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Chapter Eleven

When Caleb opened his eyes the next morning, it was to an overwhelming sense of well-being.

No, he and Delia hadn’t shared a goodnight kiss — she’d offered him a friendly thanks for dinner and a promise to keep in touch right before she got out of the car — but he knew he was going on to the quarterfinals, she’d all but promised to work with him on his next flip…

whenever that happened…and the brakes on his new Mercedes hadn’t failed and the car hadn’t blown up as they were driving home from the restaurant.

He thought he could count all of that as a win.

A pause to throw back the covers, and then he got out of bed and padded downstairs in his underwear to get a pot of coffee going.

Sure, he supposed he could have paused to pull on a T-shirt, but with the thermostat set at a steady seventy-two degrees no matter what, he didn’t have to worry about getting cold.

As he waited for the coffee to finish brewing, though, he found his upbeat mood starting to slip away. Yes, he’d secured a place in the quarterfinals, but he had absolutely no idea what had been going on with Ty Carter or Aaron Sanchez, who might prove to be the more problematic of the two men.

At least Delia wasn’t going out for drinks with Ty.

Unfortunately, there didn’t seem to be much Caleb could do about it, except hope that Delia’s friend Prudence dug up some good dirt today in enough time for the date to be canceled.

Of course, if Pru did happen to find something incriminating, then that would add yet another person to his “do not trust” list…and it was starting to get pretty long.

First things first, though. He drank his coffee and then nuked a breakfast sandwich he’d bought at Sprouts before heading upstairs to take a long, hot shower. Once he was dressed and ready for the day, he checked his phone to make sure he hadn’t missed any calls or texts.

Nothing there, and he found himself frowning. Okay, it was still early enough — a little before ten — that Delia might not even be out of bed yet, although he found that hard to believe. When someone had that many plates spinning in the air, they tended not to spend half their weekend asleep.

But he knew next to nothing about Prudence and her work habits, except a few comments Delia had dropped here and there that made it sound as if her friend tended to be kind of a night owl.

If Delia hadn’t texted Pru right after she got home the night before, none of that research into Aaron Sanchez probably would have even started yet.

Well, just because they were going to dig up dirt on Aaron, that didn’t mean Caleb couldn’t start looking into some of the other players, especially Ty Carter and Paul Reeves, the man who seemed as though he might have some connection to Aaron, even if Caleb hadn’t been able to puzzle it out yet.

He didn’t have a private detective license the way Pru did, but he could still try poking around at the surface-level stuff to see if any of it pinged his radar.

After all, it wasn’t as if he had much else to do with his time.

Delia woke up to a message from Pru.

Aaron Sanchez seems on the up and up. Got his real estate license about five years ago. Before that, he was a manager at an Italian restaurant in Bullhead City.

That did seem pretty innocuous, and Delia could see why he’d wanted to move into a different career. The food service industry was not for the faint of heart…and had even crazier hours than the real estate business.

Pru’s text continued after that.

Went to UNLV, grew up in Laughlin. Parents still live there, younger sister is in Reno. I’ll keep poking around, but as far as I can tell, he isn’t anyone except who he seems to be.

Those words should have reassured her, but Delia knew that Robert Hendricks had seemed to be your ordinary, run-of-the-mill casino executive…right up until the moment when he’d turned into a demon and tried to kill both her and Caleb.

But as good as Pru was at digging up all sorts of interesting information about a person, there was no way she’d be able to tell just from looking at some online data whether a certain individual had been co-opted by a demon.

No, you had to have done something to provoke said demon, the sort of situation Delia was trying desperately to avoid.

Based on the information at hand, she had absolutely no reason to cancel her date with Aaron, even though all her instincts were telling her she should still back out.

Clearly, she needed coffee to figure out this particular conundrum.

She pulled on a robe and went downstairs, then started a pot.

A few years earlier, her mother had asked if she wanted a Keurig for a birthday or Christmas present, but Delia had decided she could get along just fine with her trusty old Black & Decker coffeemaker.

