Page 4 of Script Swap (The Last Picks #11)

“Nobody died,” I said around my toothbrush.

In the bedroom, Bobby made a sound that wasn’t quite agreement.

To be fair, no deputy would have been thrilled about that night’s chaos.

After the lights had gone out—and more importantly, after the scream—the audience had dissolved into a churning, panicked mob.

The few still-functioning security lights were the only reason nobody had gotten trampled.

(That, and the fact that the people of Hastings Rock were, deep down, good and decent people.

Although you might have been hard-pressed to prove that point based on how Mr. Ratcliff had shoved his way past the women and children.)

“Nobody even got hurt,” I said through a mouthful of toothpaste.

This time, Bobby didn’t respond at all.

The rest of the night had been, if not exactly smooth, then at least not overly problematic.

Once the theater had been evacuated, everyone stood around in the street, with nervous high spirits and, yes, an after-the-fact thrill.

There had been lots of strained laughter.

Lots of wide eyes. JaDonna Powers (who had what I called church hair ) had thrown her head back like a horse and practically whinnied she was having such a good, wild, scary time.

Eventually, Terrence had come out and informed us that there had been a malfunction with the lights, and everything was fine, and wouldn’t we come back inside for complimentary popcorn and the second half of the show.

Tinny had stood behind him, masked by shadows so that she looked like one of those ink drawings in the scary manga that I’m not allowed to read.

(Per Bobby, Keme, and Indira—Fox said I should be allowed to read whatever I wanted so long as I didn’t interrupt their naps.)

To their credit, the actors had finished the play like true professionals.

The ending was a little different from how I remembered it in real life—instead of Keme saving the blundering Daniel Dank, it had been Pippi to the rescue.

She’d also clonked Vivienne and given a four-minute monologue as she assumed the mantle of Matron of Murder.

(Artistic liberty. And schlock, schlock, schlock.)

(But look who’s talking; I was obsessed with a TV show called ThunderCats .)

Still, that wired-to-the-gills energy had persisted.

The laughs, when they came, had been a little too loud.

And at the play’s most intense moment—when a foolish Daniel Dank got trapped by the wicked Marienne—JaDonna Powers, in the audience, actually let out a little scream.

Everyone did one of those sympathetic-but-also-nervous chuckles. Because we were all still feeling it.

Because when the lights had gone out, for a single moment, we’d all thought the exact same thing: someone had been murdered.

Toothbrushing duties officially accomplished, I popped out to the bedroom. Bobby was on the bed in his grungy white straight-boy socks, striped boxers that had two holes in them, and a Volcom T-shirt that had been bleached by sun and salt until it was practically see-through.

Ladies and gentlemen, I’m not made of stone.

Here’s the thing about Bobby: he’s so handsome, and he doesn’t even know it.

Not at all. He’s got these muscles. He’s got miles and miles of smooth, unblemished golden skin.

He’s got eyes that are like burnt bronze, and sometimes, when he looks at me, it’s like I forget how to breathe.

(One time, not only did I forget how to breathe but I also choked on a pancake, and Fox whapped me on the back so many times I think they cracked a vertebra.)

Right then, Bobby wasn’t looking at me. Instead, his attention was fixed on the papers spread out on the bed.

One set, fanned out to his left, was a printout of a sample exam—more specifically, the detective exam.

Another set, to his right, consisted of supplementary materials: photos, interview transcripts, and the like.

One thing that made the case interesting to a crime buff like me was that the Sheriff’s Office used old cases for the exam—nothing that would compromise the integrity of an investigation, but real cases nonetheless.

The exam was simple in concept: the detective-to-be was presented with the kind of things a detective would come across in their daily work, followed by a series of questions.

It should go without saying that Bobby was amazing at it.

He was perfect at it, actually. Right up until the moment when he had to take the test.

Test anxiety is a real thing. (Ask me: I’m a connoisseur of anxiety; I know all thirty-one flavors.) Bobby, on the other hand, was not a particularly anxious person, although I had seen him freak out, for lack of a better term, on a few rare occasions.

For some reason, though, tests put Bobby in a weird headspace.

He could study for weeks, and then, when he sat down, his mind went blank.

He froze up. And you might be surprised to learn that freezing up is not a quality they encourage in detectives.

So, for the last couple of months, we’d been studying.

