Chapter 5 #2
Olimpo padded out after me and settled at my side. He was heavy enough to lean against if I needed it. His breath steamed the air. He watched the door in case I tried to go back.
I put my hands flat on the brick wall and pressed until my palms stung. The bandaged one was throbbing. I flexed it, felt the ache, let it live in my bones for a while.
I made myself think about her.
I thought about the kiss. The way her hands had gone to my chest, not to push me away but to hold. The way her mouth had opened under mine. The way she had made a sound, small and raw, a sound that was not pain and not hunger and not anything I could name but need.
I tried to tell myself she had done it to escape.
That she had used me, because that was the only card she had left.
I tried to believe it. I ran the sequence in my head, slow, frame by frame.
Her hand on my coat. Her mouth. The heat of her body against mine.
The shudder at the end, like she was about to go off a cliff.
I thought: you are an idiot. You are a child. She did it to run.
But that was not the truth. The truth was, she had not run when I made the sound. She had not run until she had put her mouth on me a second time, until she had gotten what she needed, and what she needed was me.
She was running from herself, not from me.
I pressed my forehead to the brick. It was cold. I let the cold into my skull, tried to push the thoughts out with it.
She’s gone, I thought. You’ll never see her again, I thought. You are poison, and she knows it.
I stood there for a long time, letting the night freeze me to the core.
Then I made a decision.
I would find her. I would keep her safe. I would not touch her, not ever. Girls like her weren’t for people like me.
Olimpo whined, low in his throat. He leaned in, a hundred and ten pounds of dog, waiting for me to move.
I pushed off the wall. I scratched behind his ears, and the big head tilted up, searching my face for something I could not give.
“I’ve got to go, boy,” I said. “If I don’t find her and take her in, these people, these dangerous people, will find her. And their plan for her—it’s worse than death.”
He wagged his tail, just once, slow, like he understood every word.
I turned for the door. Olimpo followed, steps soft and steady. The cold was still nothing.
I tapped Marco’s number into my phone. Time to work.
By six Marco had the network up.
He had men at O’Hare, men at Midway, men at every rental car counter, even a kid at the Greyhound station just in case.
There were Caruso soldiers running every block from Wacker to Roosevelt, and by sunrise every one of them knew her face, knew her name, knew not to touch her if they saw her—just call Marco and wait for me to get there.
I ran point from the kitchen table, stacking pages, cross-referencing the CCTV from the club with the feeds Marco could pull from the city traffic cams. I watched the clock. I watched the door. I waited for the call.
At 6:42 it came.
Marco had the Greyhound station. He had a clerk in back, a kid who owed him a favor. He had the manifest for the 6:05 to Detroit. Gate four. Single female, ticket bought with cash at 5:50, no checked bag, just a carry-on.
She boarded.
I was in the car before Marco finished the sentence. The lot was crusted with ice, but I took the turn at speed and felt the tires catch. I ran the red at Clark and hit the highway at seventy.
The 6:05 stopped in Kalamazoo at nine for a twenty-minute transfer break. If I floored it, I could make the stop before the bus pulled out.
Two and a half hours. Two hundred miles of I-94. The speedometer never dropped below ninety.
The world outside was a blur. Snow at the edge of the roads, more like dirty slush now, the sky still black at first and then going grey, then pale, then full blinding white as the sun came up over the flats to the right and the farmland started to take shape on the left.
I thought about her on the bus, her face pressed to the window, eyes fixed on nothing.
I thought about the ticket, folded and unfolded until it fit her hand like a lifeline.
I thought about the taste of her mouth and the way it lingered, the salt and the heat and the shudder at the end, and how it would be gone by now, rubbed out by coffee or time or whatever armor she built in place of skin.
I did not call anyone. I did not play music. I drove with both hands on the wheel and the engine screaming like an animal in my chest.
At 8:55 I hit the city limits. At 9:03 I pulled into the bus depot, the brakes screeching.
The bus was already there, blue and white, hissing and idle at the curb.
I scanned the windows, looking for her face.
She was not there.
I killed the engine and went inside. The waiting room was half empty, but I knew her right away, even with the hood up and the coat zipped to her chin and the face turned away from the door.
She was at the vending machines. Bag at her feet. Bottle of water in her hand, not yet opened.
She saw me before I reached her. Her whole body went still. Like a deer at the sound of a branch.
I stopped six feet away, not a single step closer, both hands open and out where she could see them.
Like a cop at the end of a hostage standoff.
She didn’t run, didn’t even flinch. She just went stock-still, like some part of her had already known I would come for her, here, before the sky was even fully lit.
She stared at me with that shark stare—a look I’d seen on men who’d come back from war, and once or twice in the mirror on bad mornings—but there was something else there now, too.
Not fear. Not quite. Fury, mostly, carved into her jaw and the backs of her hands as she clenched the water bottle so hard the label twisted off.
But underneath, something like relief. Like she’d been waiting for someone to catch her falling.
“What are you doing here? What is your problem?” Her voice was low, but it carried. The clerk behind the ticket counter pretended not to hear.
I watched the angry flush rise in her cheeks, the way it clashed against the rest of her, which stayed cold. I couldn’t decide if I wanted to step closer or just put my head through the vending machine and end it right there.
“You’re my problem,” I said. The words landed wrong. I winced. “I mean—”
“Well in that case, just leave me alone. Let me get back on the bus.” She didn’t look away from me, but her left shoulder dipped back, telegraphing her escape.
I didn’t move. “You don’t understand. My problem is that I care what happens to you.”
She made a laugh out of it, but it was the kind that hurt to hear. “You don’t. You don’t fucking know me. You don’t even know my name, do you?”
“Then tell me.” I said it careful, slow.
She shook her head like I was an idiot. “So you can use it against me? Use it to track me down?”
“No,” I said. “So I can talk to you. So that when you try to leave, I can say, honestly, that I’d rather you stay. That I want to keep you safe.”
Her lip curled, but her eyes flicked, quick as a pickpocket, to the corners of the room. Assessing exits. Calculating the odds. “You mafia men are all the same—”
“You have experience with the mafia?” I asked, and I let the word taste like blood.
She hesitated, just a flicker. “Yes. No. Just . . . leave me alone.”
Behind her, the clock over the waiting area said 9:13. The driver was outside the glass, pulling on a cigarette, his eyes on me. I tried to read her next move, but I couldn’t.
I said, “The men. The ones who tried to take you before.”
She went even colder. I could feel her closing doors in her head.