him. “I want my money back, man. I want it back now.”

Cord shook his head. Normally an angry, buff, stupid guy would be the cause of some alarm, but not tonight. This jerk was in his house.

“Sorry,” he told him in the same voice he used in his former life as a car salesman to inform buyers their trade-in wasn’t worth quite what Kelley Blue Book said even if it was. “No refunds. It’s worded that way in the waiver you signed before the overnight.”

The waiver everyone signed said no such thing, but Roman wouldn’t bother to look and Cord would have that fixed by the time the next tours showed up tomorrow. But tonight? Roman glared at Cord and flexed before he looked to his girlfriend, his face melting from anger to a pout before he left her standing in the unnaturally cold closet.

Oh, yeah. Eleven p.m. had been a magical time.

Cord rushed out the front door to greet the reporter and photographer as they stepped out of their car, barely taking notice of the cute girl in the black T-shirt running on the sidewalk. This was it, his ticket. One good story in the local metro paper and he’d have more tour requests than he could schedule. Cord would tell the reporter about Roman chickening out as they worked their way upstairs. He had to.

3

The sun on his face wasn’t the first thing Dave Collison, Ph.D., noticed. Neither was the sensation of something pulling on his leg, although it stopped for a moment before beginning on the other. It was the smell. Something smelled awful.

“Whazizip,” he mumbled, although he was unsure of what he was trying to say. His brain was busy matching up enough synapses to figure out what pulled on his feet, and why it had stopped.

“Hey,” he managed before summoning enough strength to force open his eyelids. He wished he hadn’t. Dave lay in an alley atop a pile of black, festering garbage bags that smelled like rotting fish sandwiches from All-National Burger, and a homeless man had apparently just stolen his shoes. “Hey.”

The man, about fifty and short on teeth, grinned at him through a dirty, rust-and-white beard and held up a leg showing Dave his left Aston Grey Leu leather oxford on the man’s sockless foot, then did the same to his other leg to show Dave his right.

Dave didn’t know what to do so he said, “Hey,” again.

The man, in a dirty T-shirt, shrugged his thin shoulders, stuck his hands in the pockets of his dusty, oversized jeans, and hummed as he walked from the alley out onto the sidewalk and disappeared around a corner.

“Goddamnit.” Dave lay back on the trash bags. He didn’t know where he was, he didn’t know why he was there, and he didn’t know what happened after he’d met the girl in the bar last night. Skirt? Skip? Skid. Her name was Skid. Thoughts of last night began to crawl from whatever hole they’d burrowed into. Nickname. She crashed a motorcycle.

His eyes grew wide as a few mental wheels clicked into place. “A full matter transfer,” he whispered. “I was in a full matter transfer—twice.” But why? He examined the alley and determined, as far as alleys went, this was pretty shitty. “Where am I?”

Dave started to sit up, but realized his face felt like something had slept on it wrong. Then the night began pouring out. The beer, the knife-throwing trick, the fist coming at him.

“She punched me,” he whispered, and moved a hand to feel his face. His nose was tender but didn’t seem broken. “What happened to me?”

Dave pushed himself to his feet, the bad smell sticking to him. His hands went to his pockets. Wallet, keys, phone, all there, but he’d woken in an unknown alley with a dirty shirt, no shoes, and no idea how he got there. “Now I know how Bruce Banner feels.”

It wasn’t until he pulled his cell phone from his pocket that he saw he was going to be late for work.

4

Skid stopped running at the corner of Tim Binnall Boulevard and stretched. Bud Light Dave. That son of a bitch. How the hell did he disappear? That moment at Slap Happy’s replayed in her head and made her want to punch him again. She exhaled slowly and raised her arms above her head, leaning to touch her left foot. As she tried to clear her mind, her eyes locked on the street sign. She froze. Her plan was to turn right on Tim Binnall Boulevard, stop at a coffee and muffin place down the street, take another right onto Baltimore, walk home, shower, and collapse onto her bed. But the green sign with white letters didn’t read “Tim Binnall Boulevard.” It read “Tim Binnall Avenue.”

An uneasy feeling crept over her. She’d gone by the “Tim Binnall Boulevard” intersection every day since she left Roe Bros. and moved to a city that was so Midwest, people still smiled at strangers. It was “Boulevard,” of that she was certain. Had the city council changed it on a whim? Was this Binnall not worthy of the status of boulevard? A simple vote would be all it took.

