I bounced from the bed, paced to the window and back. My hair kissed the small of my back, my one vanity. Perhaps I should’ve found some pants, but he’d already seen every inch of me.
“Please don’t. Don’t make more of me than I am, or more of what we had. I think you’ve romanticized me, and that’s why you can’t let me go. You have to move on. We’re poison together, remember?”
“And I think you’ve forgotten what it was like between us because that’s the only way you can stay away. God, Corine . . .” My name fell as a sigh.
“Not now.” My anger evaporated, leaving desperation. I didn’t know what I would do if he pressed. “Let me finish getting dressed and then we’ll talk this thing to death. Eva can whip up some dinner, you can tell me what you learned from Booke. I just . . . don’t think it’s a good idea to be in a bedroom with you.”
Not the way I felt. Not with so much emotion desperate for release and I couldn’t seem to weep.
He almost smiled. I saw the quirk of his mouth, or maybe it was a trick of the shadows. “I bet Eva can get us an address for Lenny Marlowe. We’ll go see him tomorrow and talk to him about what he saw. Doubt he knows anything, though, or he’d be in the same shape as poor Maris.”
I suspected he was right, but it couldn’t hurt. “Good idea. Do you know if Delta has assigned him somewhere new? If so, what shift is he working?”
Details. I’d always handled the details that way. Funny that I would be the practical one in our relationship, but it always fell like that. I made sure we had food in the house and that Chance remembered to eat while making deals. He contacted people, talked me up, and for a while, we lived high profile. We made the news when we saved the little girl, but in the end, the publicity caused more harm than good.
To my amusement, that much hadn’t changed. He looked blank. “I don’t know, but I’ll have Eva find out. I imagine she can smooth-talk somebody at the agency.”
I’d be surprised if she couldn’t.
Legwork
Lenny Marlowe lived in a trailer near an overpass.
Each time a semi went by, the whole thing shook alarmingly. I didn’t know how the guard slept at night, which proved a person could get used to anything. The entire place could’ve fit into the posh suite we’d rented at the hotel in Monterrey, but I had lived in worse places that last year in foster care.
Along with a pink flamingo, two ceramic ducks, and a broken lawn mower, he had a rusty sign in his front yard that read BEWARE OF DOG. It tickled me to find the dog in question was a mouthy Chihuahua with bulging eyes and a spiked red leather collar. Butch sat in the crook of his owner’s arm, eyeing us with suspicion.
Lenny himself was a tall, lumpy guy with small, close-set eyes, an overlong nose, and a wide, thin mouth. He seemed delighted to have company, almost conspiratorial, in fact. Chance sat quiet beside me on Lenny’s sagging brown couch.
“Well, like I done told the police”—he gave the word a long O—“when I went in, I’d plumb forgot I didn’t report there no more. I worked that warehouse six months, and you get into a habit, y’know?” I nodded to show I did and he went on. “But when I got in there, it smelled funny, like bad egg salad. I took a walk through and saw the mess. I’ll tell you straight, I got out of there quick.”
“I don’t blame you. That night, you didn’t see the woman who lost the purse?” Chance asked.
“Nope. Best I can figure, they must’ve had her in there the night before, after I got off work. That was supposed to be my last night on the job, but I forgot and came back. They hadn’t changed the locks yet.”
“Can you think of any reason they would take a hostage there?” I watched the guard’s face, trying to decide if he could possibly be this guileless. It was like interrogating Forrest Gump.
“Well, it’s dark and pretty isolated. Most of the businesses have shut down—just that La Quinta Inn left a few blocks away. So I guess if you wanted to beat somebody up, nobody would hear the screams.”
Good place for magickal workings then as well.
“Had you noticed anything strange before that night?” Chance looked remarkably impassive, impervious to the idea of someone hurting Yi Min-chin.
I knew better.
Lenny thought that over. “Well, I wouldn’t tell this to the cops ’cause they’d think I got a screw loose, but yeah. I work second shift, so it’s all dark and spooky, but I swear I heard stuff moving around in there sometimes. Nobody shoulda been there but me.”
I exchanged a glance with Chance, and then he asked, “Did you ever see anyone?”
Lenny shook his head. “No. Mostly it was a feeling, and I’d get the willies real bad. I’d turn around and nothing would be there. Sometimes I’d see movement in the shadows but if I shined my light on it, nothing.” He hesitated. “I guess I thought maybe birds got in because I heard wings rustling sometimes.”
“I bet you’re glad to be out of there,” I said. Though I tried not to show it, I felt dead man’s hands crawling up my back just listening to him.
“No kidding. I work at a desk now. No more creepy warehouses. I monitor stuff on a TV, nice building. I have a phone and everything, but they don’t let me order pizza. I’m not supposed to let people in the building at night.” If encouraged, he would probably talk about his new job all day, or at least until time for his next shift.
