Alex West viewed the human smile as a mask.

The original smile was a monkey expression of anger, hatred, and fear. It was the monkey's way to show their teeth, how sharp they were, how big. A last warning before things go south and the claret begins to flow. Think twice about fucking with me, said the original smile. Think twice. I have TEETH.

At some point the malice drained away, and human teeth—small pearls of nothing, of bone. The scariest thing about them would be the possibility of MRSA hiding in a cavity—became a beacon of friendship. Simultaneously, they became a lie, and the con-man's best friend. Alex learned this early on, from his Daddy, sitting on an egg crate near various boardwalks and beaches where the tourists piled in six high and you found yourself paying through the nose for a simple vanilla cone. It didn't matter what beach, or where. The Wests would cycle from California's blazing glory to the homey cliché of Coney Island. What mattered was the size of law enforcement's memory; you hoped for goldfish-sized recall. Rejoice in people battered complacent by a stream of Karen-y tourists, in a vice squad that was only so-so. Tourists who would think, oh well. We're leaving tomorrow, and it wasn't that much money. Heaven for a con-man has short-term residents and solid access to public transportation.

Daddy had been a big man named Baylor. He'd viewed a kid as dead weight, and then as a possible prop, and then a partner worth training, just for a little while. They'd been a decent team, Alex thought, raking in the suckers, the money flying into Baylor’s wallet like birds to a princess’s hand. That was the only part of his childhood where he didn't remember being hungry, and the only time he remembered Baylor looking at him with pride. Being a con-artist had been his ticket to joy.

Of course, cons age in dog years. He was fifteen when he and his dad decided they'd seen enough of each other. Daddy found his way to Club Fed, where Alex lost track of him and good riddance. In the immortal words of Taylor Swift, who the fuck was that guy? Alex managed to scrape by on two-bit jobs and didn't have to share the take with anybody, and that got him through to eighteen without too much trouble.

And then he met April Rayne.

It could have been terrible, he acknowledged now. It would have been like the first time Hemmingway tasted whiskey, or the first time Jack the Ripper drew blood. There's marks, God loves 'em, they're born every second, and then there's marks, and when you meet the kind that will flay themselves alive if you smile right, it's like stepping off a cliff into freefall. There are reasons people have limits and boundaries. They're what keep folks safe and sane, and give them a sense of self inviolate. April Rayne, having none of those things, was a disaster looking for a place to happen. Here was a woman who would fall for anything, literally anything. She was nursing Flat Earth ideology and wearing wire and crystal bracelets that were supposed to improve her IQ, paying a surcharge for her water because somebody dropped a cheap chunk of quartz in it, and was risking chemical burns for essential oils. That old saying "you say jump, I say how high" didn't work, because April was already in mid-air and she didn't care where she fell. She was perfect. And perfect was the worst thing Alex West could have found at eighteen. It was like Clyde Barrow meeting that pretty blond Bonnie for the first time. Water and a level surface. Gasoline on a fire. He'd have been comprehensively screwed from day one.

But right behind April Rayne was her daughter Haven Center, who had somehow managed to crawl her way into a masters degree at eighteen, with her mother firmly strapped to her back and who wasn't about to let some two bit con-artist blow all her hard work. Baby Hawk hadn't been as formidable as her future self; she'd yet to learn how to hide her fangs. He'd known almost immediately that going after April as long as Hawk was around was a mistake...but she was there. The mark from Heaven was sitting right there, all fat and flustered and waiting to be plucked (though actually April Rayne was very fit; the result of buying and using every exercise fad that ever bounced, mixed, or danced its way across an infomercial meant that April—and, as a side effect, Hawk and Alex—could run a flat marathon with two seconds warning.) He'd get everything he ever wanted. All he had to do was get around April's very pretty, aggressively skeptical, mixed-race daughter. Should be easy. Right?

Alex would have felt rather sorry for his younger self, but the little shithead had deserved it.

It'd been Hawk that had dragged his unwilling carcass up to law-abiding absolution. At first, out of a sense of mutual interest: Alex disliked April's then-boyfriend because the guy was taking half of April's paychecks. Hawk had disliked April's then-boyfriend because the son of a bitch had given April two black eyes and a cracked rib. They had both been trying, independent of each other, to get rid of him. Alex had asked they try working together because the fuckhead was about to propose and neither of them had stopped him so far. He disliked Hawk because she saw straight through him, and Hawk disliked Alex because he was a criminal waiting for a conviction, but they both hated that guy.

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He'd been gone within a week.

Alex and Hawk were dating within two.

