Damaged Goods

Chapter 1-1

Chapter One

I jerked awake in my bed in Wheaton, Maryland, bathed in sweat. Eight years had passed and I still had the dream. I was alive, Perkins wasn’t.

The room was a dark blur. My head throbbed. I blinked rapidly to clear my vision, but it continued to go in and out. I stared at the bedside clock and forced the numbers into focus. 0430 hours.

I flopped back on the bed and stared at the ceiling. Was another hour of sleep really worth it? Did I even want to go back to sleep?

“Oh, what the hell,” I grumbled. I turned off the alarm, threw the covers aside, and got up. I had an important meeting that morning and didn’t want to be late.

I peeled off my sleep shirt, trudged to the bathroom, and took a warm shower in a bid to relax and ward off remnants of the dream. I toweled dry, threw on a robe, and brewed a strong pot of coffee. The paper wouldn’t be delivered for another hour. I like reading an actual newspaper. Yeah, I’m weird that way.

Filling my mug to the brim with coffee, I dry-swallowed two Advil and sipped the hot brew. A poor substitute for the painkillers I’d been forced to quit, as part of my court-ordered therapy. My aching brain cried out for one tablet from my hidden stash of leftover Oxy. Excuses floated through my head. But it’s an emergency … Focus, I thought.

I puttered around the kitchen, making a simple breakfast of English muffins slathered in butter and Marmite (a salty British condiment you either love or hate). After cleaning the few dishes and utensils, I did a 10-minute meditation to prep for the day. Then, I performed yoga stretches to strengthen my back, get my head right. As I did, I steeled myself for a meeting with a multi-millionaire.

I’m not what you’d call a real private eye. My return from Afghanistan was hardly auspicious. I came back a physical and mental wreck, thanks in part to outmoded or inappropriate gear and vehicles. The ill-fitting heavy armor had worn my spine down something fierce. As for the explosions I’d survived before leaving the country, let’s just say noise as benign as a distant firecracker made me as jumpy as a cat in a dogs-only kennel.

Back then, scenes from the war played in my head like a movie on a continuous loop. Between that and my aching back, I couldn’t sit still for even a short length of time.

I required a few years of physical and occupational therapy to manage the worst of the toll on my body from the war. As for the mental aspects, I was still in recovery. Probably for the rest of my days.

I found office work completely unbearable. Office politics aside, my coworkers seemed to b***h non-stop about tiny problems. That drove me nuts.

I ended up working as a freelance researcher. I developed my computer skills sufficiently to track down debtors—deadbeat dads, deadbeat moms, deadbeats of all stripes. I even did a little repo work. Such work as I could get plus pain pills and therapy—court-ordered and otherwise—kept me afloat.

The latest call for my services had come out of the blue—on a Sunday, no less. I’d been referred to Stuart Blaine by one of my previous clients. All my clients are by referral. Most of them aren’t in a position to pay the freight for a legitimate private eye.

It’s an unfortunate fact of life that one can’t obtain a private investigator’s license in Maryland if one is addicted to narcotics. According to the VA and the judicial system, I was such an addict. Advil, therapy, and yoga notwithstanding.

The fact that Blaine made more than enough dough as a real estate developer should have set off alarm bells. But he claimed it was an emergency and wanted to meet me as soon as possible. My calendar wasn’t overflowing with billionaire clients, so we arranged to meet the following morning.

Before leaving, I double-checked my attire. My dark blue suit wasn’t Nordstrom, but it placed well above Goodwill or Salvation Army. I tugged at the jacket and fiddled with tights so sheer, they might as well have been pantyhose. I loathed dressing up to impress some big shot, but I needed the money. What a way to start a Monday. Hopefully, a few hours in this getup would be worth the sacrifice.