The Ones We Trust by Kimberly Belle Read Free Book Online

bob, then turns back to her drink. “But if you do your job right, nine times out of ten it’s the bad guy.”

7
    The next time I walk through its double glass doors, Handyman Market looks more like a haunted house than a hardware store. Orange lights and black streamers and miles of fake cobwebs are slung from every display and shelf unit, hanging above tombstones, cauldrons, smoke machines and every other front yard decoration imaginable. I walk down the middle aisle, past the ghouls and ghosts and glow-in-the-dark skeletons, sidestepping a grinning witch straddling a broom, in search of Gabe. I find him atop a ladder in the electrical department, loading boxes onto a top shelf.
    Recognition flashes across his face in the form of that extraordinarily ordinary grin.
    “Abigail Wolff is back, and less than a week later, which we all know can mean only one thing.” He swings himself down off the ladder, the metal rungs squeaking under his weight. “You flooded your house, didn’t you?”
    I pretend to be insulted. “Do you really have that little faith in my abilities?”
    He leans in, and his grin widens. “That bad, huh? Come on. I’ll show you where the shop vac and drying fans are.”
    “Ha-ha. My bathroom is demolished, and look—” I hold up both hands, wiggle my fingers in the air “—still have all ten. No water damage, either.”
    Well,
almost
none. There was a little excitement when a pipe snapped clean in two as I was unscrewing the showerhead, drenching me and the bathroom floor in the process, but I had the rags and the mop, and the water turned off in thirty seconds flat. The only real damage done was to my blowout and a wall I was already planning to paint over anyway.
    He holds out his hand, palm to the sky. “Let’s see it, then.”
    For a moment, I’m confused. “See what?”
    “Your list.” He steps closer, and I can smell the detergent on his clothes, the sawdust coating his apron, his shaving cream spicy and complex. “Does it have
Find Handyman ASAP
written anywhere on it, because I’ll bet it does.”
    His sarcasm, his teasing tone, his half-cocked grin. So far I like everything about him, and it’s distracting me. His closeness is distracting me. His thick shock of hair is distracting me. His looks as if it hasn’t been combed in days, but instead of making him look ungroomed, it makes him look really good in a way that makes me uneasy. Especially in light of what I came here to tell him.
    A bitter taste pools on my tongue, as if I’m sucking on old pennies. This is going to be so much harder than I thought.
    Because if I’ve learned anything from Chelsea’s death, it’s that I have a lot to make up to the universe for my hand in it. When I set in motion events that ended in her lifeless body hanging in the shower, I upset the universal balance just as surely as pitching the planet a few degrees would transform the earth’s climate. In order to tip the karma scale back to good, I have to
do
good. I have to do what’s
right
, which means I have to tell someone about Ricky.
    And it has to be one of the good guys.
    Just say it
, I think, glancing around, my gaze skimming over the lone customer all the way down at the end of the aisle, an elderly man sorting through a markdown bin. He doesn’t seem to be paying us much attention, and he probably can’t hear us from here, but I lean in and lower my voice anyway.
    “I need to talk to you about your family’s case.”
    Gabe freezes in momentary confusion, but it doesn’t take long for him to catch on, and his expression to catch up. The muscles tighten in his jaw, his mouth, the skin around his eyes, and three vertical trenches slash up the center of his forehead.
    “My family’s case?”
    I nod.
    “My family’s
case
.”
    “Yes.”
    Gabe takes two small but significant steps backward. “Are you a journalist?”
    “I’m a
former
journalist, and I’ve found something that—”
    “Jesus!” he says, and fiercely