Then why had rust grown around the bolts?

“I’ve seen weirder,” she said and started running again.

5

Cord turned off the custom refrigerator in the master bedroom and had no intention of using the stereo remote control for the news crew. Nope. That would be too much of a good thing, bordering on unbelievable. People come into a supposedly haunted house not expecting to encounter cold spots or books flying across the room, so about half the time nothing is exactly what they got. To the ghost hunters and weekend spooktacular enthusiasts, this didn’t mean the joint wasn’t haunted. It was just another house that behaved like they thought it would. A lot of them came back the next night, or maybe a week later because something would eventually happen.

Cord always made sure it did. Anything to keep them coming back.

“So, this is where it appeared?” asked the reporter. Cord stood in the hallway with her, the photographer and most of the overnight guests.

“The full-bodied apparition,” the photographer Carly emphasized. “This is where you saw the full-bodied apparition.”

The reporter, who had introduced herself as Beverly Gibson, nodded. “Yes, uh, the full-bodied apparition,” she said, her attention not quite there. “Could you… Could you tell me what happened?”

Cord’s mouth slid open, then shut almost as fast. The reporter lady seemed like she might be a bit off. Distracted? Sad, maybe? But that didn’t matter; this was as big a show as last night and he had to sell it.

“It surprised us all,” he said. “Maybe you could leave the question open for everybody. We were all here. Tamara?” The hot girl blushed.

Oh, Cord. You slick smooth loveable bastard.

“Well, we were here. Right here,” she said, pointing the palms of her hand toward the spot on the hall floor like she was attempting to hold it down. “And Cord’s meter went all crazy.”

“Meter?” Beverly asked, looking at Cord.

Expert testimony in three, two, one— “An EMF meter. That means electromagnetic frequency.” Cord looked around him at all the rapt faces. He felt like a TV preacher. “Spirits, at least in theory, are composed of energy because—” The Law of Conservation of Energy? Sure. “—if the Law of Conservation of Energy applies to the paranormal, the energy of a spirit, a soul if you will, cannot be destroyed. It can, however, be transformed into what we saw last night.”

The crowd, his people, was quiet, no one daring to interrupt Cord’s show. Except Beverly.

“A ghost?”

Carly pulled the camera away from her face for a second. “Full-bodied apparition.”

Beverly faintly smiled. “Of course. Could somebody describe it?”

The tall old nosy neighbor and total Wanker raised his hand. “It was the ghost of Tommy Sanderson.”

The hall fell quiet. “What did he look like?” Beverly asked.

Cord took over before he lost any more column inches in tomorrow’s newspaper. “A man in his thirties with brown hair, white shirt, gray pants, and a really surprised look on his face.”

Beverly scribbled illegible shorthand into her reporter’s notebook while Carly snapped the tense expressions around the ghost-hunting group that wouldn’t have been any better if Cord had paid them.

Cord almost jumped when Tamara’s warm hand rested on his forearm. “He said something to you.”

Yeah, he did. ‘Help me,’ would have been nice. ‘I can’t find the light,’ would have been better. ‘My dad still stalks this house,’ would be the absolute friggin’ best. But twenty witnesses heard what the man had said.

“Where’s Skid?” Cord said. “The ghost of Tommy Sanderson said, ‘Where’s Skid?’” He bit his lip and held it for one, two, three seconds before he looked into Beverly’s eyes. “We have no idea what he meant.”

Carly clicked a close-up of Cord, who smiled like a stoned Matthew McConaughey in Dazed and Confused. Alright, alright, alright.

Beverly pulled the conversation back a step. “But the meters.” She looked at her notes. “The E-M-F meters. What did they do?” She looked at her notes again. “Tamara said they, ‘went all crazy’.”

Cord slipped his hand into his pocket and fingered the remote control. Maybe a little show wouldn’t hurt.

6

The coffee place sat where Skid thought it did, on the corner of Binnall and Baltimore, which was as comforting as was the brick storefront with “Muffin Monday All Week Long!” painted in the windows in bright pink and yellow. A black awning hung over the door reading “Manic Muffins” with cartoon lines around the words to show how manic it was. Two wrought-iron tables with three chairs each sat on either side of the door with fresh flowers in tall coffee mugs in the center of each. Cute. This was cute, and normal. The sun cut through the clear morning sky, the coffee shop looked like a coffee shop, and no one disappeared in front of her. Normal.

