Poppy’s mouth fell open. It was still open when Ben led Willow rapidly away.
Liam’s laughter followed them.
14
Ben did drive Willow to work. He had pulled her to a halt on the sidewalk, two shops short of Millet’s, and opened the passenger door of a black Citroën parked at the curb. “They’re all in the shop waiting for us to get back,” he said. “You want to walk into that, or get to work?”
Willow didn’t ask how he knew what was going on inside a showroom he couldn’t see. She accepted that he could and climbed into the car at once, Mario on her lap. “Where did this car come from?” she asked when Ben got behind the wheel. “It wasn’t here when we left.”
“Of course it was,” he said.
Willow pursed her lips and they drove in virtual silence. He didn’t even know that with each new and unexplained event, he made her more certain she had to find a way to make him feel good about leaving again.
Mean ’n Green’s current offices were in two rooms reached by passing through a recently opened tattoo parlor at the back of a dilapidated terra-cotta-washed building. This morning Willow was glad she had not gotten around to having any kind of sign out for the business yet—that might make it a little harder for the curious to find them.
When Willow got out of Ben’s car in the minuscule parking lot, she cringed at the sight of a police car pulling in behind them. She glanced nervously around, expecting the press to have the place staked out. The cruiser was the only potentially hostile object in sight.
“Don’t worry,” Ben said. “I’m coming with you.”
How she wished she could say, “Great.” Instead she ducked down to see him and said, “Let me call you if they’re here to see me. They may not be, but anyway, we don’t want to look as if we’re on the defensive and you’re my bodyguard.”
“Why not?”
“You are so predictable,” she hissed. “Now please do what I want for once. Thanks for being with me….” The cop got out of the cruiser and stood in front of the tattoo parlor. “See,” Willow continued rapidly, “nothing to worry about anyway. He’s here for the tattoo parlor. Happens all the time.”
“You mean you work where there’s a lot of criminal activity?” Ben said, focusing on the neon sign in the window.
Willow kept her face perfectly straight. “No. Cops get a lot of tattoos.”
She shut the passenger door, tucked Mario under her arm, and stood there waving. This was Ben’s first visit to the office site she’d moved into less than four months earlier. She intended to stay put until he left so he wouldn’t figure out she also had to enter the building via the tattoo parlor.
He looked at her for so long she feared he would insist on waiting her out. She smiled at him and raised one of Mario’s front paws.
Ben rolled his eyes, backed up and drove away.
Once he was out of sight, she ran into the building without glancing at the police officer, who remained in front of the building speaking into his collar mike.
“There she is, the woman of the hour,” Rock U. hollered when he saw her. He was working over a large black-and-green tattoo on the back of a big kid with matted white dreadlocks.
Unlikely music, the ping of tiny cymbals and rush of water in decidedly Zen mode, floated from large speakers. Pictures flickered on a muted TV high on a wall.
Rock U. subscribed to the open-salon principle. A good thing, since his business was in one room, about eight feet by nine.
“How come you got your name up in lights?” he said, letting each word rise and fall as if he were warming up to sing. “Saw the van right there on the TV. And that uppity Zinnia, she won’t even give me a hint of inside info-mation. That girl has an attitude, I tell you. You would think she was manager of a swank hotel, not a cleaning outfit.”
As broad as he was long and all muscle, the man was a human billboard displaying many of his specialty tattoos. Like every other day, he wore a black muscle shirt and tight, black leather pants decorated with a heavy key and small tool-loaded chain hanging from a belt loop. He wouldn’t tell anyone what the U after his first name stood for and the employees at Mean ’n Green had been known to waste time speculating about it. Unlikely, Unwashed, Unspeakable; the possibilities went on.
“You got a dog?” Rock U. wrinkled his hooked nose.
“Can’t talk,” Willow said, breaking into a jog. “But I love you, Rock U. And it would be so amazing if you thought of a way to delay that cop out there until I’ve had a chance to talk to Zinnia. I only need a couple of minutes.”
