I tossed the keys onto the snack bar and headed for my bedroom. “Hey, Mr. Wong.”
“He’s attractive, right?”
I paused and turned back to him. “Mr. Wong?” I looked at my perpetual roommate, at his utter grayness as he stood in my living room corner. He’d been there since I rented the apartment, and since he did have seniority, I’d never had the heart to kick him out. Not that I’d know how. But I’d never actually seen his face. He hovered 24/7 with his back to me, his nose in the corner, his toes inches from the floor. He looked like a cross between a Chinese prisoner of war and an immigrant from the 1800s.
“Who’s Mr. Wong?” Garrett asked. They’d never been introduced. This was all very new to Swopes, and I figured I should bring him into the fold slowly, let him absorb the new information at a comprehensible rate and save all the bells and whistles for later. Then again, he’d asked to be brought in, insisted on it, so screw him.
“He’s the dead guy who inhabits the corner of my living room. But I’ve never seen his face. Not a full-frontal anyway, so I really couldn’t say if he’s handsome.”
“Not him,” he said, “Farrow. Wait, you have a dead guy living in your apartment?”
“Living’s a strong word, Swopes, and it’s not as if he takes up a lot of space. So, you’re talking about Reyes?”
“Yes, Farrow,” he said, eyeing the corner I’d greeted, a mixture of curiosity and horror playing on his face.
“Oh, then damn straight he’s attractive.” I checked messages on my phone. “Wait a minute, are you coming out of the closet?”
A loud sigh echoed against the wall as I traipsed into my room and closed the door. It was funny. “I’m not g*y, Charley,” he called out to me. “I’m trying to understand.”
“Understand what?” I asked, knowing full well what he was getting at. How could a girl like me get mixed up with a guy like Reyes? If he only knew the whole story. Not a good idea, though, since he’d have me committed for falling in love with the son of Satan.
“Look, I get the bad boy thing, but a convicted murderer?”
Surprisingly, the oil hadn’t soaked all the way through my pants, so I didn’t need another shower. Since my room was still in disaster-zone mode, I rummaged through a lump on the floor and found a pair of jeans that were tolerable, slipped those on with a pair of bitchen boots, and headed to the bathroom to freshen up.
“I think you need to water your plants,” Garrett called out to me.
“Oh, they’re fake.” He was looking at the plants I had along my windowsill. Either that or my mold problem was getting out of hand.
After a long pause, I heard, “Those are fake?”
“Yeah. I had to make them look real. A little spray paint, a little lighter fluid, and voilà! Fake dying plants.”
“Why would you want fake dying plants?” he asked.
“Because if they were all thick and healthy looking, anyone who knows me would realize they were fake.”
“Yeah, but is that really the point?”
“Duh.”
I heard a knock on the bathroom door that exited to my living room and opened it slowly. “Yes?” I asked Garrett as he stood there reading the sign on my door. The one that read no dead people beyond this door. This was my bathroom, after all, my inner sanctum. Not that the sign always worked. Mr. Habersham, the dead guy from 2B, completely ignored it on a regular basis.
He reached up and pushed against the door.
I pushed back. “Dude, what are you doing?”
“Making sure I’m not dead.”
“Do you feel dead?”
“No, but I thought maybe you had a sign that only dead people could see.”
“How on planet Earth would I have a sign only dead people could see?”
“Hey, it’s your world,” he said with a shrug.
I stepped out of the bathroom ready to face that world again. Or at least a small corner of it. “Look, Reyes is my problem, okay?” I said, grabbing my keys again and heading for the door.
“Right now he’s an escaped convict. And he’s my problem as well. Did he threaten you back there?”
I needed to steer Garrett clear of anything having to do with Reyes, and I needed to do it fast. As far as I knew, Reyes had never hurt an innocent person—not permanently, anyway—but it simply wasn’t worth risking Swopes’s spine. “I have a case I need your help on.”
“Yeah, well, I’m supposed to be tailing you.”
“Our deal’s still on.” I locked the apartment back up then started down the stairs. “Hi, Mrs. Allen,” I called out when I heard the squeaking of a door down the hall.
“Another dead person?” Garrett asked.
I paused and said with a heavy sigh, “Unfortunately, no.”
“So, our deal?” he asked as we headed out the front door.
“Like I said, totally on. You check out the origins of a dead guy riding around in Cookie’s car, and I’ll call you the minute I figure out where Reyes is.”
He eyed me with more doubt than I was accustomed to. And I was accustomed to a lot of doubt.
“Well, his body, anyway. The little shit hid it from me.”
“Farrow hid his body from you?”
“Yes, he did. The little shit. And we have to find it before it passes.”
Garrett scrubbed his face with his fingertips. “I am so confused.”