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Okay. I was being a snob.
Maybe he looked homeless because he was an uber-genius or something. You know, smart people were known for being rather absentminded about normal, every day tasks like haircuts and... eating proper meals. The clothes, well, some guys just genuinely didn't know anything about what did and did not go together, let alone what was and was not in fashion.
All the awful clothing aside, he was actually pretty good looking. A good couple square meals to get some meat on his bones, he would actually be really attractive in a sort-of hipster kind of way.
"You ready?" he asked, giving me quick eye contact before turning away and disappearing behind his office door.
Alright. Not having great social skills wasn't unusual either if he was smart.
I took a deep breath, shook my head slightly, and followed him inside, closing the door at my back.
Yeah, well. If you ever stopped to consider what the office of some of the great writers in the twentieth century before computers were a thing looked like, offices like Bukowski or Salinger might have inhabited, yeah, that was what Barrett Anderson's office was like. Meaning it was a small room with a simple black office desk and chair with a chair for visitors and a hip-level office cabinet on the side. But every single surface was stacked with books, with paperwork, folders. The walls had newspaper clippings, online printouts, pictures, and handwritten notes pinned with colorful thumbtacks to above my personal eye level.
Barrett was already behind his desk, shuffling papers that made the five or six discarded coffee cups sitting on top of some of said stacks of paper wobble ominously.
As I walked toward the guest chair, I immediately rethought my impression that Barrett was the tech-savvy guy his website implied. Because, well, he didn't even have a computer in his office. No computer, laptop, fax, phone... nothing. How the hell had he even made the website in the first place?
"Not what you were expecting?" he asked, reading my expression with a small smirk.
"Where's your computer?" I blurted out as I sat down.
"What do most people think is the most valuable thing in their houses?" he asked, but it was rhetorical because he went on with barely a pause. "High end jewelry, the TV, stereo system... no. It's your computers and laptops. If I broke in, I wouldn't even have to steal it. I could just use a zip drive with some specific malware on it, stick it in the USB port, let it do its thing, pull it back out, and I have access to every password to every bank website, investment website, 401K website you have ever visited. I also have all the dirt on everything you've ever looked at online. A computer should never be left out where someone else could access it for even a couple of seconds."
Well. Didn't I kind of feel like an idiot?
"But the paper trail you have here?" I asked, waving a hand around.
"Take a closer look," he invited, nodding toward the paperwork on his desk.
Curious, I reached for the closest stack and picked it up to read. It was some kind of mathematical papers and while there were words, they weren't in English. "Is this... Russian?"
"Polish," he said, taking them back from me. "They're also in code."
"Quite fastidious," I nodded, feeling a bit more secure in my choice, and also making a mental note to start storing my laptop in my safe when I wasn't in the house.
"What do you need help with, Miss..."
"Elsie is fine. And I guess, for right now, I need help figuring out what is going on at the warehouse on Kennedy."
"The warehouse on Kennedy," he repeated, brows drawing together.
"Yes."
"That's all you're gonna give me."
"Does knowing my motivations somehow change the information of what is going on inside the warehouse?"
"See your point," he said, reaching for a drawer and pulling out a fresh piece of loose leaf paper, scribbling notes in, I imagined, coded Polish. "So you want information of the people coming and going, items being brought in or out," he kept babbling as he grabbed his coffee with his left hand, brought it to his lips, took a long sip, then settled it back down. "Do you want full workups on every person?"
"Full workups?"
"Jobs, past jobs, habits, financial records..." he trailed off, looking up at me from behind his glasses, the expression there very much intimating that he thought I was an idiot for making him explain.
"Ah, sure," I said, shrugging. "Whatever you can find."
"Anything else?"
I pressed my lips together to keep them from twitching. I'd been on more than my share of consultations with various professionals over the years: attorneys, accountants, doctors, etc. Never had I been in a meeting as clipped as this one with the strange, sloppy, hungry-looking Barrett Anderson.