Skid slowed as she approached the shop, ignoring the store for a moment and concentrating on the street sign at the intersection. “Tim Binnall Avenue.” This sign was faded and slightly bent. It had been there for a while.

That can’t be right.

Even though the world seemed almost sane and cheery, she didn’t like the feeling in her gut. The kind of feeling she sometimes had when something bad was about to happen, or when she ate at that dodgy Indian restaurant on Washington Street. Moe, Larry and Curry was the worst.

7

Brick squatted behind the counter and stared at the tray of muffins he’d slid into the display case earlier; big, beautiful chocolate chip muffins in sparkly cups topped with pink frosting and Homer Simpson sprinkles. The frown he wore deepened. Brick got to the shop around 4:30 a.m., baked his first batch of muffins by 5:15, had them iced by 5:45 and in the display case by 6. By then, more muffins were ready, some to be iced, others not. But this batch of muffins was different than any he’d ever iced before because he’d used chocolate frosting as brown as mud—and now they were bright pink.

“I’ll take a pink one,” Katie said, pointing at the rack of muffins that should be brown. Katie was a semi-regular. She was at least 60, maybe older, but came in every morning from a jog. “And a cup of coffee, black.”

Brick forced a smile. He’d never had to force a smile with the older woman before. She’d come in on his grand opening and stopped by a few times a month. “You bet,” he said, and put a pink muffin in a recycled paper sack, “Manic Muffins” stamped on the front.

“You know,” she said as he poured her coffee into a to-go cup. “I had an idea.”

“What’s that, Katie?” he said, snapping a lid on the cup.

“Well, since your name’s Brick, I thought it would be cute if you offered a muffin named Brick.”

“Okay. I’m listening.” He set her coffee on the counter and picked up the cash. She knew exactly how much, to the penny, and she always left a five-dollar bill in the tip jar.

“Maybe you could make red velvet cake muffins but bake them in little loaf pans so they’d be rectangular on the bottom. You know, like a brick.”

That was a good idea.

“And fill it with cream, because you know you’re softer on the inside.”

The forced smile melted into a real one. “That’s perfect. I’ll get to work on that.”

Katie took her sack and coffee and started walking toward the door.

“I’ll have to come up with a muffin called the Katie,” he said after her.

She stopped and turned, her face smiling, but her eyes were flat. “I don’t think you’ve got anything that sour, Brick.” Then she left, the bell over the door chiming as she walked outside.

“That was weird,” he said, turning his attention back to the pink muffins, the conversation pushed into the back of his mind. How is this even possible? he wondered, then thought, just briefly, that he might be losing his mind. Last night’s whatever it was, then this. I must have used pink frosting. But—

The bell over the front door jingled again. Katie, he thought, maybe with another idea, although he had to admit the Brick muffin was a good one.

A cough from the other side of the display case cut off his thoughts. He stood and saw it wasn’t Katie, and his day wasn’t getting any easier.

“Hipster Dan Haggerty,” said the woman from Slap Happy’s, the one with the knife. “You?”

The morning had started normally. His phone had blared the annoying default bell chime he’d never gotten around to changing, and he had eaten breakfast while reviewing possibilities of why his computer date dumped him. But the woman who punched the Oilyman in the face? He hadn’t seen this coming. Don’t say anything stupid. Don’t say anything stupid.

“I think the universe is trying to throw us together,” Brick said, resisting an urge to groan.

The woman exhaled loudly enough Brick knew that, yeah, it was stupid.

Brick shrugged. “Sorry.”

“I don’t want to talk about last night. Whatever happened didn’t happen. I just want a muffin.” She pressed her finger against the glass display case Brick would have to clean later. He hated smudges. Parents with little kids were the worst.

“A guy talked to me in the bathroom last night,” Brick said.

“I thought there were rules against men talking in bathrooms,” the woman said, then nodded to herself. “I’ll have one of those pink ones, please.”

Brick didn’t move. “I turned my head for a second and he wasn’t there anymore. It was like he just disappeared.” Brick pulled himself up to his full height and crossed his massive arms. It didn’t seem to impress her. “Then I see you talking to the same guy at the bar. He was cleaner than the man I saw, and his hair was different, I think. But it was the same guy.”

“It was like he just disappeared,” the woman whispered.

Brick relaxed. “What did you say?”

The woman seemed to gather her wits back from whatever directions they’d traveled and looked up at him, her eyes made of iron.

