Chapter 31
Thirty-One
For the next few days, Ciaran and her friends wouldn’t let her out of their sight. She wasn’t about to complain about him taking the night shift, but she wasn’t sure what was worse during the day, being cooped up inside, or being cooped up inside with one or both of her friends playing babysitter.
“I can take care of myself, you know.” she muttered for the dozenth time as Lexi handed her a sandwich, then retreated with her own to the table where her work laptop sat beside a scattering of papers and files.
“I know you can,” she said, already tapping away on the keys as she chewed. “But why be alone when I can work from anywhere?”
Jal bit into the soft French loaf piled high with turkey and cheese, and the herbed oil and vinegar dressing was a delightful explosion on her tongue. “Well, somehow you managed it for the last two years.” she replied, mouth full.
Lexi froze, and Jal felt a flash of guilt.
She brushed the crumbs off her hands and deliberately finished chewing before she spoke.
“I’m not going to apologize for just following your lead,” she said, her back ramrod straight at the table, not quite able to completely mask the hurt in her voice.
“Besides, Andy was securely behind bars the whole time, and you needed space to heal. Do I wish you had included us more in that? Of course I do. But this is totally different.”
Jal set her plate aside, her appetite gone.
The sunlight streaming in through the window suddenly felt like a spotlight on how much of a jerk she was being.
She drew her knees up under her chin and wrapped her arms tightly around them.
“I’m sorry, Lex.” she said, her voice small. “I’m just going crazy in here.”
There was a scrape of the chair and then Lexi was there, crouching down so she could get into Jal’s line of sight.
Her blue eyes were soft, which only made Jal feel worse.
“It’s like when someone says don’t think about white elephants, and that’s all you can think of.
” Lexi said. The absurdity of it made Jal laugh. And think of white elephants.
“Being cooped up inside when it’s your choice is easy. Being cooped up inside when you have no other choice, is torture. I do get it, believe me. But let’s give it a little more time. Hopefully Andy will give up soon and life will return to normal.”
Jal nodded though her stomach was now twisted in knots and the sandwich had lost all its appeal.
How ‘normal’ could things get when the police had all her money?
And now that she was on their radar as a suspected thief, how could she go back to picking pockets when she had a reason to look over her shoulder all the time?
Two reasons, if you counted Andy, which she definitely did.
As stir-crazy as it made her, Jal understood that Andy could be anywhere, just waiting to pounce.
Manhattan was a very big place, but if he’d found her once, he’d find her again even if she never went back to her usual places.
Besides, the police had her address. Could it be just a matter of time before Andy’s contacts got a hold of it?
So far, thank God, that hadn’t happened. But it could and there wasn’t a damned thing she could do about it. His intentions, as far as she was concerned, were pretty fucking clear. She belonged to him. Though to what end, she didn’t know.
“You okay?”
Jal blinked, to find Lexi’s worried features still a foot away. She shook off the thoughts and took another bite of her sandwich, smiling around it to try to reassure her friend enough to go back to her own lunch, and work.
Lexi gave her a dubious look, but patted her knee and got to her feet.
She sat back down behind her laptop, but Jal could still feel her eyes on her as she finished her sandwich, and picked up a book, the same one she’d been trying to finish for weeks.
And today was not going to be that day. Jal just opened the book and stared at lines of type that could have been in a foreign language with the circles her mind had been spinning in all day.
Dimly, she heard Lexi’s phone ring but didn’t pay any attention until her voice rose in pitch and volume. “Whoa, whoa, wait Elena,” she was saying. “Slow down!”
The book slipped out of Jal’s hand and clattered to the floor. Her head snapped to Lexi, who was sitting stiffly with her hand around her throat, eyes large as she listened. “What’s going on?” she demanded.
Lexi put the phone down on the table and hit a button. The sound of pounding feet and heavy breathing filled the air. Jal rushed across the room and skidded to a halt beside her friend.
“He’s behind me!” Elena’s voice came out of the speaker.
“Who’s behind you?” Jal asked, though there could only be one person. At the same time, Lexi shrieked, “where are you?”
“I’m on Ninth, about a block from Lima.” There was a thud and a shout of outrage. “Sorry!”
