CHAPTER ELEVEN
Iam present. I am prepared. I am in control.
I recite my little mantras in my head, even as I stand on the street corner doing my damnedest to project the opposite: I am lost, I am alone, I am extremely murderable.
I tug at my platinum bob wig and frown at my oversized map of London.
If it’s a clueless blond tourist this killer wants, it’s a clueless blond tourist they shall get.
It’s not yet seven back home. If I were there, I’d still be wrapped in blankets, mentally preparing to tour the stages of grief en route to my cubicle. Funny how I feel more eager to face the day when it entails baiting a serial killer.
Which reminds me: I haven’t called out of work.
I make a mental note to do that later, lest HillCare’s hundred and seven Twitter followers feel abandoned.
No one else really needs notifying; my friends and family are fairly accustomed to me skipping town at the last minute.
And it’s not like it makes a difference with Steph.
A little murder vacation should hardly interfere with us sending each other bookish memes.
Grant, on the other hand, started emailing excuses the moment he found a phone charger at the airport. He’d arranged a cat sitter for Arthur before we’d even boarded the plane.
With no pedicabs in sight, I sneak a glance at him.
He’s leaning against the building behind me with his rented bike, the helmet he insisted the rental guy dig up from some dusty corner of the shop, and a blatant disregard for his instruction to act nonchalant.
The plan is for him to subtly follow the pedicab after it picks me up, providing backup and alerting Lissa and Lesley to our final destination.
For now, he’s looking at his phone, but holding it in a death grip that is anything but casual.
Probably running Google ragged with searches like how to catch a murderer and Anna Matthews home address.
I check the time and scan the street, which is humming with routine weekday hustle and bustle. The Facebook post specifically said the Pulverizer would strike at noon. Where is he?
I’m pretty sure I’m being stood up when I hear the screech of tires down the street.
My nerves fire to attention. Stopped at the next light over is a beanie-wearing man clutching the handlebars of a pedicab, hunched in a posture typically reserved for Tour de France competitors.
His mouth is a grim line. He checks his watch. He’s running late.
It must be him. I can’t imagine another scenario where someone would be racing the clock via pedicab, unless he commandeered it on his way to stop the love of his life from marrying someone else. But this is not that kind of Anna Matthews book.
The light changes, and he pedals furiously. I steel myself with a lungful of crisp air as he draws nearer. After the intersection, he pulls up to the curb and looks around. When he sees me, his shoulders relax. He smiles. And he gestures in invitation to the carriage behind him.
I resist the urge to look back at Grant as I approach him—the Pedicab Pulverizer, in the flesh—feeling like a boa constrictor is wrapped around my neck.
He looks fairly nondescript for someone so dramatically nicknamed, with few noteworthy features aside from a trace of salt-and-pepper stubble and one small silver earring.
But he eyes me with a flash of contempt that tells me I’ve got the right guy.
He quickly papers over it with a thin smile. “Need a lift?”
This might be the hardest part—going against all my instincts to accept a ride from a murderer. It’s the kind of thing you’re generally advised not to do.
I have one second to take a steadying breath and get in character. Think like the tourist. Be the tourist. I open my mouth.
“Ya” is what comes out, in an inexplicable attempt at a Scandinavian accent.
My heart thunders as I climb into the carriage, scanning it for escape routes and defense angles.
“Where to?” His voice is gruff, with just a hint of artificial friendliness.
“Buckingham Palace,” I say, naming the first tourist destination that comes to mind. It doesn’t matter. He won’t be bringing me there. Still, as he looks over his shoulder at me, I swear he rolls his eyes ever so slightly. Him, the homicidal cyclist. Judging me. The nerve. “How much?” I ask.
“Fifty quid.”
Rip-off. Especially since he’s planning to kill me.
I fight the urge to argue and start digging in my bag for Lesley’s cash when a figure appears in the corner of my vision.
“There you are, honey.” Grant grips the side of the carriage, with what is technically the first smile I’ve seen from him—though with the alarm in his eyes, I don’t know if it counts.
His helmet is off, presumably left with his bike.
“Why don’t we walk together instead? I have something I need to tell you. ”
I stare at him, mystified. What the hell is he doing?
“No,” I say through clenched teeth. “I am Swedish.” Goddammit. Acting has never been my forte. My main strategy here was to not speak very much, and Grant isn’t helping.
