“You’re almost an adult. Get yourself something to eat.”
“There’s no food; I already checked.”
Hazard tried to run a mental inventory, but all his systems had crashed. He named something at random. “There’s cornmeal. There’s water. Make yourself grits.”
“Um, it’s not the Depression.”
“Will you get out of here please?”
“Don’t you have a job? I thought you were a detective. Or is he your sugar daddy, and you just work out and jerk off all day?”
“Get out and shut the door.”
“I’m literally starving to death.”
“Get out!”
Colt’s face screwed up with rage, and he stomped away.
Hazard waited until the steps had faded. Then he sprinted across the room and slammed the door.
He unloaded the revolver and locked it up. He dressed. He called the family services office—no answer—and Ramona—no answer. He left a message that might have sounded slightly frantic. When he couldn’t think of anything else to do, he went downstairs. He checked the fridge and the pantry. He admitted, grudgingly, that Colt was right.
“Come on.”
“Where are we going?”
“Shut the fuck up, that’s where.”
Colt pulled on a pair of beaten-up sneakers.
“Tie your laces,” Hazard said.
“I don’t like them tied.”
“You’re going to like starving to death even less.”
“Why do you have to be such a dick about everything?”
“Ask John sometime. He’s probably got it figured out.”
Swearing under his breath, Colt tied the laces.
Hazard checked the thermometer he’d hung outside the kitchen window. “It’s barely forty degrees outside. Put on your coat.”
Colt glared at him and tucked his hands into his armpits.
“We’re not going until you put on the damn coat.”
“I don’t have a coat, dumbass.”
“How do you not—” Hazard cut off at the look on Colt’s face. He walked into the hall, opened the closet, and dug through the coats and jackets. He grabbed a North Face coat, one with down filling, waterproof fabric, and a synthetic-fur-lined hood. He pulled it off the hanger and shoved it at Colt, who had followed him.
“Ew. I would literally rather be stabbed to death by a hobo than wear that.”
“It’s an extremely high-quality coat.”
“It’s blue.”
“So what?”
Colt pointed at a utility-shirt jacket. “I want that one.”
“That’s John’s.”
“That’s the only one I’ll wear. I’d literally rather be stabbed to death—”
“For the love of God, fine.” Then Hazard realized something. “It’s blue.”
“It’s navy. God, what kind of gay are you?”
Hazard didn’t exactly throw the jacket at Colt, but he realized that was mostly a question of degree.
“Are you serious?” Colt asked when he saw the minivan.
Something about the way Hazard slammed the driver’s door must have convinced Colt to let this one slide.
After dropping off the DNA samples with an express parcel service, they stopped at McDonald’s. Colt bankrupted the Hazard and Somerset family with his order. Then they drove on to the Astraea office on Market Street with the smell of hash browns, bacon, sausage, and fresh coffee filling the minivan. Thank goodness for breakfast all day.
When they parked at an angle to the curb, Colt looked around and said, “This place is a dump.”
Hazard considered the street—at almost noon, Market Street was getting busy, with steady traffic on the road and shoppers thronging on the sidewalks. This was the part of the city that had been built first, when Wahredua had been a river town, and the old brick and frame buildings, built tall and skinny on cramped blocks, looked down on the wide, flat, brown swirls of the Grand Rivere. Even with the windows up, Hazard could smell the fryers from the family-friendly restaurants—and a few of the bars—that lined the street. Mixed with it came the sweet, yeasty aroma from the Magic Dragon Bakery, which occupied the ground floor of the building in front of them.
“Actually, Market Street is a prime example of a Midwestern town’s successful reinvention of itself.”
“Actually, Market Street is a prime example of a Midwestern town’s successful reinvention of itself.”
Hazard’s hand stalled as he reached for the keys in the ignition. He looked at Colt.
Colt raised his eyebrows and took a savage bite of McMuffin.
“Was that supposed to be me?”
“Was that supposed to be me?”
Hazard wrapped his hands around the keys. “How old are you?”
Colt tore off a piece of hash brown, chomped it, and through the food, asked, “How old are you?”
Yanking the keys free of the ignition, Hazard managed not to say anything. The way Colt slammed his door shut when he followed Hazard out of the van, though, sounded suspiciously like an echo.
Hazard led the boy upstairs. He checked the locks on Astraea’s front door for any sign of tampering. Then he undid the locks one by one and opened the door. He groaned when he saw the pile of thermal-paper faxes that lay just inside. He stepped over them. Maybe if he pretended he didn’t see them, they’d eventually stop coming.
The offices for Hazard’s private investigation agency consisted of three primary parts: a reception area; an inner office; and a small bathroom. Business had been good, and for the most part, Hazard had been pleased with the slow transformation of the space into something he could be proud of. He’d replaced the secondhand office furniture in the front room with new—and marginally more comfortable—chairs, a simple—but, Somers assured him, stylish—reception desk, a new coffee maker (the old one had suffered a mysterious breakage when it hit the wall at forty miles an hour), more plants—at Somers’s recommendation, kinds that could survive the office’s fluctuating temperatures. He’d even stopped recycling—in Somers’s word, stealing—magazines from their dentist and physician, and Astraea now had its own subscription to The Economist, the Harvard Business Review, and the Journal of Forensic Sciences.
Sure, there were things that still needed doing—Hazard hadn’t been able to get the landlord to fix the crack in the front window, which meant there was always a draft, and the bathroom hadn’t been updated in about fifty years, and the painting that Somers had given him—
“Why is that picture crooked?” Colt asked.
Hazard crossed the room and straightened the painting. It showed the Grand Rivere, matching the view from the front window.
“It smells like farts in here.”
“It doesn’t smell like farts,” Hazard said, which wasn’t entirely true. He’d spoken to the landlord about the plumbing.