New release sample: RETURN OF THE LIVING PROOF

 

"I can take my bike or the moped to the office and then ride with the truck carrying the signs and stakes and all that stuff. No problem."

"How close are they?" I tried to remember seeing a sign for Pi Surprise. They hadn't come into the Tattler to buy advertising yet. Which suddenly struck me as a little strange. All their advertising was either in the Plain Dealer, or stuffed into mailboxes. Nothing in the local paper. So how far away was their office?

"They're in that little flower market on the corner down past the schools."

"On the Neighborlee side of the border, or the Allenby side?"

Pete thought a moment, while I held my breath and told myself it was all right, nothing dangerous ever came into Neighborlee from Allenby. Darbyville, yes, but not Allenby.

"Across the street, so I guess Allenby. I saw the help wanted sign just about the time they were putting it up in the window. It's a new office, they moved here from Euclid, so I'll spend the first couple weeks just helping with renovating the office."

"Okay. Sounds good." I told myself I was hungry, it had been a long day at work, and Pete would make a good spy, to figure out if there was something not-quite-ordinary going on with Pi Surprise. Maybe someone was just out to make things difficult for an expanding business, moving those gnomes around.

I knew the place Pete was talking about. The lot held a ramshackle building that had once been a convenience store and then went through at least a dozen transformations all the years I was growing up. It was in a bad location for businesses. The chunk of land set aside for Neighborlee schools sat right on the southern border of town. The building had started out as a gas station, just across the street and over the border in Allenby, nearly hidden by huge clumps of trees on three sides. Over the years, all those businesses that had moved in and moved out had neglected the building and the parking lot. It was generally a bad location for businesses that depended on visibility and traffic driving by to survive. 

Thinking about it, I supposed a business that just used the building for a headquarters and sent its workers out would probably last longer than anything that had tried to set up there in the past. At the very least, Pete would have work for the summer. I couldn't imagine him keeping the job when school started again in the fall.