“Brass monkey,” I said. “My father used to say that.”

“Brass monkey. Whatever that is. I’ll try to remember it.”

“Are Leon and the boys ready yet?”

“Almost,” he said, looking back at the garage. He shook his head. “As ready as they’re ever gonna be, I guess. Whaddya think of this, Alex?”

Two hours in his acquaintance, and he was already treating me like a long lost friend. Or a kindred spirit, perhaps. Somebody who seemed to think we had a lot in common, despite our outward appearances. Hell, maybe we did. God knows I could have used another friend. Jackie, Vinnie, and finally Leon. That was the whole deal right there.

Leon-I had met him at the Glasgow one night. Leon with the wild orange hair and the flannel shirt, the big local goofball that nobody had ever taken seriously, not for one second. He had come up to Paradise to fight me in the parking lot, all because he had lost his dream job as a private investigator. The lawyer who was paying him had somehow convinced me to take his place, but the job turned out to be anything but a dream. Not long after that, I found out that Leon actually knew what he was doing. And that I most definitely did not.

We were partners for a while. I still have some of the business cards he had made up. Prudell-McKnight Investigations, his name first because it sounded better that way. Or so he said. With the two guns on either side of the card, pointing at each other.

Of course, I had no desire to be a PI. With Leon as my partner or not. But that didn’t stop the trouble from finding me. I can’t even count the number of times Leon helped me. With the computer stuff, or hell, just the fact that he had a gun for me after I threw mine in the lake. I owed him my life.

I started feeling bad about it, the way I’d only go see him if I needed his help with something. I promised myself I’d make a point of taking him out to lunch every so often. Or stopping by his house, even though the sight of me still made his wife nervous.