Glass Houses

by Stella Cameron

  Do. Not. Think.

  A call to the nearby mini-cab office brought a handsome man wearing a purple-and-gold turban to her door. He said nothing, only jerked his head while looking at Olivia, signifying for her to come with him. While she locked her front door and glanced around before stuffing the key under a flower pot, he flung open a back door on his burgundy-colored vehicle, leaving it open while he slung Olivia’s belongings into a boot, where what looked like scrap metal lay in a rusted jumble. He got into the car and started the engine with Olivia still on the pavement. She had to leap inside and drag the door shut or he would have left her behind.

  She clung to her seat while the driver—who apparently spoke no English—careened his dented sedan to Heath Street and into the congested morning traffic. Surrounded by lorries and buses, Olivia repeatedly closed her eyes when her driver battled with any vehicle obviously more powerful and well maintained than his taxi. He battled with every vehicle.

  If she was slated to die today, she’d die today. But she’d already avoided death once, and now she’d started her daring journey, she felt almost invincible.

  She uncurled her sweaty fingers from tom cloth seats and eased against the back.

  The airline ticket cost so much she still couldn’t bear to think of the figure. The woman booking agent she’d spoken to on the phone had turned all nasal and superior when Olivia mentioned that the fare seemed a bit steep. “When you book at the last minute and you don’t know if you’re staying over a weekend, what do you expect?”

  This wasn’t like her. She might prefer to think of herself as spontaneous and, well, artsy, but she was really rather timid when it came to taking risks.

  This was not a risk. She was going to meet a perfectly honorable, concerned friend. And there was no longer any doubt that she’d stumbled into some sort of unsavory nonsense.

  That was all the thinking she’d do for now.

  Making sure the driver couldn’t see her in his mirror, she opened her purse. That disgusting, despicable man back there couldn’t possibly have given her enough money to pay for the ticket, but perhaps with some extra from a cash point, she still wouldn’t have to actually use her card to pay for the flight.

  For the first time she realized there were two envelopes rather than one. A second was adhered to the first by leftover glue where a label had been removed. Obviously she hadn’t been intended to get both.

  Olivia dealt with the first. On either side of the bundle inside the envelope was a twenty-pound note, with a ten-pound note next to them. Not much of a start. After checking the driver once more, she began to count. But not for long. Her fingers grew clammy, then numb and didn’t seem to want to move. A fifty-pound note showed its face, and another, and another, and another. She paused when she’d counted five hundred pounds. “Good gracious,” she murmured. “However much is there?” The magazine had been going to pay her two hundred and fifty if they printed her photographs. A kill fee because they’d changed their minds should be less. Both she and Sam had certainly been right in not believing the story about a kill fee, even before London Style denied all knowledge of offering her one. No magazine would voluntarily overpay.

  Olivia uncurled her fingers and looked at the thickness of what she’d counted so far. She tried to estimate how much more money there might be.

  “Oh.” Surely there was a mistake? Surely there couldn’t be that much—a thousand pounds perhaps?

  “Oh, crikey!” Either she needed glasses, or she was even more rattled than she’d thought. She continued to count, amazed at how quickly the sum added up in increments of fifty. “Yes, a thousand. Unbelievable.” There was still more, so she counted on under her breath. “Fifteen hundred. Sixteen. Seventeen— two thousand. Fishhooks, I’d faint if I dared.”

  What she’d soon added up was over four thousand pounds. With trepidation she lifted the opened flap on the other envelope and discovered a used ticket to a film called Nasty Girls Need Punishment, a dry-cleaning receipt, and two uncashed checks, apparently drawn on the same account. And she still didn’t have a final figure on the cash. The biggest risk in her life—as far as she could see—would be to remain in London while people either attempted to take her life or tossed thousands of pounds at her for something that should have no value other than as part of Penny Biggies’s layout for London Style. She, Olivia, was an unknown for whom any publisher would offer peanuts, for which she’d be grateful.

  Making this trip was absolutely the right thing to do. It was the only thing to do. And she was going to do it.

