by Lane Swift
The air felt too thin, like it was impossible to fill his lungs. Dante put his hand out for the chair and at once changed his mind. He needed to be standing.
“Sit down, man. You’ve got time for a stiff one.”
“No. I can’t. I have to go soon, but I wanted to say that I overstepped the mark. If you are ever interested in anything in the shop, you’ll always be welcome, and if you want to come in privately, just say, but otherwise I’ll never mention it again.”
Two down, one to go. Dante had already loosened his tie once this morning but reached for it again. At the same time, Jim returned to him for another quick, rough hug and a hefty pat on the back.
Dante took the opportunity to confess, “I don’t know what’s happening to me.”
Jim let out a long sigh. “Underneath that fancy cloth, you’re just like the rest of us. You reach your forties, and it’s like one day you’ve got big plans for the rest of your life, the next, you realize your mortality.” He shook his head. “Your babies are going their own way, and once upon a time, you thought you’d relish the freedom, but now all you can think about is how much you’re going to miss them. And let’s not forget the aches and pains. We’ve all been through it. I’ll tell you sometime, over a real drink.”
It sounded bleak. Yet Jim sounded stoic. Almost cheerful.
“Maybe this evening.” Dante might have more to talk about then. “I’m taking Lucas Green to the funeral. I wanted to make sure he’s okay.”
“That’s decent of you.”
“It doesn’t feel that way. When I came to you a few weeks ago,” Dante said, “when we ended up betting on Lucas killing Shaw… that wasn’t what I’d intended.”
“I know.”
“You did?”
“You wanted to help him. Right from the start.”
“Why didn’t you say anything?”
“You were on a warpath for something. I thought agreeing to the wager would be the lesser of two evils.”
Dante had known Jim almost his whole life. Through adolescence, a decade-long love affair with a man who almost turned out to be his ruin, and another fifteen years as a shop owner and a father. He shouldn’t have been surprised or held back on being honest from the start.
“I still want to help him. If he wants my help. He might have given up on the whole idea by now.”
The color rose on Jim’s cheeks, and not with mirth. “I can only hope.”
“It’s not going to be like before. When I was with Flynn, I was trying to prove myself to him. I was naïve. I’m not anymore.”
“No. You’re older.” Jim’s look was harsh. “Maybe not so much wiser. And you’ve got more to lose than you did back then. I wish you could be happy with the perfectly good business you have up the street.”
“My father’s business. I haven’t done a thing with it but keep it ticking along since he died.”
“It’s a good business.”
“I don’t know if I want to be good.”
Jim didn’t seem to have an answer to that except to clench his fist and lightly thump Dante’s arm with his prosthetic right hand. He returned to his accounts without another word.
As far as Jim was concerned, a prosthesis made of polymer and electronics was all the reminder he needed to stay on the right side of the law. He’d never mentioned it, but his wife Carol had spoken to Selena, Dante’s other full-time employee, who’d talked to Lois and Kit. Jim still suffered from phantom pains and nightmares, years after the loss of his arm. The price of his mistakes wasn’t so much high as it was long. Interminably long.
Dante understood his reservations about him getting involved in a crime, but this was different. Dante was different. “I won’t do anything rash.”
Jim sunk back into his chair and punched a number into his adding machine. The whole desk rattled. “You’ll do what the hell you want to do.”
Dante took that as a dismissal. He was sad more than angry to leave Jim that way, not because he thought his old friend was right, but because he’d hoped Jim would understand. Even if he didn’t approve.
Chapter 12
LUCAS DRESSED in the one and only suit he owned. It was dark navy. Over it, he donned his peacoat and the satin scarf Avery had bought him for their last night out together. He was ready for Dante early and stood by the window, searching the end of the street for any sign of a car.
Her words haunted him then as they had the last week. Don’t give up on love.
He hadn’t given up. He’d merely left it out in the cold. As surely as this frosty December would turn into a snowy January, and by March the snow and ice would thaw, love would return to Lucas, and Lucas would return to love. Maybe, while he waited, there would be some unexpected warm spells to remind him of the spring.
