Page 71 of Kiss Me Now
Chapter Twenty-Three
Ian
The Rink case was killingme. Or making me want to murder something. I tried to take out my frustration in the batting cages with Landon after work one evening, but even smashing the pitches from the machine didn’t make me feel any better.
“Yo, Ian, you good?” My brother looked at me with concerned eyes from beneath the bill of his Orioles cap.
“Fine.” I smashed another pitch and grunted.
“You sound real fine,” he said, his lips twisting.
“It’s just a case. I keep turning up leads and they keep running into dead ends.”
“At least you don’t have to do the paperwork on it.”
I stepped out of the strike zone to study him more closely. “You getting tired of your job? About time. It only took me a year.” He was a second-year associate at the largest firm in Baltimore.
“I’m tired of grunt work.”
“It’s the nature of the beast, man. You gotta put in time before you get to do the interesting stuff.”
“You didn’t.”
I grinned at him. “No, I sure didn’t. I jumped right to the interesting part.”
“But you’ll never see the inside of a courtroom.”
I shrugged. “Overrated. I like being where the action is, doing the research, solving puzzles. It’s a good fit for me.”
“Then why are you so frustrated that you dragged me to the batting cages tonight?”
I gave him a tight smile this time and kicked at my bat. “Because the puzzle isn’t solving. Or maybe the better way to say it is that I know exactly what this puzzle is but I’m missing the last piece.”
“Can’t find it?”
“Yes and no.”
“Talk to me in hypotheticals.”
I thought about how to say it in a way that kept me inside the right ethical lines. “Imagine you have a big, powerful guy named Bad Guy.”
“Creative.”
