up at her. Biting back a couple of bad words over her near fall, she met his glare with an equally stern look.
“Eavesdroppers never hear anything good about themselves,” she warned him, “not that anyone was talking about you. That was your new BFF on the phone. He starts working here at the store tomorrow.”
Hamlet’s emerald eyes widened, and he gave a small meowrmph. Darla laughed. “Oh, so you approve? Maybe you’ll listen to him, then, if he tells you that it’s dangerous for cats to be out after dark.”
Hamlet had no comment on that last. Instead, he rose and turned tail, spilling down the stairway like a small oil slick. Darla shook her head. With trouble like Hamlet roaming the store, she suspected that Robert joining their ranks could only be a good thing.
* * *
AS PROMISED, ROBERT SHOWED UP RIGHT ON TIME THE NEXT MORNING. Darla quickly got him settled in and put him to work. To her pleased relief, he picked up on the routine immediately, and by the end of his shift had even waited on a couple of customers. Things were progressing so smoothly, in fact, that she should have known it was only a matter of time before something went wrong. And so Darla was distressed but not unduly surprised when, a couple of days later, something did.
“I got a beef with you,” a belligerent voice rasped, the harsh sound an unpleasant counterpoint to the pleasant tinkling of bells that always announced someone entering the bookstore. Startled, Darla glanced up to see an unknown man heading toward the counter where she was busy reconciling the morning’s paperwork.
Fell off the ugly tree and hit every branch on the way down, was her first reflexive thought.
He was squat rather than simply short. His bullet-shaped head jutted well past his rounded shoulders, giving him the familiar Neanderthal hunch common to men who’d long since forgotten their mothers’ admonitions to stand up straight. Oversized hands that dangled from longer-than-normal arms contributed to his cavemanlike bearing. The man’s wardrobe didn’t help matters. He was dressed in a faded blue-striped T-shirt emblazoned with the FCC’s favorite four-letter word, while his baggy jeans were less a deliberate fashion statement than a case of belly out-sizing butt.
Had his pale blue eyes been filled with friendliness rather than disdain, his physical features might have appeared less unsavory. As it was, from his doughy, pockmarked face only slightly camouflaged by a patchy red-gray goatee, to the stringy tonsure of matching hair, he exuded an angry, unkempt air that made her want to break out the hand sanitizer. She’d never met the man before; that much was certain. So what possible beef, as he’d put it, could he have with her?
“I’m sorry, I didn’t get your name,” she replied, deliberately assuming her most polite shopkeeper manner in an attempt to stave him off.
He bared small, tobacco-stained teeth, but the gesture fell far short of a smile.
“Name’s Bill. You stole my best employee from me.”
“You’re Porn Shop Bill?” she blurted before she could catch herself.
Remembering Robert’s nickname for the man—“the Not-So-Great Ape”—she was surprised it had taken her as long as it had to connect those dots. The man did bear more than a passing resemblance to the orangutan from those old Clint Eastwood movies. Though she doubted that the simian in question had ever viewed his surroundings with as much jaded malevolence as this man did, surveying her store.
Now, he snapped the bullet head back around to look at her, and the pale blue eyes narrowed. “Hey, lady, don’t get all high and mighty. You and me, we’re in the same business. My customers just happen to be a bit more freethinking in their choice of”—he paused and assumed a deliberately effete accent—“literature.”
“Literature, my . . . foot.” She’d almost ended that retort with another body part, but the thought of possibly being overheard by the pregnant stay-at-home mom in the reference section made her purposely temper her word choice.
“And I don’t steal employees,” she went on in the same deliberately calm voice. “They apply, they meet my requirements, I hire. So unless you want to buy a book that has an actual plot, why don’t you leave before I call security?”
His reply was a variation of his T-shirt slogan. Darla’s temper flared, and she snatched her cell phone from under the counter, hitting the speed dial for Jake.
“You. Out. Now,” she demanded in a voice that trembled only a little, pointing at the door