ONE
He sighed, grabbing a stack of newspapers off his desk and walking into the hall, switching off the light. He moved past the bathroom and opened the door in the back, turning on the light to his studio apartment. Dropping the newspapers onto the blue card table he used for dining, he went to fill the coffee machine.
To the left of the room was an enormous king sized bed with black sheets and comforter, a egg crate he used as a bedside table with a lamp straight out of the seventies on top. The far wall had a bright red couch, the material slightly worn on the arms, but clean and intact. To the right was a small kitchen with a refrigerator, sink, and oven. A huge coffee machine stood on top of the retro baby blue formica counter tops over top of the wooden cabinets painted in a hideous mint green. Everything was aged, second or third- handed. It had never much occurred to him to buy things. He usually realized he needed something when he stumbled upon it. The bed frame had been abandoned in the house of a deadbeat dad he had been hired to track down, the red couch from someone who had skipped bail, the coffee maker... well, the coffee maker was store bought. He didn't screw around about coffee.
He sat down on the black folding chair, opening one of the newspapers and continuing to read. Every word. He never knew what tidbit might prove invaluable on a job.
Outside, the rain pelted against the windows, merciless, unrelenting, the thunder loud enough to make the walls shake ominously. He sighed, watching the electricity flicker slightly. He was losing a night of work over this stupid storm. He was supposed to be parked in a car watching some investment banker pick up his girlfriend. He was supposed to try to get pictures of him boinking the mistress so the bitter wife could rake him over the coals in alimony.
It was a job that would pay well and he was sitting on his ass in his kitchen instead, reading about a string of heroin-related deaths in the tristate area. New Jersey drugs leaking their way onto the city streets, too strong for the locals, causing overdose after overdose.
He got up, moving to grab a yellow pad off the kitchen counter and sitting back down to take notes. It was probably nothing, but it could mean something if he had another case from a worried parent of an addict. Or a dealer trying to get out from under the grips of the supplier. Who knew?
Xander Rhodes was an eclectic private investigator slash private security slash what-the-fuck-ever people were willing to pay him and his varied talents to handle. While most of his profit came from the angry spouses wanting to catch their partner in the act, he worked the occasional case of political chess... catching a straight, married male candidate sthupping his male secretary. Or paying a dominatrix to diaper him and put him to bed in a giant baby crib at the fetish club, Limits, downtown. Xander laughed, rubbing the side of his face with his knuckles. That had been a fun one. Even though it got him into all kinds of trouble with Corey, the force to be reckoned with, black-haired bombshell owner. It was worth it, looking at the pictures of a grown man in a bonnet with a pacifier in his mouth next to a young, gorgeous woman wearing a hideous mumu with the word "mommy" embroidered on the front.
Crazy shit went down at that club.
And he did the occasional job getting kids out of street gangs or addicts out of crack dens and into the arms of their worried families. Jobs that paid little, sometimes nothing, but made him feel better about the nastier aspects of his work. The pictures that could be called nothing other than blackmail, the faces his fist had needed to collide with, the people he couldn't get to in time.
He shook his head, balling his hand into a fist on the surface of the table. He was having a hard time getting over the case he had handled two weeks before. Some chick working at EM Corp who had a stalker and came to him for help. And he hadn't figured it out on time. She had been taken. Kidnapped. Drugged. Tortured. Almost killed. He hadn't even been the one to figure it out in the end. It had been a fellow secretary of hers and her boss/boyfriend. He had essentially been useless to her. And visiting her in the hospital a few days later, seeing her bandaged and bruised, had been an image that kept him awake every night since.
Maybe he was getting complacent, slacking, not taking things as seriously as he did when he was younger. Maybe the steady income and full belly was having a calming effect on him. He remembered the days at the beginning, the clawing hunger that never relented driving him to dive headfirst into an alley full of gang members, throwing fists, taking a knife to his side, but still dragging the son of an affluent stockbroker back home to his parents and getting a check that could fill his stomach for a week.
Sometimes eighteen felt like a lifetime ago. And sometimes he felt like he had just blinked and fourteen years had passed. He shook his head. Thirty-two. It's funny how, when you're young, thirty seems so old. Back then you thought it was such a strange number that brought with it all kinds of maturity, a full bank account, good credit scores, a steady foundation to live upon. The secret they never tell you when you were growing up is that you never actually feel grown. Thirty-two felt like eighteen, perhaps with a bit less angst and lot less of a tolerance for all nighters... but the same all in all.
Xander sighed, looking back down at his paper, willing his eyes to keep the words from swimming. It was past two in the morning and he had been reading the papers for hours. He should have just called it a night and climbed into bed, tried to catch up on some sleep. But catching up seemed like a pipe dream after weeks of near-sleeplessness. What was the point in lying down until he knew he would finally just crash from the exhaustion? What good would it do to lie in bed and stare at the ceiling?
