Tiny Glitches: A Magical Contemporary Romance (12 page)

“Yep.”

Diego opened the back hatch. Water trickled out. A noxious cloud of wet elephant, wet elephant poop, and wet carpet followed. Diego lifted his arm to his nose and stepped back. An easy-to-interpret neon yellow hazmat suit engulfed him.

“Did you transport alpaca back here?” Diego asked. Nose clamped, he leaned in to inspect the vehicle more closely. “No. Let me guess: two-year-olds? My sister has twins from hell. Two girls, right? Look like angels. Nope.
Hijas del diablo.
They make my five boys look like saints.” He shook his head and crossed himself. The hazmat suit gained a clerical collar, making it one of the more bizarre apparitions I’d seen.

“Kids can be real monsters,” I agreed.

“Look. This isn’t an on-site job. I need to take it back to the station, pull in our experts.”

“Fine,” Hudson said. “When you’re done, leave the keys with anyone from EliteGuard.” Hudson pointed to the intercom next to the door. “And I’d like it back today. It’s a rental.”

Diego’s eyes grew round. “Shit, man. Those kids owe you big. This one’s gonna cut into their college fund.” I stared at the sequined feather headdress sprouting from Diego’s plastic-shrouded head.

Hudson sighed. “Just do what you can.” He handed over the keys.

“I’ll do my best, but I don’t do miracles.”

* * *

I followed Hudson and his Monopoly-piece apparitions across the parking lot, calculating how many consultations it would take to pay for everything Kyoko had destroyed. Fifty consultations? Seventy? Everything I earned for the rest of the year? I stumbled against Hudson when he stopped.

“Where’s your car?” I asked.

Hudson gestured in front of him. I stepped to the side. The compact motorcycle was cherry red, with a huge round tank and low handlebars. The driver’s seat wrapped around the tank. A paperback novel–size leather seat perched behind it. A helmet hung from the handlebars.

“You’re kidding.”

“Wait here. I think Richard has an extra helmet.”

Hudson jogged back to the building and disappeared inside. I moved away from the slender machine. “He’s got to be kidding.”

“How far is it to Jenny’s?” I asked when Hudson returned.

“From here on a bike? About ten, twenty minutes. Why? Are you afraid of motorcycles?”

He wasn’t making fun of me. I appreciated that. Motorcycles weren’t for everyone. They certainly weren’t for me. Or at least logic said they weren’t. However, a wishful part of me admired the sleek lines of the bike and envisioned the fluid freedom inherent in the machine’s small frame. A hundred times while seated on sloth-like buses, I’d fantasized about switching places with motorcycle drivers, splitting the lanes and coasting ahead of all the congestion. Here was my opportunity.

I calculated the risk. Most vehicles could withstand me for twenty minutes. The Suburban had lasted almost forty. But if a motorcycle died, it could prove a lot more dangerous than if a car died.

“Have you ever ridden on a motorcycle before?” Hudson asked when I hesitated.

“Never.”

“I promise to drive safely.”

“Completely safely?” I asked, a little crestfallen.

“Completely.”

“Oh.”

“How about not recklessly?”

I reached for the helmet. Hudson laughed and handed it to me, followed by a leather jacket two sizes too big. The full-face helmet encompassed everything above my shoulders and smelled of hair gel and cologne, neither belonging to Hudson. The jacket smelled of leather and bacon.

“They’re Richard’s, but I figured you’d rather be safe than smell good.”

Hudson shrugged on his own leather coat, then took my bag and put it over his shoulder. He started the bike and gave me a few pointers. Mainly, my job was to hold on and keep my body in line with his. Seemed simple enough.

Getting on the bike felt like climbing a pinnacle. I perched a mile above the ground and a half mile above Hudson. When I leaned forward to wrap my arms around him, I cracked my helmet against his. The seat had all the comfort of a two-by-four under my butt. Hudson turned the ignition and eased the bike forward. I cinched my arms around his waist and tightened my thighs against him. He drove around the parking lot slowly until I relaxed enough to breathe.

“Ready?” he shouted.

“Ready,” I shouted back.