  Four

  “No,” Vanni said. “Not just no, but hell, no.”

  Aiden checked over his shoulder. They were in a small office off the squad room, but someone might come in at any moment. “Come on, buddy. What’s the big deal? A friend—me—needs a favor, so you’ll do it.” The open office door and a wall of windows were visible to the swarm in the squad room.

  “No.” Aiden’s partner kept his eyes trained on a computer screen where he was selecting mug shots for a lineup. “Don’t ask again. Gimme a hand here. Does that look like him?” He pointed at the blank face of a white male, bald, with the kind of innocent baby eyes guaranteed to raise the hairs at the back of any cop’s neck. The guy was a big, strong sunovabitch, and no one you wanted to know was at home behind those eyes.

  “Does it?” Vanni pressed him.

  “Sure. Put him in.” The pictures they chose, a visual lineup, included the real suspect and would be used to try for a positive identification by a victim.

  “That’s good enough,” Aiden said.

  “Says who?” Vanni swept a hand in all directions, indicating the scene in the squad room where detectives came and went—at the moment mostly came—and yelled good-naturedly to each other. Suit jackets had been discarded and the sleeves of white shirts rolled up. Mini-consultations were conducted in corners. Vanni waggled his head and said, “See anything out there, partner? We’re havin’ a busy momin’ in case you didn’t notice. Our one hundred percent effort is needed around here. The chief’s on his way up; word has it he’s stewin’ about somethin’. Someone probably closed a loophole in one of his schemes. Probably a crackdown on his free Yankee tickets.”

  Aiden was an even enough tempered guy and he didn’t shake easily, but the last thing he wanted was for the chief to hear Vanni talking wildly about kickbacks. And kickbacks, by any other name, were still kickbacks. “Can it, Vanni. I know you’re fooling around, but this place is a zoo. Anyone could hear you and not understand. And I’d likely be guilty by association. The chief’s just looking for an excuse to get my ass in a sling. What gives with the SWAT guys, by the way?”

  “You think someone’s going to tell us?” Fats Lemon said, having sidled into Vanni and Aiden’s space. He was a skinny guy with a gray crewcut and tight, bronze-colored skin that crumpled into a wrinkled mask when he smiled. Fats smiled a lot, was smiling now, his wide, thin-lipped mouth stretched, and all but closing his eyes.

  “Hey, Fats,” Vanni said. “How’s it goin’? Let us know if we can do anything to help. It’s a bummer for Ryan to be gone so long.” Vanni was better at making polite small talk than Aiden.

  “I’ll let you know,” Fats said, preening nicely. “Maybe I’ll be that hard up some day.”

  Aiden would have taken him by the neck, but Vanni shot up from his chair and stepped between. “Didn’t I hear you’re expected at the morgue?” When Fats nodded, Vanni went on to say, “You’d better get on it then. Make sure you don’t fall down the steps on the way out of here. I’d hate you to bruise that skinny ass of yours. Give old Carver my regards. Tell him I hope to have something different for him one of these days, something he’s never seen before.”

  It was Aiden’s turn to intervene. “I’ve got to leave,” he murmured to Vanni. “Come outside. I want to talk some more before I go.”

  “Push me some more to get your own way, you mean.”

  “Whatever.”

  Fats Le
mon still hovered, for all the world as if he was passing time with two good friends and colleagues.

  Vanni succumbed to temptation and said, “Carver’s been known to get real angry with people who keep him waiting— unless they’re dead. Once heard a story—not confirmed, of course—about him asking a tardy rookie to crawl inside a drawer to check something for him. He said the stiff on the table had just been taken out of that drawer and that it wasn’t as cold as it ought to be. The cretin rookie did as he was told, and Carver slid the drawer back in, locked it, and went away for an hour.”

  “Sure,” Fats said to Vanni. “I’m no rookie and I can handle Carver.”

  Chief Friedlander arrived and the noise level dropped a bunch of decibels. A small man, he made up for lack of height with what Aiden liked to call “presence.” Muscular and fit, his walk forceful enough to create its own energy, he entered any room chin first and with the type of assurance that told everyone around they’d better listen up—just in case he barked a question in their direction.

