Rose quickly snatched a piece of scrap paper from her purse and scribbled out her cell phone number, handing it to him giddily. “Thank you so much! You won’t regret it!”
“I’m sure I won’t,” he replied, beaming.
Rose gave him one final nod and then hurried out the door, fireworks exploding in the back of her mind. This was insane! What a ridiculous day! She hardly cared about her ruined heels and her crappy afternoon now—things were finally looking up!
As she rushed by the nurses’ station on her way to the elevator, she overheard a couple of them whispering among themselves about a strange irregularity in Joseph Sanford’s chart.
“It was weird,” muttered one of them, dressed in pink scrubs. “The puncture marks on his neck indicate he was shot with a tranquilizer.”
“Maybe it’s some awful new way to mug people without them fighting back,” suggested another.
An older, third nurse said gravely, “Yes, yes. But the amount of tranquilizer in his bloodstream… that’s the kind of stuff used to take down a wild animal. Like a bear.”
“How is he even alive?” asked Pink Scrubs, wide-eyed.
“A miracle?”
“Something like that,” sai
d the older nurse darkly.
Rose walked away with a head full of question. Someone had jumped on her new boss and tranquilized him. For what purpose? He wasn’t robbed. His wallet was intact. And why had he told the doctor he didn’t remember anything? Was he lying?
Her logic told her to stay away from Joseph Sandford but her heart ordered the opposite.
She must help him.
Besides, Joe had just offered her a job. A job she desperately needed.
And there was another thing, when he held her hand, her heart wouldn’t stop thumping like crazy. It had been forever since a man made her heart beat like that.
And Rose couldn’t just let that feeling go.
Chapter Two
Joe Sandford didn’t have a moment to waste as he made his way through the labyrinth of servers in the dimly lit room. The hum of computers all around him and a hundred fans keeping them cool, muffled his steps as he moved quietly.
It had been quite a night, he had to admit. Tailing the head of IT systems at ArisCorp was easy enough—that was the kind of work any private eye could take care of. He was a predictable man, balding and in his forties, an unmarried workaholic. Finding out which strip clubs he frequented was the easiest part of this whole job.
Paying one of the dancers to get him drinks all night had been the next step. Again, pure child’s play. He had good rapport with the dancers all around Cleveland. Any successful private eye had to if they wanted any information that was worth a damn. Nobody had more secrets spilled to them than strippers, and unfortunately for most private eyes, nobody held onto those secrets as well as them, either.
Joe, however, wasn’t most private eyes. He had the intuition to know which palms to grease and the money to make sure the bribes were generous. For a job like this one, they had to be. Slipping at any step meant alerting some powerful enemies.
For him, though, the prospect of more enemies felt like just a drop in the bucket compared to what else he was up against. But now was no time for reminiscing on the past.
He’d swiped the cardkey the IT admin had in his coat pocket and left it unzipped. When the man would come to later today, he’d think he had just left it at the strip club—and that was precisely where Joe meant to leave it after the job was over.
Nobody would be the wiser.
Getting into the ArisCorp headquarters had been another issue altogether. But Joe had learned long ago the art of moving through the shadows like a vesper, and he had tricks of the trade that made him more silent than the most seasoned of operatives. Tricks that were almost totally unique to him, in fact.
He had to admit, as many budget cuts as ArisCorp had made over the years, security was not one of them by a long shot. Some of the dozen-or-so guards he’d seen posted around the perimeter were men he knew from other jobs like this, and they were notoriously ruthless and efficient. That didn’t make much of a difference when he had been slipping around them silently, but he could at least appreciate that ArisCorp knew quality when it came to security.
Joe was here on what he considered a routine job. Of course, he thought, most of the jobs these days were awfully dull, so accepting a job from the little environmentalist nonprofit Green Futures to get some dirt on an industrial giant like ArisCorp was just too good to turn down, even if the money they were offering was a pittance.
Green Futures was concerned about a sudden disturbance in one of the wildlife preserves outside Cleveland. A few of the environmental scientists on their team apparently detected several kinds of toxins in the environment—none of the usual suspects for the Cleveland area, as it happened. They learned that one of their own officers had been approached with an offer of a large sum of money to turn a blind eye to that particular part of the wildlife preserve—that any misunderstandings could be covered up by the agent’s lawyers. Fortunately for Green Futures, the officer they approached wouldn’t be bought, so they hired Joe to investigate corporate activity—specifically, toxic waste dumping.
ArisCorp was a relative newcomer to Cleveland, which in itself was almost a dead giveaway. Hell, they’d been run out of California for dumping back in the 90s. Getting hard evidence on them was the hard part. But that was what made things more fun, Joe thought with a smile.