Page 12 of Come As You Are
We’d already sampled a couple of my new drinks, and I’d been right in my suspicions: the alcohol on the shelves had been watered down. The bottle of Belvedere I’d brought from the storeroom was, as far as I could tell, unopened and full strength,while the bottle behind the bar hadn’t had quite the same burn to it. In a mixed drink, it was almost undetectable, but if I were to pour it neat, the customer would probably notice. It likely meant someone was skimming off a couple of bottles at a time and watering down the open bottles so the loss wasn’t as obvious. It was one of the easiest dodges to pull off in bartending, but having full bottles of premium alcohol go missing would also explain why the bar seemed to be losing money on the drinks. If this was happening with all our top shelf brands, we could be losing thousands of dollars. I was going to have to keep a much closer eye on what was happening with the liquor.
Once inside the storeroom, I scanned the shelves again while I waited for Vee. In addition to finding out why the hell he was camping out at Illyria, I needed to know if he had moved the boxes around or if someone else had. If he hadn’t moved them, I needed to know who had because that was probably going to be the person skimming alcohol. That Vee had seen something while he was sleeping in the storeroom was too much to hope for, but I’d ask that anyway and cross my fingers he could tell me.
Vee arrived a few minutes after me, sliding through the door as quietly as he could. I had to give the kid credit. He walked up to me, meeting my eye, and apologized.
“I know I shouldn’t have been sleeping at the club,” he said. “It was just going to be temporary. Until I could find another place.”
He glanced down at the floor, biting his lip, and I noticed the glassy sheen to his eyes. Vee was fighting back tears, and he suddenly looked so lost and alone that I wanted to take him into my arms and soothe him.
“What happened?” I asked, keeping a tight rein on my control. Sleeping at Illyria wasn’t allowed no matter what the reason, but I knew living in San Francisco was hard.
“My roommates ditched me,” Vee said, still staring at the floor. “They took my money and anything they might sell and took off. I don’t have enough to rent a new place on my own.” At that he snorted and shook his head. “And I don’t know enough people to find a room I can afford. I thought if I could be here for a few days, I could figure something out.”
It was my turn to snort. At Vee’s pay rate, it was going take him months to come up with enough for a deposit and first month’s rent. “How long have you been in SF now?” I asked.
“About four months now.”“Long enough to know how impossible that was going to be.”
“Yeah. But I don’t have anywhere else to be,” he said, his voice so quiet it was like it had shrunk inside him.
I knew in that moment what I was going to do, but I needed to ask my questions first.
“Did you move the boxes around or did someone else do that?”
“It wasn’t me,” Vee said. “I was trying to make it look like I wasn’t here.”
I nodded because that made sense. “When you were in here at night, did you see anyone come into the storeroom?”
Vee shook his head, and frustration welled up in my heart though I knew it would have been too easy for him to have seen who our resident thief was. And, yeah, I knew I was taking a big leap of faith that Vee wasn’t lying through his teeth. I believed the kid didn’t have it in him, and he looked so miserable, I was pretty certain he wouldn’t have done anything to screw up having a roof over his head.
“There is one thing,” Vee said, his gaze flicking up at me.
“Yeah?”
“I saw Mal up in Olivia’s office the other morning.”
“That’s not—”
“It was at five thirty. No one else was here. And no one else gets here that early. Ever.” He shrugged when I didn’t sayanything, then continued. “I usually wait until Olivia arrives at one, and then sneak out to get something to eat and come back when my shift starts. But I’d gotten up to pee, and Mal was in her office. I thought I was going to get caught.”
My mind was whirling, but one thing struck me as odd. “Weren’t you worried about the motion sensors?” I asked. Our alarm system was set with motion sensors for the dance floor, the stairs to Olivia’s office, and the hallway to the storeroom. Vee sculking around after the alarm had been set by Olivia or Mal at the end of an evening should have set it off.
Vee shook his head. “I overheard Festus talking to Mal about it. They’ve been out for months, and he was complaining that Mal hasn’t called the company to get the system worked on.”
“For fuck’s sake,” I growled. “And I suppose the code on the storeroom door doesn’t work either.”
The grin Vee gave me was in stark contrast to his earlier expression of fear. “It wasn’t that difficult to figure out. It’s the same code as the dressing room.”
I laughed, but it was bitter and full of disbelief. Fucking Mal. “All right,” I said. “Here’s what’s going to happen. I’ve got an extra bedroom in my place. It’s not much, more like a glorified closet, but it’s yours if you want it.” I raised a hand as Vee opened his mouth, refusal written all over his face. “And don’t even try to tell me you can’t accept it.” I waved at the storeroom. “You absolutely cannot stay here anymore. I know about it, and I can’t let you sleep here. You don’t have anywhere else to go, you said that yourself, and I’m not about to throw you out on the street.”
While all that was true, Olivia would also kill me if she found out that Vee was on the street and I could have prevented it. That was at least part of why I was offering him a place to stay. The way she looked at him told me everything I needed to know about how she felt, so I wasn’t about to let him sleep rough. Theother part, if I was being honest, was because I actually liked the kid. He was naïve to the point of being a danger to himself, but he worked hard and was a genuinely nice person.
So, I accepted his thanks and chalked his discomfort up to not being used to people taking care of him. Given his most recent experience with his roommates, I figured I wasn’t too far off the mark.
Vee came home withme after our early shift. He wasn’t working that night, but I was, so that gave him a lot of time to settle in and get used to my place. Not that there was a lot to get used to. I lived in a fairly standard two-unit Victorian about a block away from Delores Park. Two bedrooms, one bath, and a nice deck off the kitchen since I had the upper unit. It took less than two minutes to give Vee the tour and show him where he’d be sleeping. The smaller of the apartment’s two bedrooms was so narrow it only fit a twin bed, but there was a closet, a dresser, and a slim table next to the bed that doubled as a nightstand.
“It’s not much space,” I said as I pushed open the door for him and let him enter first.
With a shrug, Vee turned in a circle in the middle of the room, and then lowered his backpack to the floor. “But there aren’t any roommates to steal my stuff,” he said. “So, it’s better than what I had before.”
