“Wonderful.” Again, she said it but I questioned her sincerity.

“And then he’ll teach you different techniques. How to enter a room when there’s a terrorist raiding your refrigerator. What to do if someone breaks down your front door with an axe. It’s all about staying alive and defending yourself and your family.” When she only stared off into space, I added, “You’ll do fine, Cook.”

Oh yeah, that special place in hell was looking more and more likely by the minute.

3

667: The neighbor of the beast.

—BUMPER STICKER

The moment I could feel my knees again, I decided to check on my old friend-ish type person-slash-associate of sorts, Garrett Swopes. He was always good for a laugh. On the way over, I pulled up one of my new, possibly pirated GPS apps my friend Pari told me about. So even though I could find his house with my eyes closed – a feat I was fairly certain I’d done one night during a bout with insomnia – I brought up the app on my phone, picked a voice, and plugged it into the auxiliary outlet. Heavy breathing, as though someone were on life support and breathing through a machine, flooded the car. It might not have been so creepy if it weren’t dark out. I punched in my destination, i.e., Garrett’s address, then hit Route.

“In three hundred feet, turn right,” Darth Vader said. The Darth Vader. I felt like we were friends now. Like I could tell him anything.

“Thanks, Mr. Vader. Can I call you Darth?”

He didn’t answer, but that was okay. As the non-favored child of a stepmother, I was used to being ignored. I headed that way.

The breathing sounded again. “In fifty feet, turn right.”

“Okay, well, thanks again.”

We did that the whole way. Him telling me what to do. Me thanking him. I suddenly felt dirty, like he was using me for his own amusement. This relationship seemed very one-sided.

When I was almost there, Darth spoke again. “In two hundred feet, your destination will be on the right. Your journey to the dark side is almost complete.”

Why did I get the feeling he was related to Reyes?

“Your destination is on the right.”

“Yeah, okay, got it. Had it before.”

“Your journey to the —”

I exited the app before he could finish his sentence. It seemed wrong to cut him off prematurely, but I could take only so much heavy breathing before inappropriate thoughts involving whipped cream and a Ping-Pong paddle crept into my mind. And I was going to see Garrett Swopes. While not anywhere near the top of my to-do list, the guy’s abs were to die for.

I hopped out of Misery, my beloved cherry red Jeep Wrangler, and strolled to his front door. He lived in a small bungalow-style house with lots of lush vegetation, which was kind of unusual for Albuquerque. We were more of a lush-free kind of state. Sparse was more our style. I knocked before realizing his truck wasn’t out front like usual.

The door opened anyway and an exhausted-looking bond enforcement agent in dire need of a shave stood before me. Garrett Swopes was a lot like a hot g*y friend only he wasn’t g*y, which was too bad because then I could tell him how hot he was without him getting the wrong idea. He had smooth mocha-colored skin that made the silvery gray of his eyes even more arresting. And again he had abs to die for as evidenced not by his lack of a shirt but his negligence in buttoning said shirt.

I drank in a hearty swig of Garrett-abs before addressing him. “How’s it hanging, Swopes?” I asked, ducking past him.

He rubbed his eyes with a thumb and index finger. “Charles, it’s late.”

“It’s always late when I come over. At least you weren’t in bed this time.”

After a lengthy sigh to let me know just how annoyed he was pretending to be, he closed the door and headed for the kitchen. For some reason, every time I came over, he felt the need to drink. It was weird. “To what do I owe the pleasure?” he asked.

“To my pleasure, duh. I get all kinds of joy annoying the ever-loving crap out of you.”

“I meant, what’s going on? Is the world ending? Is a mass murderer stalking you? Are you trying to stay up for days at a time to avoid alone time with your evil neighbor?”

Damn. He knew Reyes had moved in next door to me. I’d wanted to be the one to tell him, to break it to him gently. My relationship with Reyes was complicated and, at one point, involved me staying up for days to avoid summoning the guy into my dreams. Unfortunately, Garrett had become a victim of my circumstance. He’d helped me through a rough time and I should’ve been the one to tell him about Reyes’s new pad.

“Who told you I had a new neighbor?” I heard him twist the top off a beer, the snap and hiss strangely comforting.

“I’ve been keeping tabs,” he said.

That probably wasn’t good.

“So what’s going on?” he asked again.

“What? I need a reason to come see my oldest and dearest friend?”

When he walked back to the living room and handed me a Corona, he kind of glared at me before sinking into a recliner.

“Okay, well, my old-ish and most annoying friend anyway.” I sat on the sofa opposite him, taking note of the chaos strewn about the room. Just like the last time I’d come to visit, the coffee table was littered with books and notes on the spiritual realm, heaven and hell, demons and angels. “I’ve been worried about you.”

“Why?” he asked after taking a swig.

“I don’t know. You just seem different now. Distant. Like you have PTSD.”