The evening was on the cold side, and I had the fireplace turned on. He sprawled onto the couch beside me and picked up his controller. The large flat-screen TV fired to life as our video game came out of sleep mode.

We were playing a team game, real macho nonsense but stupid fun. We’d been dropped into the jungle and were seeking ancient treasure while fighting off other adventurers, giant spiders, wildfires, and a wraith who wanted us dead. We’d taken a break just before entering a sacred tomb so that he could deliver my note to my tenant.

Unsurprisingly, given how much rent-free space she was taking up in my head, I couldn’t let it be and had to ask him about her.

“ ‘Fine’ as in the slang way of saying she’s really hot, or ‘fine’ meaning she said she was fine, which is girl code for ‘I refuse to talk about this because it’s not fine but I haven’t figured out how I am going to make you pay for it yet’?” I asked.

“My, dude.” Jackson shook his head. “What sort of women have you been dating?”

“Recently? None,” I said. “Before that? Expensive ones.”

Jackson’s mouth curved up on one side. He had very reluctantly been drafted to be my messenger boy. The only reason I even managed to get him to go was by threatening not to finish our quest.

“On your six!” he yelled.

I whipped my character around and took out an enormous arachnid with three blasts from my laser. Zap! I got it right in one of its big red eyeballs. It rolled over with its legs in the air and then turned to dust and blew away.

I glanced at Jackson. “So?”

“You really want to do this now?” he asked. “We’re almost at the entrance.”

I thought about playing it cool and pretending I didn’t care what Annabelle Martin seemed like up close and personal. Yeah, no. Sometimes you just have to be at one with your curiosity, like a cat. Cats were curious and they were still considered cool. Right?

I assumed an indifferent pose and said, “I just want to know if she looks to be the type to have human sacrifices in my guest house living room or not?”

Jackson had started to take a sip of beer and sputtered, inhaling some beverage into his lungs. I paused the game while he coughed. When he could speak, he pointed at me with his beer bottle and said, “You have a dark soul.”

“Don’t I know it,” I muttered.

“No, she’s not having human sacrifices or anything else in her living room,” Jackson said. “She seems . . . nice.”

“Nice?” I asked him. I stared at him like he’d recently whacked his head and was now speaking in tongues. “I saw her. In the hot tub. In her bathing suit. She is not nice.”