My Favorite Suspects: Part 10
"You need to understand," Luna said, "the more you want me to do, the more it could cost you."
In this cozy noir, amateur sleuth Terry Perez revisits his first case in which he investigates a series of crimes at his supermarket. Can he solve the mystery before he loses his job at the store? Who in his circle will turn out to be the criminal?
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One of our phones chimed repeatedly. We both peered down at our screens. Luna picked up her phone and considered the caller ID, her lips twisted.
"I need to take this." She got up. Set the knife down on the cutting board beside the skinned apple. "Help yourself," she said, and went around the corner toward the bathroom.
The washer/dryer under the gray linoleum counter had clicked over to the drying cycle. I took my khakis out and pulled them on. They were slightly damp. I didn't care. All I wanted to do was to get out of there, grab an Uber, and get home. I had enough of Luna. Enough of A.J. Enough of Miller. Enough of everyone getting the advantage over me.
I picked up the knife and tried to twirl it as effortlessly as Luna had done. I nearly dropped it twice. It felt like a normal kitchen knife. No modifications to make it lighter, better balanced, or whatever. A typical knife you'd pick up in a Costco or Target. She was simply really good with that knife. I used it on the apple and popped a slice into my mouth and welcomed the dark cider coolness on my throat.
I'd jammed my wallet into my back pocket and had left the kitchen when I heard Luna's voice. There's some truth to the old cliché that other senses compensate for the weak ones. Possibly to make up for my nearsightedness, I had excellent hearing.
"You left me waiting at the Backstop for half an hour," she snapped at whoever was on the other end of the call.
In my socks, I crept across the worn beige carpet, through the carefully arranged movie set of a living room, and entered the hallway, the white walls turned amber by the late afternoon sun. There were two bedrooms. The door to the farthest was closed. Behind the other door, a few inches ajar, I glimpsed Luna's dark hair. She ran her free hand through it and fluffed the ends, agitated.
"I was waiting," she said. "At the front door. Like we agreed. Yeah."
I lost sight of her for a moment.
"The Backstop was your idea," I heard her say. "Did you not see the cop car? That's what I tried to tell you. That's what the churches are for. Get it? Next time we play it my way."
Then, like a horror-movie jump scare, the door swung open. Luna stood, phone pressed to her ear, her other hand on the door handle. Her glare said, do not enter.
"Who was the guy with me?" she said into the phone. "Nobody. He's some loser I bumped into. If I left alone it would call attention to me. At least that way it looked like I was waiting for him." She paused. A man's voice from the speaker, rough, angry, loud enough in the quiet apartment but not quite loud enough for me to make out the words. "Will you forget about the guy already? He was an afternoon snack. He's probably back at the seminary right now saying a hundred Hail Marys for his immortal soul."
She held up a warning finger to me: Shh.
A minute ago, I was a problem. Then someone called and I became a small problem. Maybe an afterthought. Like a stray dog. I'll eventually amble off on my own and become someone else's problem.
"No," Luna said. "No more excuse—no. No. No more excuses. It's simple. I have your stuff. I want my money."
The man on the other end of the line grumbled, his tone defeated.
"I'll text you," she said, and ended the call. She held the phone by her side and tapped it against her white shorts and waited for me to do something.
The room behind her, unlike the rest of the apartment, had a haphazard, back-stage quality: faded white painted walls, an old door propped up on sawhorses for a makeshift workbench, and stacks of papers and electronic equipment on the desk and the floor underneath. The room had a musty smell of hot crayons. Luna appeared completely out of context. I almost didn't recognize her, like the difference between seeing an actor deliver a moving speech on a movie screen and seeing them in the dairy aisle comparing ingredient lists on yogurt containers.
"Why are you still here?" she said to me, flatly.
I didn't have an answer prepped.
"If you had any street smarts, you would've left. I sure as hell would've left." She pointed at my waist. "If you had other ideas, you wouldn't have put your pants on. Are you some kind of cop?"
Her phone buzzed. She checked the screen and began tapping out a response with her thumbs. "I can't figure you, Price Check," she said, multitasking. "You have this weird mix of intuition and naiveté. Were you raised by Mormon psychologists in some kind of weird experiment?"
"I was about to leave," I said.
Luna nodded and tapped furiously on her phone.
I had an idea and decided to take a chance. "I need the twenty back that you took from my wallet," I said, folding my arms across my chest.
"Nice try," she said, focused on the phone. "You don't have any twenties in your wallet."
I waited.
She slowly lowered the phone and looked up at me from underneath her dark brown eyebrows. "Oh, very nice try, Price Check. Very nice."
“What am I?" I said. "What difference does it make? You're asking the wrong question."
"Really?" she said. Maybe a hint of playfulness.
"You said you owed me a favor. I want to cash that in. Right now. I think your problem is not that I figured out your secret, if I actually figured out anything. Your problem, right now, is the way an alcoholic stripper pays back a favor is very different from how a thief pays back a favor. And the way you help me is going to confirm one story or the other." I shrugged. "Personally, I'm hoping for thief, because I could really use one."
She put her hands on her hips and snorted. "All right, Price Check. What do you want?"
I explained my situation with Miller, our suspects, and how he caught A.J. I explained how I lost my job. How I thought Miller was Ghost but I had nothing to prove it. "That's what I want," I said, wrapping up. "My job back. Can you help me with Miller?"
"You want me to shank him?"
I thought back to the creepy way she’d skinned the apple in the kitchen. "Would you really?"
"That's not what I do." She laughed. "Let me give you a free lesson, OK? People like Miller are smart. They lock their doors. They put alarms on the windows. They install security cameras. But they don't think of everything. That's what I do: I figure out what they've overlooked. And that's where I slip inside."
I smiled. Thief Luna was more interesting than Stripper Luna.
"But you need to understand," she said, "the more you want me to do, the more it could cost you. And I don't only mean money. You could wind up an accessory or an accomplice. Or worse." She made fists and pushed her hands together at the wrists, miming handcuffs. "Do you want your job back that bad? Or is it better to walk away?" She patted my shoulder, a maternal gesture. "Free lesson's over, Price Check. Now either call in the favor or get the hell out. Girl's got shit to do."
"I think there's another option," I said.
Luna gave me her sideways look. Not coy. Skeptical.
I reached behind her, to a small pile of phones and cameras on a shelf, picked up a thumb-sized GoPro camera, and held it up to the light.
"Go on," she said. "I'm listening."
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Use the Previous and Next buttons at the end of each post to navigate through all posts on My Favorite Suspects, or use the Story Guide for an overview of this book and list of all chapters.
Stay tuned for the next chapter!