Her face brightened, and she nodded enthusiastically. Girl had good taste.

* * *

I had a plethora of people to interview on the Emery Adams case, and I had the perfect solution to keeping Heather both off the streets and safe. Ish. Hoping my solution would agree, I found her, a.k.a. my tattoo artist friend Pari, sleeping—which would explain why she hadn’t answered my texts, or phone calls, or her door when I pounded for ten minutes. Luckily, I knew where she hid the key.

After leaving Heather downstairs in Pari’s office with computer, a soda, and a half-eaten bag of chocolate chip cookies I found on a desk, I made my way upstairs, hoping Pari had gone to bed batching it. There were just some things I didn’t need to see.

Her apartment sat above the tattoo parlor she had on Central. I opened the door slowly, really slowly, to get the full effect of how badly the hinges needed to be oiled. Just below the headboard sat a patch of thick brown hair, so either her unruly locks would need a thorough brushing when she got up, or she’d gotten a cat.

I tiptoed to her side and turned on a lamp. It was a bit early for her. She kept late hours, sometimes working until two or three in the morning. But I needed to get Heather taken care of quickly and quietly.

“What the fuck?” she screeched when she realized I was standing over her. Staring. Wondering how best to rouse her. “Turn off the fucking light!”

She buried her head deeper in the covers as I reached over and turned off the lamp, knowing it would do no good. Pari’d had a near-death when she was a kid. She’d seen apparitions ever since. Not really people like I could see, but mists and fogs where a departed might be.

But with me, she got the full effect.

“I swear to God, if you don’t turn out that—”

I think it hit her who I was. Probably because I’d started to giggle.

She threw the covers off and bolted straight up. “Chuck!” she yelled before covering her eyes and falling back. “Oh, my god. Find my sunglasses. The industrial-strength ones.”

Like I knew which of her sunglasses were industrial strength.

She snapped and pointed to her nightstand. “Purse. Side pocket. Hurry before my retinas disappear completely.”

With another laugh, I fished out her glasses and put them in her outstretched hand.

She slid them on and then bolted upright again. “Chuck! Where the hell you been?”

“What do you mean?”

Her hair was flat on one side and Texas big on the other. “You’ve been gone for, like, a year.”

“Really?” I said, perplexed.

Scrambling up for a hug, she grabbed hold of me and pulled me onto the bed with her.

“This is kind of sudden,” I said, giggling again, “but okay.”

“Holy hell, I missed your face.”

“You can’t actually see my face. You told me it’s just a bright white blur even with your shades on.”

“Then I missed your blur. How long have you been back?”

“A week.”

She settled beside me, snuggling closer against my side.

“And while I love the whole reunion thing,” I added, “like, I’m totally into it, for reals, but you sleep in the nude.”

“That I do,” she said, her “pretty if not a little road-worn” face morphing into a full-on smirk. “That I do.”

She wrestled her way off the bed and found a robe while I struggled to sit up.

“And you have a water bed,” I said, perplexed for real that time.

“One of my boyfriends left it, and it’s too heavy to move, so I just gave in to the inevitable. I’m a water creature, anyway.”

“You’re a creature, that’s for sure.”

“Oh, man, Chuck.” She beamed at me, and I’d forgotten how much I missed her until that moment.

I stood and hugged her again, and I could feel emotion welling inside her. Like, real emotion. Pari wasn’t exactly the emotional type except when it came to her love interests.

“Hey,” I said, setting her at arm’s length. She was about a foot shorter than I was with a killer body and an attitude to match. “What’s this?”

“I wanted to go. To be there.”

“What?” I hugged her again. “Stop it. I was a mess. I couldn’t even remember my own name, much less yours.”

When she looked up at me again, I fought the urge to giggle for the thousandth time. She looked like a bug with her huge industrial-strength sunglasses. But her distress was real.

“I thought we’d lost you,” she said. “And you are way too special to lose.”