the store laughing up his cat sleeve at his cleverness.”
Darla took an angry bite of her own sandwich, chewing miserably. Even the mile-high stack of juicy white turkey breast piled on pumpernickel and topped with sauerkraut, Swiss, and dressing wasn’t enough to restore her to something resembling a good mood.
Jake nodded sagely and reached for her own sandwich. Through a mouthful big enough to choke a linebacker, she mumbled something that sounded like, “Any blood?”
“Not this time. But the screams were pretty darned awful.”
“Look, kid, why don’t you just stick Hamlet in a carrier or something while you’re interviewing?” Jake suggested in a reasonable tone. “Keep the applicants out of claws’ reach, at least until after they’ve filled out the paperwork and you’ve asked all your questions. Once you’ve hired someone, well, it’s survival of the fittest.”
Darla considered the notion a moment and then shook her head.
“Unfortunately, I know who’s going to come out on top in that battle. And I don’t have time to train a series of people. It’s mid-October, which means the holiday buying season is only a month away. I need someone I can depend on to help me and James, and I need them trained before the big rush starts.”
Darla took another bite.
“I’ve got another applicant coming in after lunch,” she told her friend. “Maybe I’ll luck out with him. Of course, with the job market like it is, it’s not like Hamlet will run out of potential hires to torment anytime soon.”
“Well, speaking of the job market . . .” Jake swallowed the last of her sandwich and reached into the pocket of her brown corduroy jacket to withdraw a business card. Tossing it onto the table in front of Darla, she gave a casual shake of her curly black mop and said, “Check it out.”
“Does this mean what I think it does?”
Jake nodded, her strong features glowing with a proud smile. Darla hurriedly wiped a bit of errant dressing from her fingers and snatched up the card to read it aloud.
“Martelli Private Investigations, Inc., Jacqueline ‘Jake’ Martelli, President. Oh, and you even have a website!” Darla’s smile matched her friend’s as she added, “I can’t believe you finally did it. Congratulations!”
“Well, I figured sitting on my butt for two years was enough,” Jake replied. “Those occasional security jobs along with the disability settlement might pay the rent, but I can only watch so much cable television when I’m not hanging out in your store. I missed being in the thick of things.”
“Once a cop, always a cop, right?
“Pretty much. Besides, fifty is too damn young to retire.”
“So is forty-nine,” Darla said, knowing that her friend wouldn’t actually be turning fifty until January, when she’d officially start collecting her retirement. This still gave Darla a couple of months to plan the surprise birthday party she intended to throw. And since Darla’s own next major milestone birthday wouldn’t be for almost five years, when she hit forty, she was pretty confident that she was safe from any similar birthday revenge for a long time.
Aloud, she merely said, “Actually, as soon as you started talking about going into business, I checked into the zoning laws here. There’s no issue if you want to go ahead and run your office out of your apartment.”
“I was hoping you’d say that, since I already ordered the signs to hang on the fence and doors,” Jake confessed, her grin now a bit sheepish.
Darla had inherited Jake as her garden apartment tenant—Darla always had to correct herself from calling it a basement—in much the same way she’d ended up with Hamlet and the bookstore. The aforementioned fence was a sturdy, wrought iron barrier to the short series of steps that led down to the apartment, which was partially below sidewalk level. Jake had moved into Dee’s brownstone soon after the on-duty shooting that had left her with a permanent limp and hastened her retirement from her police detective career. Viewing Jake as her personal on-site security force, Darla’s great-aunt had in return offered Jake a rent well below the going rate.
Darla had also inherited the subsidized lease, but she agreed with Dee that it was rather cool to have her own personal cop—or rather, ex-cop—keeping an eye on things. Besides, she and Jake had become fast friends.
Now, Darla laughed. “Actually, I think there’s a certain cachet to having a private investigator in the same building as an independent bookstore. Maybe I need to expand my mystery section, take advantage of the