“I’m telling you,” she said, “nothing goddamn fell away. That’s not how it works. You lost your people in that attack, yeah, but you didn’t lose any parts yourself. I say you gained something.”
“Laney—”
“Shut up.” She squeezed his hand. “You tell me, what is this?” She squeezed again.
“Is that a rhetorical question?”
“I’ll tell you what it is—it’s a hand that’s connected to a heart so big I can’t believe it sometimes. This is a hand that helped save my hide several times over.”
He felt breathless. And not from blood loss.
“And what else?” She squeezed. “What else is this hand connected to? Right now? Who are you connected to right now?”
He looked into her eyes. “You,” he whispered.
“Yeah, you got that right,” she whispered.
He wanted to laugh and cry both at the same time. He had the impulse to make a joke, just to control the situation. Because he was spinning out of control. Because he was falling off the edge.
“What is it?” she asked. “You can tell me.”
He pushed through the impulse to squash the moment with understatement. It’s just that the feeling was too sharp, too intense. He swallowed. “It hurts,” he grated out.
She sucked in a breath, staring at him like he’d uttered something amazing. “Where does it hurt?”
He looked at her, thinking about the question. “My thigh.” But that was a half-truth. “Everything hurts,” he said. “Everything,” he whispered. “Beauty hurts. Darkness hurts. Love. Death—”
“Like hell you’re dying.”
It felt good to tell her. Like something essential, chunking into place. “Laney—”
“What, Peter?”
He was silent for a bit, absorbing the soft ring of his name. “It all hurts.” The boys outside kept bouncing their ball. Bounce. Bounce.
“I know.”
“Sing to me,” he said.
She went still. “You want me to sing a song?”
“Yes,” he whispered. Maybe he wasn’t thinking straight, but it’s what he wanted.
Her eyes filled with tears. She started to sing You Are My Sunshine as she had before.
“No,” he said. “Sing one of yours.” He wouldn’t blame her if she refused. He’d ridiculed her songs right to her face. But now he wanted to live inside one of them.
He nestled his head into her lap.
“Which one?”
“The kitchen,” he whispered. “With the cookbook.”
She started to sing, soft and whispery and melodic. The cookbook full of wishes. The stupid kitchen hangings.
The emotions flowing through him were too sharp, too clean, like they might rip him up inside, like they might rip up the world, but he let it happen.
He was going off the edge and he no longer fought it.
He closed his eyes as she sang on, letting the lost things inside the song echo with all the beauty and ruthlessness in the world.
And the strangest thing: it was all okay.
She was on the part about her mama now, catches tokens of life like fireflies, to enjoy when she was right as rain, but that day never came. That was one of the lines that had suggested to him that her mother was an alcoholic hoarder. He’d used that knowledge to manipulate Laney before, but now he felt into it, and into what it would’ve been like for Laney, the abandonment with a mother like that, and no father. He’d had so much, really, with his own family. Gwen. He missed them, but they’d given him such gifts. Gratitude washed over him. He’d never gone near that feeling—the loss was too much for him to bear, but they were still with him.
The beats of the bouncing ball sounded far away as he abandoned himself to her song.
It was then that the answer came to him, in the form of a line from her mother song: Greedy with memories.
“Laney.”
She paused in her singing. “Yeah?”
“She kept things,” he said. “Your mother.”
“Our place was piles of things.”
“Memories.” He turned his gaze up to her. “How did she keep memories? Was it photos, or did she do video?”
“Some video, but not of Rolly.”
“What about your wedding? Did she video tape your wedding?”
She furrowed her pretty dark brows. “Mama was drunk off her ass—she couldn’t have worked a doorknob, let alone a camera. I’m sorry.”
He sat up, ignoring the blaze in his thigh. “The mother who keeps every last magazine and broken TV doesn’t miss her girl’s wedding, dammit. Somebody taped that wedding, and she got a copy. Especially if she was drunk. Especially then.”
“It would be something ancient. Like VCR,” she said.
