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“Your accent still needs work.”
“Yeah, I know…”
The elevators whisked me to the lobby and out the glass doors that led to the muggy heat of Miami in August. I put on my sunglasses against the blinding sunlight and stopped at a food truck for a fish taco, and I winced when a dash of spilled oil flared up in the truck and almost seared some poor guy’s eyebrows off. They scrambled covering the flame and snuffing it out, and I pretended I didn’t see the commotion.
I didn’t know what gods of ill fortune I’d pissed off and how. All I knew was that I’d been like this all my life, but the bad luck never seemed to apply to me—just everyone around me.
It had already caused an abrupt end at the last three companies I’d been at. EWO Operations had been my first real job after college, and I’d had a great year there until they got sued into oblivion, completely out of nowhere. Castleton Office Suites had hired me right out of the flaming wreck, and I’d been ready to dismiss the weird ending as a one-off until a catastrophic systems failure made the company go insolvent in an hour, its shares going in a fire sale and our clients tripping over themselves to back out of their agreements, creditors suddenly snapping for their share of what was left. A couple employees left for lunch with everything fine and found no company there when they got back, their access cards pinging off the scanners all of a sudden.
But I’d done exceptional work there, so it was easy for me to move on to my next job, a real estate officer at the regional firm Pillar. I’d enjoyed it for a year and a half, confident that the company’s fundamentals were good, we ran our business cleanly, and we had good relations with everyone we worked with. Thought we were safe.
Then the founder shot his wife, got in a car chase, and landed in jail. Turned out that was bad for a company’s image.
Having the three of them lined up on my resume—well, it didn’t look good. And I’d had a hard time for a second finding a job. María had scoffed at the superstition of it all, looked at the past deals I’d made, and she’d offered me a job on the spot. Queen Pearl had been good to me—a cushy job that valued me for what I really knew how to do, and María had always been good to me personally and professionally.
And then, just two weeks ago, our bright shining star in accounting, Philip Dauer, turned out to have a neat trick behind his great work: fraud. María had managed to keep the whole thing under wraps as much as possible as we got slapped with mountains and mountains of fines for accounting fraud, investigation after investigation, and by now, we were on the brink. Only a handful of people knew—Queen Pearl was a strong name, and most of the Miami luxury real estate business respected us as a small but elite group. It would have been just my luck if we’d disappeared overnight, but María had kept it together.
She’d stuck her neck out for me, a little bit. I didn’t really believe in superstition and curses, but I couldn’t deny the feeling that she’d taken a big risk bringing me on. And I didn’t want to bring her down after how good she’d always been to me.
“There you are,” Ruth said once I’d gotten to the meeting spot outside the front doors of the tall, glassy office building. She folded her arms, giving me an appraising look. “So, counting on you. Find anything?”
“Yup.” I hoisted my bag up my shoulder. “How are you feeling? Tired?”
“Tired?” She raised her eyebrows. “When haven’t any of us been tired lately?”
“Fancy a nap?”
She snorted. “That’s your brilliant plan?”
“Pretty much.” I gestured her away from the building. “C’mon. We’ll go hang around Mr. Garcia’s office later. For now, I booked us an experience.”
“An experience? What, a nap experience?”
“Literally.” I pulled up the booking on my phone, handing it over to her. “Mr. Garcia, turns out, is a big proponent of consciousness exploration and an advocate of lucid dreaming techniques.”
She took the phone, scrunching up her nose. “We’re going to ask him about naps?”
I suppressed a smile. “From what I can tell? He seems quite passionate. Should be a good in, as long as I can look like I’m as excited about naps as he is.”
She chewed her lip. “Where did you even find out about—”
“Standard procedure.” I waved her off, turning away. “I called his coworker, chatted a little, got her to like me, asked her if it’s true Mr. Garcia has some esoteric interests—I’d never heard that before, but it’s always a safe bet with these guys—and she offered it up. Said he was on a meditation retreat just last weekend. I looked up the retreat and did some digging, jotted down some questions to ask him about it.”
She shook her head, catching up alongside me. “You’re something different for everyone, aren’t you? Last I looked you were getting into jazz music, and now you’re a spiritualist hipster.”
“Ah, y’know. Bait the hook to suit the fish.”
She shrugged. “Hey, I get to take a nap and get away with it, sign me up. Let’s go, then.”
Chapter 2
“Sorry, ma’am,” the secretary said, a wiry older woman with a dour look, her hands folded defensively in front of her. “Mister Garcia isn’t interested in seeing the Queen Pearl agents right now.”
Strict woman. Tight body language, dark expression. Probably had to wear it as a defense—I’d seen it plenty in women who had spent a while in professional positions. Judging by her age and the number of odd idiosyncrasies she had around her desk, she’d probably been doing this longer than not—had installed herself into the position and it had installed itself into her. Had her identity bound up in the defensive posture. I’d have no luck leading her with an open posture.
I matched her body language, drawing myself up into a proper position, and I handed her a paper brochure. Furrowing her brow, she took it, and the moment her defensive posture was broken, I made my move. “Hello, ma’am, thank you for giving me some of your time. I am from Queen Pearl, but it’s not about that. I was looking up some information on Mister Garcia’s interests while we were looking for more options for him, and this meditation retreat came up. I know this is a little out there, but I wanted to ask him about it.”
“About this?” She raised her eyebrows, looking it over. “Is this soliciting something?”
