Tempting Fate by Carla Neggers

imagine what their life together might have become.
    Hell of a romantic he was.
    He’d tell her, as he hadn’t often enough in their too-short time together, how much he loved her.
    Rubbing his face with his palms, he could feel the rough stubble of a couple of days’ growth of beard. He seldom shaved every day. His neighbors initially had thought he was a do-gooder or gentrifier come to restore one of the street’s old adobe houses and sell it at a profit. Now they pretty much figured he was just an old reprobate. He’d once asked the family next door, eight people crowded into an apartment not much bigger than his place, their advice on identifying and killing—unless there was a damn good reason why he shouldn’t—a giant spider that had taken over his bathroom. Turned out it was just an ordinary desert spider. Nothing to worry about. They’d thought his naïveté and terror great fun and gave him a beer and had Carlos, the baby of the family, go back with him to liberate his bathroom. Meanwhile, of course, the spider had vanished. Now John never took a leak without wondering where the damn thing had gone.
    He went through his all-purpose room to the front door. When he’d fallen into bed early that morning, he’d left out the books, photographs, articles and two hundred pages of the manuscript for the biography he was writing of his notorious great-grandfather, Ulysses Pembroke. Dani had commissioned him. John had no idea what she planned to do with it. He hadn’t asked. He knew damn well she hadn’t given him the job out of a sense of charity. He’d used up his daughter’s goodwill a long, long time ago.
    He pulled open the door, the dry heat hitting him as if he’d pulled open a furnace running full blast against a subzero chill. “Yeah, what’s up?”
    A kid, no more than eighteen, in shorts, T-shirt and sandals, stood red-faced on the landing. He looked parched. John felt a wave of guilt at having kept the poor bastard waiting in the scorching heat. It was hot, even for Tucson in August.
    â€œMr. Pembroke?” the kid asked tentatively.
    John stiffened, immediately thinking of Dani. Something had happened to her. Then he thought of Nick: his father was dead. Ninety years old and finally gone to the great beyond. Or Mattie. But he wasn’t ready to say goodbye to his mother yet. He tried to will away the habit of thinking the worst, but couldn’t. The worst had happened often enough.
    â€œYes,” he said sharply, trying to control his fear.
    The kid took a step back, no doubt wondering if he’d come to the wrong place. John supposed he looked like hell. Although still lean and rawboned, his black eyes as alert as ever, he’d lost weight, both fat and muscle, and his skin had begun to sag on his neck and elbows. He was fast becoming an old man with flabby knees. Lately his grooming amounted to daily teeth cleaning and a weekly shower. Part of his routine came from conviction: the desert wasn’t a place to be profligate with water. Part came from not giving a damn. Twenty-five years ago he’d never have answered the door unshaven, gray hair sticking out, in nothing but a pair of wrinkled turquoise shorts.
    â€œI’m from Tucker’s Office Supply,” the kid said. “A fax came for you.”
    John had never received a fax here. He didn’t own a telephone or a computer. He’d given up on as much technology as he could since Eugene Chandler had given him the boot.
    â€œDelivery was included,” the kid said.
    â€œSo I don’t owe you anything?”
    He shook his head. The air was so hot and dry his sweat evaporated instantly. Or maybe John had left him out there so long he’d stopped sweating. Dehydration and hyperthermia were constant threats in summertime Arizona.
    John took the offered envelope. “Wait a second.”
    He went back into the cooler gloom of his adobe,