Carlos

Despite my best efforts to stay awake and be an interesting companion on the drive over to Shasta City, I fall asleep. I wake up with a crick in my neck, sun burning one side of my face, and John watching me from the other side of a stationary vehicle.

We're parked on the side of a street lined with semi-dilapidated houses, which despite their ramshackle appearance still manage to capture a bit of the mountain-town charm. Craning my neck, I peer out the window, but a row of trees obscures my view of the peak for which the town is named.

"Are we there yet?" I mumble, sitting up and rubbing my face.

"Yeah. You sure you're okay?"

"Fine. Just a little tired from my walk on the other side."

He eyes me skeptically. "You'll be honest with me, won't you? If you're not okay, I mean."

"You got it, partner," I mutter, and stretch to crack my back.

If I am honest, I'm hungry and grumpy, and tired despite my nap. Usually, after expending as much psychic energy as I did this morning, I'd eat something chocolatey and caffeinated — a grande mocha Frappuccino sounds about perfect right now — but for some reason I don't want to mention this. John is so strong and stoic, I don't want to seem like I can't keep up.

Unfortunately, he's also unusually perceptive, for a guy.

"We'll try to make this quick," he says. "Then we'll get something to eat. There's a Black Bear Diner we can hit on the way out of town."

I look over at him, surprised, and he winks.

"Becky and I may not have been married long, but I learn fast. Driving for hours without stopping for something to eat is a cardinal sin of mine, apparently."

Great, now he's comparing me to his nagging ex. So much for matching his machismo.

I start to turn away when he interrupts my thoughts with a light touch on my arm. When I look at him again, his expression is earnest and almost... tender.

"Carlos, having basic needs doesn't make you weak," he says. "If you're hungry, tired, thirsty — whatever — say something. I'm not gonna judge you for it. Fuck, if I saw what you described seeing in that place, I'd piss myself, but you just brushed it off like it was no big deal. I'm not gonna think you're weak if you need to stop for a rest or something to eat. You're human."

"And you're not," I say, frowning at him. "How do you know what I was thinking, anyway?"

His expression clouds and he backs off, facing forward again and staring out the windshield. "I'm mostly human, and it was just a lucky guess." He nods at a house a little further down the street. "You ready?"

"Sure."

"Good," he says. "Lets do this."

~ ★~

According to the Shasta City police, Daryl Sparks, P.I. lived with his wife and worked out of a small shed in his backyard, which he'd converted to an office. As John parks in the weedy patch of dirt that serves as a driveway in front of a house that can most kindly be described as a 'fixer upper,' I let out a low whistle.

"Guess the P.I. business wasn't booming, huh?"

"Sparks only got his license a few months ago," John says. "Before that, he ran a pool business into the ground. His resume is a list of failed ventures and get-rich-quick schemes, and he was up to his eyeballs in gambling debt. Our best guess is he was hoping to run a little extortion game on the side, blackmailing people he spied on for his paying clients. If so, it's not off to a great start."

I fail to hide my surprise." You think he found out who killed Kyle and tried to blackmail them?"

If a guy whose detective training probably consisted of watching reruns of Cops cracked the case while we're still in the dark, it doesn't say much for the official efforts.

"Maybe he got lucky," Johns says, as we walk up the overgrown path to the front door. "Or thought he did — right up until whoever he tried to blackmail used him for carving practice instead."

He rings the doorbell, the button of which is only half attached to the wall.

I see movement behind the frosted glass of the door, and it opens to reveal a woman dressed in pajamas, a robe, and fuzzy slippers. Her hair is gathered in a messy bun on top of her head, and yesterday's makeup smudges her face. I don't hazard a guess at her age: given how haggard she looks, she could be anywhere between twenty-five and forty.

"Pearl Sparks?" John hangs back, keeping a non-threatening distance between us and the door, and holds out his badge.

"Yeah?"

"I'm Detective John Turner, of the Spring Lakes Police Department. This is my partner, Carlos Martinez."

She leans against the doorframe. "Jesus, don't you people have something better to do than harass me? Like find the fuck who killed Daryl? I've answered your questions already. You have more, you can talk to my lawyer."

She starts to shut the door, and John turns up the charm.

"Wait, Mrs. Sparks," he says, stepping forward and catching the door before she can close it. "We won't take long, I promise. We'd just like to have a look around Daryl's office. We just need your permission to come on the property."

She scowls a him, but I can tell she's softening. Another flash from John's mercurial autumn eyes and she's butter.

"Well, I guess that's alright. Just don't break anything."

"We'll be careful," he promises.

She nods. "Fine. Lemme get the key. Meet me 'round back."

She shuts the door and John releases a breath.

"Fuck, I'm glad that worked."

I frown at him. "Did you just 'Dracula' her?"

"What?"

I lower my voice. "Like, vampire hypnosis, or whatever."

He laughs that low, breathy laugh that gets me in the balls. "What? No. Why?"

I shake my head, almost certain he'd used some super-human influence to get his way with Mrs. Sparks; if he smiled at me like that, he could have his way all too easily.

"You okay?" he asks, for the second time in the last quarter hour.

"I'm fine," I say, brushing him off with maybe a little more asperity than necessary. "Let's not keep dear Mrs. Sparks waiting."

As we pick our way around the side of the house, stepping over bits of old fence and other rubbish, I rub my chest. Jealousy. That's what I'm feeling.

I've heard it described before plenty of times, and read about it in books; I thought I knew it pretty well, in fact, from my days of pining after people who'd already met their perfect match.

Nope. That, I realize now, was envy. Jealousy is a whole different monster. I envied what others had; saw them enjoying what I wanted. What I just felt was jealousy over the prospect that someone else might take what's mine.

