She sighs like I’ve personally offended her. “Fine. Let me get real pants.”
I look down at her leggings, oversized t-shirt, and fuzzy socks with tiny pixelated cats on them. “Those count.”
“These are ‘sit in my house and feel vaguely squishy’ pants,” she says, levering herself to her feet. “Not ‘trail a giant mob wall down the stairwell’ pants.”
“I’m not the mob,” I say automatically.
She waves a hand. “Organized crime lite, then. Whatever you boys call yourselves. Point is, the girls in the upstairs apartment are already nosy. If they see you and me out there together, they’ll assume things.”
“What kind of things?” I ask.
The tips of her ears go faintly pink. “Nothing we’re discussing before I’ve had a full cup of coffee.”
Fair.
She disappears into the bedroom. I use the thirty seconds of quiet to breathe and take in the apartment again.
Small. Clean-ish. Organized chaos: cords coiled in neat loops, notebooks in tottering stacks, a tangle of blankets on the couch. There’s a mug with a punny coding joke on the coffee table—Talk Data To Me—and another next to the sink that just saysNope.
The tree in the corner is objectively tragic, but the hummingbird isn’t. That thing looks like money and memory. It’s hung low, like she wants to see it, not just display it.
I file that away.
She comes back out in jeans, boots, and the same oversized hoodie, hair scraped into a messy knot. Real pants apparently means denim.
“You good?” I ask.
She narrows her eyes. “Don’t ask me that every five minutes.”
“Noted.”
I open the door, check the hall—empty—and let her go first. She locks the door with the kind of ritual familiarity that says she’s done it a thousand times, even before last night.
“Don’t hover,” she mutters as we move down the narrow corridor.
I’m not hovering. I’m just tall, and the hallway is small. There’s nowhere else for me to be.
We start at the top and work our way down.
The third floor is composed of four units, one of which is Tallulah’s. Windows look out over the street and the alley. One of the doors has four separate locks and a sticker that says THIS HOME PROTECTED BY JESUS AND A GUN. Another has plastic plants outside it and the faint smell of weed seeping under the crack.
“Mrs. Lewis,” Twiggy murmurs, nodding at the Jesus door. “Nosy but harmless. If a leaf rustles wrong on this floor, she’ll post about it in the building Facebook group.”
“Good,” I say.
“Good for surveillance, bad for my blood pressure,” she replies. “She thinks I’m a hacker for the deep state.”
“Are you?”
“I’d tell you, but then I’d have to kill you,” she says.
The stairwell is narrow concrete, paint peeling in strips. The light at the landing flickers ominously.
“Thurston came up this way?” I ask.
“Yeah.” She gestures down. “Old fire escape in the back connects to the second-floor landing window. Jack thinks he came up that way, checked my door, then looped around to the front to do his creeper thing at the window.”
“He could’ve gone higher,” I say. “Roof access?”
