Hot Rocks

counter. It pleased her to see the way he switched between sommelier duties and playing with the dog. To give him a break, she squatted down to get a tin from a base cabinet.
    “Henry! Want a treat!”
    The dog deserted the rope instantly to go into a crazed display of leaping, trembling, barking. Max could have sworn he saw tears of desperation in the dog’s eyes as Laine held up a Milk-Bone biscuit.
    “Only good dogs get treats,” she said primly, and Henry plopped his butt on the floor and shuddered with the effort of control. When she gave the biscuit a toss, Henry nipped it out of the air the way a veteran right fielder snags a pop-up. He raced away with it like a thief.
    “What, you lace them with coke?”
    “His name is Henry, and he’s a Milk-Bone addict. That’ll keep him busy for five minutes.” She pulled out a skillet. “I need to sauté the chicken.”
    “Sauté the chicken.” He moaned it. “Oh boy.”
    “You really are easy.”
    “That doesn’t insult me.” He waited while she got a package of chicken breasts from the refrigerator and began slicing them into strips. “Can you talk and do that?”
    “I can. I’m very skilled.”
    “Cool. So, how was business?”
    She picked up the wine he’d set beside her, sipped. “Do you want to know how things went today in the world of retail, or if I saw anything suspicious?”
    “Both.”
    “We did very well today, as it happens. I sold a very nice Sheraton sideboard, among other things. It didn’t appear that anything in the shop, or my office, or the storeroom was disturbed—except for a little blood on the floor in the back room, which I assume is yours.” She drizzled oil in the skillet, then glanced at him. “How’s your head?”
    “Better.”
    “Good. And I saw no suspicious characters other than Mrs. Franquist, who comes in once or twice a month to crab about my prices. So how was your day?”
    “Busy, until naptime.” He filled her in while she laid the chicken strips in the heated oil, then started prepping the salad.
    “I guess there are a lot of days like that, where you go around asking a lot of questions and not really getting any answers.”
    “A no is still an answer.”
    “I suppose it is. Why does a nice boy from Savannah go to New York to be a private detective?”
    “First he decides to be a cop because he likes figuring things out and making them right. At least as right as they can be made. But it’s not a good fit. He doesn’t play well with others.”
    She smiled a little as she went back to the salad. “Doesn’t he?”
    “Not so much. And all those rules, they start itching. Like a collar that’s too tight. He figures out what he really likes to do is look under rocks, but he likes to pick the rocks. To do that, you’ve got to go private. To do that and live well . . . I like living well, by the way.”
    “Naturally.” She poured some wine in with the chicken, lowered the heat, covered the pan.
    “So to live well, you’ve got to be good at picking those rocks, and finding people who live even better than you to pay you to poke at all the nasty business going on under them.” He snitched a chunk of carrot to snack on. “Southern boy moves north, Yankees a lot of time figure he moves slow, thinks slow, acts slow.”
    She glanced up from whisking salad dressing ingredients together in a small stainless steel bowl. “Their mistakes.”
    “Yeah, and my advantage. Anyway, I got interested in computer security—cyber work. Nearly went in that direction, but you don’t get out enough. So I just throw that little talent in the mix. Reliance liked my work, put me on retainer. We do pretty well by each other all in all.”
    “Your talents extend to table setting?”
    “A skill I learned at my mama’s knee.”
    “Dishes there, flatware there, napkins in that drawer.”
    “Check.”
    She put water on for the pasta while he went to work. After checking the chicken, adjusting the heat, she picked up her wine again. “Max, I’ve thought about this a lot today.”
    “Figured you would.”
    “I believe you’ll do right by my father for a couple of reasons. You care about me, and he’s not your goal. Recovering the stones is.”
    “That’s a couple of them.”
    “And there’s another. You’re a good man. Not shiny and bright,” she said when he paused to look at her. “Which would just be irritating to someone like me, because I’d keep seeing my own reflection bounced off someone like