Offensive Behavior

“Sick.”

She took a deep breath. That’s what she could smell, he’d barfed and tried to clean himself up. “Did you eat from the menu tonight?” One of the kitchen hands had been vomiting and got sent home.

He rolled his head on the window. “Yeah.”

“Shit, you’ve got food poisoning.”

He grunted assent.

“Can you get up? I’ll put you in a cab.”

She left him trying to get his limbs organized and waved a cab down. The driver looked at her, looked at Reid, shook his head and drove off.

“Hey!”

she yelled after him. But then another driver pulled over and Reid had made it upright. She took his arm and led him to the curb and pushed him into the backseat, where he seemed to pass out.

“You’re coming too or he’s out,” said the driver.

“I’m only the Good Samaritan. I don’t know him.”

“Well I’m an Arab infidel, and my tea-leaf reader is in the shop for repairs. I don’t know where he lives and he’s cramping my style.”

She leaned in and shoved Reid till he rolled on one hip and she could get his wallet out of his back pocket. On another occasion she might’ve noticed he had a very nice ass.

“In or you’re both out,” said the driver.

“Aarrgh.” She wedged herself into the seat beside Reid and read out the address on his driver’s license. He had a couple of fifties and hundred dollar bills in his wallet, more than enough for this cab. She’d drop him off and continue on home, call herself a superhero for saving someone’s butt after all.

His place was only a five-minute ride away. Total swank job. A South Beach warehouse conversion, all steel and glass and nothing like she expected from a man who seemed as if he’d left good times behind. But for all its imposing grandeur and probable view of the bay, dropping him at the hospital might’ve been a better idea.

The driver shifted eyes up in the mirror. “He your boyfriend?”

“Nope. Don’t know him from Adam.”

The driver sighed. “I’ll help you get him to his door.”

“You are a Good Samaritan.”

“No, I want my backseat available and there’s no way you, tiny person, can get him home alone by yourself.”

“I’m fine,” Reid said, and flung his door open, getting his feet to the ground but not making it upright.

Zarley gave the driver a fifty and there was no pretense there’d be any change, though the fair wasn’t a quarter of that amount.

Together they managed to get Reid out of the cab and moving to the security door, where he mumbled a code that got them inside after much fumbling about.

“You going to leave him like this?” the driver said while they rode the lift, Reid propped between them, a mass of shakes, as though he was freezing cold.

“I’m fine,” Reid said.

“And my mother still loves me,” said the driver.

Yes, she was going to leave him. Maybe he had a wife, though no ring, or a roommate. There was a door buzzer and they pressed it and that roused Reid further. He placed his hand on a sensor pad on the wall and the door opened.

The driver backed off and he’d called the lift back and disappeared inside it before Zarley had a chance to stop him.

Reid staggered inside the apartment, an overhead light turning on automatically as he moved passed it. She could’ve left him then, but there was obviously no one else home so she followed him inside. She’d get the name of the guy who was with him last night and call him to come around.