For the first few blocks, I watched the road streak past our knees, jolted by adrenaline each time the bike dipped left or right for a turn or a lane change. When I looked up, my breath caught. The world was in motion and I was at its center. Wind whipped against my jeans; the bike vibrated under me; the sun heated my back. The motorcycle’s muffled mechanical purr blended with the wind’s hiss. I tightened my arms around Hudson, savoring the feel of his solid body through his jacket.

My daydreams hadn’t come close to capturing the intensity of the experience.

Hudson took a sharp right and accelerated up a curving on-ramp, the bike dipping sideways around the corner. Then we were on the freeway, a tiny scrap of metal and rubber beneath us, thousands of enormous cars surrounding us, flying across the pavement at seventy miles per hour with the rest of the traffic. It should have been terrifying.

It was utterly exhilarating.

When we dropped off the freeway after threading our way through two backlogged lanes exiting at a snail’s pace, the surface streets were too tame, the turns too seldom, and the speed bumps in the neighborhoods were an affront to the pleasure of the ride.

It wasn’t until Hudson backed the bike between two parked cars that I remembered the purpose of our drive. I scrambled off the bike while Hudson held it steady. My knee popped when I straightened it, and my leg muscles protested the stretch. I unstrapped the helmet and tugged it off, fluffing my hair with my free hand. Hudson turned off the motor and pulled his helmet off, still straddling the bike. I couldn’t stop grinning like a fool.

“That was incredible!”

“Did I just make a motorcycle convert? Maybe when you get your license reinstated, you can take the test. You’d get a lot fewer tickets with a bike.” He tapped the motorcycle’s dials, a frown replacing his wide smile. “That damn curse better not have followed us.”

The muscles in my cheeks gave out, and my smile deflated. “Is it broken?”

“Not broken. Just giving me weird readings. There’s no way we were doing forty down this street. More like twenty-five.”

Eyes downcast, I shrugged out of the leather jacket and traded Hudson the helmet for my bag. He attached the extra helmet to the back seat, then stuffed Richard’s jacket inside it. Hudson unzipped his jacket but kept it on. It was a good look for him, but I turned away so he wouldn’t see the defeated expression I couldn’t mask. For a few minutes, I had forgotten I was me, cursed. I had been a normal woman, one for whom riding a motorcycle could be more than a once-in-a-lifetime experience. Sometimes reality sucked.

To combat a welling pity party and the accompanying tears, I distracted myself with examining the neighborhood. We stood in front of a dilapidated craftsman bungalow. Yellow paint flaked from the siding, and the trim sported more brown wood than white paint. Drapes shuttered every window, an ominous sign. A scraggly hedge and brittle, knee-high dead weeds suffocated a minuscule front yard. The slender lot squeezed between two larger homes, the boundaries defined in the front by the crisp, tidy green edges of lawns on either side and by tall wooden fences in the back.

Everything about the house, including the numbers placed at a slant down a wide porch pillar, screamed negative feng shui. I didn’t need Hudson’s verification to know we’d found Jenny’s place.

A partially cleared pathway through the dirt and dried leaves led up the porch steps to the door. No welcome mat greeted visitors. Hudson pulled the tattered screen door aside—it shrieked loud enough to excite the next-door neighbor’s dog—and pounded on the door. The sound echoed through the still house.

“I don’t think she’s home,” I said.

He knocked again. Nothing.

“Now what?” This was our only lead on Jenny’s whereabouts, and I wasn’t ready to walk away empty-handed. I wriggled the handle. “We need to see inside.” I pressed my face to a window, shielding the light with my hand. No shadows shifted on the other side of the curtains, and no convenient gaps revealed Jenny inside. “What if she’s here and not answering?”

“Let’s find out.” A jaunty white captain’s hat with a dark bill and a braided blue cord around the base of the brim perched on Hudson’s head. A gold seagull embellished the front of the hat. Paired with the leather jacket and jeans, Hudson looked like a cruise ship captain on shore leave. Perhaps a hipster captain, since he’d also accessorized with the black frames he’d worn at breakfast.

