Chapter Seventeen
THE KID CAME to me on a Thursday, alone, and that was the first thing that told me something was wrong.
I’d been on the bike across from the lot behind her building for about an hour, waiting on her three o’clock to let out, when I saw him come through the doors alone.
That was wrong right off. Him and Amy were damn near always together; I’d watched enough of them these past few weeks to know that, and hated most every minute of what I’d seen.
But here he came without her, moving fast and headed straight for me, shoulders tight and hands jammed in his pockets, none of that easy grin or smart mouth he usually had going.
He stopped about six feet off, farther than he usually stood, and didn’t say one goddamn thing about a muffin.
“Hey.” He pulled one hand out of his pocket and put it right back in. “Can I—okay, this is weird. Can I talk to you for a minute?”
“Where is she?”
“Library. She’s fine. She’s completely fine, that’s not—” He stopped, dragged a hand through his hair, and I caught the shake in his fingers.
I got off the bike.
He saw me do it and swallowed. “Okay. That’s somehow worse. But okay. I’ve been standing in a stairwell for twenty minutes trying to figure out how to say this without sounding insane, and I’ve officially run out of better versions.”
“Say it.”
“There’s a man watching Amy.”
Everything in me went still.
“Yesterday,” he said, talking faster now that it was out, “she came out of her two o’clock and I was waiting for her by the columns, and there was a guy standing across the quad.
Just… standing. Not walking anywhere, not on his phone, not doing anything, and he was looking right at her.
So I thought, okay, creepy campus guy, congratulations, we’ve invented another one, and I kept an eye on him.
Then we walked to the coffee place, I looked back and he was behind us.
Half a block, maybe. We sat down, he ended up across the street. We got up, he got up.”
I didn’t say anything.
Sawyer rubbed both hands down the front of his jeans. “Then he was back today.”
That got something moving deep in my gut.
“Same guy,” he said. “Different jacket, which I don’t know why that made it worse, but it did.
Same face, same build, same creepy standing-there-doing-absolutely-nothing routine.
So today I watched him instead of pretending I wasn’t watching him, and that’s when I figured out the part I really don’t like. ”
“What part.”
His eyes flicked toward my bike, then back to me. “He knows about you.”
I went colder.
“Maybe not you you. I don’t know. But he knows you’re watching her, because every time you had a clean view, he disappeared.
Every single time. Car between you, pillar, crowd, building, whatever he could use.
Then you’d turn or move and there he was again, always where he could see Amy and you couldn’t see him.
” Sawyer blew out a breath and shook his head.
“I spent half of today checking because I thought maybe I was making it into something it wasn’t, but I’m not.
He was working your blind spots. Deliberately. ”
Radiator.
The word came into my head cold.
“That’s not some creep who thinks she’s pretty,” Sawyer went on, and the jokes were gone now. “Guys like that want you to know they’re looking. This guy doesn’t want anybody to know he’s there. Especially you. And the way he watches her...” He stopped.
“What.”
Sawyer looked sick.
“Tell me.”
“Like she belongs to him.”
I didn’t move, but something must’ve changed in my face because Sawyer took a step back before he caught himself.
“How long.”
“I know about yesterday and today.”
“Know about.”
His mouth tightened. “Yeah. I know. That’s not the same as how long he’s actually been there.”
Smart kid.
Didn’t make me like him any better right then.
“She know she’s being followed?”
“No.”
My eyes narrowed. “Why not?”
“Because she’s already — ” He made a helpless gesture with both hands.
“Something happened to her. I don’t know what, she won’t tell me, she says it’s nothing, she’s been saying it’s nothing for days and she looks like she hasn’t slept in a week and I can see it, okay, I can see her white-knuckling something. ”
That landed too close to what I’d seen in the garage.
“So ask her.”
Sawyer gave me a look. “Yeah, sure. Great idea. I’ll just sit Amy down and say, ’Hey, you seem deeply traumatized this week, care to unpack that over a scone?’ Why didn’t I think of that?”
