Under the Surface (29 page)

The hell of it was, he knew walking out the door had hurt her more.

 

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Noise. An intrusive, annoying clanging, too close to her head to be her alarm because her phone was charging in the kitchen. She'd have to get out of bed to turn off the alarm.

The bed shifted as the warm body beside her reached for the nightstand. Through the stupor of sleep she heard Matt fumbling for his iPhone in the mess on top, then a solid thunk as something hit the carpeted floor—the Sig or his department-issued Glock, probably. Maybe the knife. Possibly the economy-sized bottle of lotion she slathered on her hands before she went to bed. Most likely a gun.

“I'll take it,” she said, her voice thick, trusting he'd hand her the shrill electronic device, not a semiautomatic.

He dropped the vibrating, buzzing phone on her abdomen and rolled onto his back. “Christ,” he muttered.

She sat up, then paid the price for moving. He'd held her in place by gripping the hip that hit the linoleum the night someone shot out her windows, so when she sat up fresh twinges shot through the joint. Muscles in her thighs and calves protested vehemently when she moved.

None of that compared to the shredded ache she felt in her heart.

She swiped at the screen to shut off the alarm, then automatically checked various accounts without really seeing the comments and replies. It was something to buffer her against the turbulent emotions eddying in the air.

“Time is it?” he asked, his voice morning thick.

“Noon. Sorry. I should have set it back an hour, but I fell asleep instead.” And she'd forgotten to charge the phone as well. She'd lain awake, unwilling to follow him down into the bar and badger him further but exhaustion finally won.

She felt like she would never be rested again.

“You okay?” he asked.

“I think that's my line,” she said.

His arm covered his eyes, and his chest rose and fell evenly. Too evenly. In for a count of four, out for a count of four. Repeat. She looked at the hand loosely curled on his chest. The thin skin covering his knuckles looked like her heart felt.

He wasn't going to answer her. Finally she said, “I'm fine.” Tears prickled at the backs of her eyes. She blinked hard, and after a few moments the sensation faded. “I'm sorry, Matt. I pushed when I shouldn't have.”

I wanted something I shouldn't want … something I can't have.

“I'm sorry too.” He lifted his arm from across his face, looked her right in the eye. “I was too rough.”

“It was fine. You were fine.” She could handle that. Handle more. “I won't break, Matt.”

“I might.”

She knew he'd meant to make a joke and defuse the tension, but the words sounded like he'd forced them out through steel wool. A wave of mortified regret crawled up her throat. Ten seconds earlier she'd told herself she had to stop pushing, and here she was … pushing.

Give him some space, some time.
“I'm going to get in the shower.”

“Okay.”

She untangled her legs from the light quilt and managed to walk to the bathroom without stumbling, then managed to shower without crying. Fifteen minutes later she stood in front of her tiny closet with her hair wrapped in a towel, wearing her bra and the short black skirt with the small front pocket for her iPhone. She pulled out a white sleeveless cashmere turtleneck, yanked off the towel, pulled the sweater over her head, and slid the phone into the pocket so she'd remember to charge it. She looked over her shoulder at him. Matt was steadily going about his business, avoiding her eyes. “Make sure you charge that,” he said.

“It'll be fine as long as I don't make a call,” she replied. “I need makeup more.”

She stood back to let him into the shower, the thin plastic curtain like a brick wall between them. She dried her hair and scrunched the waves into a simple style. She'd begun to dab concealer under her eyes when she heard a soft thump and a single knock at the door.

The UPS guy, delivering her latest shipment of boxed groceries she'd ordered online. She walked out of the bathroom, gently unchained and unbolted the door to the landing, and crouched down to grab the small white box.

She looked up into the barrel of a dull black gun. Lyle held it, staring down at her, expressionless. Staring at a gun looked just as unremarkable on television as getting shot at, but in real life Eve's entire body went numb.

Lyle took the box from her and shoved it onto the counter beside the door. “Downstairs. Now.”

“I'm not going anywhere with you,” she said, as her brain kicked into overdrive. In a split second she ran through the circumstances. Matt's small arsenal was in the bedroom on the nightstand. He was in the shower, defenseless. She was an idiot.

