2. Razor
RAZOR
The phone buzzes against the workbench while I’ve got my hands in an engine.
It stops. Starts again.
I wipe my hands on the rag hanging out of my back pocket and pick it up.
Kate.
I stand up straight, because my sister doesn’t ring me at seven in the evening on a Tuesday unless something’s wrong. I swipe to answer.
“Yeah.”
“Hey. You busy?”
“What’s going on?”
“It’s Darcie.”
“Okay…and?” I then set the rag down very slowly on the bench. I don’t react. I don’t do anything. I just listen.
“She’s fine,” Kate says quickly. “She’s here with me. She’s okay. But some shit’s going on and I don’t know what to do about it.”
“Tell me.”
Kate tells me. A dog at the clinic. A man who got cagey when Darcie asked questions about its injuries. A note on Darcie’s car two days later. A car following her home tonight — three turns round the block, a dark blue sedan, lost her somewhere between the clinic and here.
I listen without interrupting. I keep my voice level.
“Who knows?” I ask when she’s done.
“Just me. She hasn’t told her family. She didn’t want to freak them out.”
“Police?”
“She doesn’t think they’ll do anything.”
“She’s right.”
“Can you just... I don’t know. Check on her? Or tell me what to do? You’re the only person I know who—”
“I’ll be over tomorrow. Seven.”
“Thank you.”
“Kate.”
“Yeah?”
“Anyone else calls her about this, you tell me. She goes anywhere, you tell me. Anything changes in the next twelve hours, you call me. I don’t care what time.”
“Okay. Okay. I will.”
I hang up. I put the phone down on the bench. I stand there for a long minute with my hands flat on the wood, staring at an engine I’m suddenly not interested in anymore.
Darcie.
Her name hits the same way it always has. Like someone dropped something heavy on my chest and I forgot how to move for a second.
I don’t sleep much that night.
I lie on my back in bed and I think about a girl who stopped being a girl a long time ago.
Almost seventeen years old. That’s how old she was the first time I saw her. Kate brought her home from school and I walked into the kitchen and there she was, sitting at the counter with a glass of orange juice, shoes kicked off under the stool, laughing at something Kate had said.
She looked up at me.
And something in my chest went wrong.
I was twenty-four. I’d been patched for two years. I’d had women — plenty of them, most of them forgettable — and I’d never in my life looked at a girl and felt my whole body stop working.
She was a teenager still. She was my little sister’s best friend. She was sixteen years old and I was a grown man with a patch on my back and I had absolutely no business feeling anything about her.
I shut it down.
I shut it down so hard and so fast and so completely that I think it scared her. I stopped talking to her. I stopped looking at her. I’d walk into a room she was in and walk right back out. Kate noticed. Kate teased me about it — why are you being weird about my friend — and I denied that I was.
There was one time, later — she was maybe eighteen, coming out of Kate’s bedroom in a pair of shorts and a t-shirt with the sleeves rolled up, hair wet from the shower — and she looked at me across the hall and I looked back and for about two seconds I let myself.
Two seconds. Then I turned away so fast I heard something pop in my neck.
I think she saw it. I think she’s been wondering ever since if she imagined it.
She didn’t imagine it.
Years passed. She grew up. I got better at pretending I didn’t notice when she was in the room.
I told myself it was a teenage thing, a weird reaction I’d shake off, and then eighteen came and went and nineteen came and went and she was at Kate’s twenty-first birthday in a dress that nearly killed me and I spent the whole night with my back to the room because if I turned around I was going to do something stupid.
Twenty-two. Twenty-four. Twenty-six.
Ten years.
I’ve watched her through the narrow crack of my own peripheral vision for a decade, and in that decade I have not had a single conversation with her that lasted more than about thirty seconds.
She’s always been careful around me. Polite. A little cool. Like she’s keeping a respectful distance from something she’s not sure about. And I’ve let her. It was better that way.
Now someone’s threatening her. Now I have to walk into her apartment tomorrow and sit across from her and ask her questions and look at her and not look at her, and keep my hands to myself and my face flat, and be the man she needs me to be.
Her building is one of those older blocks on a quiet street near the clinic, two storeys, buzzer out front that half works. I hit her number at five to seven. She lets me in without asking who it is, which means Kate told her exactly when I’d arrive and she’s been listening for the buzzer.
I take the stairs. Apartment 2C. I knock once.
The door opens.
She’s wearing jeans and a jumper the colour of oatmeal, and her hair’s down around her shoulders, and she looks at me with those eyes I’ve been carrying around for ten years, and for a second I forget why I’m here.
I haven’t stood this close to her in I don’t know how long.
Not since Kate’s last birthday, maybe, and that was across a crowded kitchen with four other people between us.
Now there’s nothing. Just a doorway and about three feet of hallway and her, looking up at me because even in proper shoes she’s still a foot shorter than me.
“Hey,” she says.
“Hey.”
Neither of us moves.
Then she steps back and pulls the door wider. “Come in.”
Her apartment is small. Very small. Living room, kitchen down one wall, a door on the left that must be the bedroom, a door on the right that must be the bathroom.