There he was.
“Watch your mouth, kid.”
“I’m nervous.”
“Noticed.”
“You look like you’re deciding where to bury somebody. It’s not helping.”
“Sawyer.”
“Right. Sorry.” He took a breath, and when he spoke again the humor dropped away.
“I know when to leave her alone. Maybe not always, but with this? I know. If I tell her there’s a strange man following her, she’ll thank me for telling her, and then she’ll go home, lock it up inside her head and deal with it completely by herself until she can’t anymore.
That’s what she does. That’s all she does. ”
I knew that.
Better than he did.
Didn’t much enjoy finding out he knew it too.
“So I’m not putting one more thing on her unless I have to.” He looked straight at me then, and there was nothing boyish about him for a second, just somebody who loved her enough to be scared and had decided being scared wasn’t an excuse to be stupid. “I’m putting it on you.”
My jaw tightened.
“Because you’re the guy sitting on a motorcycle outside her building every day for some reason nobody will tell me, and I’m not an idiot.
Whatever’s going on, you’re here because somebody thinks Amy needs watching.
Fine. I can live without knowing why.” He paused.
“Actually, that’s a lie. I hate not knowing why.
It’s killing me. But I can shut up about it. ”
Barely.
“And if I’m wrong about this guy, you can make fun of me later. Or glare at me. Whatever it is you do for fun.” His eyes went past me toward the building where Amy was still inside, and when they came back the fear was there again. “But I’m not wrong.”
No. He wasn’t. And just like that, the damn grudge I’d been carrying against the kid went out from under me.
Because he wasn’t standing there trying to prove anything.
Wasn’t competing with me, wasn’t marking territory, wasn’t doing one damn thing I’d spent weeks accusing him of in my own head.
Far as Sawyer knew, there’d never been a contest. That had been all me, something I’d built up and fed every time I saw his hand on her or his mouth near her ear or watched her laugh at something he’d said, while the kid kept bringing me blueberry muffins and running his mouth and doing the one thing that mattered now.
Looking out for Amy.
He’d gotten scared for her, figured out he was in over his head, and came straight to the biggest dangerous thing he knew was already watching her.
Me.
I’ve done worse things than hate a kid for loving somebody. Couldn’t think of many lately. “Tell me what he looks like.”
“Older. Fifties, maybe? I’m terrible at ages once people get past thirty.”
“Sawyer.”
“Right. Sorry.” He concentrated, all the nerves pulling in enough for him to think. “Big. Not fat, just...thick, I guess. Like he works with his hands, lifts heavy stuff or murders people recreationally. Weathered face, really lined. Buzzed hair, gray coming in. And he’s got this way of standing—”
Sawyer stopped.
“What.”
“He looks like he’s not scared of anything.” The humor was gone again. “You know how everybody on a college campus looks at least a little bit like they’re in the wrong place? Even the professors sometimes. This guy looked like the campus was in his wrong place.”
Cold moved up the back of my neck.
“Clothes.”
“Work jacket. Jeans. Boots. Nothing you’d remember. He looks like somebody’s dad who came to fix your sink.” Sawyer frowned. “Except for the tattoo.”
“What tattoo.”
“He’s got a tattoo. On his neck, right here — ” Sawyer put two fingers on the side of his own throat, under the jaw.
“It’s dark. Like really dark, and kind of messy?
Blurry, almost, like it got smeared. It’s some kind of animal.
A snake? Maybe a lizard, I don’t know, it’s got legs, so I guess not a snake.
It’s ugly. It’s not… you know how tattoos are usually nice?
” He gestured vaguely at my arms, at everything, the green sprawl of my mother’s work climbing up out of my cuffs.
“That’s a nice tattoo. His isn’t a nice tattoo.
His looks like somebody got drunk in a garage with a pen and a personal grudge. ”
Something inside me went dead still.
“What?” Sawyer said.