“Sure you are, Evie,” he said gently. He gave her a smile so full of toothy malice the hair stood up on her arms. “Because if you don't I'll shoot you. And then I'll leave you here and go and shoot your father, your mother, your motherfucking brother. I'm sick of this fucking bar and all the trouble it's caused me. It ends now.”

She went utterly still. Natalie, her best friend, or Cesar, supporting his family, or Pauli, who was just a kid.
Her family.

The shower shut off. In a few seconds Matt would dry off and walk through the bathroom door, and maybe Lyle would shoot him too.

But he didn't know Matt was a cop.

Matt would find her.

She hurried past Lyle, out the door and onto the landing.

“Nice and quiet going down those stairs,” he said, eyeing her four-inch heels. “Don't want lover boy getting alarmed.”

No, they didn't want that, not until lover boy had gone and gotten all of his biggest friends with their semiautomatic pistols and concussion grenades. Lyle gripped her arm, hustled her across the parking lot, and shoved her into the backseat of the SUV. His cell rang. “Keep an eye on her,” he snapped at Travis, sitting in the driver's seat, then slammed her door and took the call with a snarled “Yeah?”

Twisting sideways to fumble for the seat belt, she pulled her iPhone from the pocket of her skirt and slipped it between her thigh and the seat. After she fastened the belt she swiped her thumb across the screen to wake it, and tapped the phone button.

“Hey, Travis,” she said as she lowered the volume. She bent over and pretended to adjust her heel, dialing a memorized phone number, praying adrenaline would make her fingers accurate.

Voice mail. The voice was faint, audible only to her ears as the relentlessly pleasant female operator asked the caller to leave a message. She hung up, waited a few seconds, pressed Call twice to redial the number.

Oh shit, Matt! Oh shit oh shit oh shit! Please answer your phone!

Travis wouldn't meet her eyes in the rearview mirror. She'd known him her whole life. He'd always worked to ingratiate himself into whatever circle was closest. The fact that he wasn't chatting her up, let alone looking her in the eye made her stomach lurch. Driven by the most basic impulse of all—survival—she reached for the door handle.

The locks clicked shut. She looked over the back of the driver's seat at Travis, who still wasn't looking at her.

“They'll meet us at the warehouse,” Lyle said as he slid into the Escalade's leather seats. The truck pulled away from Eye Candy, into traffic.

*   *   *

After a firefight, routine mattered. Shower and dress. Jeans, polo, running shoes, gun at his right ankle, knife. Stick to the routine, the last stand against feelings, memories, images. Eve walking up the stairs with a sociopath. Eve taunting him, Eve trembling under him until he'd wrung every last drop of fight out of her and she turned to flame in his arms. The misery on her face this morning.

The silence in the living room triggered a mental alarm. Maybe she was in the office, doing paperwork. He walked into the living room and saw a package on the counter, but the office door was closed.

“Eve?” he called as he opened the door.

The office was dark, the door leading down the spiral staircase to Eye Candy's dance floor closed and dead-bolted from the inside. No light shone through the curtains covering the floor-to-ceiling windows.

“Eve!” he called again. His voice tauntingly bounced around the cavernous space as he hauled open the door and launched himself at the stairs, his hands skidding down the curved railing. He jogged into the storeroom, the dish room, then behind the bar. Nothing.

“
Eve!
”

She'd vanished. He took the curving stairs three at a time and bolted through the office, back into her apartment. Her purse was still on the counter. The pegs by the back door held her car keys. On the landing he scanned the empty alley, then dashed down the wooden staircase and around the side of the building. The parking lot was empty but for his Jeep.

Cold certainty crawled up his spine and settled into the base of his brain. She was gone, taken from the apartment from under his nose, while he was in the shower.

He was drowning. He knew how it felt, a deceptive lack of feeling that marked the leading edge of a tsunami. Then the surge hit. He stood stock-still as the wave engulfed him—fear, anguish, terror, anger rising inside him, forcing their way up his chest, into his throat—then he was moving. He had to get away from this rampaging, acid-skinned, sharp-clawed thing inside him, threatening to gut him from the inside out.