Rock U. chuckled. “Just long enough to tell that bitch to keep her mouth shut with the policeman, too? Not just me?”
“Could be,” Willow said, her hand already on the battered door leading to Mean ’n Green’s salubrious digs. “I’ll tell you all about it as soon as I can.” Which will most likely be never.
She hadn’t quite closed the door to Mean ’n Green behind her when she heard the front door open again. Willow figured the cop was on his way and she didn’t look back.
The phone buzzed continuously, but Zinnia behaved as if she didn’t hear it.
“Listen up.” Willow raised her voice to be heard over the racket. “If a cop comes in here, you don’t know anything about anything.”
“I don’t,” Zinnia said and blew a gum bubble.
Fabio sniggered. “I don’t,” he mimicked. The best shopper in town, he sat in one of several chairs behind a long, Formica-topped table Willow’s staff shared whenever they were in the office. Fabio worked at a computer—probably doing price comparisons and mapping his day’s routes. One of the things the company prided itself on was keeping prices as low as possible.
Willow waited for comments about Mario, but Zinnia and Fabio behaved as if they hadn’t noticed him.
“This isn’t funny,” Willow said when she got no more reactions. “You know we’re all over the news.”
Zinnia sucked in her gum. “Are we? Can’t imagine why.” An exotic black woman with a killer figure, Zinnia prided herself on never wasting words.
“Did you hear anything from Chris?” Willow’s heart gave an extra thud while she hoped for the right answer.
“No, ma’am,” Zinnia said. She answered the phone and spoke into her headset in a voice she managed to make sound recorded. “This is the answering service. The party you’re trying to reach will call you back. Please leave a message.”
Willow listened to her say the identical words twice more before she said, “Press?” and Zinnia gave a bored nod, yes. This would only get worse.
“Okay,” Willow said. “What’s your next job, Fabio? Shouldn’t you be out shopping for Mrs. Leopold?”
“I surely should. But she canceled.”
“She isn’t sick, is she?” Willow asked. Agoraphobic Mrs. Leopold never left her house. Mean ’n Green had been buying and delivering everything she needed for a long time, and Willow liked her.
Fabio crossed his darkly tanned arms over his chest and didn’t meet Willow’s eyes. “As in she’s canceled us for good, boss. Says she doesn’t need our services anymore.”
Willow frowned. “I thought we’d have her forever. She must have found someone else.” She thought about it. “You don’t think it’s money troubles, do you? I wouldn’t want to think of her going short of things.”
“You go sit in your office, and I’ll bring you a nice cup of tea,” Zinnia said, silencing the next buzz without answering.
Amazed, Willow whirled to look at the other woman. “Tea isn’t—” She barely stopped herself from saying that making tea wasn’t on Zinnia’s Agreed-to List, signed only by Zinnia and posted on a corkboard behind her desk.
Willow figured she could use what kindness she could get this morning. “That’s so nice of you,” she said. “Thank you, Zinnia. You are checking to make sure we’re not hanging up on customers?”
Zinnia gave a “what do you think?” look.
Willow went into the second room, he
r own very small office, which didn’t have a door because each time it had opened or closed, the old one scraped her desk. Chris had removed it. When she got around to it, a pocket door would be installed.
“You’ve got a dog there,” Zinnia sang out. “Does he shed?”
So much for kindness. “No, he doesn’t. He’s Mario. I need a little quiet while I make a phone call.”
Squeezing past one side of the desk, she plunked into her beloved wooden captain’s chair—this one swiveled and rocked—and brought up the master list of clients on her computer. She clicked on Mrs. Leopold’s file, found her number and picked up the phone.
The woman answered in her whispery voice, and Willow asked what had happened to make her cancel their agreement. “If there’s something we need to improve or change, I’d really appreciate you being honest with me about it,” she added.
The line didn’t go dead, but Mrs. Leopold didn’t answer the question, either.
“Mrs. Leopold?” Willow prodded. “Would it be okay if I came over and we had a chat?”
“No!” the woman said, sounding frantic. “The locks are being changed right now, so your key won’t work. I’ve already called the police. They know I’ve been a client of yours, and if anything happens to me, they’ll know where to look.” This time she did hang up.
