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bowl of water was full before turning her attention back to Ric. “A trip to the dentist with your two front teeth on ice in a Ziploc baggie? Or maybe another few days of pink urine? Gee, that’s always
so
much fun. Setting my watch alarm to go off every ten minutes so I can check to make sure you haven’t gone into shock from excessive hemorrhaging…?”
    Yeah, telling her about the internal-injury thing had definitely been a mistake. At the time Ric had thought it would invoke a little sympathy, maybe make her extend the two-week notice that she’d given him back when she’d quit—on day one of her employment—when she found out she’d be sitting behind a desk.
    Time was running out. He had only a few days left to replace her or convince her to stay.
    And it was there that she had the unfair advantage.
    He wanted her to stay. Rather badly.
    “It wasn’t days, it was
day
,” he pointed out now.
    “I’m going in to find Brenda Quinn’s last known address,” Annie told him with that hint of bitch-queen, do-not-cross-me, I-am-determined, you-are-toast that he’d first heard in her voice back when he’d met her, when she was eleven and he was fifteen. Almost twenty years ago. Damn, had they really been friends for nearly two decades? Although he hadn’t seen very much of her in the last ten years…
    Still, it occurred to him that now, just as when she was little, the best way to deal with her might be simply to let her try. Just hang close to pick her up and dust her off in case she failed miserably.
    It wasn’t as if there were any real danger hiding in that strip club.
    It was, however, filled with relentless apathy, seedy despair, and unending depression. Spending some time in Screech’s might well make Annie decide against a career path as a private investigator.
    “Okay,” Ric said.
    She looked up at him with a mix of wariness and disbelief.
    Ric nodded. “Go for it. Go find Brenda.”
    “You don’t think I can do this,” she accused him.
    “What does it matter what I think?” he countered. “It only matters what you do. Or don’t do.” Which was more likely going to be the case. But she’d find that out soon enough.
    “Thank you, Yoda.” She gave a tug on the bottom of her T-shirt, as if that would somehow provide the illusion that she had real breasts.
    And thank
you
, Mary Mother of God, for keeping him from saying that aloud, because he definitely hadn’t meant to be insulting, just realistic. Not that her breasts
weren’t
real. They just weren’t stripper-sized.
    They were extremely nice, actually. And now that he was thinking about it, it was really her waist that wasn’t stripper size, which was good, because women who had that creepy, tiny-waisted wasp thing going on just didn’t do it for him. No, Annie was curvy and soft in a way that Ric truly appreciated. She was no skinny twig who might snap if you held her too tightly and he was
so
screwed because he was standing here, staring at her body, thinking about sex.
    And that was a serious violation of rules one through about two thousand and twenty-seven in the male employer/female employee relationship handbook. It came right before rule number two thousand and twenty-eight: Never, never,
never
employ family or friends—because how the hell do you go from twenty years of friendship to employment without completely screwing things up?
    Cursing Annie’s brother, Bruce, and his brilliant ideas—Bruce who was going to be mad as hell when he found out that Ric had actually let Annie go into that strip club, so he better never find out—Ric looked slightly more northward, and found himself meeting Annie’s gray gaze.
    Her very cool gray gaze.
    It was disconcerting as hell. If she wore heels, she’d be at least as tall as he was, and he was not a short man.
    “You’re such a jerk,” she said, clearly able to read his mind all the way back to his real-breasts thought. “What, do you think I’m going to pretend I’m here