Doghouse (2 page)

The bartender worked his way back down the bar to the two of them, taking the situation in with a brief glance and absolutely no change of expression. “Top that off for you?” he offered, reaching for the coffeepot, but Seth covered the mug with one hand. “I'm good.”

It was coffee, then, or Tonica was hiding something high-test in the pot. That wasn't in character for either one of them, though.

Tonica waited, and Ginny waited, and Seth stared into his coffee mug, his face set in stone. The silence was starting to get to really awkward when he grunted, and finally spoke.

“I gotta talk to you two.”

Them, not her. Even in Ginny's relief, she was amused at how those words seemed to move Tonica into “sympathetic bartender” mode without his even noticing. He leaned forward, resting his elbows on the bar top, left hand folding into his right, his expression open and attentive. It worked wonders on the drunks who unburdened themselves to him on a regular basis, but Seth didn't seem to notice.

“Me, too?” Ginny asked, just to make sure.

“Yeah, you, too, Blondie,” Seth growled. Whatever it was he wanted to talk about, he wasn't happy about it. “I want to hire you.”

It took
a lot, at this point in his life, to leave Theodore Johan Tonica dumbfounded. Seth had just managed it. “You want to what?”

The old man growled slightly. “You heard what I said.”

“I heard, I just wanted to make sure I heard right. I might have been hallucinating.” Teddy realized, even as the words came out of his mouth, that joking wasn't the
way to go. The old man looked as unhappy—and as uncomfortable—as he'd ever seen him, and that was saying something. Even Ginny had picked up on it, her professional “I'm trained, I can help you” expression firmly in place, but her hazel eyes widened with shock.

“You mean, as investigators?”

“No, as a bartender. Of course as an investigator.” Seth might be uncomfortable, but he wasn't at a loss for snark. “I need the two of you to look into something for me.”

“Ah. Um.” Bartenders learned to roll with the punches, verbal or otherwise, but this had caught him off guard. Seth, asking for
their
help? “You know we're not licensed, or anything like that, right? I mean, maybe . . .”

“If I wanted to go to someone else—if I
could
go to someone else—I would've. You in, or not?”

“Tell us what this is about, and we can tell you if we can help you.”

Teddy noted with relief that Ginny had learned that much at least: she no longer leaped in with a promise to make everything better before she learned what “everything” was. That was good, because while every instinct Teddy had was telling him to say yes, that anything that made Seth ask a favor had to be serious, the reality was that anything that drove Seth to ask a favor had to be serious. He'd already said—several times—that he wasn't interested in continuing this “researchtigations” thing Ginny had dragged him into, much less get involved in a friend's problems that required such help. . . .

“I'm asking for a friend,” Seth started, and then shot them both a glare. “Shut it. I am.”

Both of them kept their expressions serious and intent, although Ginny's lips twitched slightly with repressed laughter, her shock fading to interest.

“And?” she asked.

“A friend of mine, old friend from my boxing days. He's getting screwed over by his landlord. Bastard's throwing him out of the house he was renting, claims he's doing something illegal and that invalidates the lease. Bullshit accusations, but he's . . . Deke's a good guy but he took a few too many hits and not enough mat, if you know what I mean.”

“Punch drunk?”

“Whatever they're calling it now. He's a little slow, but he's a good guy, good heart, probably doesn't even jaywalk 'cause he knows it's wrong. But you don't want to put him up against some suit of a lawyer, someone'd make him look like a fool. Deke'd come out badly. And the thing is,” Seth hesitated a moment. “Deke
needs
to stay in this house. He's been there for years, it's familiar, and he needs that familiarity. You understand?”

Teddy thought maybe he did. An older man, not entirely there, suddenly homeless? That was a recipe for a fast decline and a bad ending.

“What do you want us to do?” he asked, resigning himself to the inevitable.

“Hell if I know, whatever it is you do. I just want proof the landlord's a lying sack of scum, so we can make him back down.”

“What are they accusing him of?” Ginny asked. “The illegal part, I mean.”

