“What did they look like?” tried Marcos, taking it from her hand to wipe on his jeans. He handed it back to her when it was dry.
“Like bad guys,” she muttered.
Marcos made a frustrated noise. “Amy, what’s going on? You can talk to me.”
Her eyes caught sight of something else, and she crouched to pick up the end of a full, unlit cigarette. “One of them was holding this. Can you get prints off it?”
“What is this, CSI?” grumbled Marcos. But he took it, and carefully tucked it into his pocket.
“Amy?”
Amy spun toward the voice cutting through the music, and the voices, and the buzzing in her own eardrums. Mike was running down the alley, but stopped just before he reached her. Her heart trembled as he held her face in his hands and looked into her eyes. It was as if he could see straight through to her soul, and what he saw turned his worried expression to that of ferocity.
“Who?” he asked slowly.
She shook her head.
“What happened?”
“Good luck,” said Marcos behind them.
Amy’s jaw shook. The words were stuck in her throat. The girls, she wanted to say. They’re in trouble because Danny fucked up. And because I brought Danny into our lives, it’s my fault.
“Okay,” he said, as if she’d said all this aloud. “It’s okay, all right? Let me look at you.”
He pulled back just half-step, feeling his way down her shoulders and arms. When he got to her wrist, she jerked back, and his jaw flexed in another wave of fury. His hands slid down her back, and over her hips. When he touched her she stopped shaking. She grew stronger, and more solid. He caught sight of her scraped knees and she grimaced. Her favorite leather boots were scratched all to hell and that pissed her off even more.
“I need to get out of here,” she said.
He nodded, and took her hand.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Mike had parked his truck illegally on the street right in front of the club, and when they returned to it, Amy found Alec outside the passenger door exchanging heated words with a bouncer. Anna was tucked against his side, and though the conversation didn’t look friendly, he seemed unwilling to let her go.
After another short argument with Marcos about giving a statement, they piled into the cab of Mike’s truck. Alec sat in the backseat with Anna strewn across his lap. Amy kept to the passenger side, worrying the hem of her dress. Marcos had passed on the ride, saying he needed to talk to the owner about security issues.
“What did they want?” asked Anna.
“What do you think?” Alec answered grimly. “A pretty girl, all alone.”
“God.” Anna reached forward over the seat. “They didn’t try...”
Amy’s gaze flashed to Mike, who was silent, and gripping the steering wheel as if he might throttle it.
“Money.” Amy cleared her throat. “They just wanted money. Bad luck for them, huh?”
Mike missed the entrance for the freeway that would take them home. Instead, he continued straight, toward the north end of the city.
“Where are you going?” asked Amy.
“The hospital,” he said. “We need to get your wrist...”
“No!” Amy’s voice was sharp enough that Mike tapped the brakes and jostled all of them. She forced herself to laugh. “Sorry, my volume’s a little off from being in that club too long. Let me try that again. No.” She made certain the word was quieter this time. “It’s just sprained. I just need some aspirin.”
Mike’s gaze had turned her direction, and she focused her eyes on the windshield in front of her. She didn’t want to cause a panic, and she certainly didn’t want to drag her friends into her trouble. Alec and Anna had had enough of that in the past.
She wished she could keep Mike out of this; Danny was her problem. But the two men hadn’t just mentioned her daughter, they’d mentioned his, and that meant she had to tell him.
“What did they look like?” asked Alec.
Mike stayed silent. Listening. Waiting.
“One was tall, the other had curly hair.” Amy shook her head. “It happened fast. I didn’t get a good look.”
“It’ll come back,” said Alec. “And when it does, just let us know.” There was a promise in his voice, one strengthened by Mike’s silence. She found herself awed and a little fearful of what these two men were capable of.
“How’d you get away?” asked Anna.
“A kick to the groin and a beer bottle to the face,” she told them.
The hard line of Mike’s mouth cracked, and lifted just slightly.
Alec chuckled. “Sounds like those self-defense classes are paying off.”
“Yeah,” she said, and for a moment, allowed herself to feel proud of what she’d done. “Yeah, I guess they are.”
For the rest of the ride, Amy focused the conversation back on Anna and Alec, and their upcoming wedding. What still needed to be done, and what the cake was going to look like, and how Alec better just accept the fact that they were going to have to have a do-over of tonight’s club fiasco because this couldn’t really count as a proper bachelorette party. The words came fast and strong, and soon she almost believed her own confidence. Anna and Alec did, at least, and that was what was important.
Mike dropped their friends off at Anna’s apartment. As soon as the door clicked shut, Amy knew her façade was no longer going to be effective, but she remained quiet until Anna’s place had disappeared in the rearview mirror.
“What really happened?” Mike asked, pulling into a stoplight.
She looked at her knees, wincing as they stung every time she moved her legs.
“Danny.”
The light turned green, but Mike didn’t move.
“Your ex was there tonight,” he clarified.
She shook her head. It was harder to tell him than she’d thought it would be, and she hadn’t expected it to be a walk in the park.
“He owes some men money. They came to collect.”
Her voice sounded cold and distant, unlike her own.
