Fired Up

lights above the front doors and the occasional glow from an upstairs window.
    “You see, this is one of the reasons I ended my relationship with Fletcher,” she said to Hector. “He’s unreliable. He can’t help himself. He makes a commitment, and then he can’t follow through on it.”
    Her satchel was on the floor in front of Hector. She fumbled briefly with the straps, reached inside and found her phone. Fletcher was still on her list of contacts under Personal.
    “Should have moved him to Business,” she told Hector.
    She punched in the number. Four rings later she was dumped into voice mail. She did not leave a message.
    “To be fair, I suppose it’s possible that he’s not actually having sex with a new girlfriend,” she said. “Highly unlikely but possible. Maybe he just fell asleep in front of the TV. Guys do that.”
    Hector looked at her, patient as always. She did not do a lot of stakeout work. With the advent of the Internet it had become increasingly unnecessary. If you wanted to verify that a person who was filing a medical disability claim with his insurance company didn’t really have to wear a neck brace all you had to do was check out his home page at one of the social networking sites or find his blog. Invariably the claimant had posted numerous photos of his recent skiing vacation or hiking trip together with a chatty little comment about how much fun he’d had and how he planned to spend the money he would get when the insurance company settled his claim. And she never did divorce work, period. It was one of her rules.
    She almost never took cases like the one she was on tonight, either. They were always messy. But she’d made the fatal mistake of letting herself feel sorry for Fletcher.
    “I admit I have a soft spot for him,” she said to Hector. “That’s because for a few brief, shining moments I was convinced that he was Mr. Perfect. I was actually thinking of giving up celibacy for him. It’s not his fault it turned out that I was wrong.”
    She sat quietly for a few more minutes, contemplating the almost-dark house. Invisible energy feathered her senses.
    “There’s something screwy with this picture, Hector.”
    Hector yawned.
    She tried Fletcher’s number again. Still no answer. She closed the phone.
    “Okay, that’s it, we’re going to wake him up,” she announced. “I don’t care if he is having great sex. It will serve him right if we interrupt his postcoital glow.”
    She plucked the leash from the dashboard and attached it to Hector’s collar. They got out of the car. She took a minute to transfer the tiny camera and her phone to the pocket of her trench coat.
    She stashed the satchel in the trunk and picked up the end of Hector’s leash. Together they crossed the street in the middle of the block and went up the front walk to the door of Fletcher’s house.
    The flickering glow of the television set showed at the cracks in the curtains. The bluish light appeared eerie for some inexplicable reason. Once again, she felt the hair stir on the nape of her neck. Instinctively she ramped up her senses a little and looked around. There were several layers of psi prints on the steps and the doorknob but none of the dreamlight looked fresh or dangerous. Most of the residue had been left by Fletcher.
    “Nerves,” she said to Hector. “Probably shouldn’t have had that second cup of coffee.”
    She leaned on the bell for a while and listened to the muffled sound of the chimes inside. There was no response. Her skin prickled. She looked down at Hector. He appeared monumentally unconcerned.
    “Well, you never did like Fletcher,” she said. “If he actually was in trouble in there you’d probably just lift a leg and pee on him.”
    She tried the door, expecting to find it locked. It was. Fletcher had become very security conscious recently.
    She glanced back down at Hector. He was idly sniffing the ceramic planter on the front step. As she watched, he marked the territory, but she could tell his heart wasn’t in it. Nothing about Fletcher interested Hector.
    “But he’s a client now,” she explained. “We can’t just ignore this.”
    Hector looked bored.
    She dug into another pocket of her trench coat and found the high-tech tool that her cousin Abe had given her as a birthday gift. “Any respectable PI should be able to pick a lock,” he’d explained. “This little gadget will open just about any standard- issue door lock. Think of me whenever