Her face appears briefly, sweaty and red from hanging upside down for the best part of ten minutes. “Of course not!” she says, with a little too much enthusiasm.
“What do you need me to do exactly? Fetch coffee? Pay gardeners? Do laundry? Apparently, I’m good at that.”
She drops a few feet onto the ground, shakes her hair off her face and rolls her eyes. “I’m not going to make you fetch coffee, Erin. It’s just a couple errands, that’s all.”
I fold my arms. “‘Kay. So, what kind of errands?”
She pants like she’s out of breath which, to be fair, I would be too after hanging upside down and rummaging through the remains of Halloweens gone by.
“Well, it turns out, the headless mannequins I need are not in here, so they must be at the docks.”
“The docks?”
“Yeah.” She sighs, wearily. “We have a storage unit at Washington Port. It’s kind of like an overflow for our window dressing props.”
“So, you need me to go fetch them?”
She smiles, abruptly, like she was expecting to have to lay the persuasion on thick. “Well, yes. That would amazing.”
I shrug. “You offered to pay me money and give me a generous reference for helping you out for the day. I’ll do whatever you need me to.”
“You can take my car,” she says, reaching into a deep pocket and jangling a set of keys at me. “You think you’ll be okay driving through the city?”
I arch a brow. “Once you’ve learned how to drive in New York City, you never forget. Besides, people driveeverywherein California.”
“That’s true,” she concedes, hitching a shoulder.
I swipe the keys from her, thankful for a little bit of alone time on the road. “How many of those decapitated things do you need?”
She rolls her lips inward. “Twenty? It might take you a while.”
I open my palms. “You’re paying me a day rate, right?”
She frowns as though she’s questioning her proposal. “I am.”
“Then I’ll do my best to get them in a day.”
“Good, because there’s no power in the storage unit and daylight starts fading at five.”
What?
“Is this going to be like a scene fromSilence of the Lambs?”
“What do you mean?”
“I’ll need to have a torch on me at all times so I can navigate the dead bodies, and have to blow the hair out of my face a lot?”
She clicks her tongue with a wink. “Exactly that.”
I’m about to laugh when her smile falls and she hands me a map. “Now seriously, there is no light and no logical lay-out. You will have to rummage hard.”
I gulp and nod.
“When you find the mannequins, stack them by the entrance and I’ll send a truck to collect them tomorrow.”
“Can I take a photo?”
“What?”