“Don’t you let that silly thing upset you,” Zinnia said. She stood on the other side of Willow’s desk, the promised tea steaming in the Spode willow pattern cup and saucer reserved for Zinnia alone. “Put down that phone. And put down that dog, too, while you’re at it. You’ll get his hairs on your uniform.”
Willow looked at the phone blankly, then stared at her office manager. “Why would Mrs. Leopold talk to me as if I were a criminal?”
“Can’t think of any reason,” Zinnia said, putting the tea in front of Willow, who remembered the phone and did set it down. “And if a cop comes in here anytime soon, I won’t be able to think of a reason, either.”
“Neither will I,” Fabio bellowed, his English heavily accented. “I won’t know why the Smiths quit, either.” He claimed to be Italian, blond because he was from the north, but the accent sometimes slipped. According to his own reports, he attracted women like mosquitoes to standing water in hot weather.
“Put a sock in it,” Zinnia said over her shoulder. “Not another word out of you until the coast is clear. Got that?”
“Yes, ma’am,” Fabio said. “I could always lock the door and we’ll pretend we aren’t here.”
“Quiet,” Zinnia snapped.
Willow drank some of Zinnia’s green ginger tea, breathed in the delicious aroma, then had an insane urge to laugh, until a knock came at that door Fabio had wanted to lock.
“Open it right up,” she said. “Don’t look guilty, either of you.”
Zinnia gave an uncharacteristic wink and sauntered to let in the expected member of the police force.
“Didn’t want to scare you by walking in,” Rock U. said. He strutted past Zinnia and jerked his head to indicate she should close the door again.
Predictably, it slammed.
“That guy wasn’t the sharpest needle in the box,” Rock U. said. He had a thing about using the word needle frequently. Said it took the sting out of people’s fear of them if they were mentioned casually.
“The cop?” Zinnia asked.
Rock U. turned his back on her and addressed only Willow. “Did I imagine it, or was that man who drove you here Benedict Fortune?”
Puzzled, Willow said, “Yes.”
“Thought so. He’s supposed to be a wizard, isn’t he? Word around the Quarter has it you two were an item.”
“They surely were,” Fabio said. “Mamma mia, and what a hot item, if I may say so, boss? The air around you two sizzled—bet it still does. And make that, he is a wizard.”
Why hadn’t she followed Sykes’s advice, kept her office door and bought a smaller desk? “Ben’s a good friend of mine,” she told Rock U. “Cut the gossip, Fabio.”
“He’s back in town?” Zinnia said, her eyes all but crossed in ecstasy. “That man is a major stud. When he walks down the street, it’s like the parting of the Red Sea. All the people get out of his way and stare. Is that black hair still long finger food?”
Willow ignored her. “What did the police want, Rock U.?”
“I could hardly get a word out of him. He told me he’d be parking outside until he’s relieved by another cruiser. Then he said he hadn’t been told we did tattoos, as well. What else does he think I do?”
“He’s watching us,” Fabio said. “We are under surveillance.” He sounded excited.
“I’m worried about Chris,” Willow said. “What if something horrible has happened to him?”
“Probably heard all the fuss and ducked out,” Fabio said. “He likes to do his own thing—without an audience.”
Without warning, Mario climbed from Willow’s lap onto the desk and sat facing the bigger room.
Rock U. frowned at the dog. “He’s giving me the evil eye,” he said, taking a step backward. “Where d’you get that thing?”
“He’s my dog,” Willow said shortly. “He’s a very good watchdog, and he’ll be with me all the time now. With everything going the way it is, I need someone fearlessly loyal around.”
“I’m fearlessly loyal,” Rock U. said, still eyeing Mario.
Willow heard a low growl, but chose to ignore it.
“The cop made a mistake about tattoos because you won’t put a name on your place,” Fabio said. “He thinks it’s part of the stuff we do.”
“I got a sign,” Rock U. said, sounding aggrieved. “It lights up and says Tattoos. What else do I need? And you don’t have a sign, either. You been here weeks longer than me.”