A horn honked behind them. Mike started to pull over, but Amy motioned for him to stay on the road.
“We have to get back to the house.”
He waited a beat. The air between them grew heavy. Palpable.
“Why do we have to get back to the house?” His voice was low and, again, she got the sense that this sweet, patient man could easily become dangerous.
She buried her face in her hands.
“They’ve been following me,” she said. “They know about Paisley and Chloe and you. They know my mom has money. They told me if I went to the cops someone was going to get hurt.” Her voice broke at the end. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”
Mike reached across the seats and pulled her against his side. The wheels whirred faster and faster on the empty road as he raced through a yellow light in the direction of the house.
“I’ve called your mom,” she said. “She says they’re okay.” For now.
“How much money?” Mike asked. She gave in then, and rested her cheek on his shoulder. She wasn’t sure how much longer he’d let her do this before he realized the juice wasn’t exactly worth the squeeze.
“$37,000.”
He muttered something she couldn’t make out, and pulled her even closer. She wrapped her arms around his chest.
“I should have known he was in money trouble when his stupid checks bounced,” she said.
“What checks?”
“Child support. Not that I wanted it anyway.”
She thought of the missing money in her account. She was positive now that these events were linked. Maybe Danny had stolen her money, maybe it was these men. Either way, it wasn’t good.
“Why didn’t you tell me he wasn’t keeping up with payments?”
Amy pushed back, shocked that this detail of tonight’s chaos was the one he’d chosen to attend to.
“Oh, I don’t know,” she said. “Because I have a s
hitload of other crap to deal with at the moment?”
Mike drove faster.
“It’s all right,” he said. “I’ll take care of it.”
“How?” she asked, feeling a sudden, dizzy hopelessness. “You have an oil well under the house I don’t know about?”
“You’re safe. The girls will be fine. That’s what matters.”
She pushed back. “I didn’t ask you for money. I’ll find a way...”
“You can’t pay them off,” Mike said. “They’ll just come back for more when they run low.”
“Then what do you mean, you’ll take care of it?”
She thought he might be talking about something lawyerly that he’d learned in night school. A way to prosecute people who didn’t pay their child support, maybe, or some other way to get Danny to take care of his own problems.
He didn’t answer.
“I don’t know who these guys are,” she said. “I don’t even know where Danny is.”
But I saw him three weeks ago. If she told him now, he’d think she was crazy, worse, a danger to their children. At this point she couldn’t say he’d been wrong.
Silence. Mike focused on the road.
And then she knew. It was in everything he wasn’t saying. In his question about the child support check. In his claim that he would take care of it. She just fucking knew.
Her voice was barely above a breath, but it seemed to slice through the space between them.
“Do you know where Danny is, Mike?”
He took a slow breath, nostrils flaring.
She turned as far as the seatbelt would allow, facing him fully. “What did you do?”
“Amy...”
“What did you do.” She wasn’t asking now. She was demanding an answer.
He didn’t back down.
“Just, for once, let someone help you.” He’d entered the neighborhood and turned down the street that would lead to his house.
“The child support. That was you.” Her mind turned to the money she’d been receiving in the mail. She hadn’t gotten anything for a year, and then randomly a check had arrived. It had been after Alec had paid her a visit to check on her after the bridge incident. She’d wondered if he’d had something to do with it, but never had suspected Mike.
“You lied to me,” she said. It was wrong to be angry. Hypocritical, considering what she’d hidden. But Danny was her problem, and what she chose to share about him was her prerogative. Mike kept secrets about his wife, too.
He didn’t disagree, and she couldn’t tell if that made her more or less furious that he’d gone behind her back.
“I manage just fine on my own. I don’t need his money, and I sure as hell don’t need you groveling on my behalf.”
“I didn’t grovel.”
She felt sick as she shoved back in her seat. No, he wouldn’t have asked nicely. Not when she knew the way he felt about men like Danny. A memory clawed at the back of her mind: their date at the restaurant, when he’d told her about his father. I became who he taught me to be.
“Did you hurt him?”
Mike made another turn. They were only a few blocks away. She considered getting out and walking but knew it wouldn’t be faster.
“He hurt you and Paisley,” said Mike, his words far simpler than the tension bunching his muscles would suggest. “He needed to answer for that.”
“And you thought you were the one to make him do it?” she asked weakly. “You don’t know him. You can’t just call him out.” It would humiliate him, crack his eggshell-thin ego. Once, when they’d been married, she’d corrected something trivial he’d said in front of the bagger at the grocery store. He’d been so upset he’d broken her cell phone against the wall and refused to speak to her for a week.
She put her head in her hands, but her nerves felt like she was laying on a nest of blades. “He may seem like nothing to you, but these guys weren’t playing. Danny’s connected to bad people, Mike. People that could hurt us.”
“They won’t.”
“How do you know?”
“Because if they do, I’ll take care of it.”
He was so clinical. So detached. She nearly didn’t recognize him. This wasn’t the man who’d brought her a box of buttons. Who’d eaten burned leftovers with a smile on his face. Who’d made love to her.
