The Fix Is In (Torus Intercession 4)

“My sister Nuan swears by my mother’s recipe and had my mother make batches and batches of cookies for her during her two pregnancies, but my sister Tori prefers my mother’s handmade hard candy, and she sucks on them all day long.”

“How many sisters do you have?” Benji asked, back to looking at me now that we were safely away from the topic of his car accident.

“I have six brothers, who’re all married, five of them with kids. The brother right above me, Rory, he and his husband are expecting their first child in February.”

“So the sisters you were talking about are your sisters-in-law,” Benji clarified.

“Yeah, but if you met them and heard how bossy they are, you’d swear they were blood-related to me, and that’s how I think of them.”

“That’ll be hard on you if any of them get divorced,” Delly apprised me.

I scoffed. “Catholics don’t get divorced; you can ask my mother.”

“They were all married in the church?”

I nodded.

Sian made a hmmm noise. “Even, uhm, your gay brother?”

I grinned as I drove. “Oh, yeah. Father Sean doesn’t mess around. He says God needs good Catholics more than he needs intolerance and bigotry.”

“I like the sound of this man,” Sian commented, and I could hear her rustling around in the giant Ziploc bag of cookies my mother had packed for me. Normally there were far too many, but I was thinking I’d be lucky to have a few left for the flight home.

“Jesus didn’t say squat about homosexuality, so Father Sean dismisses all that crap. But really, all that aside, if you met my sisters and my new brother, Rory’s husband, Roshan—my mom calls them R and R—you’d get that nobody’s going anywhere.”

“Why is that?”

“My family is great. Huge and rowdy and loud as hell, but everybody, and it’s a whole lotta people, have your back.”

“I love that,” Delly said with a sigh. “Do you have lots of cousins too?”

“My dad is the youngest of seven brothers, just like me, so yeah, there’s a ton of Jameses when we all get together.”

It only took a second.

“Wait,” Sian stated, and I heard her little catch of breath. I didn’t mean to roll my eyes, but whenever I accidentally told any woo-woo types about me and my dad’s birth order, this was what happened. “You’re the seventh son of a seventh son?”

I groaned softly.

“That’s awesome,” she stated at the same time I saw a pizzeria with a twelve-foot-tall man with an exaggerated mustache and a chef’s hat. Without asking, I took a left.

“This street dead-ends at a small two-lane bridge, and you want to take a left, and then look for the red house with the gray roof. You can’t miss it,” Benji promised with a smile.

The directions were ridiculous, but the way his face lit up made me not care.

“So why did your brain jump to meth houses?” Delly asked me.

“Well, as far as I can tell, people around town have been complaining about all kinds of disturbances in abandoned buildings, and when Deputy Gage couldn’t find anything wrong, that’s when they called you guys, thinking it was something paranormal. Yes?”

“That’s right,” Benji confirmed.

“And what did you guys find when you went to the different places?”

“Nothing,” Sian informed me. “They were gross. I didn’t go in, but Delly and Benji said they smelled like ammonia and… what else was it?”

“Like rotten eggs,” Delly replied with a yawn. “God, rain makes me so sleepy.”

“So when the explosion happened, there were only a few things that could have caused it. Since it was contained to a small area and not the whole block, or even damaged Mrs. Chen’s house, gas lines were pretty much ruled out,” I informed them. “Since I doubt Mrs. Chen had sticks of dynamite lying around, or any other explosives, the list was narrowed down quite a bit.”

“And because the places were abandoned and smelled bad, you thought meth house?” Sian surmised. “Were you a cop before you became a bodyguard?”

“No, I was in the Marine Corps, and when I was deployed, I found out that cooking meth isn’t just an American problem. In Afghanistan and Iraq, I saw my share of meth houses.”

“So someone in town is doing the whole Breaking Bad thing?” Delly was incredulous.

“I suspect they’re trying,” I told her. “At the moment they’re using places they think no one cares about, but some of the people who heard odd noises or saw what they thought were ghosts in the middle of the night decided to have you guys check it out. So now, not only did these would-be meth cooks have to be on the lookout for Deputy Gage, but for you guys as well. And actually, you all were probably the bigger issue. From what I’ve gathered, Gage doesn’t seem like an in-depth investigation kind of a guy.”