“Bein' part of a dogfighting ring.” Seth blew out a heavy gust of air, smelling slightly of pickles and cigarettes, and his shoulders slumped, just a little. “Of all the hare-assed ideas ever. Deke might've hit a few guys in his time, but he wouldn't ever do that to an animal. And dogfighting? He's not a brainiac, but even he's not that dumb, and he sure as hell isn't that mean.”

Before the whole scandal with the sports figure and dogfighting a few years back, Teddy had never given it a thought, never known that that was a thing people
did
. Once he'd seen the photos in the news, he'd been horrified and disgusted, if not terribly surprised: people did horrible and disgusting things, especially to creatures that couldn't fight back. But it was ugly stuff. His first, instinctive reaction was to back away, fast, even as Seth insisted his friend was innocent.

“If you two are half as good as you say you are, should be a piece of cake, right?”

Ginny started to bristle, but Teddy lifted a hand, calming her—for the moment. Seth was even more wound up about this than he'd thought, at first. Whatever was going on, it was important.

“Is there any chance that your friend could be involved—even if by, I don't know, accident?” Teddy held up a hand again when Seth glared at him. “We need to know. People stumble into all kinds of stupid things, especially if they're . . . not the sharpest knives in the drawer.”

Seth glared at him some more, then shrugged. “Maybe. I don't know. But he swears he didn't do anything wrong, didn't do anything illegal. And I believe him.”

“Why?” Ginny asked. “Why do you believe him? I mean, you know people do dumb things if they need the money, and you said he wasn't, well . . .”

Seth pushed his hands against the bar, but didn't move away. “I can't doubt him,” he said quietly, all the anger gone. “You let someone down once, it's human nature. You let 'em down again . . .

“It's not in him. Not that. You gotta trust me on that.” Seth normally looked young for his age, but just then, he was an old man.

Ginny looked at Teddy and shrugged, just the slightest lift of one shoulder.

“Is there anything else going on?” Teddy asked. “Maybe a score being settled, he got on the wrong side of his landlord, somehow?”

“Deke swears he didn't do anything to piss the guy off, but, well, he wouldn't mean to, but the guy's got no filter, you know? He thinks it, he says it. Sometimes he says it before he thinks it.”

“So what do you want us to do, specifically?” Ginny asked, turning her drink an exact quarter turn, then looking directly at Seth. He'd given her enough shit in the past few years. Teddy couldn't blame her for pushing him, now.

Seth met her gaze squarely. “I want you to prove he didn't do anything wrong. Save his dumb ass, before he's
homeless, before this breaks him so bad I can't put the pieces back together again. He's only got a couple more days before he has to get out. He sure as hell can't stay with me, I barely got room to turn around myself, and who'd rent a place to him, in this market, without references? He was barely making ends meet in that piece of shit house, as it was.”

Ginny exhaled, a tiny breath through pursed lips. Unlike Teddy, she was a dog person. He could only imagine her reaction to the accusation. But—not for the first time—she surprised him. When she looked at Teddy, her gaze told him that this was his call; that she'd go with whatever he decided.

He'd said no to jobs before, especially after the walk-in freezer incident. He had a full-time job—hell, he had a more-than-full-time job. So did Ginny. Neither of them needed more stress, and it wasn't as though Seth was going to be able to pay them much, considering he knew exactly how much the old man earned. . . . But Seth was a stand-up guy, for a grouch, and he'd asked them for help.

And it sounded like Deke needed somebody on his side.

“All right,” Teddy said, like there had ever been any doubt. “We'll look into it for you. But”—he held up a finger when Seth started to mutter what might have been a thank-you—“if there's even the slightest hint that your friend is guilty, we're done and you drop it. All right?”

“He's not guilty.”

“All right?”

“All right.”

“Finally!” At
Ginny's feet, Penny let out a satisfied grunt. Her eyes were half lidded as though she were still asleep, but she had been listening to the humans talking above them. Georgie's wuffling snore rumbled underneath her, and there were other people talking, so she couldn't hear all the words, but she knew the tone in her human's voice, and Georgie's human, too. They were sniffing something new out. Something that needed doing, or fixing. And that meant that things were about to get interesting again.