“People don’t just disappear,” she said, then pointed behind him. “I’d also like a coffee, please. Black. What do you call your large?”

“Large,” Brick said.

She nodded. “Yeah, that sounds great.”

He used tongs to pluck a pink-topped muffin from the case and slide it into a sack, then poured house blend into a large cup made from recycled trees, or recycled cardboard, or recycled toilet paper. He didn’t know what his cups were recycled from, he just knew the hipsters who came in spread the word when they realized Manic Muffins was a friend of the environment.

“How long have you been here?” the woman asked.

Brick snapped on a plastic lid the hipsters never questioned him about and turned toward her. “I thought you didn’t want to talk.”

She pulled a sweat-soaked twenty from the band of her running pants and put it on the counter. “I don’t. So, how long have you been here?”

He took the twenty and left it behind the counter to dry, then began to hit buttons on the cash register. “Since 4:30. Why?”

Her face tensed. The woman seemed nice, like the kind of person who’d bring snacks to work, but at that moment she held herself like a fighter, and although Brick had at a good foot and a half on the woman and at least 150 pounds, he suddenly felt if she wanted to hurt him, she could. He counted out the change without thinking and set it on the counter. He didn’t want to get too close to her.

“Here.” She shook her head. “No, not here. Not today. I mean in this building. How long has your store been in this building?”

How long? “Four years, I guess. Maybe five. You with the Chamber of Commerce?”

A tight grin pulled across her lips. “Four or five years on Binnall Avenue?”

“No,” he said. “Boulevard. Binnall Boulevard.”

The woman plucked her coffee and the bag with the pink-topped muffin off the counter and barked a laughed. “Ha. I thought so,” she said, grabbing her change; at least the bills. She dropped the coinage into the tip jar.

Then she walked out the door. For the second time in less than twelve hours, the same woman he didn’t know walked away, leaving him to wonder what had just happened.

“Avenue,” he said aloud. Brick stepped from behind the counter and walked to the front window, looking between the hot pink and yellow lettering his niece Amy had written for him. The sweaty woman in black running clothes rounded the corner, going east on Baltimore.

He glanced up at the street sign next to the red traffic light. It read “avenue.”

“Well,” he said. “I’ll be damned.”

8

The journalists were nice, Cord determined as he stood in the yard and waved. Carly the photographer waved back before she pulled the Ford Escape into the street. The overnights took that as a cue and said their goodbyes, some promising to book another tour online and bring friends. Damn straight.

This was it; he knew. Oh, sure, he’d been interviewed on some of the paranormal radio shows, and a few authors had written about the Sanderson Murder House in books like Ghostly Kansas City, Missouri’s Spookiest and Show Me Your Ghosts!, but his house wasn’t like the Waverly Hills Sanatorium or the Crescent Hotel & Spa in the national world of ghost attractions.

Until now. A full-bodied apparition witnessed by twenty people would do it, and those nice newspaper ladies would take him there.

“Thank you for a thrilling evening, son,” Mr. ‘I Lived Next Door When the Murders Happened’ Wanker said, patting Cord on the shoulder. “I never liked that boy, Tommy. He borrowed my hoe one fall and never gave it back. Kept barking, ‘Hoe, hoe, hoe’ at me then laughed all through December. Not saying he deserved to be hacked to death with a Japanese sword, but I am saying I can see why his father got tired of his shit.”

Mr. Wanker nodded and walked off to his car.

Tamara waited until all the other ghost hunters had gone before she came out of the house and approached Cord. He sighed, a smile growing across his lips. Why do birds suddenly appear every time you are near. It was a song, but it wasn’t a question. She stopped in front of him. No arm touching, not even an accidental brush against his shoulder. Tamara had to go back to her life, and that brought her back to reality.

“Hey,” Cord said, taking a half step closer. Not invasively close. More like ‘I had a great time at summer camp am I ever going to see you again?’ close. “You want to go get some breakfast, or something. There’s a muffin and coffee place just a couple blocks away. It’s—”

She shook her head, her glorious black mane swishing in the same way that made actresses in disaster movies always look like they’d just styled their hair.

“I can’t,” she said. “I have a boyfriend.”

Cord smiled his best car salesman sealing-the-deal smile and gently took her hands in his. She jerked them away.

“He pulled up about five minutes ago,” she said, pointing toward the street where Roman stood in a tight tank top outside the door of a Mitsubishi sports car.