I didn’t answer.
Blown-out lines. Gray-blue under the skin. Crude enough a college kid noticed from a distance. Could’ve been a shitty tattoo from a shitty kitchen somewhere. Could’ve been homemade.
Could’ve been prison work.
I’d seen enough jailhouse ink to know the difference when I had it in front of me, and I didn’t have this one in front of me yet, but Sawyer’s description was close enough to put the possibility where I couldn’t ignore it.
Especially on the neck, out where there was no hiding it and maybe no interest in trying.
Then everything else lined up behind it.
A rock in a radiator. A face in a garage that put her on the concrete.
And now a hard old convict standing outside a college building in a work jacket, watching my girl come out of class like she belonged to him.
Watching her, following her through Charleston, and working my blind spots well enough that I’d never once caught him doing it.
“Hey.” Sawyer’s voice came from a long way off. “Hey, are you… is this bad? You’ve got a face happening. That’s a bad face.”
I looked at him.
His attempt at humor died immediately. “Oh,” he said. “Fantastic.”
“Look at me.”
“Unfortunately, I already am.”
“You did right. Coming to me. You hear? You saw something wrong, you paid attention, and you brought it where it needed to go instead of trying to handle it yourself.”
Sawyer nodded. “I just didn’t want to put it on her. Not until I knew what it was.”
“You were right.”
He looked at me at that, like maybe he hadn’t expected to hear it.
“We keep it that way for now,” I said. “She doesn’t know until we’ve got something worth telling her. Scaring her with half a picture gets us nowhere, and if she knows somebody’s watching, she’ll start changing how she moves. I don’t want that bastard knowing we’re onto him.”
Sawyer’s face changed. “You want him to think nothing’s changed.”
“Exactly.”
“Okay.” He nodded again, slower this time. “I can do normal.”
I looked at him.
“Fine. I can do something in the general neighborhood of normal.”
“That’s all I need.”
“Terrifyingly low standard, but I’ll take it.”
“Second thing.” I waited until the smartass stopped enough that I knew he was listening. “You don’t go looking for him. Don’t follow him, don’t try getting close enough for a picture, don’t get clever and decide you’re gonna figure out what he drives or where he goes when he leaves.”
Sawyer opened his mouth.
“Whatever you’re about to say, no.”
He closed it.
“You see him again, you get Amy somewhere public. Building, restaurant, classroom, don’t give a shit, long as there are people around. Then you call me. You don’t let him know you saw him and you sure as hell don’t get between him and anything.”
“I can get her somewhere without making her suspicious.”
I believed him. That would’ve bothered me yesterday. Today I was grateful for it. I pulled out my phone. “Number.”
He gave it to me, hands shaking just enough I noticed and he probably hoped I didn’t.
“You’ll actually do something,” he said.
Wasn’t quite a question, but close. Kid handing something dangerous to a man he barely knew and needing to hear he hadn’t made a mistake.
“Yeah.”
“Like...an appropriate something?”
I looked at him.
“Right. Stupid question.”
“I’ll handle it.”
He let out a breath that looked like he’d been holding it since yesterday. “Okay. Cool. Cool, cool, cool. I’m going to go back inside now and be so aggressively normal she’s going to know immediately that something’s wrong.”
“Sawyer.”
He stopped. It was the first time I’d ever said his name and he heard it, I saw him hear it.
“Thank you,” I said.
He nodded, twice, quick, and went back across the lot toward the doors, and I swung my legs over my bike, watched him go, then I put my eyes on that building and I read every face going in and out of it, every corner, every parked car, my hands were steady, everything in me had gone cold, slow and clear, the way it goes when the waiting’s over and there’s finally something to do.
A man with jailhouse ink on his throat had been standing where I could have seen him if I’d been doing my job right.
I’d fix that. Starting now.
And tonight I was going to Devil, and this time I wasn’t bringing him a bad feeling and a hole in a radiator.
This time I had a man.