Then he heard it, discarded at first as a tree hitting a building or some stupid street kids out in the storm like they were invincible. But then it got louder.
A tapping. More like a banging, hard and insistent.
Xander got up from the table, walking toward the door that led into the office, flicking on the light. He waited for a moment, hearing only the rain pelting against the windows and the cars parked on the street out front. Then there it was again. Loud. Frantic. Someone was banging on his door. Hard enough to make it shake.
"Keep your panties on," he yelled, reaching into his desk drawer and slipping a gun into the back waistband of his jeans. It couldn't be good. Not at two AM. Not in the hellhole neighborhood he lived in. In the middle of an epic storm.
He reached for the lock, sliding it, and pulling the door open.
He wasn't exactly sure what he had been expecting: an old client, a friend in need of help, the cops. He knew for sure that he hadn't been expecting a woman to be standing there in black leggings, a gray sweater that fell half-way down her thighs, her slight body swimming in it, and completely drenched. To the bone wet. Like she had been in the storm for a long time.
She was small. Short, slim, almost childish in her delicateness. The neck of her sweater was stretched out, revealing sharp juts of collarbones and impossibly pale skin. Her long light blonde hair was wet, falling down her chest, dripping onto her already soaked sweater. She had a strange face. It was feminine and soft, but with a sharp jaw and small, straight nose, and big, round, bright, almost startling, sapphire blue eyes.
There was a deep purple bruise underneath her left eye and a split down the side of her lip, the skin broken and the flesh around it swollen. There were two small tears leading from her ear to the middle of her cheekbone. Bright red, but superficial. Scratch marks.
Her hands were still raised to hit the door, the skin on her palms cut and dirty like she had fallen and scrambled across the ground.
She was pretty. Xander looked past the cuts and bruises, the trauma, the wide eyes and saw what was underneath. Someone young. But maybe she was older than she looked. She was somewhere in her mid or late twenties, though she was built like an underdeveloped teenager. Her clothes seemed chosen to draw the least amount of attention to herself as possible, drab in color, the shirt way too large. Her face was gorgeous, doll-like. Her skin pale as porcelain, slightly flushed in the cheeks. From running, he guessed. Her ears were pierced, but there were no earrings, one of the holes looked stretched slightly. The nails on her fingers were painfully short, the skin around the edges red. From chewing them. From some untold anxiety. She held herself erect, so ramrod straight that she looked like she was ready to bolt at any loud noise. But her shoulders were pulled back, confident maybe? Determined, probably more likely. Prideful.
He looked down, her black leggings covered in mud. One knee was torn open, the skin underneath inflamed... like from road burn, like from skinning your knee enough for it to smart, but not bleed. He glanced lower, seeing one dirty white ballet flat. The other foot was bare, dirty. The nails were painted a happy, bright yellow. And there was a small, delicate silver ring around her second to last toe. He looked down at it, his brows drawing together. It seemed out of place, strange.
His head slipped back upward, taking in her bird-like tiny wrists. She curled her hands inward slightly, revealing her damaged knuckles. She had put up a fight, he realized, almost nodding his head. Good girl. You always fight back, no matter what the cops on television say. You always fight back.
A strange clicking sound had his gaze moving back up to her face, realizing that her teeth were chattering. Her lips were almost blue from cold. Her breath hissed out of her mouth, puffing in the freezing night air. Her head was slightly protected from the rain from a small overhang in front of his office. But she was starting to shake, her small body trembling. From cold. Or fear. Or underused adrenaline. Or all three.
God, he realized, feeling a bit pervy, he had been staring at her for way too long. He wanted to blame it on professionalism. He tried to take everything in. He had to observe the tiniest, most minute details, take them in, log them for later. You never knew. The smallest things could be important. But, he admitted internally, he really didn't have any reason to be looking her over so thoroughly.
And he hadn't said anything. And she hadn't said anything. They just stood there, awkwardly staring at each other in silence, the rain and the occasional crack of lightening an eerie soundtrack.
He watched her face for a second, waiting for her to speak. Waiting for her to say something, anything, break the silence. Give him a reason to look away.
Slowly, he raised an eyebrow, tilting his head slightly down at her. A face that, unmistakably suggested she better get on with it or he was going to slam the door. His fingers gripped the door frame, blocking her entrance.
She looked down for a second at her feet, standing in a small cold puddle, before she looked back up at him, her eyes big and pleading. Almost tearful. They were at that point where there wasn't any moisture, but it was about to spill out if one wrong word was said.
Her bright eyes found his and her mouth finally opened, her voice shaking from the cold and whatever she was running away from. "Please help me."