“Peter, what took you so long? This is Leo Boyle, my landlord. Leo, this is Peter Ash.”
Boyle kept his eyes on the screen, but he put up a lazy hand. “Yo, bro.” He looked to be in his mid-twenties, but his hairline was already retreating up the broad expanse of his forehead. He wore factory-distressed jeans and a wrinkled dress shirt that he’d left untucked, trying to hide his soft belly. They were fashionable clothes, Peter supposed, and probably expensive, but a long way from dress blues.
“Nice to meet you,” said Peter. He shut the door with his medical boot, hefted the bags to the kitchen counter, and began to put away groceries. “Can you stay for dinner? Nothing fancy, just fish tacos, Spanish rice, and salad. Plenty of food.”
June shot Peter a smile, her eyes bright.
Boyle glanced at June, then at Peter. His face was soft and undefined, the skin pale and puffy with lack of sleep or too much alcohol or both. “Sure, I guess.”
“Great,” said Peter. “Can I get anyone a drink? There’s beer and wine and mineral water and orange juice.”
“You bet,” said June as she leaped off the couch and perched on a stool to ogle the supplies. “Oh, man. I’m hungry. And thirsty. Is that Lagunitas Copper Ale? I’ll take one of those.”
Boyle clambered after her. “There’s Grey Goose in the freezer,” he said, staking some kind of claim with his knowledge of the liquor supply. “I’ll take a martini, dirty. No vermouth. Two olives. To the brim.”
“Coming up.” Peter found an opener and set the bottle in front of June. “Glass?”
She shook her head and raised the bottle to the corner of her mouth without the stitches. A small amber trickle made its way down her chin. She wiped it off with her wrist.
Peter found a lonely martini glass in a cupboard of recycled jelly jars, washed out the dust, then took the vodka from the freezer and poured. He fished two ancient green olives from the crusty jar, splashed a little of the brine into the glass, then topped with vodka until the meniscus was crowned at the rim. Clearly the volume of alcohol was important to Boyle.
He pushed the glass carefully across the counter. Boyle lifted the glass without spilling a drop, and took an experimental sip. “Not bad,” he said. As if making this particular drink was a challenge.
Peter opened a beer for himself, then turned on the oven to heat and laid a thick slab of halibut on a pan to come up to room temperature. He brushed it with a little olive oil, then added salt and pepper. “You mind if I use your shower?” he said to June.
June gave him an innocent smile with something else behind it. “I thought you’d never ask.”
? ? ?
“DID YOU MAKE IT to the library?”
Showered, scrubbed, and shaved, Peter had the rice simmering, the lettuce washed, and the vegetables chopped. Peeling and dicing mangoes, he didn’t want to ask about her research in front of Leo Boyle. He definitely wasn’t going to bring up Tyg3r, or whatever he was supposed to call the skeleton key algorithm.
“For a few hours,” she said. “Public Investigations has a subscription to TransUnion, where I found more history on our guys.” She held up a hand. “Before you ask, I logged on with one of my coworker’s passwords. But I got location histories, legal histories, past and present vehicle registrations. Then cross-referencing on all of that. We definitely have some new leads there. But nothing new about the companies we talked about.”
Peter noticed that June was being cautious with the details, too. Maybe it was Boyle, or maybe just habit. Then she waggled her eyelashes at him, Groucho-style. “I did buy a new computer. Leo was just geeking out on the specs.”
Her landlord had downed his martini with no evident effect, and was sucking on a lollipop. “What are you working on?” He talked to June as if Peter wasn’t in the room.
“Just background,” she said, catching Peter’s eye. “It probably won’t turn into anything.” He was glad June didn’t seem to want to get Leo involved. The less anyone else knew, the safer they would be.
“Gotcha,” said Boyle. “Woodward and Bernstein stuff.” He watched June out of the corner of his eye, trying not to stare, and failing. June didn’t seem to notice.
Or maybe she was used to it. Peter understood why Boyle would come over to see June. Anyone in their right mind would. But what did June see in Boyle? The man had the personality of a banana slug.
The timer went off for the rice. Peter put the fish in the oven, turned the timer on again, then stirred the diced red pepper and smoked jalape?o into the rice along with some paprika and garlic powder, poured in a little of his beer, then put the rice back on the heat. He put the mango pieces into a bowl with chopped tomatoes and basil and squeezed a few limes into the mix for a simple salsa. His shoulders were tight from the static, but cooking helped calm him down.
As he assembled the salad, he thought maybe he could distract Boyle from staring at June. “So, Leo. What do you do for a living?”
“Oh, you know. A little of this, a little of that.”