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just trying to help out a client. It’s your job to make me look good.”
    Bax grinned. “Is that covered by the retainer?”
    “Making me look good? You know it, buddy.”
    “Then I want a bigger retainer.” A light flashed on thephone. Bax frowned. “Wait a minute, she’s not coming over here now, is she?”
    “Dunno. Depends on how desperate she is. I talked with her a little while ago.”
    “Hell, Si, it’s the end of the day. I’m surprised the receptionist is even still out there to page me.”
    “Maybe you’d better go check it out.”
    “Whatever she wants, it’s going to have to wait,” he warned Simon. “I just finished the last job you threw my way. I’m taking a couple of weeks off.” His first vacation in over three years, a trip to Copenhagen to see his cousins, maybe, or a jaunt to Prague.
    “It’s no big deal. A slick guy like you can probably figure it out while you’re still booking your flight.” He cleared his throat. “You make my client happy, you’ll make me happy.”
    Bax snorted. “Next time we go back to contract, I’m upping my rate.”
    “Whatever you say, buddy, whatever you say.”
    Bax hung up the phone and stepped out into the hallway that led to the reception area of the communal office suites. So maybe having space here cost a couple hundred more in rent than a one-room office somewhere, but it gave him access to a receptionist, mail room and a slick conference room. More important, it gave his business an established air that reassured the kinds of clients he sought. Just because he worked without a staff didn’t mean he had to look like a one-man show.
    As long as he was a one-man show.
     
    “M R . B AXTER will be with you in just a moment,” the blond receptionist told Joss, punching the button on her console with one red-lacquered nail before she pulled off the telephone headset and prepared to go home.
    Joss turned to the deep, pewter-colored couches that lined the walls. A receptionist? Who’d ever heard of a private eye with a receptionist? Then again, who’d ever heard of a private eye having a lobby with ice-blue carpet so thick you could snag a heel in it? And five-foot-tall ficus plants? Weren’t P.I.s supposed to work out of tiny offices with venetian blinds and half-glassed doors, in tired old buildings on the wrong side of town?
    Tom’s lawyer was going to have a lot of explaining to do. She should have known better than to trust his referral. Simon Fleming had told her his investigator might be able to help her out. He’d neglected to tell her the guy was going to be some corporate clown.
    An expensive corporate clown.
    Scowling, Joss stalked over to the wall of windows that overlooked Montgomery Street, now pooled with shadow in the late afternoon. She didn’t like the idea of telling her problems to some pretentious twit who’d look down on her. She knew the type—if you didn’t have a brokerage account and an MBA, they wouldn’t take you seriously. She could just imagine the kind of private eye who’d have an office here. He’d probably be short, for starters, pasty and soft. And balding, with a comb-over that didn’t hide anything.
    “Are you here for Executive Security Consulting?”
    Joss jumped and whirled.
    He didn’t look soft at all, was her first thought. He’d come up behind her so quietly on the plush carpet that she hadn’t heard a thing. Then again, he looked like he always moved silently. There was something about him that reminded her of a panther, dark, sleek and dangerous.
    Then he smiled and the impression evaporated. He looked, if not entirely friendly, at least approachable.
    “I’m John Baxter.”
    Tall, she thought, tall enough that she had to raise her chin to meet his eyes as he came closer. Not lanky, though. Self-possessed and lean, solid without being bulky. He looked like the kind of guy who could snatch flies out of midair or explode into violence if the need arose. Confident, capable and