Swift Justice Read Online Free

“Thanks for listening.”
    “I live to serve.”
    From anyone else, it would’ve been a joke. He clomped down the deck stairs and I tracked his progress across the thin strip of woods that separated our houses by the sound of rustling leaves and snapping twigs. His door creaked open a hundred yards away—I really needed to go over there with my WD-40—and a faint “good night” drifted to me.
    “ ’Night,” I called back.
    The night seemed darker in the silence after his door banged shut. I collected Dan’s glass and my bottle and took them inside, carefully bolting the deck door behind me. I didn’t want the bear helping himself to my Oreos.
     
    (Tuesday)
     
    Make the best of it, make the best of it
, I chanted to myself at seven the next morning as I parked my Subaru outside theoffice next to Gigi’s Hummer.
Make the best of it.
I pushed the door open.
Make the
—
    “Oh, my God!” I stared in dismay at my office. A ficus tree in a pink ceramic pot sat to the right of the door, its leaves tickling my face. The smell of coffee wafted through the room, emanating from the pot perched on a crocheted doily atop the file cabinet. Two mugs—one with Garfield the Cat and the other embossed with blue stars and the slogan REACH FOR THE STARS !—sat beside the pot. For clients, no doubt. A poster of kittens in a basket of yarn balls simpered from the wall behind the desk I’d have to get used to thinking of as Gigi’s. Framed family photos, a potpourri bowl filled with stinky mulch, a dish of pink M&Ms, a foot-high plaster rooster wearing a necklace of linked paper clips, a three-tier in-box of lavender acrylic, and a small stereo spewing New Agey–sounding woodwinds obscured the desk. Gigi smiled at me from the chair she’d customized with a beaded seat and a cream-colored cardigan draped across the back.
    “Good morning!” Her voice and smile were as happy as the short-sleeved yellow blouse and matching slacks she wore. She looked like a giant canary.
    “What the hell is all this?” I asked, my arm sweeping out to embrace the entire office. I started toward my desk, an oasis of simplicity and bareness in this gift shop hell, and tripped over an area rug frolicking with parrots and jungle foliage.
    Her smile faltered. “I just moved in a few things to make it feel more homey.”
    “This isn’t home. It’s a place of business where our clients expect professionalism, not ducklings,” I said, spotting a duckling planter sprouting wheatgrass on the windowsill.
    “It’s my philosophy that customers feel more comfortable in an atmosphere that reminds them of home,” she said, the southern accent thickening.
    “Well, no one would feel at home in this unless they lived in a Hallmark store,” I said. “Get rid of it.”
    “No.”
    The single word took me aback, and I stared across the room at her. Her pleasant face wore an obstinate look, and her mouth was set in a mulish line.
    “It’s my office.”
    “It’s
our
office,” she returned, “and since we’re going to be working together, we have to learn to compromise, reach consensus.”
    Screw consensus. That was probably the word du jour at her charity committee meetings. I bit back the profanities that threatened to spill out and tried reason. “Look, Gigi, you might know best what works in a beauty parlor, but you’ve got to understand that people looking to hire a private investigator are looking for a different . . . aesthetic than women wanting acrylic nails or a perm.”
    She folded her own manicured nails into her palms. “I can accept that,” she said after a full minute of thought. “Maybe if I put the duckling planter in the bathroom?”
    Gaagh. She wasn’t getting it. I felt like I was wrestling an eel. “That’s a start,” I choked out. “I’ll help you put the rest back in your car after work.”
    She held my gaze for a moment, then bent her head to continue reading from the open file folder on her desk.
    “What’s