“We should go out after supper. Maybe get a drink or a cup of coffee. There are some places at the bottom of the hills. There shouldn’t be anyone there that we know.”
“We should work on these contracts,” he said. “We’ve got years of contracts to look back through.”
And yet he wasn’t making progress on them. “There are so many. It feels overwhelming sometimes,” she said, watching him.
He nodded. “And I hate what they mean.”
That his partner in the firm was negligent at best and criminally misrepresenting her clients’ interests at the worst. “Me, too.”
“What do you want to do after supper?” he asked. “Work?”
“Or a glass of wine at that restaurant, Vino’s? I saw that they have a bar on the way home tonight.”
He said, “Charley Lees’s new comedy is out on the streaming service. We did the contract for it last year. Might be interesting to see if it was worth all those crazy amenities he demanded.”
RÉSUMÉ
“Do you have any guns in the house?” Rox asked Cash.
He chuckled, but his eyebrows dipped in confusion. “No one has guns in California.”
“Does that actually mean that you don’t?” she pressed.
“I have no guns in the house.”
“Oh, okay.”
He cocked his head to the side. “Jan’s comments about Pym’s car accident upset you, didn’t they? I assure you, no one is trying to murder me because I found that ridiculous clause in the Watson contract.”
“Okay.”
That wasn’t actually what she had been worried about, but now she was worried about not having guns in the house.
Rox found a three-pound box of rat poison hidden under the kitchen sink.
God, rat poison. That was a terrible way to die. Why the hell didn’t Cash have humane traps or something?
The next day, Rox took a short walk on the grassy hillside and poured it out. She was gone only a few minutes, but her heart was racing as she ran back to the house, terrified of what she might find.
Cash sat in his home office, snarling at a contract. He typed something on his laptop, stabbing at the keys, and slapped the lid shut.
“Are you okay?” Rox asked, breathless.
“If I never see one of Valerie Arbeitman’s contracts again, I’ll be fine,” he growled.
Rox stood in Cash’s enormous bathroom, staring at the shower rod that circled the soaking tub. She had already raided the medicine cabinets and drawers, finding nothing more sinister than over-the-counter painkillers and one lone antibiotic capsule from three years ago.
The stainless steel shower rod wasn’t one of those tension bars that you jammed between the shower stall walls to hold up your curtain. The ends of this thing were screwed into the wall, secured right into the rough stone tile with what looked like huge screws. The screws’ heads were bigger than Rox’s thumbnails. They probably speared straight into the studs.
That thick steel bar looked like it could hold a man’s weight, even if the man was swinging at the end of a rope tied to the bar.
Rox picked up the screwdriver and went to work.
“Is there a reason you keep leaving the garage door open?” Cash asked.
Rox paused, thinking up lies. “I didn’t have a garage at my apartment. I guess I’m not used to remembering to close it.”
“And sometimes when you close it, it doesn’t shut all the way.” He frowned. “Mice are coming in through the gap, and I can’t find the mouse poison.”
She glared at him. “You don’t need rat poison. We have three cats.”
His dark green eyes, now healed from all the bruises and swelling, widened. “Will they hunt the mice?”
Yeah, dude. Cats hunt mice. “Well, Speedbump just kind of stands there and yells at them. He’s the manager. But Midnight and Pirate are great hunters. I used to catch moths for them to hunt in my apartment. They loved it.”
“Let’s get them down there, then. I’ve got to see this.”
ABSENCE
Rox stood out on the deck, the sea breeze picking at her hair, and tapped the contact on her cell phone titled Brandy and held it to her ear. “Hey, honey?”
From the barking in the background of the call, Brandy was already at the animal shelter. She asked, “Yeah? When are you coming in?”
“I can’t this weekend. There’s some stuff going on. You have enough food for the week?”
“Plenty. Don’t sweat it. I’ve got three other people coming today. Two of them have been socializing kittens for a couple of weeks, so now I can put them to work.”