The driver turns back, frowning. “You know this guy?” I shake my head quickly, all too aware that my lonesome-tourist act is in peril.
“Trust me,” Grant says pointedly. “You are going to want to hear this.”
I glare at him. He’s a fraction of an inch from blowing our cover, and for what? An eighty-eighth reason we shouldn’t be doing this? I pry his fingers off the side of the carriage.
“Drive, please,” I call to the Pulverizer, with one more warning look at Grant. “I mean, pedal. Danke.”
Shit. That’s German, isn’t it? This is a clusterfuck on wheels.
We take off, leaving a flustered Grant behind.
“Where you from, love?” The driver shouts over the traffic as we make our way down the road. I hope I’m imagining the note of skepticism in his voice.
“Sweden!” I say, perhaps too enthusiastically. “Stockholm.”
“Stockholm,” he repeats, sounding like someone trying to decide if a child is fibbing. This is not good. “And what do you do in Stockholm?”
I rifle through and dump out the junk drawers in my brain, cursing myself for choosing one of the few places I’ve never been. “Oh, you know,” I say breezily. “Go to IKEA. Listen to ABBA. Be … cold.”
Oh, shit, wait. He meant what do I do in Stockholm.
“Sales,” I hurry. “I am in sales.”
But something’s off. By which I mean more off than the standard pedicab-serial-killer kind of off. A heavy silence has fallen, the kind that tells me he’s thinking hard. It’s like I can hear him adding up my story, my terrible accent, my obviously unnatural hair.
He darts a look over his shoulder, then does a double take toward the sidewalk that leaves him slack-jawed. And when I follow his gaze, I can see why.
Grant is tearing down the sidewalk, shockingly close behind us—arms pumping, jacket flying out behind him, dodging pedestrians by a hair.
And while I’m aware this is a big red flag and I should probably be giving him a death stare, all I can seem to do is gape.
The man is fast. We’re flying down the road on three wheels, and he’s almost keeping up.
When I look back at the Pulverizer, his eyes are not on the road, but fixed on me. And there’s fear in them.
“He sent you, didn’t he?”
It’s like the world goes silent. “Who? Mr. Page?”
Horror floods his features, and I go cold. If the name alone can strike fear into the heart of a serial killer, Mr. Page must be one hell of a Big Bad Guy.
Without warning, the Pulverizer leaps from the bicycle seat, lands in a squat, and runs.
“HEY!” I shout, full Bostonian road rage taking over. Without him at the handlebars, the pedicab careens wildly, earning honked horns and screeching brakes all around.
I throw myself toward the handlebars and end up getting Heimliched by the bike seat, my fingers stretching desperately for the brakes.
I can only graze them. I’m zooming toward an intersection, running out of time.
With a kick to the carriage behind me, I gain only a fraction of an inch, but it’s enough.
I squeeze the brakes a nanosecond before whipping through a red light, where I would have been inevitably crushed by the ambulance that whirs by.
I jerk my head to the right just in time to see the Pedicab Pulverizer disappearing around a corner. Farther back, Grant has come to a winded stop and is staring at me in horror, seemingly more interested in witnessing my near-disaster than pursuing our target. Fuck, fuck, fuck.
Ignoring the still-red light, I jump onto the bike seat and pedal into action, once again stirring up a cacophony of car horns.
Pedicabs, as it turns out, are not the swiftest of vehicles.
They’re cumbersome and unwieldy at the best of times.
And this, with cars screaming at me on the wrong side of the road and a murderer slipping farther from my grasp by the second, is not the best of times.
I clunk down the street and around the corner, coming to a crash-stop halfway up a curb. I look desperately in both directions.
He’s nowhere.
The storm of profanity that escapes my mouth earns me a glare from a well-dressed elderly woman passing by. A man pushing a stroller stops to cover his child’s ears and frown at me. I slump over the handlebars, rubbing my temples as I try to catch my breath.
I’m tempted to think this couldn’t have gone worse. Sure, the worst-case scenario of dealing with a murderer is getting murdered. But letting him get away when you were explicitly asked not to is a close second.
The sound of ragged breathing fills my ears, and only when it gets louder do I realize it’s not just from me. I look up to see Grant running his last few steps toward me, then keeling over with his hands on his knees.
“What?” I bark at him. “Where’s your bike?”
“I left it,” he rasps. “I thought it would slow me down.”
“What was so important that it was worth royally fucking up our first assignment?”
He finally looks up at me, breathing hard.