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“You’re a guardian angel,” I said to Shonda as we walked back into the stuffy, windowless hallway, a fluorescent light flickering ever directly above us.
“No, no. I’m the one Hazel’s guardian angel sent.”
“And who was that? Who hired you? Who paid for her bail?”
Shonda, walking with an energy that said she owned this place, didn’t even miss a beat when she spoke the name, even though my heart must have skipped six: “Detective Rocky Hudson.”
12
Rocky Hudson
My doorbell rang, the chime bouncing around the walls of my house. I set aside the notes I’d been writing and shut the laptop, closing the screen on a picture of Jesse at his high school graduation, his smile bright and wide, very much unlike the yellowing grin he had acquired over the years. I checked my watch, realizing my food wasn’t supposed to get here for another twenty minutes. I had left the front gate open so that the delivery person wouldn’t have trouble getting in. Did someone else decide to ring my door? I wouldn’t mind a box of Girl Scout cookies if that were the case.
The doorbell rang again just as I reached the door. I peeped through the peephole and was surprised at the face I saw staring back at me, those big brown eyes looking even wider when seen through a fish-eye lens.
I opened the door, the heat and humidity punching me in the gut. I squinted against the bright sunlight and looked down into those spellbinding eyes.
“Sam, what are you doing here?”
How did you even find out where I lived?
“I, well, I’m here to, um.”
Sam stumbled like someone who had been carried solely by instinct.
“Come inside before you melt.” I threw him a bone. He stepped inside, closing the door behind him. He looked around my foyer, a slight look of disbelief on his face.
“How do you live here… “
“Are you here to audit me? Do you work for the IRS?”
Sam stopped gawking and looked to me, cracking into a smile when he realized I was joking. He looked cute today, wearing a pair of light blue shorts and a white T-shirt, his hair styled so that the front rose in a kind of small wave. His glasses seemed freshly cleaned, the black frames catching the afternoon sunlight flowing in from the floor-to-ceiling windows surrounding him.
“So where’d you find my address?”
“You aren’t the only one with detective skills, okay?”
I crossed my arms and tilted my head. “You asked your uncle if he knew where the house with the top-hat-wearing manatee mailbox was?”
“Maybe.”
“Well, make yourself at home,” I said. “Want anything to drink?”
“I’ll have some water, please.”
I started toward the kitchen, throwing a glance behind me as I walked.
Sam looked like he wanted to tiptoe around the house, like some kind of lost fawn that had stumbled its way into my living room and was too scared to touch anything. “Is that real?” Sam asked, pointing at the Banksy hanging on the wall. The canvas, covered in strokes of evergreen and gold and ivory, took up about half of the stark white wall in my living room. It was framed in a sinewy barbed wire, dropping a thin and prickly shadow underneath it. The light that streamed in from the sliding glass doors bounced off the silver border.
“It is,” I said, admiring the piece with Sam at my side. “I grabbed it when it first popped up here for Art Basel.”
“Oh. Whoa. That’s wild.”
Sam stepped closer to the painting, his eyes wide. My attention drifted from the colorful canvas to the colorful human standing only a few feet away from me. If I were a betting man, I’d bet that even Banksy would have his eyes pulled from his masterpiece to Sam. He had a way of attracting the spotlight without even doing anything noteworthy. He was just standing there, a hand in his pocket, a half grin on his face, and yet he was all I wanted to look at.
“Wow,” Sam said, stepping back from the painting and looking around the rest of my living room. He walked over to the sliding glass doors and made another surprised noise. “That pool!”
I opened the doors and stepped outside with Sam. My backyard was large, not only extending outward in a field of lush green grass, but also wrapping around my house, where the basketball court was.
The star of my backyard was definitely the pool, though. It went to seven feet deep, where a rocky waterfall spilled a roar of water down into the saltwater pool. A green slide curved through the plants that climbed up the waterfall.
The water rippled and glittered under the sun. It was made even more tempting by the heat and humidity that made me break out into an instant sweat.
“I can’t believe you’ve got a waterfall with a waterslide through it. Who are you?”