At eleven on the dot, a black saloon, paintwork glinting in the slanting sunlight, pulled in front of Lucas’s house. The car was a Mercedes and Dante the driver. Lucas opened the front door before he rang the bell.
The low winter sun was unforgiving. Dante had fine wrinkles in the corner of his eyes, and a slight peppering of gray at his temples. Lucas hadn’t noticed before, not in Dante’s shop or in the soft firelight of his office. It might have been the strain of grief, maturing Dante from a man who looked to be in his thirties, to someone most definitely over forty. Lucas didn’t think so. Dante simply wasn’t as young as Lucas had initially thought.
“Thank you for coming to get me.”
“No. Thank you. It would have been awkward if we’d gone separately and met there.”
It was awkward enough. The moment where they might have shaken hands had passed. Dante stood still and stiff as a soldier on the doorstep, and Lucas wondered if the neighbors saw him, what would they think? That Lucas had for some inexplicable reason hired a chauffeur or a bodyguard?
Lucas stepped out into the brusque December air and closed the front door. His exhaled breath was a puff of smoke. The car was warm inside, and Dante had had the good sense to put on the radio.
Lucas could lay on the small talk when the situation required, but he was content with the silence as they drove. He didn’t feel up to talking. He remembered how patient Dante had been the first time they met. How he seemed to consider his words before he spoke. Today, Lucas got the feeling from the way Dante kept his eyes firmly on the road he was content to say nothing too.
The crematorium had six private rooms. At the end of the corridor, a sign on an easel welcomed guests to Avery Lister’s memorial. A bland plume of white lilies, sprayed with tiny buds of baby’s breath, graced a stand inside the doorway. Music played. If Lucas wasn’t mistaken, it was something from last century, with an up-tempo beat and too much synthesizer.
A gravely suited attendant pointed Dante and Lucas in the direction of the guest book.
“A guest book? Who the hell for?” Dante said to no one in particular.
The attendant ignored his remark and said, “Are you family? Friends?”
Lucas thought it irrelevant, but he replied, “Friend. I knew her from a pottery class.”
He wrote his name, and in the space for a comment: I’ll miss you. Nothing poetic sprang to mind.
Dante said, “She worked for my father, many years ago, in our family business. We remained friends.”
Above Lucas’s name, three other people had signed without leaving a comment, and judging by the empty room, already left. They were all Listers. Lucas assumed Avery’s two brothers and the third, a woman, possibly a wife. The room had been open fifteen minutes. They had been and gone in less than fifteen minutes.
Dante signed his name below Lucas’s. Lucas watched, to see if he added some elegant sentiment in Latin. Something profound and fitting.
Stepping away when he’d finished, Dante motioned for Lucas to read. I still have your Le Creuset casserole dish. I take it you meant for me to keep it.
Lucas laughed. It broke through the somber hush of the memorial room with all the dignity of a fart. He slapped his han
d over his mouth.
“I’m sorry,” he said through his fingers. “That wasn’t what I was expecting.”
Dante gently clasped Lucas’s wrist and lowered his hand from his face. “Don’t hide that smile.”
Lucas’s heart skipped and raced. The rousing effect of Dante’s touch, though brief, lingered—still lingered, like ripples spreading out on water from a single drop of rain. As if that wasn’t enough to leave Lucas unbalanced, the slight waft of Dante’s cologne followed. Citrus, pepper, and musk. It suffused Lucas with the unmistakable heat of desire. He didn’t know what to do with it. Not here.
The blush flamed from his chest to his cheeks. Dante must have been able to see it. Amusement played at the corners of his mouth and lit up his eyes, and it was a playful and blindingly attractive expression.
Was making Lucas blush his intention? Was Dante flirting at Avery’s memorial? It certainly felt that way. Lucas wasn’t imagining it. (Or wishing it?)
The thrill raced like electrical current through his limbs, and he wanted to laugh more than ever. “All right,” he said, “I won’t hide mine if you don’t hide yours.”