Hawk broke him. He could acknowledge that now. Before he met her, he hadn't imagined people like that could exist. People who could look at the world and see it for what it was—a washed up, fucked up, messed up place where no one really has a plan—and still choose, daily, to do the right thing. To turn around and face the world with a Pollyanna smile. He'd felt it at times when they were enemies, and he'd chalked it up to it being her play. Her angle of attack. Which was true, in its way; that was Hawk's angle. It just wasn't aimed as expected. If you're trying to be a criminal, the absolute worst thing anyone can do is have solid expectations of you. It shows a guy what the alternative is, gives you a taste for the straight life. That shit's worse than crack, going straight. Hard work, yeah, but that was just the bitterant they laced it with, keep everyone from catching on that they had a good thing with that whole Law Abiding Citizen spiel.

He'd looked into Hawk's eyes, and for an instant he'd seen himself reflected as a good man. There was no coming back from that.

It helped a lot that life with Hawk was never boring. First, there was her mother. Whenever Alex felt especially bored, he'd just call April Rayne and ask about her day. He'd find a problem that would take several weeks to solve. Doing this, in an odd way, lead him to his current job. Technically, he was a PI. When asked, he'd just say that and leave it alone. But what Alex West was, really, was a fixer. Missing people? He'd find them, figure out if they needed help or not, and connect them to that help. He'd only do a divorce if one spouse was documented as abusive, and he would verify the evidence before he accepted the case. He picked his clients carefully, and addressed their issues with even more care. He didn't always make an enormous amount of money, but it was enough for him to feel satisfied. And if he didn't have a job, and April had somehow managed to avoid hooking up with Satan for the ten thousandth time, then there was always Hawk and her bugs. Hell, maybe they'd get lucky again this year and she'd score a large enough grant to study ants in Australia again. That'd been a blast.

Hawk had gone all the way through her mother's care package when Alex decided he'd circled around the pile of ugly yarn long enough. He'd walked into the house with an agenda, and the cake pearls were way too nasty to be an effective distraction. "So, when you're done with your Mom's..." he trailed off and gestured at the pile of junk. "I could use a little help on the current job."

"Somehow I knew you weren't here for the cake pearls." She smiled patiently and waited. "What's the case?"

"A dying garden. Old lady up on Hilltop called me like, three days in a row--"

"Ah, you got a pray-er," Hawk said. This was a Rayne-thing, relating to the Bible story of the old woman who annoys a judge into helping her. Hawk was not a believer, but one couldn't exist in modern society without absorbing at least a little bit of Bible by osmosis.

"Well, I told her my rule about vetting clients, so she gave me her daughter's number. The girl confirmed it, but added that she's worried her mother might have dementia. Both women are sure her garden is being poisoned, but the daughter thinks her mom might have mixed up Miracle Gro and bleach. Mom wants me to find who is poisoning her garden, daughter wants me to talk mom into getting an assessment and maybe a live-in carer for a bit. I'm going to drive up there and take a look."

Here was his assessment, reading between the lines: the daughter was right. Mom had dementia, early onset, and was either forgetting parts of her gardening routine, or really had put cleaning chemicals on her roses. Daughter sounded clearly overwhelmed. His goal in this was to figure out what happened and get the old woman assessed. And if someone really was poisoning her garden, he'd find out who, and how, and make them regret every choice that lead to them abusing an old woman. But there was one problem with this, and Hawk caught it before he had a chance to bring it up.

"Alex, you kill plants. How are you going to know what's going on with this woman's garden?"

"That is why I'm asking you. I don't expect you to know anything about plants," he said this hastily, as one chants a rapid prayer at the precipice, and continued. "But anything affecting the plants would also affect the bugs, right? And I don't know bugs well enough to...well, say anything about them."

She winced about halfway through this little speech. "I'm not sure that's a given. Bugs are vulnerable to stuff you wouldn't think of, and they can shake off shit that would kill a tree."

"Like mites?" Alex hid a grin. Hawk kept trying to keep honeypot ants, and her attempts kept failing. She'd smile, and shake her head, and order another one from what had to be a sketchy website. Who on earth sold bugs online? Not as food, but as pets? He could understand pet tarantulas, and he totally got pet lizards, but ants? He'd been married two years so far, and he still did not entirely get the ants. But she got them, and she let him rant about cosmetic dampers on McMansion roofs, so he listened about the ants. Her last attempt got past what she called "the founding stage", which he interpreted as some kind of numbers thing, but died to an onslaught of mites. She'd been a bit upset by that one, but not nearly so much as the one who got eaten by feral ants.

She made a face. "Actually I was thinking more about temperature differentials and stress. But yeah, mites would be on my short list of things to look at. Alright. When are you leaving for this old woman's house?"

"Half an hour." Alex said, then added, "Where are you going?" because his wife had gotten up and begun walking towards the rear of their house.

"We're leaving in half an hour, so I need to do my chores. It's time for Ant food," she said, and on that cryptic note, left the room.