I took it a little easy today.
Joya was the kind of place that I usually have to figure out how to sneak, fake, or bluff my way into. You can tell even from the outside that it’s hoity-toity: the boardwalk splits in two and keeps going south, with a nice tall wall to let us mere commoners that this is where the rich folks frolic. The gates are manned, too, and with the polite kind of big, hulking guards. You weren‘t getting in there without an invitation.
Or unless you were guests of the Xanadu, because when we showed them our room keys the guards let us go right in. One of them even said, “Enjoy the beach, Shamus,” and sounded like he meant it.
Inside the fence it was all residential, the kind where you don’t bring the wife and kids unless they all get along all right with the mistress. Lucas cocked an eyebrow at me as we walked down the (ostentatiously low-key) bungalow-lined street towards the beach. “You look confused.”
“It’s like climbing stairs and thinking there’s one extra step,” I told him. “It’s never this easy.”
Lucas peered around. “You have to go to a lot of places like this? Why? There’s nothing here except beach houses. Really rich beach houses, sure, but all the fun places are on the other side of the fence.”
I gave a short, bitter laugh. “Places like this are where the really bad Cases come from, Lucas. You get sins everywhere, and they can slop over — but places like these got sin, secrets, and enough money to cover up both. I’ve never been here, but I’ll bet you a monroe that there’s at least three dead bodies buried inside the fences here. And that not a curtain twitched when they were buried, in the dead of night.”
That got a snort from the Adventurer. “Nice try, Shamus. If there that many murders here, you’d get ghosts. Everybody knows that.”
“…You have no romance in your soul, Lucas. You know that, right?”
“Tom, at this point in my career I’m just glad I still have the soul.”