“How’re we going to do that?” I asked.

“We’ll just have to try another door.”

The side gate wasn’t locked. Hudson reached over the top and flipped the latch. I glanced around. No curtains twitched in neighboring homes. No pedestrians walked by. Across the road, a woman sat in her car, five feet from her front door, futzing with a cell phone. I gave a mental head shake. I was never going to understand people’s addiction to their phones. A ham sandwich rested on her ample chest, but that wasn’t real. Maybe she had an addiction to ham sandwiches, too. Either way, she wasn’t paying attention to us.

I followed Hudson into the backyard and he latched the gate behind us. The unforgettable smell of elephant poop assaulted my nose.

“We’ve definitely found the right place,” Hudson said.

The backyard looked worse than the front, if that was possible. Dead vines clawed at the wooden slats of the fence, and elephant dung moldered in the churned soil.

Hudson jogged up a wheelchair ramp to the back door and jiggled the handle. Locked. He pulled a familiar packet from his jacket pocket and selected two slender tools from the flaps.

“Was lock picking part of job training?” I asked.

“No. Just something I picked up.”

I shifted closer to watch him. There was no point checking the back windows; they were blockaded by drapes like all the rest. Hudson wiggled two picks into the lock at once, crouching to get a better angle.

“How can you tell what you’re doing?” I whispered. Speaking softly seemed appropriate for the current crime.

“By feel.” He paused and glanced over his shoulder at me. “Interested in learning?”

“Now?”

“In general.”

“Why not?”

Hudson grinned. A few moments later, the lock clicked and the knob turned. Hudson tucked his tools back into his jacket and stood. Stomach fluttering, I eased into the house after him.

With the curtains closed tight, the whole house basked in a twilight ambiance. We entered through a kitchen with bare, off-white Formica counters unadorned by a single countertop appliance. One side opened to a dining room with a low center fixture, a nest of blankets, a lamp, a telephone, and a jumble of papers and pens. The hardwood floor leading to the living room was gouged in sweeping arcs on either side of the kitchen door. Shards of the door frame and splinters littered the floor.

The living room reminded me of pictures taken after a flood. Concussions pocketed the lower walls. A high-water mark of smeared dirt and scuffed paint circled the room at elbow height. Above the line, the walls were pristine white and bare. A cascade of coupon mailers and junk mail mounded near the front door beneath the mail drop slot. Several children’s toys littered the empty room, most broken. A wheeled cage large enough to fit a person hunkered against one wall. Otherwise the room was bare.

There was no sign of Jenny, and our footsteps echoed in the abandoned house. Nevertheless, we tiptoed toward the single door off the living room. It led to a barren bedroom. The bathroom beyond had a bar of soap and a combination shampoo/conditioner on the edge of the tub.

Hudson crept to the closet and rolled the door open. Empty, without even a single hanger. He did one more sweep of the house before walking back to the bedroom with normal, loud strides.

“No one’s here.”

“I don’t think she’s been here for days,” I said. I plucked the bottom of a curtain in the bedroom. The fabric was stapled to the wall. This place gave me the creeps. If this was where Jenny called home, she needed some serious help—feng shui and mental.

We scoured the house for any indication of Jenny’s current whereabouts. I found a hair tie in the back of one drawer, some ketchup packets in the refrigerator, and a mop in a closet. The mail proved equally unenlightening. Every credit card application, refinancing offer, ad, and coupon was addressed to “current resident.” The clutter of paperwork in the dining room offered the only clues: bill receipts, lists of numbers, some torn scraps of real estate listings, plus several pages of notes scribbled in kanji on letterhead also printed in kanji. However, missing from our search was a convenient message saying, “I’m headed
here
next.”

Hudson pocketed Jenny’s notes. I spun in a circle in the empty house. “Where are you, Jenny Winters?” I asked.

“Not here, and I don’t think she’s coming back,” Hudson said.

I had to agree. Frustration knotted my shoulders. “This is crap. We’re no closer to finding her and getting rid of Kyoko than we were yesterday. An now, on top of elephant smuggling, I can add breaking and entering to my list of crimes.”