Chapter 1 #3
The corner of his mouth moves. Not a smile, just an acknowledgment that I landed one. "Then let me be more precise. You left Dominion tonight after your shift. What time?"
"Bar closed late. Closing took another half hour. I left the underground lot somewhere past two."
"Drove straight home?"
"Drove to my parking garage. Same route every night."
"And when you arrived, walk me through it."
I want to tell him where he can put his notebook.
I want to fire back with something cutting enough to crack that calm exterior and find out what's underneath.
Years of mouthing off to Doms and every single one of them has eventually shown me the limit of their composure.
Frustrated, angry, dismissive, bored. I always find the edge.
Andy's composure doesn't appear to have one. And that scares me more than the man with the gun.
I put my hands on the table because they want to shake and I won't give him that. I start talking.
The second level. My spot. The stairwell.
Two figures on the ground level, one standing, one kneeling.
A working fluorescent catching a profile I recognized from years of serving the man his bourbon.
The suppressed shot. The sound of Lawrence's body on the ground.
Running. Driving. The 911 call. The nothing that replaced everything.
I give him what I gave the patrol officers. The basics. The shape of the night without the details that would tell a sharp detective exactly how much I understand about what I saw.
Because I noticed things a civilian bartender probably wouldn't. How fast the scene was cleaned.
The operational precision of it. How the lighting changed between my first pass through and my second.
I noticed because years of reading buildings taught me to see systems, and whoever cleaned that garage was running one.
But observations like those raise questions about who I am and what I've done, and I am not ready to hand Andy the key to that locked room.
He writes while I talk. Deliberate strokes, the pen moving across the page with measured control. When I finish, he doesn't look up right away. The pen keeps moving for a few seconds longer.
Then those blue-grey eyes lift to mine.
"What aren't you telling me?"
The question sits between us like a blade on a table. Not an accusation, but a read from a man who has spent his career listening to people tell him almost the truth.
"I told you what I saw."
"You told me what happened. That's not the same thing.
" He sets down the pen. Leans back. The posture should read as casual, but relaxed and disengaged are two different animals, and Andy is cataloging me, waiting for the tell that reveals what's being hidden.
"You're holding back. You've got reasons. I won't push tonight."
"How generous of you."
"Generous has nothing to do with it." He picks up the pen, clicks it once, and stands.
The full height of him unfolds from the chair and I have to tip my chin up to hold eye contact, which is annoying for a woman who is not short.
"You're exhausted, you're running on adrenaline, and you watched a man die.
Anything I push for right now, you'll give me a version designed to get me out of this room.
" He tucks the notebook into his jacket. "I'd rather wait and get the truth."
He says it like he has all the time in the world. Like my defenses are a lock he fully intends to pick, and he is content to sit with the tumblers until every last one gives.
I want to hit him. I also want him to keep talking in that low, certain voice, and the collision of those two impulses leaves me furious and flushed and gripping the table edge.
"Margot," Andy says, without breaking eye contact with me. "I'm going to need everything you've got on Lawrence Blanchard. Membership records, attendance logs, who he scened with regularly."
"I'll have it for you by morning," Margot says.
Andy looks at me one last time. The cop falls away, just barely, and what's underneath is warmer than the badge, closer than the notebook, and entirely more dangerous. Cop mode, not club mode, except the line just blurred and we both felt it.
"Get some rest, Renata."
My name again. Softer this time. And my name in his mouth, in that voice, lands like a hand on the back of my neck.
"I don't take orders from cops," I say. But my voice comes out quieter than I want.
"No," he says. "You don't take orders from anyone. That's going to be a problem, I think."
He turns and walks out, and his footsteps are quiet for a man that size.
His cologne still hangs in the air across the table, and it fills the space where fear sat minutes ago with something just as unsettling.
Remy watches me from across the room. The look on his face says he caught every bit of what just passed between me and Andy, and he is wisely keeping his mouth shut about it.
I press my palms against my eyes and try to replace the afterimage of blue-grey with darkness.
The darkness doesn't hold. Blue-grey keeps bleeding through, and underneath it, that voice. That's going to be a problem, I think.
He's right. I just don't know yet how much of one.