He looked up and his expression shifted from annoyance to curiosity at the excitement in my tone. “What do you mean?”
“The haunted apartment. Maybe something was playing on TV at a time of day the tenant was at work. Not because it was haunted.” Not yet, anyhow. “But because there was someone home who wasn’t on the lease.”
Jacob messaged HQ to request a writeup on the apartments on the floor below Boswell’s. I suspected he was eager to think about something other than the frustration at our lackluster performance—I sure as hell know I was. But I could hardly act like the conversation over the shopping cart had never happened.
“Jacob….”
He looked up from the text he’d just sent, eyebrows raised.
I cleared my throat awkwardly and decided to lead with those three little words that would melt anyone’s heart. “You were right.”
“We’re both under a lot of stress,” he began, but I plowed ahead.
“Binaural beats seem to help me focus, but now that the app is all screwed up, it’s not doing me any good. I was so hung up on wishing it could be like it used to that I didn’t see how much of my time it was wasting. No more app. No more worrying about how things might be different. I’m forgetting about the damn app and getting to the bottom of this apartment once and for all.”
Jacob nodded slowly, digesting my apology. “You know that I’m here for you. However you need me.”
Unless it meant dealing with all the red tape—though I didn’t mention that. Jacob and I were a team where it counted. He might not like paperwork any more than I did. But I trusted him to have my back, even when we disagreed about the particulars. And that was worth everything.
The next morning, a dossier on the downstairs neighbor was waiting on our phones, so Jacob and I headed back to the apartment building in hopes of finding out something useful.
Murray Haskel was a retired widower who’d been in the building for nearly a dozen years, which meant he’d lived below Kostic, Sledge and Boswell. He’d never incurred so much as a parking infraction, so I expected he wouldn’t mind treating us to a little chat.
And how wrong I was.
When we knocked on his door, he opened it only as far as the chain, and lined us up with one squinty eye. “I’m not interested.”
“I’m not selling anything.” I pulled out my ID. “Victor Bayne.” I left off the “Agent” and also the “FPMP,” hoping a friendlier approach would soften the guy up. It didn’t, not really. But at least he didn’t slam the door. I explained I had some questions about the apartment. I told him it would really help us out if he could tell us what he knew about his upstairs neighbors. And I tried to commiserate about how thin the walls were in “old buildings like this.”
It was a pretty good spiel. But Haskel wasn’t biting.
“No idea who lives up there.”
“Not now,” I clarified. “The apartment is vacant. Erm…itisvacant as far as you can tell, isn’t it?” The squinty eye narrowed. “No voices, no TV?”
The distant strain of a laugh track filtered down from the third-shift worker’s place.
Haskel looked me dead in the eye and said, “I never hear anything.” And before I could wedge a foot in the door, he shut it with a forceful click.
“Let’s get Evelyn,” Jacob said. “We could really use an empath.”
“And give this guy time to suddenly remember he’s got somewhere else to be?” I planted my hands on my hips and glared at the closed door. Jacob had the good grace to not insist on heading back to HQ. I swallowed my pride and said, “Maybe you should give it a shot.” After all, I wasn’t the only one to fall hard for Jacob’s charms.
Jacob mirrored my stance. “I don’t think he’d open up that door for anything.”
“I’m not so sure about that,” a voice piped in from the stairwell as someone tromped up to the landing. A twentyish woman with a pierced septum rounded the corner to join us. Her sweatshirt was ratty and her Doc Martens had seen better days, but her lime green manicure was pristine. She shouldered between Jacob and me, brazen as you please, banged on Haskel’s door with a knock any cop would envy, and bellowed, “Doordash!”
Haskel’s door jerked open about three and a half inches. The delivery woman fell back a step. “Well?” Haskel demanded. “Hand it over.”
The woman cracked her gum thoughtfully and glanced down at the McDonald’s bag in her hands. “Doesn’t fit.”
A hand shoved through the door crack and mad a grab for the bag. Doordash leaned casually to one side and left him swiping at air. “What’s the matter, is your door broken? Maybeyou should think about that before you enter 300 characters of custom instructions.”
“The last time I okayed someone to leave it at the door, they practically pitched it at the front of the building—from across the street! Now give it over before my hotcakes go solid.”
“Do you think I enjoy walking up all those stairs? Like I do it for my health? I’ll tell you something. Most people appreciate it when someone goes above and beyond. But not only have you never once tipped me—you went out of your way to three-star my last delivery.”
“What do you want, a parade? It was average!”
