Savage (Park Avenue Kings #1)

4. Cooper

4

COOPER

T HE COMMUTE TOOK forever. By the time I made it to the Lower East Side I was hobbling, my left knee screaming with every step I took. Not like I could’ve braced myself better for the fall—I had been too busy coming to terms with the fact that I was about to die.

Once again, I looked around me, hoping like hell no one had followed. I had a feeling paranoia was going to be my friend for a long, long time.

As I reached what was now “home,” I stopped in front of the barbershop that took up the bottom floor of the tenement building I lived in and sighed. Of course the only place I’d found in my price range was a tiny-ass fifth-floor walkup. The square footage was about the same as my closet back in Colorado, but it didn’t matter. It was about location here, not space, and this was where I needed to be.

Tipping my head back, I sucked in a deep breath of air, holding it in so the cold burned my lungs.

I didn’t even know how to begin to process what had happened tonight. If I could. It was beyond anything I’d ever experienced, and being a journalist had taken me down some shady roads in the past. All I could hope was that I’d gotten a few good shots of their faces, so I could?—

Wait. Shit. There was no point in finding out their identities now or continuing to follow them, was there? The man in the mask had taken care of every last one of them, and judging by the way none of them had been moving by the time I left the alley, I could guess what that meant.

My heart began to pound faster as the reality of the situation hit.

Oh God. Had I really been a witness to murder?

No, I thought, forcing my eyes open. No, he just incapacitated them so they wouldn’t kill me.

Though, truth be told, I didn’t give two shits if they died. Maybe that was callous, but those men were the scum of the earth. They were killing people.

They were killing… my people.

I swallowed hard and tried not to think about that, at least not until I was in my apartment. As I reached for my key, I briefly considered attempting to climb the fire escape so I could avoid the confrontation that was about to happen, but the hope that maybe my landlord had taken a strong sleeping pill to knock her ass out all night had me heading for the door instead.

As I slipped inside, I could hear the sound of late night infomercials coming from her door and prayed that meant she wouldn’t hear the creak of the stairs as I headed up?—

“Skulking around in the middle of the night. I knew you were bad news.”

Swallowing a sigh, I turned around and gave Edith Wilson a tight smile. No doubt she’d been watching the entrance with her hawklike eyes. She was every bit the ill-tempered old lady who ruled the roost in her front-snap dressing gown.

“Now, Ms. Edith, if I were bad news, you wouldn’t have generously let me rent an apartment from you.”

She grunted and narrowed her eyes to slits. “I’m reconsidering that generosity. I don’t put up with good-for-nothings.”

“I can assure you it’s nothing like that. It’s just such a big, confusing city, and I went out exploring and got a little lost.”

“Of course you did. I told you, Kentucky boy?—”

“Colorado.”

“—that small-towners get eaten in this city.” She pursed her lips and looked me up and down. “Try not to get eaten.” She went to close her door and added, “Or do,” before slamming it shut.

That was officially the shortest interaction we’d ever had, which was something to be grateful for on this night from hell. Ms. Edith was the nosiest landlord in the city, of that I was positive, and it didn’t matter if it was two p.m. or two a.m., she wasn’t popping her head out to say anything nice.

Again, it didn’t matter as long I was here and I had a roof over my head. I could deal with crankiness.

I trudged up to the fifth floor with my knee protesting the whole way. Once inside, I flicked on the light, went straight for the world’s tiniest fridge, and wrapped some ice in a towel, needing to get off my leg so I wouldn’t be limping around the city for days.

Opting for my bed over the desk and chair I had pushed up against the wall, I hopped over to it and kicked out of my shoes. I was too tired and too damn sore to bother undressing the rest of the way, and merely flopped down onto the harder-than-I-liked mattress that took up the majority of the space in the tiny studio.

It was ridiculous for a thirty-year-old to be living like a frat boy, and under normal circumstances I wouldn’t have entertained the thought. But this wasn’t a normal circumstance. In fact, any sense of normal had vanished from my life a couple of months ago when a friend overdosed on a new drug that had entered the Colorado party scene.

Ever since then I’d made it my mission to track down the source, to expose the people responsible and take that information to the cops. But that new mission had driven me from my comfortable life to this unfamiliar one.

I stared up at the fan and light overhead, and then my eyes shifted to the flaking paint curling off the ceiling. What the hell am I doing here?

I’d known the city would be overwhelming. That the people I was looking into were dangerous. But tonight had been beyond anything I ever could’ve imagined when I first decided to move out here.

Drugs, guns, a masked vigilante? It was like some horrible nightmare I was trapped inside where I almost got my head blown off. Except it was no nightmare, just a really fucked-up reality.

I squeezed my eyes shut and shifted on the bed, and when my phone dug into my hip I cursed and reached into my pocket to pull it out. As the cell came free, I was about to toss it on the mattress beside me when I spotted something silver stuck to the bottom.

The light reflected off the rectangular metal card as I shuffled up the bed and leaned back against the wall.

Huh, where did this come from?

It wasn’t mine, that was for damn sure. But then where?—

Oh fuck. The alley…

I pried the card off the back of my phone, realizing it was stuck due to a magnet. That moment in the alley when I’d dropped my phone—it must have attached to whatever the hell this was, and when I picked it back up in the middle of all that chaos, I hadn’t noticed it.

Whatever it was.

I turned the small card over, and when a familiar symbol at the top came into view, my breath left me like I’d been sucker-punched in the gut. There, staring back at me, was the same symbol I’d seen on the drugs my friend had taken. The same symbol I was trying to find out more about. One of the dealers must’ve dropped it tonight.

I flipped it over, looking to see if there were any other discernible markings, any other clues, but there was nothing.

Maybe it was a key? Like those hotel ones. But what did it open? Someone’s place? A stash house? Or maybe it was an access card to a facility. Or a safe? The possibilities were endless. The one thing I did know was that it belonged to the same people who’d supplied my friend the laced drugs. The same assholes who’d held a gun to my head tonight.

I let out a sigh, frustration riding me as I thought about how close I’d been to learning more information, only to have it snatched away from me due to a stupid misstep. But then again, maybe not. The masked vigilante had appeared from the shadows as though he’d been watching the deal in that alley too.

I wasn’t na?ve enough to believe he’d been scouring the streets of Queens looking for people to save. That kind of thing didn’t happen in real life. So maybe he’d been there for something altogether different and I’d gotten in his way. Maybe he’d been there to steal the drugs. Or to get a story, like me.

I snorted. Yeah, right. No reporter I knew would know how to wield weapons I’d only ever seen in spy movies. Who the hell carried around throwing stars on the off chance they actually needed to throw one?

But damn he’d been impressive. Like my own personal saviorin kickass boots, a wicked-hot trench coat that held all those deadly weapons, and an intricate face mask that looked to be made out of black metal. It all probably should’ve terrified me, but now that I thought back, it only made him that much more mysterious and…sexy.

I couldn’t stop from wondering who he was. Where he lived. What he did in the light of day. But maybe it was better that I didn’t know. The less I knew, the less I was any kind of threat. It wasn’t like I was ever going to see him again, or at least that was the hope. One almost-fatal encounter was enough for me.

But that didn’t mean I couldn’t try to work out what this card was or what it accessed. It just meant that this time, I’d have to be a bit more careful in how I went about it.