Page 65 of Love at First Sighting
Marcus glances over at me, with a chuckle. “Do we have to upgrade to a Nespresso?”
“No,” I say, “because then I’d have to fix theNespressothree times a week. I’m still digging on the case. Trying to figure out what this girl saw.”
“You might never know.” His voice has become frigid.
“I’d like to try. I know my last job didn’t go so well, and I want to prove myself. To you. To the rest of PIS. To my dad.”
At the mention of my dad, Marcus shifts and takes another sip of his drink. He only talks about my dad when hehasto. Maybe it’s too painful. Sometimes talking about my parents feels like peeling off a freshly healed scab.
He clears his throat finally. “What I’m trying to say is sometimes you don’t get answers. I’ve got a handful of jobs in my back pocket that were never fully resolved. Jobs that circle back every now and then.”
“With her, it’s also hard to tell,” I continue. “You know how influencers are.”
“Not really.”
Okay, fair. “Well, sometimes they have elaborate posting schedules because of sponsorships and stuff, so maybe she has an alien post queued up. I’m not letting the ball drop, I promise.”
“Your dad and I worked one,” he says with a huff of a laugh, then lowers his voice, “where this woman…claimed she’d been abducted. Found her in the woods, miles away from home, no memory of how she got there. We dug for weeks but got nowhere. She went back to normal life, so…we dropped it. Wrote it up as ‘Unexplained.’ Sometimes it’s better to never know the truth.”
Despite being the Men in Black, there’s no guarantee that the aliens have to cooperate with us. Some agents lament about the cases where abductions or flaps happen but thengo cold. We can’t always rely on extraterrestrials to come back and take credit for their work.
“Hey,” the bartender behind us rasps. Marcus and I tilt our heads toward him. He’s a wiry guy named Stu with a damp, stained towel tossed over his shoulder. “Someone rented out table six but then bailed. You want a free game?”
Marcus glances to me. “You wanna play?”
I am no expert at pool, but I’m trying to be buddy-buddy with Marcus, and buddy-buddy might mean getting my ass beat at pool.
“Sure.”
I take my drink and move over to table six with Marcus, who arranges the balls in the rack and passes me a pool cue. I have to think about how I’m going to play this conversation as much as the game itself. Marcus shakes the rack, with the eight ball in the middle, and lets them go.
“Put down a dollar. I’m going to get solids,” he taunts.
“So you give me a buck if you’re wrong?”
“Deal.”
Marcus lays the pool cue down on the table and studies the rack in front of him. He gives a few test strokes and then shoots.
He sinks a solidanda stripe. Which means he gets topick.
“Okay, you got both. Do I owe you money now?”
“Yeah.” He laughs. “Two bucks.”
“Fine,” I tell him. “But you’re not getting my prized two-dollar bill.”
“Wouldn’t dream of it. It’s a relic. I pick solids.”
Before I lay my stick down to aim the cue ball toward my best shot at landing a stripe in the pocket, I think about what I want to discuss with Marcus. I’ve been snooping all week.The appointment with Ian is in his planner, but on his Outlook calendar, Thursday and Friday are blocked out completely, but the details are private.
“So, I see you’re going to be out of the office in two weeks?” I ask. “Staycation?Vacation?”
“No, nothing luxurious.” As he says this, he leans forward and strikes another solid into a pocket. I take my place and line up a shot, but instead of sinking a ball in, I hit one of his into a pocket. Goddammit. “Tough, kiddo.”
“Anythingfunplanned?” I ask.
“You realize you sound like me asking you about your weekend plans in high school, right?”