Dante held out his hand, and they shook. Lucas took the liberty of holding Dante’s hand a second too long, savoring the warm silk of his skin and the strength in his fingers.
The gesture didn’t go unnoticed. Afterward, it seemed they had made a connection that drew them closer together. The difference was subtle, but Lucas felt sure Dante was aware of it too. They stood with the proximity of confidantes.
Well, they did share one secret, did they not? And by accident (or perhaps design) Avery had been the one to instigate it. So perhaps it was fitting that the first spark of something should be ignited here.
They took their time, perusing the display of photographs and memorabilia along the back of the room. Lucas had never seen these pictures before. Avery was an unconventional beauty, but an undeniable beauty nonetheless. She’d had strong features and the golden complexion of someone who’d lived well, much of the time in the sun.
“Did Avery put this together?” Lucas asked the attendant, whose name badge said Dean Hodges.
“I believe so.”
The display had been printed onto sheets that could easily be bound into an album or framed. Lucas asked, “What will happen to everything, once the memorial is over?”
Dean didn’t look sure. “I expect one of her family members will take it.”
“I wouldn’t bank on it,” Dante said.
If that were the case…. Lucas took his chance. “If no one comes, I’ll have everything.”
Dean Hodges shuffled uncomfortably from one foot to the other. “I don’t know if that’s possible. Her brothers might want it.”
Dante seemed to grow ten centimeters taller. Lucas was reminded of their first meeting, and he at once pitied poor Dean Hodges.
More so when Dante looked Dean straight in the eye with his sniper glare and slowly enunciated, “Like he said, if no one comes, he’ll take everything. Lucas, give the man your number.”
Dean looked anxiously in the direction the doorway. “All right. I’ll check with my manager.”
Dean scurried out of the room, leaving Lucas slightly bemused at how much he’d enjoyed that little display. Until Dante stood in front of Avery’s coffin. The simple box rested forlornly on a cloth-covered stand, bare and plain, nothing like the lady that rested inside it. Dante bowed his head, whispered something Lucas didn’t hear, and resumed his perusal of the display boards.
Lucas followed, pausing in front of a picture of a young Avery and a man who looked distinctly like Dante standing on a front-door step, arm in arm.
“Is that your father?”
“Yes.”
Gabriel Okoro had been more narrowly built than his son. They shared the intense gaze, broad nose and high cheekbones, but Dante had a softness to him that Lucas couldn’t see in his father. Not that a single photograph reflected an entire personality.
Dante didn’t linger over the board immortalizing Avery’s days at Le Plaisir. He wandered farther along, to pictures of Avery in various locales across the country, across the globe, with men and women who neither he, nor apparently Lucas, recognized.
“She got around,” Lucas said.
“Nothing and no one could hold her back.”
A gloom had descended over Dante, and in turn Lucas. Lucas needed to get out of this room. He’d paid his respects and sung along to one of the cheesy tunes on Avery’s playlist. After he left his number with Dean, there would be nothing more to do here. Perhaps he’d judged Avery’s brothers too harshly for leaving as quickly as they did.
Dante had left the boards and was looking out of wide window, over the gardens. According to the details sent to Lucas by the EEP, Avery’s ashes would be scattered amongst the roses, according to her wishes, under a bed of a plum-colored variety with a strong, sweet scent, called Ebb Tide. She knew how to make a statement.
In profile, Dante was as handsome as face-to-face. He stood with his arms behind his back, one leg slightly ahead of the other. The back of his head was perfectly round, his close-cropped hair no more than a shadow over his skin. His broad shoulders and slim waist were accentuated by the cut of yet another beautifully tailored black suit. Lucas gave him a moment with his thoughts while he spent a moment with his own.
Dante Okoro had frightened the living daylights out of Lucas the first time they’d met. In a way, he still did, for completely different reasons. Dante had read the files Lucas gave him. He said he’d read “every word,” and he was prepared to discuss helping Lucas, if that was what Lucas still wanted.
Lucas didn’t. Not anymore. Not now that he had a gun. Not now there was a glimmer of possibility that he and Dante might…. he didn’t want to speculate too hard.