“Thanks for your time,” Chance murmured. “We appreciate your assistance.”
“So you’re trying to find the lady that disappeared, right?” Lenny’s voice gained enthusiasm. “I peeked in her purse before I called the cops, but I didn’t take anything, I swear. Don’t tell, okay? So are you guys private eyes? I bet she was kidnapped. Did you get a ransom demand? I could help, be your bag man or something.” His words came out in a single breath, mashed together like a peanut butter and Marshmallow Fluff sandwich.
“No, we’re not and we haven’t. You already helped plenty.” I put down my watery Diet Coke without finishing it and stood. I expected Lenny to produce further useful information like I expected to get milk from a tomcat, but it shouldn’t do any harm to leave my cell number. I scrawled it on a page torn from my pocket calendar and handed it to him. “If you think of anything else, give me a call. We’ll get out of your way now. Thanks a lot.”
“Sure, anytime. I’ll keep an ear open for news about that Korean lady. I’ll call you if I hear anything.” Lenny got to his feet as well. His mama had apparently instilled the rudiments of good manners in him.
Once outside, I asked Chance, “You think they were using the warehouse for rituals at night?”
“Seems like a given,” he said grimly. “They probably thought he was too stupid to notice any residual effects.”
I climbed in the Camry, considering our next move. “It has to be driving you crazy, wondering how your mom got mixed up in all this.”
“Not as much as worrying if she’s safe, but yeah. It’s hard realizing I don’t know her half as well as I thought I did.” He started the car and followed the gravel drive out of the trailer park back to the access road that adjoined the freeway. “She had this whole other life before she moved to Tampa and she didn’t talk about it at all. When I think back, she had a way of avoiding questions. If I brought something up, instead of answering, she’d ask if I did my homework or if I’d remembered to take the trash out.”
“Maybe she was trying to protect you.”
He flicked me a hard look. “I’d rather know what’s coming.”
Ouch.
“Sometimes it’s easier not to deal with things head-on. Sometimes it’s better to step aside quietly.”
“Better for whom?”
I quit trying to pretend we were still talking about his mother. “Me. You think I could’ve walked away if I had to look into your eyes and say good-bye?”
“I don’t know. Could you?”
“No.” The answer came simple and unadorned. “But don’t you understand why I had to go?”
The silence built, broken only by the vibration of the engine and the roar of the tires on the road. By the exit he took, we must be heading for the police station.
Chance sounded as if the words were dragged out of him with hooks and wires. “You blamed me for what happened in Tuscaloosa. You thought I didn’t love you. You thought your safety didn’t matter to me, just the money.”
I didn’t know what I thought anymore. Certainly I believed those things at the time or I wouldn’t have left.
“You took a job that put us up against Clayton Mann,” I said deliberately. “Just what did you expect to happen? When you threaten someone who burns down buildings for a living and rapes women for fun—”
His jaw clenched. “I thought I could protect you. Do you think I don’t turn that night over in my head, time and again? Wondering how I could have changed things? You were right behind me, Corine. I went first to make sure it was safe. How the hell could I know the floor would crumble beneath you and leave me standing while you fell?”
Well, that’s your luck. Even when he didn’t try to use it, good fortune sat on him like a shining, silver crown. Bad things took one look at him and ricocheted to the nearest warm body. So of course I fell, not him.
Three stories through burning, rotted timber, old plaster, and asbestos.
Remembering that night, a wave of pain and horror stirred, and I fought it down. His luck was a Sword of Damocles, if ever there was one, a gift I’d come to see as a curse. See, unlike me, he couldn’t focus and shut it off, not entirely. It ran through his life in a subsonic hum, striking random notes that called pure chaos. Maybe that doesn’t sound like a bad thing . . . at first. It would keep things interesting, right?
Well, try living with him. If we went to a store, it was robbed. If we went to a restaurant, he’d win the millionth customer prize and a free steak dinner or save somebody from choking. Coincidences crawled on him thick as bluebottle flies on a dung heap.
“You couldn’t,” I said finally, doubt threading my words. “But we were in that situation because of you, and I didn’t want to live like that anymore.”
“So you left,” he said bitterly. “Thinking all I cared about was getting rich off your gift. But it was never the money. Yeah, the guy who hired us to bring Mann down had an ax to grind. The son of a bitch raped and murdered his daughter! In her old pictures, Kelly looked like you, Corine. She looked like you. And all I could think about was getting that sick f**k off the streets before he noticed you.”
Chance paused, his fingers turned white on the steering wheel. I stared at his profile, dumbstruck. He’d never said a word, not once. I couldn’t even remember what Kelly Armitage had looked like before Clayton Mann got through with her. It took him six months inside before he started giving up the bodies. But for a moment, I pictured Chance staring at her pictures and seeing me. Was he afraid of losing me, even then?