In the wake of the death of Bobby’s mom, I think it had given him a welcome distraction that wasn’t—well, trying to kill himself with work and exercise, which had been Bobby’s coping strategy in the past. Not that Bobby had ever said that studying was a distraction. Not that I’d ever asked.

I hopped onto the bed. The papers shifted, but only a little, and Bobby squinted up at me.

“I’m an unexpected joy,” I told him. “I’m a bouncing ball of happiness. I’m a chaos kitten come to scratch up all your furniture and fill your heart with love.”

“You’re on a crime scene,” he said.

I extracted the slightly wrinkled crime scene and gave it a glance.

It was a small room with pine paneling and orange shag carpet.

A counter ran along one wall with a pair of ladder-backed stools.

There was a safe against the far wall, its heavy door open to expose the empty interior. I held up the photo for Bobby to see.

He groaned and said, “I was doing a quick review.”

“Come on.”

“We’re both tired.”

“One.”

He gave me a look that made me suspect chaos kittens weren’t high on Bobby’s list of favorite things, but he leaned forward to inspect the photo. I counted to thirty in my head and turned the picture toward me, so that I could see it but Bobby couldn’t.

“How many stools are there?”

“Two,” he said. “One against the wall, still upright. One on the floor. On its back.”

“But how many rungs do they have on the back?” I asked.

“Two.”

“Uh, okay, that was a joke. Let’s see… what about the carpet?”

“What about it?”

“What did you notice?”

Bobby gave me that anti-chaos-kitten look again. “That’s not a fair question. The questions are multiple choice.”

“I do what I please,” I said in my best imitation of Fox. “And the universe finds a way.”

After several seconds, Bobby said, “It’s orange shag. There’s at least one clear footprint in front of the safe, but I don’t know if we could recover anything from it that would be usable.”

“Okay, what about the safe?”

Bobby was slower this time, thinking. He was so careful.

So thoughtful. I watched him sit there, unmoving, his brain at work, like he’d put his whole body in service of answering this question.

He was going to be such a good detective.

God, he was going to be such a good sheriff one day.

(I had plans, even if I hadn’t exactly told Bobby yet.

I was going to wait a good ten or fifteen years until I’d trapped him with a passel of kids.)

(Oh my God, I cannot believe I said that.)

(Please don’t tell Bobby.)

“The door has been left open, but it doesn’t appear to be forced.

That means the thief might have had the means to open the safe, but I’d also want to check for scratches around the lock to see if someone attempted to pick it or disable it.

And since our thief got careless, I’d also want to run the fingerprints through AFIS and see if we got a match, since that wasn’t an option back then. ”

“Very good, Detective Mai. You only forgot one thing.”

His brow furrowed in what might have been a trademark Bobby Mai expression: indignation and concern. “What?”

In my best evil villain voice, I said, “You forgot you should never have come to my lair alone.”

And then I launched myself at him. I scrunched up a lot of papers, for the record. But I also did a lot of kissing.

Bobby rolled with it—literally, in this case, rocking backward so that we ended up flat on the mattress. He laughed. A little. He kissed me back.

After a while, I stopped.

We lay there. Somehow, I’d ended up in the circle of his arms, and he rubbed my back. His breathing was soft and even and tickled the side of my neck.

The worst part was that I couldn’t even say what was wrong. Just that it was different. Everything was different.

After a while, he brushed his lips against my ear and disentangled himself. He was halfway to the bathroom when a knock came at the door.

Bobby glanced at me. I shrugged, so he padded over and opened it.

Fox stood there. They’d changed into some kind of dressing gown.

With a matching nightcap. And they were carrying a tray of cookies—Indira’s garbage cookies, which—name to the contrary—weren’t garbage at all.

(They’re full of deliciousness like M&M’s and chocolate chips and little pieces of candy bars that she chopped up.)

Fox gave me a look.

Disheveled.

Sprawled out on the mattress.

They said, “Good Lord!”

“It’s not what it looks like!”

“It looks like you were fornicating on top of your manuscript!”

“No! No! This isn’t my manuscript. This is—”

But that was when I grabbed one of the crime scene pictures.

Fox’s. jaw. dropped.

“No!” I shouted.

“Okay,” Bobby said. “Fox, did you need something? Besides the chance to tease Dash?”