“Your father’s sudden celebrity must have affected you.”
“Not really.”
She watched him for a moment, then said softly, “That’s impossible. It had to have impacted your life as dramatically as it did his.”
He squinted one eye. “You know what this sounds like? Leading questions, like you’re trying to interview me. In which case, you’re SOL because I’m not going to talk about The Major, or me, or my life. Ever. Not to anybody.”
She reached into the oversize bag and took out an eight-by-ten reproduction of a photograph, laid it on the desk, and pushed it toward him.
Without even glancing down at it, he pushed it back. “I’ve seen it.” For the second time, he stood up, went to the door, opened it, and stood there with hands on hips, waiting.
She hesitated, then sighed with resignation, hiked the strap of her bag onto her shoulder, and joined him at the door. “I caught you at a bad time.”
“No, this is about as good as I get.”
“Would you consider meeting me later, after you’ve had time to…” She made a gesture that encompassed his sorry state. “To feel better. I could outline what I want to do. We could talk about it over dinner.”
“Nothing to talk about.”
“I’m paying.”
He shook his head. “Thanks anyway.”
She gnawed the inside of her cheek as though trying to determine which tactic to use to try to persuade him. He could offer some salacious suggestions, but she probably wouldn’t go that far, and even if she did, afterward he’d still say no to her request.
She took a look around the office before coming back to him. With the tip of her index finger, she underlined the words stenciled on the frosted glass of the door. “Private Investigator.”
“So it says.”
“Your profession is to investigate things, solve mysteries.”
He snuffled. That was his former profession. Nowadays, he was retained by tearful wives wanting him to confirm that their husbands were screwing around. If he managed to get pictures, it doubled his fee. Distraught parents paid him to track down runaway teens, whom he usually found exchanging alleyway blowjobs for heroin.
He wouldn’t call the work he was doing mystery-solving. Or investigation, for that matter.
But to her, he said, “Fort Worth’s own Sherlock Holmes.”
“Are you state licensed?”
“Oh, yeah. I have a gun, bullets, everything.”
“Do you have a magnifying glass?”
The question baffled him because she hadn’t asked it in jest. She was serious. “What for?”
Those pouty pink lips fashioned an enigmatic smile, and she whispered, “Figure it out.”
Keeping her eyes on his, she reached into an inside pocket of her bag and withdrew a business card. She didn’t hand it to him, but stuck it in a crack between the frosted glass pane and the door frame, adjacent to the words that spelled out his job description.
“When you change your mind, my cell number is on the card.”
Hell would freeze over first.
Trapper plucked the business card from the slit, flipped it straight into the trash can, and slammed the office door behind her.
Eager to go home and sleep off the remainder of his hangover in a more comfortable surrounding, he snatched up the sock on the armrest of the sofa and went in search of the other.
After several frustrating minutes and a litany of elaborate profanity, he found it inside one of his boots. He pulled on his socks but decided he needed an aspirin before he finished dressing. Padding over to