“J&J pays me a very good salary,” she said drily. “I’m sure the agency pays you well, too.”
He turned back to the coffeemaker. “I’ve had a lot of expenses in the past few years.”
“I’m told that divorce is never cheap. Guess that’s what you get for being such a romantic. Is that coffee ready?”
He glared at the coffeemaker. “Yes.”
She finally lost her patience. “Let’s get something straight. I’ve lived high and I’ve lived on the streets. Living high is definitely more comfortable but neither place felt like home. My cottage in Eclipse Bay hasn’t ever felt like home, either. This apartment and the Dark Rainbow, they feel like home. Now why don’t you follow Petra’s advice? Get over it and pour us both a cup of coffee?”
He didn’t move for a few seconds. He just stood there, looking at her. Then he smiled slightly. His eyes warmed. He picked up the pot.
“I can do that,” he said.
She watched him fill two mugs. “And while you’re doing it, why don’t you tell me about your accident?”
He handed her one of the mugs. “I got shot on my last J&J case.”
“Shot?” Horrified, she stared at him. “I thought you said it was an accident.”
“It was.” He picked up his own mug, grabbed his cane, hiked around the counter and sat down at the table. “Someone pulled the trigger of a gun. I happened to be standing in front of said gun. Wrong place, wrong time. Pretty much the working definition of an accident.”
“Good grief.”
“I got what you might call a split-second warning,” he said around a mouthful of papaya. “Time enough to dodge, at any rate. The shooter was aiming for my back. Hit my thigh instead.”
“What happened?” she demanded.
“It was a routine referral from J&J. One of the low-rent private jobs. The client told me she wanted me to protect her from her ex-husband. Claimed he was stalking her.”
“Claimed?”
“She thought she could sucker me into killing him for her.”
“What made her think she could convince you to do that?”
“She was a level-seven strat talent. You know strats. They think they can manipulate and outmaneuver anyone. They always figure they’re the smartest person in the room.”
“Well, they do tend to make good chess players,” Grace said. “Didn’t she know that aura talents are darn hard to manipulate because we can usually see it coming?”
“Like a lot of sensitives, she didn’t think much of our kind of talent. Thought the only thing we could do was perceive a little radiation. She assumed that when we look at folks, all we see are human lightbulbs.”
Grace made a face. “Typical.”
“When she contacted J&J, she specified that she did not want to pay for a high-grade talent. In fact, she specifically asked for an aura.”
“She didn’t want to take any chances, is that it?”
“Right. She would have preferred to use a nonsensitive, a P.I. with no psychic ability at all, but she didn’t have much choice. She had told everyone, including her family, that she was deathly afraid of her ex. They were all registered members of the Society and they all insisted she get a bodyguard from J&J. She had to make it look good.”
“Bet she wasn’t expecting a powerful aura talent.”
“She didn’t know how strong I was,” Luther said. “But she wouldn’t have cared. So long as I was an aura, she felt safe. Fallon was a tad suspicious.”
“Fallon is always suspicious.”
“True. I shared his suspicions but neither of us could figure out what to be suspicious about, and I needed the money.”
“So you took the job.”
“The client assumed that I was just so much dumb muscle on the hoof.”
“Bless her heart.”
“I regret to report that she was not too far off in her assumption,” Luther said. “She damn near got me killed.”
“How?”
“The ex wasn’t stalking her. He didn’t want anything to do with her. When it finally dawned on me that she wanted me to get rid of him, I informed her I wasn’t in that line of work. Like I said, she was a strat. She realized immediately that I wasn’t just walking away from the job. She knew I’d probably warn her ex.”
“What happened?”
“She lost it.” Luther took a bite of his scrambled eggs and swallowed. “Flew into a rage and started screaming that I had ruined everything. Told me the whole story. That’s when I found out why she wanted her ex dead.”
“Can I assume you tweaked her aura a tad to prod her into losing her temper and spilling her guts?”
He shrugged. “Figured by that time I had a right to know what she was up to. Turned out the reason that she wanted her ex dead was because she stood to inherit his share of the business they had founded together.”
“That’s when she shot you?”
“No. While she was screaming at me and I was concentrating on manipulating her aura, her lover walked out of the hallway behind me and shot me.”
“There was a lover involved?”
“It was a complicated situation.”
“How did you get your one-second warning?”
“I was facing away from the hall. But the client was looking straight at it while she yelled at me. When she saw her lover with the gun, I saw her aura spike. I knew something had changed in the situation. Cop instinct took over from there. Caught the bullet in my thigh. Before the lover could line up another shot, I put him to sleep.”
Grace shuddered. “Close call. What happened to your client and her lover?”
“They’re both sitting in prison at the moment. Probably be out on an early-release program. The family has a lot of money and more than one talented lawyer on the tree.”
She nodded and ate the papaya very slowly, trying to make the moment last as long as possible. It was all so perfect, she thought. The sun-warmed room, the light, floral breeze off the lanai; Luther sitting there with her. Life didn’t get any better than this. But such moments could not last forever. She knew that better than most. After a while she put down her spoon.
“We need to talk,” she said.
“Oh, shit.”
She frowned. “What now?”
“I hate conversations that start with ‘We need to talk.’ ”