Page 2 of Just My Luck

Besides, he didn’t know where his phone was. Had he left it somewhere? He couldn’t remember.

He dug his fork into a plump bit of strawberry from the salad. His mouth watered as he anticipated the tartness on his tongue.

Wait. Strawberry? He looked at the menu card again and, sure enough, it read Spinach and Strawberry Salad.

He stared at the piece of strawberry on his fork as if he’d never seen one before. Vivid red on the outside, shading to pink and then pure white at the core.

“Vernon?” he called to the shadowy figure waiting by the wall.

“Yes, sir?”

But he couldn’t think what to say about the salad confusion. If he admitted that something was strange about this salad, that it kept changing from strawberry to seaweed, Vernon might take action. He might call his father. His father would come and give him that look, that “you shouldn’t even exist” look. He might take all this away.

“Tell Chef Hong this meal is excellent,” he said instead.

“Yes, sir.”

Lincoln put the fork into his mouth. Strands of slippery, salty wakame writhed against his tongue as if they were alive. He spit a mouthful onto his plate and jumped to his feet. His chair crashed onto the dining room floor. And then he too was falling, down, down, down…

He jerked awake. His heart was racing and it was pitch dark. Where the fuck was he? Not in his king-size bed with the coverlet hand-stitched by Italian artisans, that was for sure.

He reached for his phone. Instead of the expensive iPhone he was used to, his hand touched the cheap plastic of a burner phone. His actual phone, he remembered now, was temporarily out of commission. No one knew the number to this one. He barely knew it.

He used the dim screen to light up his surroundings. Instead of a four-poster bed, he was sleeping on a pile of thin blankets. They were nice enough—this was a high-end resort—but they weren’t very plush. This was Hawaii, after all. The tropics.

His dream was fading quickly. Before it could disappear completely, he took out a little notebook and jotted down the details. For the past few weeks, ever since he’d survived two separate plane crashes in the Hawaiian jungle, he’d been having frequent and vivid dreams. They often involved falling. In all of them, he was a boy again. Maybe he should discuss them with a therapist, but he had no time for that. He had a mission to complete first. Would James Bond take time out from chasing international evildoers to talk to a counselor?

Maybe later, when this clusterfuck had been sorted out, he could waste time talking about dreams and trauma or whatever. That was why he was recording them. For now, he had more important things to worry about.

When he’d finished jotting down the details of the dream, he lay back and stared up at the ceiling of the storage room where he’d spent the night.

Yes, Lincoln Kerr, billionaire and world traveler, was sleeping on the floor of a linen closet at the Royal Leilani Resort on the Kona coast of the Big Island of Hawaii.

If only Vernon could see him now.

“Your green smoothie, sir,” he’d say with a bow, as he presented Lincoln’s first drink of the day on a silver platter. “We’re calling this one ‘Moss for the Boss.’”

They’d chat for a few moments, then as soon as Vernon left, Lincoln would push off his blankets and stroll naked across his bedroom to the balcony. He liked to feel the sun on his skin first thing in the morning. One of his longevity coaches had recommended it, and then he’d discovered he liked it.

But that wouldn’t be possible here at the Royal Leilani. If he walked naked onto the grounds of the resort, he’d at the very least get fired. And he couldn’t let that happen, not until he found the billion-dollar piece of missing tech he was looking for. It had to be here.

He checked the time on his burner phone. Six-thirty in the morning. The housekeeping staff didn’t start their work until nine-thirty, since checkout was at eleven. But his own shift started at nine. He had two and a half hours to erase all traces of his presence from this storage room, find some breakfast, and poke around before he had to start mowing and weeding and deadheading and whatever else the head gardener asked him to do.

If only he’d paid more attention to what his groundskeeping staff on Mulholland Drive did. He had a new appreciation for that kind of work, now that he’d been doing it for a couple of weeks.

He rolled out of bed—well, off the blankets—and rose to his feet. Time to forget he was Lincoln Kerr and plunge back into the life of Jim Brennan, manual laborer.

As he was folding up his blankets, he froze. Voices carried from the path outside the storage room. No one ought to be coming this way at this time of the morning. All the pool supplies were kept in a different room, kitchen goods in yet another. That was why he’d chosen this one to camp out in.

He shrank into the corner of the room and wedged himself behind a pile of boxes of mini-shampoo bottles. That was another reason he’d chosen this room. It gave him comfort to be surrounded by cleaning products.

Forbes Magazine had included that tidbit in their profile of him.

Even though he’s known for his obsession with sanitation, Lincoln Kerr rejects comparisons to Howard Hughes. “I’m not nearly that rich,” he joked when we sat down for lunch recently. As if to prove his point, he shook my hand. He probably didn’t realize that I saw him diligently Sani-wiping his own hand afterwards.

Lincoln had detested that profile, possibly because it was uncomfortably accurate.

He held his breath as the door opened, sending a slice of bright light across the floor. A throaty female voice said, “Wait here or no popcorn for you tonight.”