Jal looked down at the clock on Lexi’s phone, and cursed. There was still a half hour before the restaurant opened for lunch. The front door would be locked and the dining room would be empty. “Go down the alley.”
“I don’t have my keys!”
Jal ran back to her phone and dialed a number from memory. “Just do it,” she yelled as the phone rang.
“Lima y Sazón,” the familiar voice of Elena’s cousin Marilena, the restaurant’s bar manager, said cheerfully. "How can I—"
“Mari, it’s Jal. I don’t have time to explain but I need you to go to the back door right now and get it open, as quickly as you can.”
“What?”
“Back door, now! Get it open!”
There was the sound of a glass crashing to the floor and a lot of frantic breathing, but the boom of the kitchen door and a sudden burst of cooking sounds and Merengue told Jal that she was doing as she was told.
Next, came the bang of a metal hotel pan hitting the floor, followed by a stream of Spanish curses, and a grunt as Mari slammed into the back door, too frantic to stop in time.
Jal’s head whipped to Lexi, who was listening to Elena’s updates. She caught something about a car turning into the narrow alley in Elena’s wake, while closer in her ear came a frantic rattle of the kitchen door locks and the screech and groan as Marilena shoved the door open with her hip.
“Look out!” Elena’s voice came from both phones. An engine roared to a deafening level, followed by the screech of tires, a loud metallic crash, and the call on Lexi’s phone went dead.
“Elena!”
Lexi abandoned her phone and ran to Jal’s side. “Elena, answer us!”
For a moment, Jal couldn’t hear anything over the roar of her blood in her ears, but then Elena’s voice broke through and it was the best thing she had ever heard. “I’m okay,” she replied through Marilena’s phone.
Lexi clutched at her in relief and Jal let her drag them both down onto the sofa. “Oh, thank God,” Lexi gasped, her blue eyes brimming with tears of relief. “What happened?”
Elena let loose a string of Spanish curses.
Jal understood only half of it, but there were several creative things that Elena wished Andy would do with himself.
“Asshole almost ran me down in the alley. Mari got the door open just in time,” she finally said over the din of half the kitchen staff demanding answers. Elena barked an order for them to get back to work and the sound ebbed away.
“I’m sure you’ll be devastated by this, nena but it looks like we’re going to need a new door.”
“Did you see what he was driving?” Jal asked.
“Yeah, a beat-up maroon Toyota, now even more worse for wear on the driver’s side. I didn’t catch the plate, other than it was yellow and I think it started with a K.” Elena cursed. “Cabrón also owes me a new phone.”
Despite the adrenaline running through her, Jal laughed at that. “Stay there,” Jal told her. “I’m calling Takeda.”
“I’ll be here,” Elena replied and hung up.
Jal went to the fridge where she had pinned up the detective’s information and dialed. He picked up on the second ring and Jal told him everything that she knew. After asking whether Elena was okay, he said he would head for the restaurant and Jal promised to meet him there.
“I’ll call for a car,” Lexi rushed to the table and started gathering all the files and papers into a haphazard pile, stuffing them and her laptop back in her bag.
Jal bolted for her bedroom to change into something more presentable and, in less than five minutes, they burst out onto the sidewalk just as a black town car was pulling up to the curb.
They piled into the cedar and leather scented interior, and the car whisked them across town as fast as it could in New York City traffic.
Ciaran needed to know where they were going, so she dialed his number, but her stomach dropped when it went straight to voicemail.
She listened to the message, hoping that even the recorded sound of his voice would help soothe her frayed nerves, but it wasn’t like the real thing.
With a sigh, she hung up and sent him a text with all the details.
She put her head back on the seat, and watched the tops of the buildings crawl by.
It was funny how much had changed, that now, when anything happened, her first thought was that she wanted –no, needed– Ciaran to know everything.
Especially when it came to Andy. Coming after her was one thing, but using her friends to do it?
How long until he moved on to Lexi, or Ciaran?
This was turning into a nightmare.
“You, okay?”
Jal turned her head and met Lexi’s worried blue eyes. There were tears caught in her eyelashes and Jal reached over to give her hand a reassuring squeeze. “Yeah, I’m good.”
They stayed that way until the car pulled up to the curb. Jal threw the door open the second they stopped and rushed inside with Lexi on her heels. Elena was perched on a bar stool with a towel filled with ice pressed to her face.