Gingerly, Lucas approached. He said, “The first couple of months after Grace died, I was busy taking care of her affairs. Then there was the court case. It dragged on and on.” Men and women in suits whose names Lucas had forgotten, whose faces he never could. “After that, once it was all over and done with, I think that’s when I lost it.”
Lucas pressed on. Though Dante hadn’t moved or responded, Lucas had no doubt he was listening. “I haven’t…. You didn’t see me at my finest.”
Dante turned to face him. “Sometimes it’s more reliable to let others speak for us, when we’re not up to the job of speaking for ourselves. Avery loved you. Very much.”
More than Dante knew.
Voices in the corridor interrupted their quiet exchange. Lucas thought, at first, that Avery might have had more guests, but the sounds rose and faded without the appearance of another person. They must have been attending a memorial in another room.
Lucas asked, “Would you like to take a walk in the grounds?”
“I don’t think so. It’s very cold.”
Lucas remained at Dante’s side. Outside in the beds, a few leaves clung to the rosebushes, ruddy and brittle and ready to fall. Funny to think that Avery would soon be beneath them, nothing more than mineral dust and memories.
She had loved Lucas. He wondered, though, if her bequest had been made during a period of clarity or whether her decision had been rash. Careless. Lucas wasn’t sure Dante was the person to ask, but who else was there?
“I’m ready to leave,” he said. “Whenever you are.”
“Then let’s leave now.”
“Can you drop me home? I’m not going back to work today.”
“Of course.” After a pause, Dante added, “I’m not working today either.”
There was something hopeful yet terribly sad in Dante’s tone. He wasn’t as invulnerable as Lucas had imagined him to be.
“Perhaps, when we get back to my place, you’d like to come in? I make good coffee.”
Dante seemed to straighten and, at the same time, relax, like a weight had been lifted. “I’d like that very much. Though I wouldn’t say no to something stronger than coffee.”
&
nbsp; “There’s an off-license on the Roseport Road. And a deli next door.”
At that, Dante placed his hand at the small of Lucas’s back and steered him toward the door. “Then we should drink to Avery with a glass of something expensive and curse her for buggering off before anyone was ready.”
As they left the crematorium building and crossed the car park to Dante’s Mercedes, Lucas wrapped his scarf more tightly about his neck, out of habit more than necessity. The sun shone warmly on his face, and the icy patches on the ground had completely thawed.
Chapter 13
LUCAS’S HOUSE was an early twenty-first-century build, and in keeping with the era, the size of a shoe box. From the front door, Lucas led Dante through the small hallway and living area to the kitchen-diner at the back.
The wide windows and pale walls created an illusion of space, and Lucas had a minimalist approach to décor, which afforded his home a sunny freshness that stood incongruously against this day of grief. The tightness in Dante’s neck and shoulders eased. It felt like a lifetime had passed since he’d asked Kit to invite Sharps over for Christmas. Since he nullified the wager with Jim. Since Jim had warned him not to get involved with Lucas’s plans to nullify Shaw.
He took off his coat and sat on the offered stool at the breakfast bar; the kitchen was too small for a dining table. The window over the sink overlooked a postage-stamp-sized garden, with a patch of damp lawn and naked shrubbery at its borders. Lucas kept it neat, like his home. Indeed, seeing him here, at home in his kitchen, moving from cupboard to drawer with uninhibited grace, Dante was pleased to discover Lucas had an alluring level of poise and confidence.
Lucas emptied the bag of food onto the counter and handed Dante the Barolo and a corkscrew. “Will you open this?”
Dante secured the bottle between his thighs as Lucas placed two large wineglasses on the counter between them. The cherry peppers stuffed with soft cheese, the olives, and the bread, Lucas spread onto a platter.
The cork lifted with a squeak and a pop and released its rich cherry vapors. Dante held the bottle high and poured them each a few centimeters, swirling the contents of both his glass and Lucas’s, while Lucas set out plates and cutlery. The wine had an intense color—bloody and brilliant. A perfect tribute.