Penny yawned, her tongue curling against her teeth, and stretched her body out lazily, slowly waking all the way up. She wanted to wake Georgie up, too, but the dog would get too excited and distract the humans. For now, Penny would do what she did best: listen, watch, and learn.

2

T
he start of a new
job was always a tangle of excitement and nerves. Despite her exhaustion, Ginny couldn't fall asleep until well after midnight, nearly an hour after she'd gotten home from Mary's. Part of her brain was whirring excitedly, wanting to fire up the laptop and start doing research. But she knew that starting anything now would mean that she wouldn't get to bed until three at the earliest, and she'd be a wreck all the next day. She wasn't twenty-five anymore, that she could get by on four hours of sleep.

What that meant, though, was that she slept through her alarm, and woke up half an hour late. Georgie was waiting patiently by the side of her bed, paws on the mattress, tattered pink leash in her mouth, large brown eyes doleful. When she saw Ginny was finally awake, she let out a pitiful whine.

“I'm sorry, baby,” Ginny said, reaching out. “Gimme a minute, okay?”

A glance at the clock said it was only six forty, so she wasn't too far off schedule. Lucky, otherwise Georgie might have broken training and left a puddle on the floor.

The weather was damp and cool after last night's rain, but the trees were starting to show green, and there was a feel to the air that said it might turn out to be a nice day after all. Ginny nodded a silent hello to the other people walking their dogs, but didn't run into anyone she knew well enough to actually say good morning to. Back in the apartment, she fed Georgie and took her shower. Just because she worked at home now was no reason to fall into bad habits, and her brain worked better once she was washed and dressed.

On the dot of seven thirty, barefoot but otherwise dressed in black slacks and a button-down silk blouse, she walked into the small bedroom she used as an office, pushed a pile of paperwork she'd planned to file off to the side, and opened her laptop. She had until 10 a.m., when Tonica had said that he would pick her up, to do the first strokes of preliminary investigation.

“Residential leases, and Washington State law,” she said to herself. “Start there, see what turns up.”

An hour and a half later, she left Georgie sleeping under her desk, grabbed her shoes, and went down to the sidewalk with a travel mug of coffee in one hand, timing it so that Tonica's old Saab coupe swung around the corner just as she hit the curb.

She might not be able to organize the entire world, but managing the small things could be deeply satisfying, too.

“Morning,” Tonica said as she got into the car. He looked like crap, the skin under his eyes showing a lack of sleep and probably some dehydration. She knew that
his normal MO was to sleep through the morning when he worked the closing shift, so he was probably running on less than half his usual shut-eye. Ginny felt a moment of guilt, but only a moment. He'd been the one to agree to take this job, and to meet with Seth and his friend this morning. Hopefully by the time they arrived, his brain cells would have started perking again.

She offered him her coffee but he shook his head, indicating the to-go cup in the cup holder already.

“Did you have breakfast?” she asked.

“Yes, Mom.” Which was a laugh, because he was more mother-hennish than she was, ever. “Seth called me this morning; we're supposed to meet them at a place called the Regulator, over in Capitol Hill.”

Them being Seth and his friend Deke, their nominal client. Normally a meeting like this would be at Mary's, but Seth wanted to keep his friend in familiar territory. Between that, and the way Seth had seemed convinced the guy would fall apart if he had to move, Ginny wondered what shape this guy was really in, and if that was going to be a problem. But she'd agreed anyway. What else could they do?

“Traffic on 99's not too bad. I told Seth we'd be a little late, figured we could swing by the house first, check it out, and then head over.”

“All right.” She fastened her seat belt and rested her head against the back of her seat. “Wake me when we get there?”

She had only meant to doze, but she jolted out of a sound sleep when he pulled the car to the curb, and
stopped the engine. She wiped at her mouth, afraid that she'd been drooling.

“You're fine,” Tonica said. “A little on your chin, but otherwise—”

There was nothing on her chin. She didn't even bother to glare at him, instead looking out the window, matching the street number on the house to the information Seth had given them the night before. The house looked a little battered from the outside, the paint needing a touch-up, but the porch steps looked sturdy, and nothing was warped or sagging. Pretty much standard for the neighborhood, which had managed to avoid both gentrification and a descent into what Realtors would delicately call “fixer-upper status.” Someone had been trimming the hedges in front, too.

