Total pages in book: 109
Estimated words: 102903 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 515(@200wpm)___ 412(@250wpm)___ 343(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 102903 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 515(@200wpm)___ 412(@250wpm)___ 343(@300wpm)
My mind is as bright white as Diamond’s sex cubicle as I consider taking the job. I mean, it’s bonkers. But also, high pay and flexibility. Two things, with my life the way it is, I find impossible to turn down. Truth be told, if I turn this down, foreclosure, bankruptcy, and losing my mother’s caretaker are all in the cards.
You have to take it. No matter how ridiculous it is.
It’s not a diamond necklace, but it is a Ruby phone line. And I guess it’ll have to do for now.
“Sure. I can start today.” The words seem to come from a whole other dimension. A whole other person. This isn’t just weird—this is a different set of time and space parameters, unexplored by man, alien, or skinwalker. I don’t think there’s a single sci-fi movie out there that’s traveled the alternate universe I’m about to.
“Great, hon,” Margo says with a smile as she lights up another ciggy. “Let’s get you set up and acquainted with the equipment, and then you can take your first call.”
Me, the virgin, taking my very first professional sex call.
Oh, yeah. This ought to be good.
2
Dominic
12:00 p.m.
The door to the Presidential Suite of the Monarch Nashville stands wide open as I approach, a line of yellow tape stretched across from one side of the jamb to the other.
My partner and buddy, Detective Shane Maddox, talks to Officer Kutch, the deputy stationed outside the hotel room, while pulling on a pair of bright-blue gloves.
The housekeeper who found the body upon entry to the suite is giving her statement to Detective Wilkins at the end of the hall, and for that reason, I’m kind of glad I’m running late.
I know she’s shaken up, and I even understand it. She knocked on a door expecting the guest to be checked out so she could do her job and turn over the room, and instead, she found a woman dead. But a detective trying to get details out of someone who’s barely holding it together is like a dentist trying to work in a mouth without teeth—not completely pointless, but a technical waste of time. The poor housekeeper will interview better in a day or two, once she’s had time to process the shock, and at that point, I’ll be happy to do the legwork.
I take one last sip of my Dunn coffee before pitching it in the trash can that sits beside Shane and Kutch.
“Ah,” Shane says in greeting, an ear-to-ear smile stretched across his face. “The fashionably late finally arrives.”
“You know I always need a caffeine boost before tackling a fresh homicide.” I offer him my biggest eat-shit grin, grabbing my own set of gloves off the forensic cart beside Kutch and wiggling them on.
“Oh yeah.” Shane guffaws. “That’s right, Detective Dunn has to get his Dunn coffee before he can do his job. Otherwise, he’s too sleepy to solve murders.”
“Wait a minute . . .” Officer Kutch chimes in, his twenty-four-year-old newbie face scrunched up in confusion. “Dunn Coffee?” He meets my eyes. “That’s your family?”
It is, in fact, my family’s business. My grandpa Louie and uncle Patrick started it over fifty years ago, and since then, it’s become a bit of a global phenomenon. “I need a Dunn” is practically a pivotal part of modern-day communication.
“You didn’t know, Kutch?” Shane says, stirring the pot as always. “Our precious Dominic here could be sitting behind a cushy desk and running the Dunn Coffee empire, but instead, he’s chosen to slum it with us regular folk.”
Officer Roddy Kutch looks at me in the same way everyone looks at me when they find out my relation to the popular worldwide coffee chain—like I’m a foreign prince, set haughtily among my jewels.
While my family’s legacy is the reason I’m able to afford a twenty-two-hundred-square-foot apartment in Nashville’s pricey West End on a Tennessee homicide detective’s salary, I’ve never been the type of guy to take the easy road. I have a hefty trust fund, but I rarely utilize it, and I sure as shit couldn’t sit on my ass and live off my family’s money—even though they ask me to every chance they get.
I need a challenge, a reason to feel like I’m doing something with my life. Something that gives me a purpose and makes a difference to this spinning ball in space.
Coffee beans don’t give me any of that.
But being a homicide detective is the kind of job that keeps you on your toes. It’s fast paced, it’s important, and it almost never happens the way I expect it to. When I got accepted into Vanderbilt University, declaring myself a criminal justice major wasn’t as much a choice as the only viable option.
My family wasn’t all that thrilled with my selection and kept goading me to switch to a business major well into my sophomore year, but I was sure of my path. And now, at the age of thirty-five, with more than seven years of street-cop experience and five years of being a detective under my belt, I know I’m exactly where I’m supposed to be.