He was headed for his Jeep, when his phone, slipped into his front pocket, buzzed. Chad's cell had a distinctive ringtone. Matt's was an old-fashioned bell-tone ring. He pulled it from his pocket. Eve's cell number appeared on the screen.

Oh shit.

He tapped Answer.

“—a little over the top back there, don't you think?”

He immediately muted the call, so he could hear her but nothing from his surroundings would be audible to Eve or anyone with her. Her voice sounded distant, melded with the radio, like the phone wasn't up to her mouth.

He could make out Lyle's voice, but his reply was too muffled to understand. But it sounded dismissive. As if Eve didn't matter anymore.

“Would you turn that off, please? I hear music so much at Eye Candy, I hate listening to it when I'm not at work.”

That was bullshit, pure and simple. She must have gotten an assent, because the background noise shut off.

“Much better,” she said. A pause, then, “Travis, I heard Maria's working at Two Slices. Is her mom watching the kids?”

Fight back the terror, the emotion that would get her killed. Phone to his ear, he sprinted to the sidewalk and pulled up a mental map of Thirteenth Street, running through the East Side, thirteen blocks from the river that formed the city's eastern boundary. The next mention will either be Spattered Ink or the crazy psychic doing business out of her house with about thirty cats for company.

“Can you believe Madame LaMoue is still in business? She gets a booth at the East Side street fair every year. Local color. That's how I describe her to people considering opening up shop on the East Side. Every community needs someone with
the eye
.”

No response from Lyle, but Matt was in the Jeep, the gas pedal floored. He used Chad's cell to dial Sorenson.

“Lyle's got Eve,” he said when she answered. “Took her out of the apartment while I was in the shower. They're moving south on Thirteenth Street. I'm on my way to the precinct.”

“Shit is about to go down,” Sorenson said. “Caleb Webber just came in. He got an anonymous call suggesting he track down his father. Pastor Webber made it to the men's breakfast at seven but not the volunteer lunch at noon. No one's seen him since eight a.m.”

“Not answering his cell?”

“He doesn't carry one. Caleb checked the restaurant because sometimes his dad stays and works there, and his car's still in the parking lot, doors locked. No signs of his dad.”

“It wouldn't take much to overpower him,” Matt said. “I'm ninety seconds away.”

He braked to a halt in the parking lot at the back of the building. Both phones in hand, he sprinted through the back door, shouldering aside officers in his haste to get to the team. Hawthorn, Sorenson, McCormick, and a couple more uniforms crowded into a conference room with Caleb Webber.

Caleb looked over Matt's shoulder. “Where's Eve?”

“Gone,” Matt said, then set his phone down on the table.

“Jesus fucking Christ! You said you'd—” Caleb began, but the sound of Eve's voice echoing tinnily from Matt's phone cut him off mid-bellow.

“Where are we?” Matt could hear the fear running under Eve's question. A car door slammed shut, then Eve said, “Is that the old Tyson plant?”

“Has she been relaying her position the whole time?” Lieutenant Hawthorn asked.

“Yes,” Matt said. “She's dropping hints like bread crumbs, and there's long stretches of silence. Two Slices, Madame LaMoue, then a shooting that happened at Lassom Park.” All heading toward the river, toward the maze of abandoned warehouses weighing down the East Side.

“Counselor, make a list of places your father could be,” Hawthorn said. “We'll dispatch a squad car to check them out.”

“Mom checked his appointment book. He wasn't due anywhere until this afternoon,” Caleb said.

Sorenson stood in front of the large map of the East Side. “The Tyson plant is at Sixth and Harrison,” she said as she tugged on a bulletproof vest.

“And before that, at First and Hancock,” Caleb said, moving to stand beside her. He tapped an intersection an inch further north and east from Sorenson's. “Tyson moved operations in the nineties before they shut down. If they're deep in the alleys, Eve's not going to know exactly where she is. She's got a shit sense of direction.”

Matt moved the phone to a safer location and searched for his size in the pile of gear on the table. Hawthorn and Sorenson were suiting up. McCormick and the other uniform were already in bulletproof vests, but McCormick was checking his equipment, patting his extra clip, turning down the volume on his radio.