The Love Scam - MaryJanice Davidson

Prologue

Agh. Pain. And thirst. Painful thirst. Thirsty pain. Where? Was? Ow.

Rake Tarbell sloooowly rolled over and stared at a ceiling. (His ceiling? No.) His eyes were so gritty and the room so quiet, he could hear his eyelids sticking and unsticking as he blinked. And sometime in the last few hours, he’d eaten … a dead bird? And washed it down with another dead bird? One that had drowned in vermouth?

He tried to open his mouth and felt his gummy lips struggle to part. Had he been kidnapped? Hit over the head and kidnapped, then had his mouth and eyes taped shut?

No.

Worse.

Hungover.

He made it to the edge of the bed in a series of small wriggles, each one causing a wave of nauseating pain to claw up his spine and wash over his brain. When at last he was upright, he fought his gorge to a draw and buried his head in his hands, hoping for a swift death. He noticed he was in a black T-shirt he’d never seen before with the puzzling yet reassuring logo I DO ALL MY OWN STUNTS. No socks. No pants. By squinting very, very hard, he could just make out a pair of crumpled dark brown cargo shorts on the floor three feet away.

I keep telling you, Rake.

Shut up, Blake.

You can’t party like a twenty-year-old forever.

Seriously, Blake. Shut. Up.

His inner voice, which sounded exactly like his tight-ass twin’s, obligingly shut up, something the real Blake hardly ever did.

He managed to lurch to his feet and staggered toward a doorway leading to a sparkling clean bathroom—okay, mystery solved, he was in a hotel room. Bland white walls, bland tan carpet. De rigueur nightstand, two-drawer dresser, television. Shiny clean fixtures and various helpful signs his head hurt too much to even look at, much less interpret, but at least he had a vague idea of where he was.

He turned the tap on full and tried to kill himself: suicide by sink, glug, glug, ahhhhh. When he realized drowning would take too long, he cupped his hands under the cool flow and drank and drank and drank, then washed his face, ran his head under the tap again—thank God for roomy hotel sinks!—and slowly stood as he raked his fingers through his hair and slicked it back from his eyes.

He nearly screamed: He’d rarely looked so fucked-up. Even his inner Blake voice

(Kill it at once, and with fire!)

was horrified.

“Okay,” he said, and winced. His deep voice reverberated around the small shiny white bathroom, which is how he found out it hurt to talk. “Okay,” he whispered to his hideous, red-rimmed, ghastly pale reflection. Normally dark blond, his hair was now dirty blond. And his eyes, God, his eyes! Like the zombies in 28 Days Later or, worse, 28 Weeks Later. He was the before picture in an antacid ad. “Get out of the room. Don’t think about the scary hotel room from 1408. Figure out where you are, then get something in your stomach—no, you have to.” His reflection was shaking his head and looking horrified; time to get stern. “You know you’ll feel better with something in your stomach.” Mirror Rake cringed, but Actual Rake was relentless. “You’ve got a day of crackers and ginger ale to look forward to, you horrible-looking shithead, and only yourself to blame.”

Probably. He hadn’t ruled out kidnapping yet; this might be someone else’s fault. He’d been hungover before, though not as often as Blake assumed. He never did anything with the frequency Blake assumed—as a matter of pride, if nothing else. But he had no idea where he was or how he’d gotten to—to wherever he was. And the mystery wouldn’t be solved from the bathroom. Had any mystery ever been solved from a bathroom? How often did Sherlock Holmes take a dump? The books never said.

He left the bathroom and managed to inch across the room to the shorts, gingerly step into them, and pull them on. These, at least, did belong to him, though they needed a trip through a washing machine. He felt the comforting bump of his phone in his side pocket as he zipped up, and the beat-up loafers at the end of the bed were also his. He figured he must have checked in (somehow—how had he managed to walk, much less communicate with a hotel clerk?), kicked off his shorts (but left his shoes on?), collapsed facedown on the bed, his absurdly long legs dangling over the end, and the shoes had fallen