  He strode into his office with its wall that was half glass and made no attempt to shut the door. Another good sign. If he closed the door and lowered the blinds over the windows, someone was for the high jump. Aiden watched him, noted his fancy, custom-made shirt once the suit jacket came off. Then there was the expensive silk tie and the Gucci loafers that rested on the desk. The chief wore no socks. He was one trendy guy.

  He looked up and met Aiden’s eyes. Before the moment could turn into a staring match, Aiden turned away. He had an edgy relationship with Friedlander, who had voiced concern about Aiden’s reserve and raised doubts about his being a good team player.

  Not long enough ago for the incident to have become a memory, Aiden had made the decision to go into a building where a domestic dispute was in progress without waiting for a backup. Things had been getting ugly in there and he feared someone would be dead before the next car arrived.

  Turned out he’d probably been right about that, but he’d put himself and Vanni at risk. And if Vanni hadn’t been right behind him, Aiden might be singing heavenly music by now. The chief had put him on suspension for a week and hadn’t stopped making sure Aiden knew how badly he’d goofed up.

  But Aiden hadn’t stopped condemning the chief for failing to help Chris Talon, Aiden’s expartner, to overcome the unnecessary guilt that caused him to quit NYPD and end up with the Seattle Police Department. Chris had blamed himself for the death of a woman charged, erroneously, with the murder of her child. She’d killed herself, but that had been no fault of Chris’s.

  Aiden and the chief existed in the same work space, but he doubted the other man had the slightest respect for him.

  Aiden hadn’t needed to hear the chief say what the force thought about maverick cops—they were considered potential liabilities. Before Chris had quit NYPD around four years earlier, Chris had been the kind of tough cop who didn’t chatter, but did know how to cut to the core in a few words. The two of them had been a perfect team, a complimentary team. Aiden rarely went through a day without missing his old buddy, but you moved on, you had to. Vanni was younger than either Chris or Aiden, brasher, louder, and he was enough of a contrast to Aiden to make his more senior partner’s quiet watchfulness real obvious.

  Vanni had tired of the game with Lemon. He motioned for Aiden to follow, ran downstairs, passed two officers at reception and a gaggle of potential plaintives in chairs along one wall, and slammed his way through the doors and onto 51st Street. There were more cops around than civilians, and a casual observer might think the cops were too engrossed in eating bagels and yakking to have noticed even if someone got knocked off on the steps to the precinct house. Any cop knew better.

  Vanni pulled Aiden across the street, dodging vehicles whose screaming drivers leaned out the windows to holler insults. Vanni’s target was the pretzel stand on the corner of 51st and Third. Vanni liked some predictability in life.

  “From here we can see if Fats tries to horn in again. That guy’s a friggin’ nightmare. I’d like to know who he sleeps with to keep his job.”

  “He’s not such a bad cop,” Aiden said. “He got lumbered with a lousy partner—you can’t blame him for that.”

  “He coulda cited incompatibility and requested a different partner.”

  Aiden managed a one-sided grin. “You make it sound like a marriage gone wrong. You know it looks bad when a cop complains about his partner. Lemon’s probably got ambitions, just like you and me.”

  “Ambitions?” Vanni’s voice rose several octaves. “He’s already realizing his ambitions. He likes working with Ryan. It’s got to be Ryan who fixed him up with the fancy duds. Their clothes are almost identical. They’re in on it together, I tell you. And Fats is ecstatic about it. For all we know, he’s got enough on Ryan to make him pay for silence and support.”

  “You ever thought of writing a book? I heard imagination’s a must in that line of work and you can clean up millions for just a couple of weeks’ work.”

  “I’ve thought of it,” Vanni said. “I’m waiting for my muse is all.”

  Vanni was a master at sliding away from the problem in hand.

  “Would it be okay if I picked up Boss this afternoon and took him to Mama’s for a visit?” Vanni continued. “She just loves that nasty-tempered dog of yours, and she says it’s been too long since you brought him over.”