“And who would have a VCR player? I bet your mother does.”
“But we can’t get it over the computer. It wouldn’t be digital.”
“Tell me you have one of the burners Rio grabbed.”
She pulled a phone from her pack.
“Call.”
She scowled at the phone, as though unsure what to do with it. “It’s been so long. I don’t know what I’ll say.” She looked up at him. “I never told her where I was. I couldn’t trust her.”
“You’ll make it right.”
“Maybe she knows what happened to Charlie.”
“Call her. Make this happen. We need more of his voice.” He fished the list from his pocket and put it on the ground. “We need these sounds.”
She dialed while he fired up the laptop. It would be a bitch to clean samples recorded off a VCR played over a phone, but if he could record Rolly forming just a few more sounds, his library would be complete, and he could beat the challenge words.
Outside the bouncing ceased. Voices. He darkened the screen. More hunters.
“Eight in the morning there. Mama won’t like that,” she whispered.
“Put it on speaker when I say the word,” he whispered, listening to the voices. He would pull the recording right into the spectrogram software. The bouncing started up again—the hunters had moved on. He nodded at Laney.
The phone rang. A soft, woozy voice answered. “Whadya want?”
“It’s Emmaline, mama,” she said, tears in her eyes.
“Baby doll? You okay? Where are you?”
“I’m fine, mama. I’ve been running from Rolly. I couldn’t call—”
Her mother began to ramble angrily about Rolly. Smooth as a pea chicken, she called him. She seemed drunk.
“You hear from Charlie?” Laney asked.
“Yeah, your brother’s in the looney bin, did you know that?”
“A psych ward?”
Macmillan’s heart nearly flew out of his chest as she caught his eye. The brother was alive. “He signed himself in last month,” her mother said. “Nobody can get at him. If that boy’s crazy I’m a monkey’s uncle, I’ll tell you—”
He saw when Laney got it—Charlie had gone in to get away from Rolly. “Mama, I need you to do something really important.”
“You’re not going to ask how I am?”
“Look, I’ve got a heap of trouble, and I need a recording of Rolly’s voice. I’m thinking you can put your hands on one. I’m thinking you might have a recording of the wedding—is that possible?”
“That man’s got nothin’ to say I want to hear.”
Eventually Laney got her mother motivated. “Now you’re glad for your old decrepit mama saving mementos,” her mother mumbled, rustling in the background.
“I’m glad for you to save mementos,” she whispered. “And you’re not old and decrepit, and I miss you, but I need this bad. The wedding dinner,” Laney said. “You got a tape?”
“Well, that cousin of Gordy’s filmed the ceremony and the toasts. Don’t know why I’d keep anything that scumsucker Rolly ever said.”
“And I bet you got a VCR player in there somewhere. Bet you can get at it fast.” Laney walked an expert line, applying just a bit
of urgency, but taking care not to upset the woman. Over the next ten minutes, Laney’s mother hooked up two VCR players, both of which turned out to be broken. Finally she found one that worked.
He whispered to her, “If I circle my finger, have your mother rewind a bit and replay.” He showed her how he wanted her to hold the phone.
They waited as her mother fast-forwarded through a tape. They got to the wedding vows, but the sound was terrible. He shook his head. No good.
But then they got to the reception tape. The holder of the video camera was closer to Rolly. He was asking Rolly what he most loved about Emmaline.
“I look at her and I think she’s the most beautiful thing alive,” Rolly said.
He and Laney exchanged triumphant glances. There it was—the oo.
Macmillan adjusted the levels. He was feeling faint, but not worse. He could probably stay conscious if he didn’t exert himself. “There’s no other woman like Emmaline,” Rolly droned on. “The way she sings, and the way she enjoys the little things. Her word pictures, they grab you.”
Rolly went on, delivering more phonemes. More sounds. He started ticking sounds off the list. A gold mine.
“Emmaline finds meaning and beauty in what other people pass by, but she’s the beautiful one,” Rolly continued.
