One
I SPENT most of my formative years in Chicago, faithfully cheering on the Cubs and looking down at people who put ketchup on their hot dogs. My older brother, Mike, was—and still is—a hard-core White Sox fan. This doesn’t explain anything about us as brothers other than he’s always on the wrong side of the fence when picking teams.
Always.
For example, at some far-off point in our childhood, back when he was actually taller than me, we played an imaginary game we called Cows and Sheep. I’m not sure where we got the idea, probably from some old movie, because it was pretty much an excuse for all-out warfare with dirt clods and water balloons under the guise of me as a cattle rancher and Mike as a sheep wrangler battling it out for control of the land’s only water source for our herds.
Namely, the garden hose attached to the faucet on the side of the house.
Now, while we didn’t actually have any cattle or sheep, I knew enough about the woolly ungulates to know they weren’t bipedal, six feet tall, with a flap in the front of their bodies for easy access to their dangly bits.
Nor did they have a loaded Desert Eagle and a pair of Dobermans intent on running me to ground.
“I’m supposed to be here!” Shouting over my shoulder didn’t seem to help. Maybe the costume’s head was too thick for him to hear me screaming at him, or perhaps he couldn’t make anything out except the dogs’ vicious, frenzied barking. I dodged a thick bush, but its branches slapped at my face with a withering sting as I went by. “I’m doing a security—”
The sheep answered me with a bullet, blowing away the overgrown trellis I’d ducked through to get some distance between us. Its wood frame shattered, showering me with a tidal wave of leaves and splinters, probably adding to the welts already on my face and hands.
This was supposed to be a quick recon—me testing the perimeter of a Brentwood estate not far from the Craftsman I shared with my husband, Jae, and where I ran my investigation business out of what used to be the massive sprawl’s front rooms. I’d taken the job as a favor for Dante Montoya, a detective my best friend, Bobby, used to work with. His boyfriend owned an elite security firm and needed someone who knew the area to scope out the grounds of an overgrown château. He’d been hired by the guy who recently bought it and discovered it was not only missing a perimeter wall but also was in Mother Nature’s firm, hard grip. But since he was being paid to break into the place on another night to test its defenses, he wanted someone who had no dog in the fight to give him a sketch of what the jungle around the battered château looked like but keep him clueless of the interior to better assess the situation.
If I survived the culling, I was going to find Montoya’s boyfriend and punch him right in his pretty, funky-ass-eyed face.
“I’m going to fucking kill you!” the sheep screamed from somewhere behind me.
I couldn’t hear the dogs anymore, but I did kind of hope the man in the full-body costume took the time to Velcro the front flap closed. From what I had seen, it wasn’t much protection against the thorny hedges around us, but at least it would save some of his skin.
I hadn’t gotten a good look at the man wearing it, but as costumes went, it was spectacular. Probably custom-made, it was a hair too cute for my tastes, but then I also couldn’t imagine myself dressed up as an ungulate complete with a pink bow and enormous round tinkling bell tied around my neck or somehow shoving my feet and hands into what looked like hard hooves.
The place should have been empty. I’d been told no one lived there yet and it would be a month or two before renovations began to restore the old, creaking mansion. But when I discovered a light on in the small guesthouse a few yards from the garage I’d parked in front of, I went to investigate.
I expected maybe a few teenagers drinking beer and smoking pot they’d taken from their mom’s stash, or even a transient who’d found a way into the fairly large single-room structure, planning on keeping safe and warm inside its thick walls.
Instead I’d found Psycho Lamb Chop playing blanket mambo with an elegant socialite in pearls and ruffled bloomers, a slit worked into the pantaloons’ seams to allow Brave Sir Baa Baa easy access to her worldly treasures.
I probably could have sneaked off without either one of them being the wiser except for one thing—well, two actually. The damned dogs.
I’d seen this movie before. Hell, I’d been a recurring guest star in that particular strain of disasters through most of my career as a private investigator. But the sheep was new, and the dogs were really damned determined to take a chunk out of my ass.
Seeing as I liked my ass where it was—and I had a husband who seemed pretty fond of it—I bolted.
Shocked the hell out of me that Lamb Chop not only had the presence of mind to grab a weapon but also had the dexterity and stamina to run in those damned hooves.
The lawn’s overgrowth made it easier to avoid the dogs, but they weren’t too far behind me. I knew the left side of the property shared a fairly solid wall with the next estate, but the original twelve-foot-tall wrought iron fence surrounding the enormous plot had fallen into such disrepair that there were gaping stretches along the back and right boundaries. It was a contentious point with the property owners, or so I’d been told. Rather than erect their own fencing, they battled and sniped about the château’s falling metal spires and left the rusting iron segments to molder instead of securing their own homes.
It was kind of ironic being chased by a man in a sheep costume after catching him in a nefarious act with a woman who had a few years on him and obviously was way out of his league, but honestly, I wasn’t all that surprised. Shit like this always seemed to happen to me. This wasn’t the first time I’d come across a couple of people having sex—make that kind of weird sex—only to have them spot me, nor the first time I had to run for my life while someone tried to blow my head off. It was kind of an occupational hazard. Private investigators usually didn’t get to pick and choose the cases that came through their front door, and since most of society’s problems revolved around sex or money, it made sense that most of our business at McGinnis Investigations dealt with spouses wanting to catch their significant others doing the nasty with someone other than themselves.
This job wasn’t supposed to be like that. I was just to go in, take a recon of the buildings, and leave. I shouldn’t be on the run, although I had some serious questions about why the woman and Lamb Chop had two Dobermans with them in the guesthouse.
“Where the fuck am I going?” It was difficult to make heads or tails of where I was. The paths through the greenery were vague at best, and the thickets were practically opaque, making it difficult to see beyond what was right in front of my face. “I don’t even know which way I’m facing.”
There was a myth about moss growing only on the north side of a tree. Since I could barely remember if the Hollywood sign was north of me at any given moment, that wasn’t going to get me out of the jungle I’d stumbled into. The hard stone paths were littered with leaves, and every once in a while, I caught the hard clop of the sheep’s hooves striking rock, but the dogs were now oddly silent.
“Where the hell are you guys?” I slowed my run down and crouched behind a stand of bushes and an oddly posed statue that could have been a woman with six arms or an aroused cuttlefish looking for a good time. Cloaked in shadows and a thick layer of tangled vines, it was difficult to tell what the carving was, but it gave me enough cover to catch my breath. “Shit, I’ve got to work on my conditioning.”