Excerpt of Midnight Oil by Karen Kendall

TROY BARRINGTON FELT like a pervert, sitting here in his car in a dark parking lot at 10:00 p.m. Either a pervert or a cop on a stakeout, except he didn't have any doughnuts or one of those cool police radios.

"What are you doing, Uncle Troy?" asked his eleven-year- old nephew, Derek, via cell phone.

He visualized the kid, tousled blond hair sticking out every which way and a chocolate stain on the Marlins T- shirt he liked to sleep in. His skateboard was probably at the end of his bed. "Just sitting out on the porch, smoking a cigar," Troy lied. He couldn't tell an eleven- year-old what he was really up to: spying on a bunch of people he didn't know but suspected were up to no good. He also couldn't tell Derek that one luscious redhead in particular made the stakeout a lot less boring than it could have been.

"Why are you still awake?" Troy asked, tearing his eyes away from her very interesting curves. "Huh? You should be in bed."

"Mom says cigars are bad for you," Derek told him, ignoring the question. "They are. Terrible. But someone gave me this as a gift, and I didn't want to throw it away." It was true that he had a cigar in his glove box, from his friend Amos, whose wife had just had a baby girl. His old teammates were dropping like flies to wives and kids. He scrubbed a hand over his face. Hadn't it been just yesterday that they were all a bunch of rowdy, testosterone-crazed twentysomethings? He had no idea how he'd suddenly fallen into his midthirties, and still had no desire to settle down with a woman.

"Well," Derek said judiciously, "I guess that's okay, then. So did you fix the holes in your porch?"

"Nope. That's my weekend project, big guy. You wanna help?"

"Yeah! Can I really?"

"Uh-huh. If you promise to hang up the phone and go to bed now. I'll bet your mom doesn't know you're still up."

Guilty silence. "Does she?"

"No. Are you gonna tell?"

"Not if you get to bed this minute. I'll talk to her tomorrow and see if I can pick you up Sunday morning, okay? After church."

"How 'bout before church?"

"After church. But good try."

His nephew sighed. "Can I use a power saw?"

"Absolutely not. But you can measure and mark for me, and help in other ways."

"Cool."

"Where are Danni and Laura?" Troy's twin nieces were twelve and played powder-puff football in his honor, which tugged at his heartstrings.

"They're spending the night with Lana Banana. That dumb girl."

"It's not nice to call her that."

"I know. Bye, Uncle Troy. Don't smoke any more cigars. Okay?"

"Yup." Troy hung up with a smile and refocused on the cute redhead.

His half sister's kids were one of the biggest reasons he'd moved to Miami — her creep husband had taken off and she was now a single mom. Frankly, Troy thought she was better off that way. Unfortunately, Derek and the girls weren't. They needed a decent male role model, and though Troy was certainly no angel, at least he could fake it for the kids.

From behind the windshield of his vintage Lotus, he squinted at Uncle Newt's strip mall. Correction: his strip mall. A month ago, at the reading of old Newt's will, Troy had suddenly become a slum lord.

Nine storefronts, most of them dark, stared back at him from his spot in a parking lot that had seen better days. The macadam was a faded gray and there were cracks everywhere. The lines demarking the car slots were barely visible during the day, and Troy wondered just how much money it cost to repave an entire lot. Damn. That would put another dent in his savings. And there'd been a few too many dents lately, one big one made by the kids' college funds. But Samantha would never be able to save enough, and the father was a deadbeat.

Troy tilted his head against the leather seat and leaned back to crack his neck, still training his gaze on the best storefront, the brightly lit one, dead center, with the largest expanse of plate glass. The one with all the laughing pretty girls inside, that redhead in particular, and a thousand bottles and jars of goop in the window. The one he wanted for his own business, a new sporting goods store — if he could break the tenants' lease.

After Hours, said the funky, squiggly script. A Salon and Day Spa. And in smaller letters, Open Till Midnight!

Inside, the place was self-consciously artsy, with an S- shaped reception desk, movable walls in pastel ice-cream colors and exotic glass lamps of different sizes and hues dangling over it all. There were filmy white curtains bracketing the windows, but the tenants never seemed to close them.

Yesterday, as he'd oh, so casually sauntered by, he'd spied a zebra floor cloth and a unicorn floor cloth, both of which appeared to be floating in an expanse of seawater from out here. When you got up close, you could see that the concrete floor had been textured and painted to resemble the ocean.

Fishy, thought Troy. What kind of spa stays open until midnight? A spa that gives dirty massages to dateless, desperate men, that's what kind. He smiled in the darkness. Because that sure violated the lease agreement.

His smile faded. At least, he'd been convinced of the spa's underhanded activities a couple of hours ago, when he first started watching the place. But to his disappointment, most of the clientele were women. And the two men who'd gone in had stayed up front, clearly visible in the well-lit windows while they got haircuts and laughed with the pretty girls over glasses of wine and beer.