“Did you get a key?” she asked, wondering what the inside looked like.

“No. I just want to see the place. Get a sense of it.”

“Okay.” She had already looked the address up on Google Earth that morning, but she supposed he was right: seeing things in person told you more than someone else's photographs.

Ginny extracted herself from the coupe, and looked at the house more carefully from the sidewalk. It was a plain one-story jobber, off-white siding with brown shutters, and what looked like storage or crawl space under the eaves . . . was there a basement? Yeah, she could see windows set in the foundation to the left of the steps, so some kind of basement. Maybe a thousand square feet, plus
another five hundred underneath? Ginny drummed her fingers against her thigh, thinking.

“I don't know anything about dogfighting,” she said to her companion, “but if Deke was allegedly involved, I mean, doing it here, wouldn't they need more room?”

“You didn't do any research last night?” he asked, surprised.

Ginny shook her head. “Sleep seemed more essential.” He winced and nodded. “Anyway,” she said, “this morning I focused on renter's rights and lease agreements. That seemed more important, knowing if there was anything we could use to block this right away. I . . .” Her mouth twisted up. “I really didn't want to know, I guess. Anything I looked up online, even with a filter, there were going to be pictures.” Just the thought made her stomach curdle, and she wished she hadn't had that bagel for breakfast.

Truth was, her inability to fall asleep last night had probably been more directly tied to unease about this job than anticipation to get started. Somehow, this—the house, the job, the idea of it—just howled bad news all over the place. Then again, their first job had seemed so simple, and it had turned out to be really bad news, so maybe her spidey-sense was off. Or maybe she was getting better at listening to it.

Ginny suspected the latter was more accurate. She didn't say that to her partner, though. No point: they were already here, and committed.

“So.” She looked at him, and he shrugged, for once
letting the issue drop rather than ragging on her. Maybe he wasn't feeling good about this, either? Tonica played a tough guy, but she'd seen him with Penny and Georgie, and the animals in the shelter, and she suspected he didn't want to think about animals maybe getting hurt, either.

He'd left his leather jacket in the car, even though it was a cool morning, and for a moment she could see him in the burbs, daddy material, with a partner and 1.5 kids, maybe a dog. . . .

He didn't talk about his past much, where
much
meant at all. She knew that he'd gone to Yale, and that his family was of the established-in-society type. Moneyed. The rest . . . she could learn, easily enough, but she hadn't. Their friendship was the here and now, not who they'd been or what they'd done.

She wondered what Seth had done, that he talked about failing his friend in that tone of voice. But that wasn't her business, either.

“Let's take a look,” Tonica said. “Casual-like.”

They walked up the front path from the sidewalk, both of them tense, as though expecting someone to shout at them to get off his lawn at any moment. The porch steps were solidly built, the sound of their shoes on the wood echoing oddly, the way sound did when there was nobody home.

“Pretty bare-bones,” Tonica said, looking in through the narrow window on one side of the door. “This guy decorates in early basic frat boy. Considering Deke must be Seth's age, or close enough, that's depressing as hell.”

“Based on what Seth said, I doubt he can afford much.” Ginny looked around the porch, noting the utter lack of anything like a chair, wind chime, or planter to make it feel homey. “Not like you have all that much furniture, either, Tonica,” she pointed out. She looked in the other side-panel window, and shuddered a little. “But you're right. Not a lot there, and none of it nice.”

“Yeah. At least my stuff doesn't look like it came from Goodwill.”

Ginny had seen his apartment once. His furniture was definitely not Goodwill. She'd bet an entire paycheck, in fact, that some of it was antique. She reached out and turned the door handle, not really expecting it to be unlocked. It wasn't.

“You want to go around back, poke around, pretend to be interested new tenants if anyone asks?” Curiosity was gnawing at her now.

Tonica looked tempted for a minute, too, then shook his head, looking at his watch. “We're going to be late, if we don't get going.”