Fabio was enjoying himself too much. “Didn’t you ask him why he’s sitting out there?” he said.
“What d’you think?” Rock U. asked him. “I asked and he said he was checking around the area. Something about a missing person.” Mario got another glare.
Getting up slowly and stretching, Willow’s new pet walked across the desk and sat on the very edge—like a sentry.
“Will you stop it!” Willow said. “All of you. Tell me one thing, Zinnia. Did the Smiths say anything about why they were canceling?”
“Said you’d know why, that we all would, and they can’t believe it of us, but don’t have a choice and won’t take a chance. That was the whole enchilada.”
“I’m going over to the Smiths,” Willow said. “Calling Mrs. Leopold first was a mistake. If I just show up at the Smiths, they’ll get over any hang-ups they have.”
“What hang-ups?” Rock U. asked. When he frowned, heavy brows half covered his eyes.
“What you were talking about when I came in,” Willow said, exasperated. “You said we were all over the news.”
“Oh, that.” His eyebrows shot up again. “I just thought it was pretty good advertising. All I was asking you was how you managed to get the name out in front of news cameras. I was thinking I might try and do the same with mine.”
“You don’t have a name, remember,” Fabio said, sniffing sharply through his slender nose. “It’s too expensive to come up with a moniker and get it painted out front.”
“Details,” Rock U. said. “Now they’re talkin’ about bats.”
Zinnia made an ugly face.
“What about them?” Willow asked.
“They think they’re moving into the city—like a plague.”
The phone rang and Willow picked it up. “It’s Sykes.” Her brother used his tough voice. “Ben and I want to pick you up in about an hour.”
“Nope,” she told him. “I just got here and I’m up to my ears. Bye.”
“Just be careful until we get there,” Sykes said.
Then Ben came on. “Do not go outside, Willow. Promise me you won’t. Go on, say it now.”
“Later, you two.”
“Say it!” That was as close to shouting as she’d eve
r heard from Ben.
“Thanks,” Willow said in a reasonable voice that cost her control. “I appreciate the warning.”
She clicked off and said, “Now. What about these bats? You’re kidding, right?”
“He’s kidding,” Fabio said. “Thinks he’s a funny guy.”
Rock U. hooked a thumb over his shoulder. “I just heard it on the cop’s radio. Reports of bats scaring people. They’ve been seen—the bats have. Today.”
“It’s not a good thing to see bats in the daytime,” Zinnia said seriously. “Usually means they’ve got rabies.”
Willow shuddered. Her back straightened and a creepy cold climbed her spine. Her brain buzzed.
She touched her forehead, then her neck. “Please give me some time to think,” she said. “Please. I need to be alone.” Could a bat have touched her?
Oh, sure—several times and without her seeing it? And she didn’t think bats went in for the kind of touching she’d felt in the Brandts’ garden.
Yet again the phone rang and Willow picked up. “Yes,” she said, as evenly as she could.
“Promise me,” Ben said. “I’ve got to deal with something, then I’ll be over for you.”
“I’m fine, Ben,” she said, touched despite her mixed-up feelings. “Thank you for caring. Nothing’s changed.”
“Promise me.”
“I’ve got people here,” she said through her teeth and cut him off again. “Now, folks, give me some space, please.”
Dimly, she was aware of shapes moving away from her. Nothing was clear anymore. She propped her elbows, very carefully, on the desk and rested her chin on top.
A quiet click suggested the other three had absented themselves to the tattoo parlor.
The next ring of her phone almost made her cry out. The readout showed Brandt, and she answered, “Mean ’n Green.” This would probably be bad, but she could hope it wouldn’t be.
“This is Chloe Brandt,” a woman’s pleasant voice said. “Is this Willow?”
She said, “Yes,” with her hand over her eyes. Wait for it.
“I’m sure this isn’t a good day for you,” Chloe Brandt said. “So I won’t keep you long. Val told me what a great job you did last night. Thank you, Willow—you saved us.”
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