Total pages in book: 130
Estimated words: 124971 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 625(@200wpm)___ 500(@250wpm)___ 417(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 124971 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 625(@200wpm)___ 500(@250wpm)___ 417(@300wpm)
“Well?” Riggs grumbled in frustration, no doubt eager to help Charlie without my watchful eye.
“Right. I’m leaving.”
I closed the door to my flat behind me and plastered my back against it, panting.
Reeling from my new discovery.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
RIGGS
Knocking down Charlie’s door was the easy part. I didn’t even need momentum for it. A front kick did the trick, and I got to feel like Kyo the Enforcer. Figuring out what had made him all confused and try to unlock our door and piss his pants was the impossible part.
“Hey, Charles, did you have a little drink today?” I asked, strolling into his minuscule apartment, assisting him by the elbow.
He shook his head. “No. Not in the last few days.” Ah, fuck. It would have been great if he was just a sloppy drunk.
“Let me grab you some water and Advil. Be right back.” I sat him on his couch.
His place was actually decent, in a Manhattan shithole standards kind of way. Lots of interesting geography and history books, cool art, shit he’d obviously collected from around the world. The sort of place I would have had, had I not been allergic to routine.
“Sure . . . ah, thanks.” Charlie sat on his couch and stared at his hands, elbows propped on his knees.
I stalked to his bathroom, straight to the medicine cabinet. This wasn’t about getting him a painkiller. It was about digging through his crap and figuring out what kind of pills he was taking. Maybe he’d skipped a few, and that’s what had caused this episode.
In his bathroom, I went through his medicine cabinet. Xenazine, Zyprexa, Klonopin . . . I’d never heard of those before. I needed to get him that Advil before he started wondering if I was taking a shit, and then a shower right afterward.
I emerged back with two Advil and some water. Charlie gulped everything down. He stayed silent for a while. I thought about helping him to a shower but then concluded he’d just be embarrassed if I offered. Best to ignore the stain between us. A stain, by the way, that must have been itchy and was starting to smell now.
“Is there anyone I can call?” I sat on a recliner opposite him.
He shook his head. “Nope. I have no one. How pathetic is that?”
“Stop with the self-pity, Charlie.” It was like looking at a mirror thirty years from now. I didn’t like what I was seeing.
“I don’t pity myself.” He smiled. “I deserve to be alone.”
Despite telling myself I didn’t give a shit, I did stay with Charlie for a couple of hours. I fixed him a bowl of cereal and some coffee, wrote down my number and stuck it on his fridge, then cleaned the place a little so he wouldn’t have to.
“Do you need anything else before I go?” I stood in the doorway. Truth was, I wanted to get back to Duffy as soon as I could and check on her. She liked the old man, and she’d seemed distraught to see him this way. It was grossly inconvenient that the wife I told myself was a shallow, money-grabbing stuck-up could feel so deeply for her old neighbor.
“No,” Charlie said. “You’ve already done more than I’ll deserve.”
“Jesus, Charles. Dramatic much? You didn’t kill my cat.”
I closed the door behind me and shook my head.
Asshole was too sentimental for his own good.
I checked in on Charlie in the days after the hallway incident. He seemed off, but not off enough that he was pissing his pants or forgetting where he lived. Still, he was irritable and pensive, which worried my ass. Was it time to step up and actually do something for someone else? The thought made me nauseous. At the same time, the temptation to offer him help had never been greater. Stupid fucking heart. It had been dormant for nearly forty years and all of a sudden decided to beat for all the strays in New York. Donating handsome amounts of money annually to charities and getting tax relief for it was so much more convenient. I wanted to get back to doing that.
Speaking of strays, I had another, hot issue on my hand—namely Duffy.
I ended up “hiring” my wife for three more days, a gesture of goodwill I had never previously made before. If Duffy suspected the post wasn’t real, she didn’t say anything. I paid her in cash, since she couldn’t technically work. And while it was laughable that Discovery would ever fund me a two-grand-a-day assistant, she didn’t know two grand was the kind of money my eightieth butler could wipe his ass with, if I wished to have one.
She clearly needed the money, and I was clearly so pussywhipped that I saw fit to start paying her for simply existing.
Duffy was actually a good employee, even though I had to pull tasks out of my ass to keep her busy.