“Hey! You, in the smiley face shirt! Which I hate, by the way.”
Angela looked up from her computer to see Paul hanging in her doorway. Literally hanging; he was clutching the top of the door frame and his feet swung an inch off the carpet. He was shirtless; his right pec tattoo (plain black ink reading TATTOO) was showing. “Do I criticize your casual attire?”
“Frequently.”
“That’s fair.”
Paul’s feet swung and kicked. “I’m getting taller, I know it.”
“You’re twenty-three, little brother. You’re done growing. Vertically, I mean.”
He managed to cling to the door frame, swing, and glare at the same time. “Oh, what, you’re a doctor now?”
“No, I just have a rudimentary understanding of human physiology. Nobody gets a growth spurt for their twenty-fourth birthday. Are those my sweatpants?”
“Well, yeah. Who else’s would they be?”
“Yours! Because you have six pairs.”
“Eight if I count yours.”
“Then don’t count mine! The thing of it is, I wouldn’t even care if you did it because you were a cross-dresser or transgender or experimental or anything like that. But you’re none of those, you only take them to bug me.”
“Guilty.”
“Bugging me makes you happy. Weirdly happy.”
“You should be happy you make me happy. Make me happier and tell me where the tape measure is. I’ve shot up at least a sixteenth of an inch in the last fourteen months. I’ll prove it.”
“I’m not sure you know what ‘shot up’ means.”
“Since I’m the one doing the shooting up, I know all about it.” Pause. “That came out wrong.”
“Paul, you see all the paperwork, right? And the spreadsheets? And my harassed face?”
“Your face always looks like that. Now stop earning money to keep me in sweatpants and measure me, dammit.”
Wily to his ways, she had saved her document the moment he’d bellowed her name from the doorway—average height and build, but Paul had a voice like a bullfrog that swallowed a bullhorn—so she knew she could leap out of her chair without worrying about the half-finished doc. In half a second she was across the room and tickling his belly, forcing him to thrash, laugh, and let go, falling in a heap.
She stood over him in triumph. “Now that makes me happy.”
“Cheat.”
“You’re insufferable.”
“And you’re popular,” he informed her from the floor. He sat up and rubbed the back of his head, to no good effect since his dark brown curls always looked mussed. “The new cop on Dad’s case—Chamberlin?”
She froze in the act of bending over to give him a hand up. “Jason Chambers?”
“Prob’ly. Plainclothes detective, super shiny badge? Anyway, he’s in the kitchen. For you, of all things. Are you stuck? You’re all hunched over.”
“Oh, God.” The potential for disaster was staggering. Least important, but the first thing that came to mind: I look like hell. Most important . . . “Where’s Mom?” she scream-whispered.
“It’s okay.” Her irrepressible brother, the oldest of the boys, bounced up from the carpet and gave her a reassuring peck on the cheek. “She’s lying down for her post-lunch siesta. Prob’ly in preparation for her predinner siesta.”
“Thank God.” Her mother did not care for the company of those in law enforcement. Not even those trying to solve her husband’s murder. Sometimes especially those trying to solve her husband’s murder. It was almost like, as bad as her father’s murder was, her mother was afraid the police would find out something even worse. Just one more thing in the Drake dynamic that made no sense.
“Okay. I’ll go talk to him. Okay. Oh, my God, I’m so . . . I’m wearing— Okay. No time to— Okay.” She looked down at her T-shirt and leggings and swallowed a groan (the Horde must not find out about her crush). “Okay. He’s in the kitchen? Okay.”
“You’re not having a stroke, are you?”
“No . . . no. No, definitely not. Probably not. Okay.”
“Hey, it’s not all bad. He liked our weird doorbell.”
“He likes ‘Chick Habit’?” She was already half running down the hall. “Okay.”