It’s clean. It smells like whatever candle she’s got burning on the coffee table.
A jumper is folded over the arm of the couch, a pair of trainers lined up neatly by the door.
Everything about it is her. I can feel that immediately. The tidy, the soft, the careful.
She’s watching me take it in. She’s twisting the edge of her sleeve between her fingers.
“Do you want— tea? Coffee?”
“Water’s fine.”
“Okay. Right. Water.”
She goes to the kitchen. I take off my cut and fold it over the back of a chair. She turns and sees me do it and her throat moves.
She hands me a glass of water. Our fingers don’t touch. She’s being very careful about that. I notice.
“Sit down,” I say.
She sits down on the couch. I take the armchair across from her, because the couch is not an option. I put the water on the coffee table. I lean forward, elbows on my knees, and I look at her.
“Tell me everything,” I say. “Start from the dog.”
She does.
She talks me through it cleanly. She’s also shaking. Her hands are in her lap and her fingers are moving against each other like she can’t keep them still.
I keep my eyes on her face. I take in everything.
“The dog,” I say when she’s done. “The injuries were consistent with what?”
She hesitates. “Fighting. Systematic. Multiple wounds at different stages of healing, all on the same side. Untrained stitching on the fresh one.”
“And this was the first time you’d seen this guy?”
“First time.”
“You get his plate?”
“Partial. Six digits. I wrote it down.”
“I’ll need that.”
“Okay.” She gets up and walks to the kitchen counter, comes back with a folded piece of notepaper. Hands it to me.
I read it. Tucson plate, the last six characters. The clinic address written underneath in the same careful handwriting. The date.
“Good,” I say. “That’s really helpful.”
She ducks her head. I’ve paid her a compliment and she doesn’t know what to do with it.
“The note,” I say. “You still have it?”
She nods and pulls it out of her bag. I unfold it. Mind your own business. Black ink, block capitals, pressed hard. I look at the back. The indents are deep. Whoever wrote this was angry when they wrote it.
I fold it again. I keep it.
“Darcie.”
Her eyes come up.
“This isn’t random. You know that, yeah?”
“I know.”
“Someone’s running an operation. You stumbled onto part of it. The dog, the owner, the note, the car — they’re all connected, and they’re all scared enough of you talking to make you stop talking.”
“I figured.”
“Good. Then you’ll understand what I’m about to say.”
I can see her bracing.
“I’m staying here until we know who this is and we’ve handled it.”
Her mouth opens. “But…Razor.”
It’s the first time she’s said my name tonight. It goes through me like a hook. I don’t let her see it.
“Not negotiable,” I say. “I’ll take the couch. You won’t know I’m here most of the time. You go to work, I go with you. You come home, I’m home. Anyone so much as looks at you wrong, they deal with me instead.”
“I can’t— you don’t have to—”
“I’m not doing you a favour. Kate called me because she knows I can handle this, and I will handle this.”
She looks at me. There’s something in her face I can’t quite read. It’s not just fear. It’s not just relief. It’s something more complicated.
“Okay,” she says quietly.
“Okay.”
I stand up. “I need to make some calls. I’ll be back in an hour with a bag. Lock the door behind me, don’t open it for anyone else. You have my number?”
She nods.
“Use it if anything feels off.”
She nods again.
I leave.
I’m back at nine with a duffel and two bags of groceries because I’m not going to ask her to feed me for a week.
I make her eat a sandwich standing in the kitchen because she probably hasn’t eaten since breakfast. I walk the apartment.
Every window. The door, the locks, the chain.
The angle of the balcony and what you can see from the street.
I’m a man who knows how things go bad, and I’d rather know now what I’m working with.
The building’s got too many ways in. One stairwell that doesn’t lock. A back door to a bin area that props open when someone’s been smoking out there. I note all of it.
By ten she’s tired. I can see it sitting on her shoulders.
“Go to bed,” I tell her.
“Are you—”
“Couch is fine.”
She hovers in the doorway to her bedroom. The jumper sleeve is twisted in her fingers again.
“Razor.”
“Yeah.”
“Thank you.”
I don’t answer. I can’t. I nod.
She closes the door.
I stand in the middle of her living room for a long second, listening to her move around on the other side of that wall. Water in the sink. A drawer opening and closing. The soft thump of her sitting down on the bed.
I sit down on the couch and I lean back against the cushions she left for me and I stare at the ceiling of the apartment she’s made into a home, and I think about the fact that the wall between us is about six inches of plasterboard and there’s a bed on the other side of it.
I can hear her moving around in there. A drawer. A tap. A quiet clearing of her throat that she probably didn’t even know she did.
She’s in that room in whatever she sleeps in. Pyjamas or sleep shorts probably. Something soft. Something I am absolutely not going to let myself picture.
I’m thirty-four years old. I’ve done a lot of stupid things. I have never in my life slept ten feet from a woman I’ve spent a decade trying not to want. Ten feet, that’s all.
This is going to be a problem.
I knew it would be and I came anyway.
I close my eyes, but already know I’m not going to sleep well.