Janice Johnson - With Child

He pictured her, a tiny, scrawny kid, asking politely, “May I be excused now?”

“Bored?”

As she stood, anger flashed on her face, erasing the childlike impression. “Frustrated. I might as well go watch TV. I can’t do anything about any of that.” She waved at the piles of bills and bank statements.

With strained patience, he said, “Solutions don’t always happen instantly, just because we want them to.”

“Have I ever mentioned that you’re a jerk?” she snapped, and shoved the chair in.

He rubbed the heel of his hand against his chest, where his heartburn was acting up. “Your opinion was obvious enough, thank you.” And rich, he thought, coming from the drama queen. No, not queen—princess. Little Miss I’m Entitled.

She stomped out. Suppressing his own frustration, Quinn put away the papers in a plastic file box and left it on the table. He was almost glad when his beeper went off. A dead body would be a welcome diversion.

HE BEGAN TO WONDER if she was throwing parties every night, or maybe just attending them. Far as he could tell, she was never up before ten or eleven in the morning, and then she would look puffy-eyed, wan and repelled by any suggestion that she should make decisions. Quinn didn’t remember Dean ever commenting that she was a night owl, but then he and Dean had hardly ever talked about Mindy at all. It had been safer that way.

As far as Quinn could tell, she wasn’t job hunting, so he guessed she was planning to live on her inheritance as long as it lasted. Thus her panic about unnecessary drains on the final total.

Quinn had originally figured she’d be left a wealthy young woman, but clearly that wasn’t going to happen. Too many bills had come to light, too few investments. Still, when it all shook out, he thought she’d have a decent amount left. If she was careful, enough to get by for a couple of years without working. Pretty good deal considering she hadn’t been married that long and hadn’t had a damn thing when she’d met Dean.

Quinn recalled she’d worked as a barista at a Tully’s downtown, which was where Dean had met her. She’d apparently been making a little on the side with her “art.” She’d probably sold a few painted wood signs to friends. The talent Dean raved about hadn’t been discovered by the wider world. She’d lived with a houseful of minimum-wage friends and students near the university.

Given her background, what right did she have to be unhappy to find out she wouldn’t be wealthy? But clearly she was. She got more petulant by the day, more determined that everybody hurry, hurry, hurry so she could sell whatever wasn’t nailed down.

He’d stopped by this morning to tell her he thought he had a buyer for Fenton Security. A pair of buyers, more accurately.

Quinn was beat, after a hard night. A body had fallen from the Olive Street overpass, landing on the windshield of a semi and shattering the glass. The semi had jackknifed, resulting in one hell of a traffic snarl that had closed I-5 south for three hours. The poor schmuck who’d hit the windshield was grizzled, dirty and wearing three layers of clothes and boots with soles that must have flapped when he walked. Staggered, more likely, from the powerful odor of cheap wine that had wafted from him along with the sickly tang of blood. Turned out he was well known in the missions around the Pioneer Square area. Nobody knew his name. Said he went by Crow. Just Crow.

A witness out walking his dog late had spotted a souped-up Toyota pause on the overpass just before she was distracted by the sound of splintering glass, the squeal of brakes and the scream of metal striking concrete abutments. Weirdly, she had even remembered half the license-plate number.

“Because it’s identical to mine,” she had said. “ALN. I call my car Alan because of the license plate.” She’d looked a little embarrassed at the admission. “But the numbers were different.” Her eyes had gone unfocused, and then she’d said in triumph, “Seven hundred. It was seven hundred something. I don’t remember the rest.”

“Ms. Abbott, you’re amazing,” Quinn’s current partner had told her with a generosity that didn’t come so easily to Quinn.

Ellis Carter was bumping against retirement, which meant he could be a little slow in the rare event of a chase, but his warmth and ease with witnesses more than atoned for the potbelly and arthritic knee.

They had run the plates and—bingo!—had come up with only one blue Toyota Supra carrying license number 7—ALN. It was registered to a twenty-something scumbag who, when he’d answered his doorbell, smirked at the idea that he might have tossed a drunk from the freeway overpass just for fun. The smirk had faded when he’d heard there was a witness. The friend hovering in the background had broken and run. Getting him to babble had taken less time than cleaning up the mess on the freeway.

All Quinn wanted to do was go home and crash, but he figured he should share the good news first.

He rang the doorbell, and after a long delay, Mindy appeared, still in her bathrobe.

“Quinn.” She didn’t sound thrilled to see him on her doorstep at ten in the morning.

Face it—she probably wasn’t thrilled to see him no matter what time of day it was.

He studied her puffy, tired eyes and the dark circles beneath them. “Still not sleeping?”

Mindy let out a puff of air that was half laugh, half exasperation. “So I look like crap. Tell me something I don’t know.”

“I didn’t mean…”

“It doesn’t matter.” She could go from animation to lifeless quicker than most of the residents of Seattle who actually died. “Did you need to talk to me about something?”

“Can I come in?”

“I suppose.” Still in zombie mode, she stepped back. Looking at the floor, she waited, seemingly unaware that her robe gaped open exposing…

God. Was that one of Dean’s T-shirts? Yeah, Quinn decided, it was. She’d taken to sleeping in her dead husband’s shirts. And boxer shorts that he hoped like hell weren’t Dean’s. He caught a glimpse of those long, long legs and of her bare feet. Those he’d seen before, as she went barefoot most of the time at home and conceded to necessity by wearing flip-flops when she went out except in the direst weather. She used to paint her toenails, though. Not just pink or red. He’d made a habit of glancing at her feet just to see what she’d done now. Sometimes her nails were turquoise, or silver glitter, or had tiny flowers or eyes of Osiris or peace signs painted on crayon-bright backgrounds.

Now, he saw a chip or two of red clinging to the cuticles, but she must not have touched them since… He stopped there. Since before.

Still in the entryway, he faced her. “I might have found someone to buy the business.”

“Really?” Accentuated by the smudges beneath them, her eyes looked more gray than green when she lifted her gaze to his face.

“You know Lance Worden? Scarecrow?”

Her face cleared at the nickname and she nodded.

“He and a buddy of his were looking to start a security company in south King County. Didn’t want to compete with Dean, and Scarecrow—Worden—thought with Federal Way and that area growing it would be good territory. But depending on price he’d be interested in Fenton Security instead.”

“Would he keep the name?”

“We didn’t get that far,” Quinn said with scant patience. He’d expected her to be pleased, maybe even excited, and instead she was worrying about something meaningless.

Maybe he should share her regret at the loss of one more piece of Dean’s identity, but honest to God he was getting tired of answering the phone five times a day to answer questions for Mulligan, who in the absence of Dean had lost any ability he’d ever had to be decisive.