“I don't think our client's going to be a stickler for punctuality,” Ginny said, but she followed him back down the stairs and to the car without further objection.

As it
turned out, Ginny was wrong: Deke Hoban was a stickler for punctuality. He sat at the table in the restaurant they had specified, his hands clenched in front of him, almost white-knuckled, and kept looking up at the clock
on the wall. Seth was with him, reading a newspaper as though he had settled in for a long delay.

“We're only five minutes late,” Tonica muttered under his breath, while Ginny took in the scene. The Regulator was an old-style burger joint, faded and ragged around the edges. She got the feeling that it—like much of the neighborhood around it—was primed for gentrification, a slow, inevitable creep. It made her uneasy for some reason, as though the steamroller were aiming at them instead of old brick buildings.

“Man's under stress,” Ginny retorted, shaking off her own nerves. “You'd be pacing and driving everyone crazy, if it was you.”

“I would not.”

“Would, too.”

He obviously had the urge to stick his tongue out at her, just to see how low they could sink, but they were pretending to be professionals now. They bypassed the hostess, who didn't look too enthusiastic about greeting them anyway, and headed directly for the table. Seth put aside his newspaper and nudged his friend with an elbow.

“Deke, this is Theodore Tonica, the friend I told you about. And Ginny Mallard. They're gonna help you.”

Ginny grimaced at the way he made her into an afterthought, but she let it pass.

“You gonna get my house back?”

Deke was built like a bullet: rounded head, rounded shoulders, hands that kept fisting as though the only thing he knew how to do was hit something. But the face that
looked up at Ginny had the open hope of a child, set with the wrinkles of a man who had to be at least seventy.

What was it Seth had said? “Too many hits and not enough mat.” Ginny didn't like boxing, but she'd followed enough news to hear about the effects of repeated concussions, and brain damage, even more than what they were talking about in the NFL with football. That was why Seth had gotten out when he did, the story went: because he didn't want to end up like Deke.

It explained why he was being so protective of him, too, maybe. Tonica probably knew all that, which was why he'd agreed to take this job, even though she knew he had even more doubts than she did about the, well, the
smartness
of what they were doing.

They weren't professionals. They weren't trained, whatever she might say about being a trained professional problem solver. They'd gotten lucky so far, but—

“We're going to try,” Tonica said to Deke. “The most important thing is to make sure that we make sure everyone knows that you didn't do anything wrong. Because you didn't, right?”

“No!” Deke shook his head, then frowned. “No. I didn't do anything bad. I didn't do what Mr. Cooper said I did. I didn't!”

His voice rose with each word, a thread of hysteria creeping in.

“All right, Deke, settle down,” Seth said. “We're in your corner, remember? So you gotta stay cool.”

Both Seth and Tonica were using soothing, even-toned
voices, almost monotones when talking to Deke. Ginny took note of that, and tried to follow their lead. It was a lot like what her trainer had said to do with Georgie: you couldn't yell, or use baby talk, just keep a steady tone all the time, so the dog didn't get spooked or distracted, and you could keep her focused.

“We need you to tell us what happened, exactly,” Tonica said. “What did Mr. Cooper say?”

Deke took a deep breath, his hands trembling. “He came to the house. A week ago, just after I had breakfast. I had cereal, and soy milk. 'Cause I'm not supposed to drink regular milk anymore. And he knocked on the door, and then came in, like he always does. Because it's his house; I just live there.”

That had the sound of something he'd been told often enough that it stuck. Ginny already didn't like this Mr. Cooper.

“And he said that I'd done something against the lease, something bad, something illegal. And I had to leave, because he couldn't be responsible, couldn't have that happening in his property, dogs fighting and such. If I left he wouldn't tell no one. But I didn't know what he was talking about. I told him that.”

“Easy, Deke. Calm down, breathe out and in.” Tonica's voice was slow, soothing, his hand resting on the older man's arm. She'd asked the bartender to help her with the first case she took because his people skills were better than hers, the way he could get people to talk, even when they didn't want to, or were trying to hide something. It
looked like he was good at dealing with panic attacks, too.