Tail Spin

help it, she poked him in the arm and laughed. “All right, you’re loaded with hard-nosed experience. Now, tell us about your house.”
    “It’s old and needs lots of updating, but it’s mine. I’m still living in my apartment since there’s so much major work to do. My folks loaned me the down payment. I pay them ten percent interest. My dad told me to take my time paying them back, they like the interest rate too much. You built this house yourself, Gillette?”
    Gillette nodded and walked to the shining silver Sub-Zero refrigerator. “After I came home from the marines—”
    “Wait a minute,” Jack said, staring at the man who looked like he should have been playing polo, his valet waiting in the wings. “You’re a marine?”
    Gillette nodded. “Yeah, I spent ten years in the Corps before I hung it up. I grew up here in Slipper Hollow, went to school in Parlow, couldn’t wait to go out into the big bad world. Since home appears to be embedded in our genes, I came back here when I got out. Rachael and her mom lived here until she was twelve or so, I believe, when they moved to Richmond.”
    Rachael added to Jack, “My grandparents were killed in an avalanche while cross-country skiing when I was about eight. I never knew them very well, they were always bumming around. ‘Hike the world’ was their motto.”
    “Yes, that’s right. After you and your mom left, it was tough being here alone, but I didn’t want to leave. That’s when I tore down the house and started building this one. It was a work in progress for a long time. Been finished about three years now. I’ve enjoyed every project, Jack, and you will, too, so take your time and don’t cut corners. I made a cheesecake. Who wants strawberries with that?”
    This handsome, fit man who looked like an Italian count in his pale blue cashmere V-neck, white shirt, black slacks, and butter-soft loafers, was a down-and-dirty marine? He made vegetarian stew and cheesecake and laid that incredible kitchen floor; he built this entire frigging house?
    After his first bite of cheesecake, Jack said, “I have a sister who’d hunt you down like a dog, so great would be her desire for you.”
    “Hmm. She likes cheesecake, does she? Is she a lawyer like you?”
    “How do you know I’m a lawyer?”
    “The way you process information, the way you speak. It helped, too, that after Rachael called me, told me your name, I Googled you. You were second in your class at the University of Chicago. Good job. That’s a tough program. You went directly into the FBI after graduation?”
    Jack sat back, folded his hand over his belly. “No, I started out in the Chicago DA’s office, stayed only a year and a half before joining the FBI. My sister was first in her class, also at Chicago, eight years before me. Plus, she’s a vegetarian. So is Savich.”
    “Funny,” Gillette said, frowning at a laptop that sat next to a bowl of green apples on the long kitchen counter, “for an FBI agent.”
    “Yeah, I’d have to say that most of us are predators.” Jack thought about Gillette Googling him, about the state of privacy now, and knew anyone could find out he’d made a B in Torts in his second year.
    At ten o’clock that night, Rachael led Jack into her mother’s old room, which, naturally, Uncle Gillette had prepared for him.
    “I was wondering, Rachael, how does Gillette make his money? It’s obvious he isn’t hurting, plus he built this house and it’s really high quality.”
    “He does computer troubleshooting for several large international corporations. Exactly what this involves, you’ll have to ask him. I remember once he started talking about a tax scam he was hunting down in Dubai, and my eyes started glazing over. Go take a pain med, Jack,” she added. She raised her hand to lightly cup his face. “Thank you. You fall out of the sky at my feet, then you become my bodyguard. Add to that you’re fixing up your own house and I’ve gotta think you’re quite a miracle.”
    “I like being a miracle,” he said, and stared at that sexy braid before he left her. Jack took his pill and settled between lavender-scented sheets, unconscious in two minutes flat.
    As for Rachael, for the first time since Friday, she felt safe to her bones even though she knew intellectually that anyone with the proper motivation and a certain degree of skill could locate her and Slipper Hollow without much fuss.
    She lay on her back on her narrow childhood bed