His mouth hung open in complete and utter uncertainty of what the hell she was talking about, much less how to reply. “Is that a riddle? Some sort of ‘What have I got in my pocket?’ moment?”
She stared at him with his dumbfounded expression mirrored on her pretty face. “Citizen Kane?”
His brain short-circuited. His first impulse was to state, for the record, that his name was Preston Shepherd. That felt incorrect, so he swallowed it down and said instead, “What the hell?”
“Fine!” She threw the passenger door open. “You do whatever it is you do at the restaurant all day! I’ll call an Uber and go talk to Charlie myself!”
As she went to unfasten the seatbelt, he held on to her wrist. “Wait a minute. Wait a minute! If you think I’m going to let you—”
“Let me?”
“—go to some gangster’s house alone, you are thoroughly mistaken.”
She glared at him. He glared back. Neither of them blinked for several long, dry heartbeats. Finally, her bottom lip quivered ever so slightly, and he caved. “I will take you to Cardello’s house,” he conceded.
Ginny gasped in delight. She threw her arms around his neck and kissed his cheek.
He ignored the pleasant warmth that lingered on his skin.
“But I am doing so angrily and grumpily, and the instant I think it looks fishy, we are leaving. I don’t care if I have to hogtie you to the roof. When I say it’s time to leave, it’s time to leave. Do we understand each other?”
She pressed one more kiss to his face, this time near his mouth. She lingered for a moment too long before pulling back far enough to whisper, “Perfectly.”
The house that the GPS brought them to—at about the halfway point between Laguna Key and South Miami—was a secluded ranch-style house, surrounded by tall, spindly pine trees. Even in the light, the trees looked ominous, the bottom half of their trunks charred. Every couple of years, firefighters did a controlled burn, and Shepherd always noticed the gray palm trees. But he never really got close enough to the pines in his day-to-day life to see the remnants of fire left behind.
This was the kind of habitat you expected a Florida panther to be hiding in, and he didn’t mean a hockey player.
The road to the house wasn’t even paved, but it was graveled right up to the front door. He brought the car to a complete stop at the end of the driveway, unwilling to go any further. “I don’t know about this, Ginny. This is the kind of house you see in a horror movie.”
“This is a very nice house!” Ginny protested, already reaching for her buckle.
“I didn’t say it wasn’t nice. I said it was horror-movie-worthy.”
“Do you know how much money it costs to get approved to build in the Rockland Pines?”
Shepherd shook his head. “I didn’t say it was cheap. I said it was horrific.”
She tossed her hair over her shoulder. “I’m going to knock on the door.”
Shepherd shook his head harder.
“Come on, Shepherd. Don’t freak out. It doesn’t even look like anyone’s home. OK? I’m just going to knock on the door and then we can leave.”
He sighed, but his stomach heaved. What he wanted to do was stick his head out of the car, vomit, and then drive Ginny to her parents’ house. Maybe pick up a ginger ale and some antacids. But what he did instead was burp and nod.
Ginny smiled at him. And it was very stupid—maybe he was just an idiot—how much her smile calmed his indigestion. He shouldn’t have eaten that burrito as fast as he did.
She left the car, slamming the door behind her, and walked down the gravel driveway as if she didn’t have a care in the world. Like she was here for a coffee date or maybe even to sell some encyclopedias.
Did people still sell encyclopedias door to door? That was a thing when he was a kid. People still needed encyclopedias, didn’t they? Like, the internet couldn’t know everything. Or if it did, it knew too much, and then how could you tell what was real knowing and what was made up?
He burped again.
Ginny knocked on the door. Shepherd gripped the steering wheel. She knocked on the door again. He moved his hand to the gearshift to take the car out of park. She looked at him, shrugged, and held up a finger.
Shepherd shook his head. “Don’t do it,” he said. “Don’t you dare do it.”
But she mouthed, “One sec!” before traipsing around to the back of the house, disappearing from view.
