Damaged Goods

Chapter One

I jerked awake in my bed, drenched in sweat. Eight years had passed and I still had the dream. I was alive, Perkins wasn't.

The room was a dark blur. My head was throbbing, and I blinked rapidly to clear my vision, but that didn't work. I stared at the bedside clock and forced the numbers into focus. 0430 hours.

I flopped back on the bed and stared at the ceiling. Was another hour of sleep really worth it? Did I even want to go back to sleep?

"Oh, what the hell," I grumbled. I turned off the alarm and threw the covers aside before slowly swinging my feet to the floor. I had an important meeting that morning and didn't want to be late.

I peeled off my sleep shirt and trudged into the bathroom for a warm shower, hoping it would relax me and wash off remnants of the dream. After a vigorous towel down, I put on my robe and went to the kitchen to brew some strong coffee. The paper wouldn't be delivered for another hour. I like reading an actual print newspaper. Yeah, I'm weird that way.

After filling my coffee mug to the brim, I dry-swallowed two Advil and sipped the hot brew. A poor substitute for the painkillers I was forced to quit, as part of my court-ordered therapy. My aching brain cried out for just one tablet from my hidden stash of leftover Oxy. Excuses and reality bounced back and forth in my head. But it's an emergency . . . Focus, I thought.

I puttered around the kitchen, making a simple breakfast of English muffins slathered in butter and Marmite (a salty British condiment you either love or hate). After washing the few dishes and utensils, I did a 10-minute meditation to prep for the day followed by yoga stretches to strengthen my back and get my head right. As I went through my ritual, I steeled myself for a meeting with a new client—a multi-millionaire no less.

I'm not what you'd call a real private eye. My return from Afghanistan was hardly auspicious. I came back a physical and mental wreck, thanks in part to outmoded or inappropriate gear and vehicles. The ill-fitting heavy armor had worn my spine down something fierce. As for the explosions I survived before leaving the country, let's just say noises as threatening as a slamming door made me as jumpy as a cat in a dogs-only kennel. Back then, scenes from the war played in my head like a movie on a continuous loop. Between that and my aching back, I couldn't sit still for even ten minutes.

A few years of physical and occupational therapy helped me manage the worst of the war's toll on my body. As for the mental aspects, I was still in recovery. Probably for the rest of my days.

I found office work absolutely unbearable. Office politics aside, my coworkers seemed to bitch nonstop about tiny problems—which drove me nuts.

I ended up working as a freelance researcher by developing the kind of computer skills needed to track down debtors—deadbeat dads, deadbeat moms, deadbeats of all stripes. I even did a little repo work, such work as I could get. That plus pain pills and therapy—court-ordered and otherwise—kept me afloat.

The most recent call for my services came right out of the blue—on a Sunday no less. I had been referred to Stuart Blaine by one of my previous clients. All my clients are by referral. Frankly, most of them aren't in a position to pay the freight for a legitimate private eye.

It's an unfortunate fact of life that one can't obtain a private investigator's license in Maryland if one is addicted to narcotics. According to the VA and the judicial system, I was such an addict. Advil, therapy, and yoga notwithstanding.

The fact that Blaine made more than enough money as a real estate developer should have raised at least one red flag. But he claimed it was an emergency and wanted to meet me as soon as possible. My calendar wasn't exactly overflowing with multi-millionaire clients, so we arranged to meet the following morning.