In conclusion, Gavin was a dickhead, and I was better off without him.

“I did hear, but I didn’t know you were there. Shit, that cut looks bad, Karla. Have you had it checked out?”

“It’s fine. Now if you don’t mind….” I lifted a brow and gestured for him to get out of the way, but he didn’t move.

“Ah, come on, don’t be like that,” he said.

I rolled my eyes, shook my head, and walked around him. He wasn’t even worth the effort of a hostile conversation. He called after me, so I threw my hand in the air and gave him the finger. His growl of irritation was infinitely satisfying. I’d just climbed into my car when my phone went off with a call from Alexis. I put it on speaker.

“Hey.”

“Karla! I just saw the riot on the news. Are you all right?”

“I’m fine, nothing a glass of wine and a good night’s sleep won’t fix. I’m on my way home. Do you need anything?”

A pause. “Well, now that you mention it, you wouldn’t mind popping by the McDonalds drive-through, would you? I have a hankering for chicken nuggets and a chocolate fudge sundae for dipping.”

I resisted the urge to gag. “Bloody hell, that sounds disgusting. Are you pregnant?”

She snorted down the line. “Piss off. I’m not pregnant. I’m depressed. There’s a difference.”

“Fine. I’ll get you McDonalds. Be home in twenty.”

“Aww, you really love me, don’t you?” she crooned.

I laughed. “Yeah, to my detriment sometimes.”

Three

The next day at work, Tony pulled me into one of the briefing rooms, opened up a laptop, and hit “play” on a video. It was surveillance footage from an apartment building, showing the outside grounds. Nothing happened for a second, and then off to the left a man approached. He wore a dark hoodie and jeans, his face shielded by a black balaclava as he reached up and grabbed hold of a window ledge on the bottom floor. Swinging himself up, he balanced himself perfectly on the narrow space, his movements swift and graceful like a stuntman or an acrobat.

“What is this?” I asked, glancing at Tony.

“Just keep watching,” he urged me, his lips curving into a smile.

My eyes returned to the video, where the masked man grabbed onto the next ledge and swung his body up the same as before. The footage cut to a camera higher up, showing he’d climbed something like ten floors, only to land on a thin brick outcropping that ran around the middle of the building.

“Somebody watched too much Spiderman as a kid,” I said cynically, though really, I was impressed, very impressed. No average person could pull off something like this without some extreme amount of skill. The pit of my stomach began to tingle with a little rush of excitement to see what would happen next.

The footage cut again to another camera, showing the man stop at a window and push it open with ease before slipping inside the building. Tony fast-forwarded a couple minutes and the man was back, emerging through the same window. However, this time the rucksack he wore appeared distinctly fuller than it had previously. He began moving along the ledge the same as before, only now he didn’t climb between the windows.

For some reason, my eyes fixed on the line of his shoulders, the way he moved his body, and some strange sense of familiarity hit me. I couldn’t quite pin down what it was, so I concentrated back on what was happening.

The video cut to yet another camera, where a scaffold was set up on one side of the old building. The man began swinging from bar to bar, his movements more panther than monkey. When he got as low as the top of a nearby street lamp, he leapt through the air, caught onto the lamp, and swung deftly to the ground, like a fireman going down a pole. The camera was angled just right to catch him running off into the night, and then he was gone.

“The boys down in evidence had this footage put together after somebody dropped off a rucksack full of jewellery and a note tipping us off about one of the units in that building,” said Tony. “We paid a visit, and it turns out there was a cash-for-gold scam being run out of the same flat our guy broke into. They target older people, usually those who live alone and don’t have anyone to tell them it’s a scam. They put leaflets through their letterboxes saying if they send their old gold to a P.O. box in the city, it’ll be valued, and a cheque for the same amount will be sent back to them.”

I nodded. “Yeah, I heard about that one.”

Tony sighed. “Obviously, weeks go by, and the cheque never comes. Bunch of scumbags, taking advantage of the elderly like that.”

“So this bloke stole the jewellery back?”

“That’s about the size of it.”

I had to admit, I was sort of fascinated. “Forget Spiderman, maybe he thinks he’s Robin Hood. Perhaps his granny got scammed, and he was pissed and decided to dole out some vigilante justice,” I joked.

“Whatever way you want to spin it, you’ve got admire his gumption. Though I don’t condone the method, at least there’s a few less people out there being taken for mugs.”

“Yeah,” I said, staring at the frozen screen of the laptop and again trying to shake off that odd sense of familiarity. “At least there’s that.”

***

Confession time: I had a crush on my eskrima instructor.

His name was Felix, and he came from the Philippines. He was also in his forties and married with three kids, but hey, it wasn’t like I ever planned on doing anything about it. I was simply happy to admire him from afar. He was short, but he had a perfect body, muscles draped in smooth tanned skin.

The truth was, I had a thing for small, handsome men. Give me James McEvoy, Elijah Wood, Daniel Radcliffe, hell, even the guy who played E from Entourage, and I was giggling like a schoolgirl. I think this derived from my deep-seated resentment of my father, who was the opposite of a small, handsome man. Therefore, they represented a comfortable ideal, something non-threatening and safe.

Lee Cross was neither small nor extremely tall, but somewhere in the middle. He was unclassifiable. Huh.

I sat on the mat beside my good friend Reya, stretching and staring at Felix as he stood by the doorway, chatting with a guy who was interested in joining the class. For some reason, there was an abundance of new members today. We practiced twice weekly at my gym, which was handy because it meant I could go for a swim afterward to cool down, or spend some time in the sauna.

“You’re staring again,” said Reya, nudging me with her shoulder.

I chuckled sheepishly and pulled myself out of my Felix-induced trance. “Sorry. But look at the man. He’s perfect.”

She laughed. “You’re such a weirdo sometimes.”

Reya and I had met under somewhat unusual circumstances. I’d been out one night at a jazz bar with Alexis, and Reya had been on stage, singing and playing piano. She performed under the stage name Queenie, and was perhaps the shyest singer-songwriter I’d ever come across. All through her act she never once opened her eyes, but her lyrics had hit me square in the gut. They were just so brutally honest, full of pain and heartache, and I couldn’t understand how a girl so young could have experienced that amount of hurt. It was clear that she’d been a victim of some kind, so I’d determined to approach her after the show.

When I did, I told her how much her music had affected me, invited her for drinks with me and Alexis, and the rest is history. Somewhere along the way, I suggested that she learn how to defend herself, and now she was a full-fledged member of the class. I went to see her play gigs whenever I got the chance, but she still never opened her eyes. I guess you could call it a work in progress.

After a few minutes, Felix came and gave a little talk to all the new members, and we finally got started. When we were done I was a hot, sweaty mess. Apparently, another gym nearby had gone into receivership, which accounted for all the new members. Reya and I were making our way toward the showers when I heard a familiar voice shout, “Come on, Smithy, you’ve got more in you than that!”