  “Sure you can take him. Now quit avoiding the reason for this conversation. Vanni, you’ve got to help me. I can’t take her back to my place in case Ryan shows up. It would turn too nasty and I don’t want to upset her. She’ll already be upset— and Ryan could take it into his head to do anything, including accuse me of being a pervert with plans for Olivia’s body.”

  “Not my problem.”

  “You’ve got an extra—”

  “No, dammit. You’ve got cold feet. First smart thing you’ve felt since you got yourself into this. But they’re your cold feet, not mine, and I’m not taking some whacko Brit female to my place.”

  Aiden wouldn’t give up until he’d talked Vanni into helping him. There was no one else to ask. “She’s not whacko, just a bit naive.”

  “Like hell,” Vanni shouted. Immediately he hunched his shoulders and lowered his voice. “She’s making a big trip to a country she doesn’t know, to meet a man she doesn’t know, spending money she obviously doesn’t have, and she could be walking into that airport to be taken away by someone with murder in mind. She’s not whacko?”

  Aiden thought about all that. “She’s all on her own with what could be big trouble. She’s coming to me because I’m the only one she knows here.”

  Vanni snatched two steaming pretzels from the guy with the cart and thrust one into Aiden’s hands. “She… Dammit, but you’re a couple of tacos short of a full meal deal. Give me your ear, friend.”

  Obediently, Aiden bent close to Vanni, who whispered, “She doesn’t know you, asshole.” He cleared his throat and this time he shouted, “She knows Sam and there isn’t any Sam. Got that? She shouldn’t be coming. There’s a disaster on its way and your name is on it. And hers. What if Ryan’s planning to blow her away because she’s got something he wants, but he doesn’t want her around to talk about it?”

  “I’m weighing those odds, partner,” Aiden said. “I acted without thinking. I’ve never done that before, not on a personal level. Now it’s my job to help Olivia gain some courage, and to make sure Ryan Hill isn’t a danger in the future. I think I can do that.”

  Vanni narrowed his dark eyes and chewed away at the pretzel.

  Aiden looked at his watch.

  “Impetuous,” Vanni said, swallowing visibly. “That’s what it was, impetuous. And you know what? You’re right, you’ve never done a spontaneous thing for yourself since I’ve known you. You collect scrap heaps you call vintage cars— and they’ve gotta keep you poor. Who ever heard of renting a warehouse for an indoor junk yard? You raise orchids that drive you nuts because they don’t bloom
like you want them to. The Wally Loder undercover thing is something else. You’re fantastic at it, but when you turn into Wally, it’s strictly for business, never to have any fun. You’ve never even deliberately gone out and gotten tanked enough to fall down.”

  “I’ve been drunk,” Aiden said.

  “Sure, but not paralytic. I never knew another cop who didn’t do that at least a few times. Shows a man’s got heart.”

  There was no answer to that.

  “Well, hell,” Vanni said, waving the remnants of his pretzel in the air. “I guess I’ve been wrong about all this. I need to encourage you, congratulate you. You’re goin’ out to the airport to pick up a woman you’ve never met. You’re going to make sure Ryan Hill doesn’t get his clammy paws on her. And you’re gonna figure out what’s goin’ on with these photographs. Great. At least it’s a start. If she shows up at all, the two of you can chat about what’s best for her, then she’ll go home again. You will have tasted adventure, boyo, adventure of the real personal variety.”

  Aiden laughed. Suddenly the whole scenario was ridiculous, and every word that came from Vanni’s mouth made it even more ridiculous.

  “This isn’t funny,” Vanni said, but he smiled. “I’ll go call Mama now and tell her you’ll be bringing someone to dinner.”

  “I don’t think—”

  “Shut your face, Flynn. Unless you just want to say thanks and good-bye. My mother will give your new girlfriend the spare bedroom until she can get a flight home. Mama loves it when the house fills up—makes her remember when we were all kids and at home. She’ll have a good cry.”

  “I don’t want to make your mother cry,” Aiden said, but quickly added, “She’s got a heart of gold and you’re lucky to have her. I’ll take you up on the offer.”