Alcohol. What kind of spa serves drinks and blasts hip dance music? Troy could hear the music clearly from outside in his car, inspiring his unwilling fingers and toes to tap to it.

If he couldn't prove they were running a dirty massage parlor, then maybe he could get them on the liquor license. If they served alcohol, didn't they have to have one by law? Troy rubbed his jaw. Or was that only if they sold the drinks? No money was changing hands in there as far as he could see.

He continued to watch as the cute little redhead in the white lab coat bumped hips with a dark-haired girl in artsy clothes and rubber flip-flops. Red had serious curves, tempting and visible through the open coat. She also had sweet, kissable pale skin and a load of hair for a man to lose his hands in....

Okay, now he really was being a pervert. He was here on a business mission, not for a cheap thrill.

Red threw back her head and laughed, then spun 360 degrees on one foot. She wobbled as she stopped, though, and would have lost her balance if a tall, broad-shouldered Latino guy hadn't caught her by the elbow.

Aha! Where did he come from? Maybe, Troy thought hopefully, he'd been getting happy in the back. But no — he swung himself behind one of the manicure stations and...

Troy gaped. Surely that bruiser wasn't actually removing a woman's nail polish and then filing her nails? But he was. Where had the guy's balls gone hiding? Were they soaking in warm paraffin wax in the back?

He continued to feel like a Peeping Tom — and, oh, shit! The redhead squinted out the window again, looking directly at him. He ducked, sliding as low in the seat as he could go.

Troy stayed that way for two or three long minutes, barely breathing, his heart pumping fast. He was just about to ease upward again when a female voice spoke to him with deadly calm.

"There are laws against stalking in this state, you pathetic creep."

Troy looked up to find the redhead standing there, all five feet of her, aiming a container of Mace at his head.

"It's not what you think," he said, the words sounding lame to his own ears.

"Really. So what's up, then, big guy? You shopping for a dry cleaner at this hour of the night? Or did you figure you'd sleep in your car so you'd be first in line for hot doughnuts at 5:00 a.m.?"

"I'm not a stalker," he told her, straightening in his seat. "Or a rapist. But it's a really stupid move for you to come out here alone to confront one. What were you thinking?"

"Mace. It does a body good."

"Sweetheart, go back inside and don't ever try this again. I could have that out of your hand and you pinned to the ground in about two seconds."

Her gaze drilled into his. In the dark he couldn't tell what color her eyes were, but he thought probably brown. Whatever color they were, they were gorgeous: almond- shaped, long-lashed and steely with determination.

"Yeah? I don't advise you to do that. Because I've called the cops, pervert, and they should be here within a minute or two. So if I were you I'd get the hell off of this property right now."

He really didn't need to be questioned by the police about his behavior. "Look, I'm telling you, this is not what you think. I'm not some kind of sicko." But Troy did as she suggested. He put the Lotus into gear and slowly drove away from her.

"And don't come back!" she shouted.

Great. Just great. Now is probably not the time to tell her she's hot — or ask her what she's doing next Saturday.

THE NEXT MORNING Troy awoke in his bed with a numb arm, a migraine and a persistent hard-on. Visions of the pissed- off redhead had flitted through his head all night, and in a lot of them she wore nothing but that lab coat, unbuttoned.

He'd been wasting his time the night before. He wished he'd gone to bed around the same time he'd forced Derek to do so. Besides the drinks and the weird late-night schedule, After Hours wasn't conducting any out-of-the- ordinary business, and he'd come close to being arrested for stalking. Damn it.

He focused on the extremely ugly brown-paneled wall of the furnished hovel he'd just purchased. The place dated from the early sixties and hadn't been remodeled since then. The scent of its elderly former resident, now dead, still hung in the air: a peculiar essence of Lister-ine, moth balls, old grease and musty carpet.

Troy swung his legs over the side of his bed and eyed the malfunctioning window-unit air conditioner sourly. Until he got this wreck of a place gutted and fixed up, he might be better off sleeping in his car.

The house had been the only halfway decent buy left in Miami's Coral Gables, and it was going to take a year of his time, a hundred contractors and a miracle of God to make it livable.

Troy shook his dead arm — it used to take a woman sleeping on it to make that happen — and made coffee one-handed as what felt like an army of ants ran from his wrist to his bicep. He yawned while something tickled at his barely functional brain.

Oh, right. Alcohol permit. He needed to check on that. If the tenants at the spa could be kicked out for something that simple, he'd be a happy guy.

He felt a little guilty as he drank coffee — black with one sugar — and did some research on the Internet to look into the laws. They'd all seemed so happy and energetic last night as he'd sat in the dark like a vulture, plotting to yank their storefront out from under them. A really nice guy, he was.