Ride the Wreck (Stonewall Investigations Blue Creek 2)

I guess that’s just another reason I should go talk to Ryan.

Not for the dick pics, though.

Although, well… I’m not going to say I’d complain about them if I did end up receiving a couple. They could have even dropped on my phone unsolicited, and I don’t think I would have been upset. He had big, firm hands—I had noticed last night when they were on my lower back—and it wasn’t hard to imagine those same proportions extending to the rest of his body. It was as simple as evolution. He needed those big hands to hold his big—

“Morning, Elijah!” my neighbor cheerily shouted from her porch. “Oh fuck me, I mean afternoon!”

I laughed as I locked my door, walking across the ankle-deep grass to Ms. Nora’s porch. She had lived in that house since she was twenty-two, an entire fifty-three years spent inside those walls. The thought drove me crazy and sent ooky-spooky shivers down my spine, but Ms. Nora didn’t seem to mind at all. She had rooted herself in Blue Creek, and the town thanked her by providing a haven she never felt like leaving.

“Where you headed off to today?” she asked, sitting back in the rocking chair and taking a sip of her tea. There were hanging planters all throughout the porch, making a semi-transparent wall of trailing leaves, some of them wrapping around the columns they grew next to.

I figured that giving Ms. Nora a full rundown of everything that happened would have taken way too much energy, so I decided on, “Just going to run some errands. Need anything?”

“Oh no, sweetie, thank you. Go, go. Do your thing.”

“See ya,” I said, hopping off her porch. My usual grumpy self wouldn’t normally offer help and a chat with a neighbor, but Ms. Nora was the antidote to my antisocial tendencies. Something about her soft voice and random curse words warmed the pruny ventricles in my chest.

“Oh, Elijah, before I forget and lose my tits over it, I found one of your necklaces in the front yard. Here.” She dug into her teal culottes and pulled out a long and gaudy silver chain. “Ugly thing.”

I laughed and grabbed the necklace, lifting it up to the light. “This was the first piece of drag jewelry I ever owned. I thought I had lost it.”

“Nope, just sitting in the lawn. Right over there.” She pointed to the border of her lawn and mine, next to the cracked sidewalk that had been losing an epic battle with the roots of a towering oak tree.

“Weird. Maybe it fell out of my bag and I didn’t notice.”

“Or maybe it’s a haunted necklace that’s come back to terrorize you for the next sixty-nine years, making everything you wear as ugly as that thing.”

“Yeah, Ms. Nora, that’s definitely it.” We both shared a laugh before I pocketed the cursed Party City artifact and said my goodbyes, thanking her for not doing the world a favor and trashing the necklace on sight. I walked over to my sun-blotted Honda before deciding the weather was perfect for a walk. Stonewall Investigations was on the main strip of road that cut through Blue Creek, only a fifteen-minute walk from where I lived. It gave me time to go over all the shit that’d happened to me this past year: obsessive emails and DMs and texts, photos of me in drag printed by the thousands and left on my doorstep, clippings of my wigs in ziplock bags dropped off at my job. Such fucked-up shit—and so much of it—I’d almost grown numb to it all.

Almost.

The Stonewall Investigations sign was a clever and artistically done blast of gay right in the center of town. It had the agency’s name written in a classic font across a clean wooden background, with a brightly colored rainbow growing out of the letters and arching out of the sign, as if Stonewall were the pot of gold everyone was always so concerned about finding. Underneath was the less artsy sign for Barks, Birds, and Booze. I went through the pet store, grabbing a bag of cat food for Ms. Nora and the few cats that hung out around her house, and then went up the stairs to the agency. I really had no idea what to expect but was pleasantly surprised by the warm feeling I immediately got as I entered the main waiting area and was greeted by a friendly guy with a not-so-friendly-looking parrot hanging out on his desk.

“Hey, I um, was looking to hire a detective. I met one yesterday. His name was Ryan… is he around?”

Both he and the parrot looked at the screen for a moment before he nodded and stood up, motioning for me to follow him. He led me into a sunny hallway and stopped at a closed door with Ryan Diaz’s name written across the frosted glass. He popped his head in and asked something about stress peeing before moving aside and letting me enter.