“I really don’t know,” I admitted. “Are you nervous?”
“Kind of. What if he cancels the show?”
I took in a deep breath. I’d been trying not to think about it for the last twenty-four hours. After Perry quit the show, I was a complete and utter Cheetos-covered mess. That was due to her absence, of course, but I think not having the show messed me up a bit too. Like her, it had given me a new purpose, and a life without the show seemed odd and meandering.
“I know I was hesitant about getting you back on the show,” I told her, “but I was more concerned about your safety than anything else.”
“I suppose you had a right to be,” she said under her breath. She cleared her throat. “That…beast was…”
Yeah. That was bad judgement for both of us, thinking that Sasquatch wasn’t real. We should have known better than that.
“But even so,” I went on, “I do like doing the show with you. I feel like it’s something that makes sense of who we are and what we see. It gives meaning in a way…I just wonder if maybe there’s a better way of doing this. Not ghost hunting but…well, I don’t know, this sound ridiculous, but maybe there is something to ghost whispering. We’ve already confirmed that you have the br**sts for it.”
She smacked my chest. “I’m more than my boobs.”
“Yes you are, but they certainly help,” I said. “But I’m serious too. If Jimmy does cancel the show, maybe there is something else we can do—together—to make sense of what we have. I don’t think we need him like he wants us to believe we do.”
“But a sponsor would make things so much easier. I could actually bring in an income that counts.”
“Hey, kiddo, you know you don’t have to worry about that stuff with me.”
She stopped in her tracks, pulling me back a bit. Her expression was grave. “Dex, earning an income is important to me. I know you have your inheritance, how else could you afford a new Highlander and a nice apartment, but that doesn’t mean I want to be taken care of.”
“It bothers you, huh?” I asked.
She nodded. “Well, yeah. My parents always treated me like a freeloader and I just don’t want you to think I am too.”
I played with her hand. “Perry, I don’t think that of you at all. I want to take care of you. I’ve never been able to take care of anyone in my whole life. I’m more than happy to do it.”
She seemed to consider that. I pulled gently at her. “Come on, let’s go get some fish thrown at you.”
I led her down the road until it turned to brick. We ducked into the market, and despite it being a weekday and off-season, it was still packed full of people. Luckily they were locals who didn’t gawk and shuffle along like they’d never seen fresh food before. We pressed past vendors selling jewelry, farmers with their rows of green vegetables, a woman yelling at us to buy chocolate fettuccini. Perry looked adorably wide-eyed, and once we got to the main attraction—the fish people—I got one of them to toss a salmon right at her. To her credit, she actually caught it and instinctively tossed it to someone else. They didn’t work at the market but it was still pretty impressive.
I grabbed us both a fresh crab cocktail, which worked surprisingly well for hangovers, and we were munching on it outside the bronze pig statue when Jimmy called.
I handed her my cocktail and said, “Here we go, kiddo,” while answering my cell. “Jimmy.”
“Okay, I’ve had time to think about it,” he said.
“Twenty-two hours exactly,” I told him.
“Yes, well I had some things to figure out. Anyway, I have a proposition for you, Dex.”
“And Perry.”
“Yes, both of you.”
“You know I’m not a fan of being propositioned, Jimmy, unless it’s by a very breasty woman.”
I winked at Perry, who was watching me stone-faced, oblivious to the people all around her, fighting to touch the pig.
“This is how it is,” Jimmy went on with a sigh, clearly as sick of dealing with me as I was with him. “And there are no other options. You got that? It’s this or it’s nothing. Either you do it my way or it’s the highway. It’s this or nothing. Do you understand?”
“Yes,” I hissed into the phone, grabbing Perry by the elbow and leading her away from the crowd. Satisfied we had some privacy, I eyed her and said, “Jimmy says he has an option for us, just the one option. If we don’t take it, we don’t have a show.”
She nodded, grim but curious. “Okay, what is it?”
“Lay it on us,” I said to Jimmy.
“I have someone I want to add to the show.”
The f**k? No. And I almost said no flat-out, but I wanted to make sure I wasn’t screwing myself over by being so impulsive.
“Go on,” I said tersely.
“Dex, you and Perry, to put it mildly, cannot be trusted. You can’t be trusted with delivering a good show, let alone a show in general. You keep screwing up or acting unprofessional. I mean, how many cameras and phones have you two lost so far?”
“No more than the average person.”
“Right. And I think you know what I’m talking about, too. You just don’t have a leg to stand on at the moment, and if I trusted you enough to let you go on as is, you’d just disappoint me all over again.”
That would have hurt if it wasn’t Jimmy who was saying it. I hated the idea of having someone else work with us; it’d totally ruin our dynamic. We worked fast and on the fly, we took risks and chances that sometimes didn’t pay off but sometimes did. Adding an extra person to the pot could make the job more dangerous than it already was.
“So, Dex,” Jimmy continued, “if you two agree to work with this person, then you’d have the sponsorship. Naturally it means that you’d be working a threesome for the near future until an alternative is brought up.”
“Naturally. So what, is this person going to be our babysitter? A host? What?”
“For now he would just be a supervisor. He would pick and plan where you go next—and he already has something lined up as it so happens—he would make all the arrangements, he would make sure everything is running smoothly, he would help you whenever you needed help, and this is crucial, when you think you don’t need help but actually do. I know you, Dex, you’re one stubborn son-of-a-bitch. You need help more than you know.”