Which is ridiculous. Because, I remind myself as I trail behind him, my eyes wistfully brushing the span of his shoulders and imagining all the muscles beneath his shirt, John isn't mine.

~ ★~

"Well, this is it," Mrs. Sparks says, unlocking the door of the little shed and waving her hand at the cramped interior. "Knock yourselves out."

She leaves us to it, shuffling back up the gravel path to the back door of the house and disappearing within.

John and I share a look.

I'd been imagining an office straight out of some old timey, noir detective film, complete with filing cabinets, a rotary phone, and a lamp with a green shade.

Instead, Daryl's office looks lifted from an Ikea floor display.

There's a cheap desk, a chair, and a straight-from-the-box desktop PC.

"Fuck." John swears as he turns on the computer and is immediately confronted with a sign-in screen. "You think the wife knows where he kept his passwords?"

"Why don't you ask her? She seems to like you."

John frowns at me over his shoulder. "I think you'd have better luck. She was checking you out the whole time I was talking to her."

I scoff. "Yeah, right. She couldn't take her eyes off you."

"Were we talking to the same woman?"

"Hasn't gotten dressed in a week, looks like she needs a spa day and a long vacation?"

"That's the one."

"Hm." I hadn't thought she even glanced at me.

"You're not, um..." John coughs awkwardly. "You're not bisexual, are you?"

"What? Fuck no. I'm bent as a boomerang."

"Oh. Good. I mean, not 'good,' but—"

A light cough makes us both jump, and I look over my shoulder to see that Mrs. Sparks has returned.

"Sorry. Didn't mean to startle you boys. I just thought you might want the password. It's BigDickEnergy. He wished." She laughs and waves a glass of chardonnay. It's barely past noon. "Can I get you boys a drink?"

"Ah, no. We're on the clock," John says, with admirable ease.

Mrs. Sparks scoffs. "Never stopped Daryl. Stupid shit. I told him not to get involved. There was just something bad about this one, you know?"

John and I share a look.

"Mrs. Sparks—"

"Call me Pearl, please."

"Pearl. What do you know about your husband's last case?"

She smiles. "What do I know? Better question is what don't I know. I did most of the work, anyway. Daryl was too lazy. Plus, he didn't like to talk to people, and what you need in a business like this is to talk to people. That's what I did. The talking."

She takes a gulp of wine and looks from John to me, waiting for the next question.

"Who hired him?" I ask.

"Dunno. Some chick. Brianna, I think her name was."

I cast a glance at John. "That's Kyle's ex-girlfriend. She was at his funeral."

Pearl nods. "That's right. Kyle. She wanted Daryl to investigate her boy's death. Said he was murdered and she knew who did it, just didn't have proof."

"Who? I mean, who did she say did it?"

Pearl narrows her eyes at us, leaning forward with one hand planted against the doorframe and her wineglass in the other. "Some punk Kyle knew from high school. They robbed a store together, and Kyle got left holding the bag. Apparently, the other kid was the ringleader, but he talked Kyle into taking the fall. Convinced him they were best buds, or something, and promised he'd have Kyle's share waiting for him — with interest — when he got out of Juvie. Well, Kyle got out all right, but there was no share waiting for him. So the girlfriend figures Kyle threatened to expose this other guy as the criminal he is, and the other guy killed him for it."

"This other guy — he got a name?" John asks.

"Yeah. Something Spanish. Alejandro, or something."

"Alejo?" I suggest.

"That's it!" Pearl points her wineglass at me, splashing me with chardonnay. "Oops. Sorry."

"Did you tell all this to the police who interviewed you before?" John asks, brows furrowed.

Pearl shrugs easily. "No. But they didn't ask."

~ ★~

"I like her," I decide, as John hands me a bag full of fast food and a knockoff iced mocha. Sadly, we'd decided to skip the diner in the interest of speed. John wanted to get back to Spring Lakes ASAP.

He glances at me, eyes catching the light and gleaming gold before fading back to a forest medley of brown and green. "Me, too. She's right, you know. Talking to people is a skill, and whoever interviewed her clearly didn't have it in spades."

"Or they just caught her before she started on the chardonnay."

John snorts. "Or that. Either way, we got what we came for. SCPD will collect his computer and scrape it for data, but I think Pearl gave us the goods."

"Alejo." I shudder. "God, I can't believe I went out with that guy."

As naturally as if he's done it a million times, John reaches over and takes my hand. "Hey, once we get him, this nightmare will end, and you can get back to your life."

I extract my hand from his carefully, and he withdraws his touch with a hitch in his breath.

"Yeah. Back to normal," I say.

Neither of us speaks again for the rest of the drive, until we pull up in front of John's house and see the front door wide open.

"What the fuck? Carlos, stay here."

John jumps out, drawing his weapon from his side holster and slinking up the steps with the masculine grace of an action hero. Disregarding his orders, I follow, albeit at a careful distance.

At the door, John feints to the side, pressing his back against the outer wall, weapon held close to his chest. Spotting me, he mouths something and makes some sort of military command gesture I don't understand.

"What? John, just—"

With a fury of delighted barks, Rick and Morty come pelting out of the open door and circle me, nipping at me playfully. I laugh and drop to a crouch to welcome them with hugs and snuggles, instantly relieved, but John remains tense as a soldier in combat. He falls back from his position at the door and draws me to my feet, shielding me with his body as if from some imminent threat.

"Fuck," John swears under his breath, chest heaving, as a shadow appears in the arch of the door. "I didn't think he'd actually come."

I squint over his shoulder, and the shadow resolves itself into the shape of a man. From what I can tell, he's tall, and pale, and Michelangelesque.

Still shielding me, John addresses him fittingly.

"David..."

"Well," the man says, looking between the two of us. "I came as fast as I could, but alas, it seems I am, nonetheless, too late. Congratulations, John. You have found your match."