He couldn’t take care of it. He’d put a band-aid on the problem with Danny, and now they were all in so much deeper than before.
They were on his street. The porch lights at Mike’s house were on, but the sight didn’t welcome or warm her as it had in the past. She was frigidly cold.
“Danny’s missing according to those men,” she said. “Do you have anything to do with that?”
He inhaled audibly.
“Are you asking if I killed him?”
She knew he hadn’t.
“Christ, Amy. Who do you think I am?” He never raised his voice, and somehow, that was worse than him yelling.
“I don’t know!” She pictured Mike threatening her ex. Telling him to stay away from her. Telling him he’d better send child support. A small part of her wanted to kiss him for caring that much for her, but that was overridden by the fear that he’d done something terrible that had led to repercussions. Her fists were so tight, her nails dug into her palms. The rage wasn’t nearly as oppressive as the disappointment.
“You were supposed to be different,” she said.
He made a hard turn into the driveway and slammed on the brakes. She jerked open the car door, glancing back only to catch the reflection of the truck’s cabin lights in his bright eyes.
“You didn’t give me a chance to be,” he said pointedly. “That’s why you’ve kept your apartment. Why your clothes are still in a suitcase. Why your mom doesn’t even know my name.”
His words doused her fear with guilt.
She couldn’t talk any more about this. Not until she saw the girls.
Both of them. Because at some point she’d stopped thinking of Chloe as Mike’s, but as hers.
She slipped to the ground, but before she’d rounded the front of the car he was there. His eyes stayed up, glancing around the neighborhood, and when her shaking hands couldn’t fit the key in the lock, he took them, touching her as little as possible, and did it himself.
Iris was already rushing toward them from the kitchen. She’d left every light downstairs on, even though it was two in the morning and she should have been asleep in the bed Amy had made for her.
“What in God’s name is going on?”
Amy didn’t answer. She bounded up the stairs, breathing hard even before she hit the first steps. The door to the girls’ room was cracked, and forcing her feet to be silent, she slipped into the dim light.
Paisley was on her side under the quilt Ms. Iris had made her a few years back for Christmas. The nightlight in the corner lit her yellow hair a pale silver, and Amy simultaneously felt like buckling to her knees and weeping, and returning to that club to kill the man that had threatened her. She kissed her on the brow.
At the foot of the bed, Chloe was hunched up like a bug, hips in their air, face smashed sideways into the pillow. Mr. Jenkins the teddy bear was trapped under one arm, and the blanket was halfway on the floor. Gently, Amy lifted it over her back, and kissed her on the cheek.
When she turned, Mike was standing in the doorway, watching. She hadn’t heard him approach, but seeing him renewed the strength in her muscles, and the fierceness in her resolve. No one would hurt these children. Whatever had or would happen between them, they were on the same page with that.
He backed into the hallway as she approached, and eased the door shut behind her. She still wanted to scream at him and shake him and ask him why he’d done this, but she reined it in. They had more immediate problems.
“My mom’s loading some food in the truck,” he said. “The girls can sleep in the back. Chloe’s been all about Disney lately and Orlando’s crowded. We can stay there with them until this b
lows over.” She could almost see him checking through the list in his mind, and even though his plan was impossible, she was grateful he was putting the girls’ safety first.
“We can’t leave. He said to stick around.” She screwed her thumb into her temple, but it did nothing to relieve the pressure there. “They’ve been to the house, Mike. They could be watching us right now.”
Mike’s jaw twitched. He seemed broader than before, taking up more space in the now narrow hallway. The collar of his baby blue shirt stretched open as he rolled back his shoulders, but apart from the wrinkles where she’d leaned against him in the car, he looked as lethal as he did gorgeous.
She realized what she must have looked like then. Sweaty from the club, her dress was ripped up one seam from when she’d run from the men in the alley, and her hair was a tangled mess. Her knees were scratched up, as were her leather boots. His brows came together as he looked over her, and again, she felt that awful surge of defeat, that he was seeing the poor, abused girl who needed help, not the woman who could stand on her own.
“We have to call the cops,” he said. “Marcos at least –”
“No cops. I won’t risk it.”
“Then what are we—am I—supposed to do here, Amy?”
A sick understanding had curdled in Amy’s stomach. Curly had said she should stick around. The girls didn’t need to be a part of this.
She stepped closer.
“Do you love her?”
He tilted his head.
“Paisley,” Amy said. “Would you protect her if she was in danger?”
“With my life.” Lines drew tight outside his eyes.
“You swear?”
“With my life,” he said again. “Where’s this going?”
“Tell me where to find Danny,” she said.
He shook his head, eyes flashing with that same danger she’d seen in the car.
“Not going to happen.”
“He’s my problem.”
“No, now he’s my problem.” He said this like it was a promise.
Any semblance of control was slipping through her fingers. She needed something to feel solid, but nothing did.
She forced her spine straight, even though she could feel the world pressing down on her shoulders. “If you leave tonight, they might not even know you’re gone.”
More: A Body Work Novel (The Body Work Trilogy Book 4) Page 24