Maybe it wasn’t as fancy, but at least she didn’t have to worry about what all those K-cups were doing to the environment.

Cup of coffee in hand, she went back to the living room to sit down on the sofa and get that sweet caffeine flowing through her bloodstream.

Sometimes, she’d turn on the local news while she had her morning drink, but since it was nine o’clock on a Sunday, most of those channels would have already switched over to religious programming.

No, thanks. The only evidence of Heaven and Hell she needed had already taken her out to dinner the night before.

The coffee helped, though, and by the time she was finished with her cup, she’d decided she wasn’t going to chicken out of her date with Aaron.

Maybe that was a big mistake, but if it turned out he was just a regular guy, then she would feel like an idiot, even if she didn’t have any intention of letting things get serious between them.

He was good-looking enough, but she could tell they didn’t have the chemistry she needed to let things get past a first date.

And no, she wasn’t going to think about the chemistry she had with Caleb, because that would only lead her into a place she didn’t want to go.

Some fruit and yogurt and water, and then she went upstairs to shower and wash her hair.

No point in getting dressed up this early in the day, so she put on yoga pants and a slouchy shirt, the kind of ensemble that was just perfect for wiping down the countertops and running the vacuum in the main living areas.

Then her phone pinged. She hurried to pick it up, thinking it might be another text from Pru, or possibly Caleb getting in touch, even though they’d already basically agreed that they wouldn’t see each other until Thursday unless some sort of emergency came along.

She didn’t recognize the number, although it had a local 702 area code.

I heard from a friend that you provide a particular kind of help. Do you have any time today to look at a property for me? It’s not too far from downtown.

Nothing else in the message…not that she needed too much more clarification.

“Particular help” had to be code for her ghost-clearing sideline, although things had been pretty quiet on that front for the past month or so.

However, since she knew that part of her business had its ups and downs just like everything else, she hadn’t been too worried about the current lull.

Especially since the last time someone had hired her for that sort of work, he’d turned out to be a demon in disguise.

She wanted to think the odds of that happening again were pretty low, but she couldn’t know for sure. And while part of her wanted to tell the unknown texter that she was busy today, she also knew she couldn’t turn down someone in need.

So she picked up her phone.

I have some time this afternoon. Would two o’clock work for you? I’ll need the address.

Two o’clock is fine. The house is at 1412 Desert Wind Drive.

Got it. I’ll see you there.

Thank you.

That was the end of the exchange. Delia gazed down at her phone’s screen for a moment and wanted to shake her head.

A lot of people would have suspected the whole thing was a setup for human trafficking or something equally vile, but she knew that people who reached out to her for ghost-whispering help were often on edge and nervous, and tended to forget important pieces of information.

Like their name, for example.

Anyway, she had a police whistle on her keychain and kept a canister of pepper spray in her purse, so she wasn’t too worried.

Also, she and Pru had taken a krav maga class at the local community college a few years ago, and while Delia knew she’d forgotten a chunk of what she’d learned, she still thought she had enough moves in her arsenal to fend off any would-be rapists or traffickers.

She wasn’t worried about the ghost itself. Ghosts — and now demons — were the reason why she always carried holy water with her.

However, those precautions didn’t mean she wouldn’t also take out some cheap insurance, just to be safe. She went back to the text thread with Pru.

Thanks for the info on Aaron. BTW, I’m doing the ghost thing this afternoon at two. 1412 Desert Wind Dr. If I don’t check in with you by three, can you follow up?

Apparently, Pru was already awake, because her text came back right away.

No problem. It’s been a while, right?

A little over a month. But sometimes it just works out that way.

Which was fine by her. Yes, once she’d figured out her unusual talent and what exactly she could do with it, she’d tried to make herself available to the people who needed their homes — prospective or otherwise — emptied of any spirits, but that didn’t mean she wanted to be freeing houses from their resident ghosts day in and day out.

Even when a ghost turned out to be mostly benign…

unlike the serial killer who’d haunted Caleb’s house…

working with them could still be a taxing process.

A nice, long break was just fine by her.

That break appeared to be over, though.