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believer in energy outside yourself working to influence your life—the universe, chi, God—or you weren’t. Typically, nonbelievers didn’t believe in feng shui. I didn’t take offense, and I wouldn’t try to make him believe. I’d seen feng shui work a thousand times; I didn’t have anything to prove to Hudson. “It’s a little more complicated than that. Less fluffing and more heavy lifting and bell ringing.”
    “I wondered about the Christmas bells,” he said.
    I shook my bag, and it gave a faint jingle. Bells were a great cure for a multitude of feng shui problems, most commonly to get chi flowing in stagnant areas of a house.
    “You do that full-time?”
    I shrugged. “I work for myself, set my own hours. I don’t have to work full-time to get by.”
    “That sounds nice. Nine-to-fivers suck the soul right out of you.”
    I nodded, though I’d never worked a nine-to-five job in my life. The closest I’d come was shortly after high school when I worked at a nursery where I could spend most of my time out with the plants and far away from the building’s phones and lights and cash registers. It had been a peaceful job that built up my upper-body strength, but it didn’t pay well and it ruined all my clothes. It also hadn’t fulfilled any creative spark in my soul, something feng shui did in spades.
    “So, a feng shui consultant with an artist aunt. That’s all you’re going to give me? If today’s any judge, I’m going to have to do something spectacular to impress you on our first date, so help me out.”
    I lifted my glasses to my forehead, and he mirrored me. He looked sincere. “You still want a date after this?” I gestured behind us at Kyoko inside the trailer.
    “This is a hiccup.”
    “A hiccup.” My eyebrows met my hairline. “Does this sort of thing happen to you a lot?”
    “It’s a first, but I’ve got high hopes.”
    I looked away, but I couldn’t suppress my grin. We were in the middle of an illegal scheme we were only peripherally aware of, poised for prison time if we didn’t get this elephant back to a questionably sane woman, and he was flirting with me. I liked his style. “Okay, I’m twenty-six, like softball, play a mean game of Bunco, and don’t have any pets either.”
    A few questions later and Hudson knew I could converse passingly in Spanish, had lived in LA for my entire life, and had attended UCLA. The last was a stretch. While I’d gone to UCLA for college classes, I couldn’t enroll in a full graduate program. I couldn’t use a computer to type the reports. I couldn’t take the requisite lab classes. Instead, I’d taken extended education classes in interior design and feng shui, and I’d audited a few business management classes.
    In turn, I learned Hudson had grown up in Austin, Texas, moved to Santa Barbara for college, was headhunted for a cush electrical engineer position his senior year, and had been in LA ever since. He’d since found a new passion in designing custom high-end security systems for EliteGuard.
    I envied how casually he mentioned relocating. Travel for any reason was out of the question for me. Cars couldn’t get me out of LA without breaking down. Trains lasted longer, but I’d never stayed on one more than a half hour, afraid of what would happen if something that large and carrying that many people malfunctioned. Even sailboats had too much electronic navigational equipment to get me to Catalina Island and back. Planes were out of the question.
    An enormous boxy black vehicle pulled into the parking lot. There wasn’t a speck of dirt or a smudge of a fingerprint on the entire gleaming surface, and the black-wall tires glistened around silver rims. Hudson stood up, verifying the tank was our ride. I eyed the back end of the Suburban. It looked big enough to fit an elephant, at least a baby one.
    “Are you sure you don’t want to come with me while I drop the guy off?” Hudson asked.
    “I’m sure. I don’t want to