Macmillan straightened. Rolly really had loved her, but he’d let that love make him small and cruel. He’d tried to lock her down. Macmillan put a hand on her arm and squeezed. He held it until she looked back.
He didn’t want to be a small man in a locked-down world—he wanted to tell her that. When he looked at Laney, he felt inspired to be big and true and reckless, to rise up to meet her.
Suddenly her pink lips spread in a cat-like smile. Rolly had used the word beige. The zh. The last of the sounds on the list.
Bingo.
He started separating the sounds while she took back the phone to speak quietly to her mother.
Ten minutes later he had a viable library. He transferred it onto the phone.
“What now?” she asked when she was off.
“I test it. Plug your ears if you don’t want to hear his voice.” He whispered peanut butter into the phone. The phone synthesized Rolly’s voice perfectly: peanut butter. Laney widened her eyes. He tried it with a few other words. Macadamia. Intentional.
“Peter—” She didn’t want him to go.
“I have to. And I’m rallying at the moment.” The truth. The pain raged on, but he wasn’t so tired anymore.
“What if they take your phone?”
“They’re only concerned with guns.”
“Let somebody else do it.”
“I trained this software for me, and I’m the only one who can get up there alive. Rolly wants to be up close and personal with me.”
“So he can hurt you.”
“Not if I take over his weapon first.”
“You think he’s going to let you waltz up to his precious weapon and play it a recording?”
“He won’t realize until it’s too late.”
“You’re not the only person who can get on that roof alive,” she said. “Let me help you.”
The thought of her up there chilled him. “Never.”
“I’ll distract Rolly while you make for the weapon with your phone.”
“I need to know you’re safe.” She’d been frightened of going back—for good reason. He just needed to get near the TZ, play the Leetle Friend password, beat the challenge question, and transfer control to his voice like Fedor showed him.
Simple.
His muscles fired as she helped him stand, sending merciless darts of pain through his thigh. He gritted his teeth and pulled himself together.
“You ready? Can you stand?” She let him go and he managed to keep himself upright.
“Wish me luck,” he said.
She didn’t wish him luck. Instead, she pushed aside the crates and walked out.
Damn.
He caught up to her as she was paying the boys. “What are you doing?”
“I’m thinking about grabbing a tuk-tuk to the Hotel Des Roses,” she said, “but what are the odds we’ll get a free ride? I think they’re good, don’t you?”
“Laney, no.”
“I’m done running from Rolly. We’ll do this together, Devilwell. We’re stronger together.” She headed to the main road and he limped after her, cursing. Her arm shot up in the air. A tuk-tuk stopped.
“No thanks,” he said to the driver.
“Yes, thanks.” She got in. “Hotel Des Roses on Tamroung Road.”
“You can’t,” he said, well aware that she could. Even if he wasn’t banged up, he couldn’t yank her out, not in the middle of all these people. He felt eyes on them. Probably too late already.
“You coming?”
He got in, holding tightly onto the metal bar. “Bus station,” he said to the driver, a large man with a red baseball cap.
“Hotel Des Roses.” She handed money up front. “Des Roses, got it?”
The driver looked nervous. Macmillan was the man, but Laney had the money.
As it turned out, it didn’t matter. Because a red car pulled up and squealed to a stop in front of the tuk-tuk.
South American muscle.
Chapter Thirty-one
Macmillan’s pulse raced at they were pushed into the Hotel Des Roses lobby by their three captors, a trio of burly thugs from Venezuela led by a man in a baseball cap. The men had tied their wrists and relieved them both of weaponry and the satchel with the laptop, but Macmillan still had his phone in his pocket. And his wound wasn’t bleeding for the moment. Just blazing with pain.
Laney held herself perfectly upright, intense amber eyes fixed straight ahead, dark hair in a long braid. He’d give anything for Laney not to be there; at the same time, he was blown away by her bravery. Facing Rolly.
“Laney!” One of the girls behind the front desk called out. “What’s going on?”
