by A. L. Tyler
He threw himself down in a chair, looking over stacks of criminal file printouts laid out on the coffee table. He was still wearing his shoulder holster over his white button-down shirt, so I assumed he hadn’t been back that long.
He capped his bottle of blood and tucked it out of view behind the chair. “Do you need something?”
It was strange that I didn’t feel at home there anymore. I could hear my magic—the magic that Angel had leeched from me—growing closer.
I had to say something. “Do you know a man named Jackson Coffing?”
Nick stood up. He frowned as he took two steps toward me. “Do you know a man named Jackson Coffing?”
I backed up until I had my back against the kitchen bar. Nick closed the distance between us. His eye twitched.
“You didn’t drop your search for Samson Grift.” He reached behind me to pull a newspaper from the far side of the bar and slapped it down on the counter next to me. I looked down and saw an article on the motel fire. Nick pointed to an ambulance in the back of the picture. My profile was barely discernible.
I closed my eyes. It was so much worse than that. I looked back up at him. “No. I didn’t.”
“This fire happened the night before I found you scorched. It was you.”
“Yes,” I admitted. “I cleaned it up with a memory spell. No one saw.”
“The Bleak will have something to say about it if anyone shows up with a cell phone video saying otherwise,” he said seriously.
I took a deep breath. No one believed online videos anymore. CGI was getting too good. Nick was still right, regardless—the Bleak were draconian, and they liked making examples on principle.
I looked him in the eye. “There’s no evidence. It’s been handled.”
“There’s a former associate of Grift’s that lives close to where this happened.” Just like that, it had become an interrogation. “You spoke with him?”
“Yes.”
“And Jackson Coffing.” He put one arm out and gripped the bar, blocking my exit. “What happened between you and Jacks?”
He was on a nickname basis with a crime lord. Awesome. “I asked him about Grift. He told me. And he wasn’t the only one.”
“I don’t care about anyone else,” Nick said. “What did you give to Jacks for the information on Grift?”
It hardly mattered. I tried to steal my nerves. “Do you work for him?”
“You’re investigating me.” He stepped back, standing straighter and crossing his arms. “If you have to ask, you won’t ever trust my answer.”
He turned away and paced to the window.
“I haven’t been investigating you.” Not a total lie. “I just had to know about Samson Grift. And you two were apparently a team, so it was sort of inevitable. And I learned all of this stuff—”
“What stuff?” A small wind moved through the apartment and he was standing before me, challenged and angry. “Tell me.”
“Bribes. Threats. Kids, Nick.”
His eyes filled with rage. My heart started to race.
“What kids?”
“Louis Irvine said Grift was trafficking kids. And you were there.”
“I was there,” he said bitterly. “That deal never went through. Did Irvine tell you that?”
“Because Grift put him away,” I said. “And then he made his son run jobs for the Packs to pay a bribe to get him out. And his kid saw a hit. And you were there.”
Nick ran a hand over his face. He turned away from me and my heart fell. It was all true.
He turned back, his cell phone in his hand. He put it on speaker and it started to ring.
A man answered. “Hello?”
“Yes.” Nick said. His voice was too calm. “This is Nicolas Warren, and I am calling on official business as a handler of the Bleak. Please state your name for the record.”
“Nick? It’s been years. How’re you doing?”
“Your name,” Nick repeated. “Please.”
The stranger’s tone changed. He was concerned. “This is Louis Irvine, Junior. Nick, what’s this about?”
Nick glanced at me, and then shook his head a little. “I need you to recount everything that happened the day you got the money to pay off Samson Grift. Everything.”
“That was years ago—”
“You’re killing me here, Lou.”
“Fine...”
Lou took a breath in, collecting his thoughts. I looked to Nick, who was leaning over the phone set on the coffee table next to us, hanging on every word. He took a seat. I stayed standing.
“I woke up, and you picked me up from the house. I remember thinking that was weird, because you usually just dropped things off. We got breakfast, I think, and then you drove me to a bar. No—wait. You made me get waffles. I didn’t get to have waffles a lot growing up because they’re so much work. I tried to order eggs and you asked for a side of waffles. Then we went to the bar, and you made a big deal of telling people my name.” Lou hesitated. “They... uh, they gave me a box, and a lot of money, and there was a fight. A guy got shot—”
“Lou.” Nick leaned back and closed his eyes. “I need the truth. For the record. This is me asking. The whole truth.”
Lou breathed into the phone. “Uh, well...”
“It’s me, and I remember the waffles, and you ate them with blueberry syrup because you didn’t like the strawberry kind. No one else knows that. It’s me asking, and I need the whole truth.” Nick looked desperate. “On that day, did I tell you to lie about what actually happened?”
“Why are you asking me these questions?”
Nick nodded. He leaned over the phone again. “My reputation is on the line today. I need you to state, for the record, what actually happened.”
Lou paused. My heart skipped a beat as I thought he’d hung up.
“You introduced me around and then we went to your car. You gave me an envelope with more money than I’d ever seen in my life and told me to give it to Samson Grift to get my dad released. You said if anyone asked, I had to say a guy at the bar gave me the money to deliver a package and then shot someone after a fight. You said I couldn’t tell anyone you’d been bringing food by because you could get in a lot of trouble. Especially my dad, because he could get in trouble, too. Then you told me to walk home and wait for Grift. He came by late that night, and I gave him your money and said it was from working a job for the Packs, and my dad came home two days later.”