“Sirikit. I’m okay.” Laney spoke in rough, rapid Thai full of affection. “Be careful. Be ready to run.”
Macmillan was surprised when the bellboy accosted them—he stepped right up to the biggest of the bunch. “You need to let her go—she works here.”
“Sujet, it’s okay.”
He wouldn’t budge; the thug pushed him away. Sujet would’ve come again if Laney hadn’t talked him down in rapid Thai. She wanted him to warn the staff that trouble was brewing. She’d worked with these people for two years, Macmillan realized. They’d be her friends. Good friends.
“Enough Thai,” one of their escorts barked. The elevator doors opened and an elegantly dressed Thai woman stepped out. Rajini Shinsurin.
The woman widened her eyes. “Laney!”
Macmillan could feel Laney stiffen beside him.
“How could you?” Laney asked. “How could you?”
Rajini Shinsurin looked on helplessly as he and Laney were pulled onto the elevator. “I had to.”
“No, you didn’t,” Laney said. “And you’re not the queen of capers.” The doors were sliding shut. Laney stuck out her foot. “I thought you were my friend,” One of the guards jerked her in— “but you’re the queen of cowardice,” she called out just before the doors shut. “Fuck it,” she said, tears in her eyes.
“She didn’t deserve you,” he said. All the guns and blood and violence, and it was her dear friend’s betrayal that made her cry. That was Laney—bravery and loyalty and fire in the heart. He wanted to tell her that and more. There was so much to say—too much to say and not enough time. Taking over this weapon could easily cost him his life.
She stared balefully at the twin columns of lights on the elevator panel. The light for floor one flashed off just as two flashed on, then two flashed off as three flashed on.
It was then that he noticed the corners of her mouth twitching, as if she’d thought of something funny.
She turned to him suddenly, eyes full of laughter. She furrowed her brow, trying to contai
n her smile. “Escorting guests at gunpoint. This sort of service will cost the Hotel Des Roses at least one star.”
He laughed. God, he wanted to kiss her. The man holding him gave him a violent shake, but he didn’t care. “I agree,” he said. “And binding guests’ wrists? That will cost the Hotel Des Roses yet another half star.”
Laney snorted. “It completely lacks in decorum. If the elevator operators at the Hotel Des Roses wish for the guests not to press the buttons, they should simply make that preference known. Today’s traveler does not expect to be brutally restrained.”
Macmillan laughed as the floor seven light flashed off.
“Cállate! Shut up!”
He was in no mood to shut up, and their captors wouldn’t do anything more to them now. The floor eight light flashed on. “The customer service techniques here are woefully out of date,” he whispered.
Laney grinned. “Zero stars. And that’s final.”
He watched her. He couldn’t believe the miracle of her, or how beautiful and brave she was.
But that wasn’t the phrase, not precisely.
She felt good and endless, and he wanted to never stop discovering her.
But that wasn’t exactly it. And then he realized. He said, “Nevertheless, I give the Bangkok Imperiale Hotel Des Roses a full five stars,” he said to her. “And I’d give more if I could.”
She looked at him in mock surprise, but he was done joking. Floor thirteen had flashed on.
“It’s because of the woman who sings here at night,” he continued. The man jerked him harder and he took a step sideways, which sent pain up and down his thigh, but nothing would stop him now. He gazed at Laney. “It’s because she made me feel passion again, and happiness, and life—everything I lost. Because you connected me back to my own heart, Laney, and finding you…”
“Devilwell,” she whispered.
“Just listen,” he said, even though what he needed to say was too big to fit into language. “I was barely alive before you, and nothing meant anything, but then these last few days—no matter what happens, this has been worth it. Because I love you. And I don’t know how much time we have—”
“Don’t talk like that.”
“I love you—I need you to know. Three days I’ve known you. I don’t care. I love you anyway. You’re amazing and beautiful, but it’s not because of that, it’s more—”
Off the Edge (The Associates) Page 26