My legs felt weak. I sat down in a chair. I covered my mouth and breathed a sigh of relief. Even after being leeched, the intense release of that moment made pins and needles sing to life down my arms.
“And if anyone else ever asks, you still need to tell that story,” Nick said. He reached for the phone. “Thank you, Lou. Thank you so much.”
He hung up, and then tossed the phone back into his stack of research.
“You thought I was one of them.” He stared at me in contemplation. “This has been going on a long time. Since before the hotel.”
“After the hotel,” I said weakly. I shook my head. This wasn’t entirely my fault, though. “You’re very convincing at what you do.”
“I have to be.”
I nodded. I held his gaze, lowering my chin. “Have you ever lied to me?”
He didn’t hesitate. “Yes.”
“Are you going to keep lying to me?”
“Yes,” he said unapologetically, irritated that I would even ask. “In certain cases, my security clearance is higher than yours. I will lie to you as I need to, and considering your former position with the Bleak, I expect you to understand. After all, you’re still lying to me.”
His lip curled slightly. His eyes were cold.
“I thought I was dealing with someone dangerous.”
He huffed a disbelieving laugh. “You thought that about me.”
“I thought I trusted Kane,” I said bitterly. I shook my head. “I don’t trust anyone anymore.”
“You can trust me,” he s
aid levelly. “I’m still going to lie to you.”
I breathed slowly through my nose. If not for Angel, we probably would have stopped talking a long time ago. We had accomplished more in our partnership in the last fifteen minutes than we had in all the weeks prior.
I wasn’t sure I liked talking.
“Fine,” I blustered.
“Good,” Nick agreed curtly. He looked past me and at the front door. “And I can hear you out there. Come in, or stop lurking.”
Chapter 29
ANGEL BANGED THE DOOR open, looking impatiently at me. “I need a word.”
I got to my feet before remembering I was outgunned if I started a fight. “I told him. That was the deal.”
She raised her eyebrows. “The deal was you tell him everything.”
“I still have eleven hours,” I sputtered.
“Gods, and that wasn’t even all of it...” Nick stalked past me, toting his bottle of blood. He gave Angel a wary look as he shut it back in the fridge. “The deal was that you would keep the secret. That’s always the deal. I don’t appreciate being made a liar because you changed your terms.”
“I don’t appreciate people who say they’re ready for treatment and then resist it,” she replied. “A word, Jette.”
I shot a poisonous stare at Angel. “Nick, did you ever get those records on Samson Grift from your friend with the awesome security clearance?”
“No,” he growled. “I was hoping you’d drop it.”
Angel looked back and forth between us. She waved a hand impatiently for me to continue.
“Do you have a picture of Grift?” I said through gritted teeth.
“No. He was superstitious about cameras. Why?”
I pulled up the picture and held my phone in front of me. “Because Jackson Coffing says this is Samson Grift. And he’s wearing my dad’s hat.”
Nick took the phone in his hand, dumbstruck. “You went to the bar.”
I inwardly cringed. “You knew about this picture, and you just lied to me.”
“Yes. As just discussed, I’m going to do that.” His eyes flashed annoyance. “You’re researching a dangerous man—one who has nothing to do with you—who still has active connections on the outside. I was trying to protect you.”
“You lied about killing him.”
He sighed heavily. “Yes, I did.”
“Was my dad Samson Grift?”
“No,” he said loudly. “No. Granted, their case file shots do look similar—”
“You looked them both up to compare?”
“—but they aren’t the same person.” He paced the length of the kitchen before stopping in front of me. “Robert took a rebounded memory charm, but he was mildly psychic. I wanted to know as badly as you did, so I looked them up. Yes, there are some visual similarities, and between that and the name, Robert was confused.”
I shifted my weight. “Why not tell me to begin with? Why not show me?”
“Because I thought you would let it go. Bringing it up again, and showing you the resemblance—which is entirely coincidental—wouldn’t have helped you let it go.”
I turned back to the living room, going to the windows and staring out at the mountains as I thought.
“That’s it?” Nick asked Angel. “She’s been working herself up over Grift and things that happened a decade ago?”
I heard the sneer in her voice. “No, that’s not it.”
“Robert said that Grift had a picture of a little girl on the beach.” I whipped back around to face Nick.
Nick closed his eyes and nodded. He took a deep breath and looked at me with pity. “Jette, I already said he was mildly psychic and more than mildly off his rocker. You were thinking about your father, he heard the name Sam, and he made an inaccurate deduction that we were talking about Samson Grift. He might have pulled that photograph directly from your memory.”
I suddenly felt foolish. I was grasping at straws, and I was beginning to realize how obsessed I’d really been. “But the hat? And the resemblance?”
“It’s a hat, honey.” I detested seeing the same pity written on Angel’s face. “A lot of people wear them.”
“I admit the resemblance is odd,” Nick said. His voice was cautious. I mentally recoiled from his kid gloves. “I will get those files for you. I didn’t think you would take it this far. If you’ve been speaking to Jacks and showing your face around The Cork Tree, I need you to trust me: you are playing with things that can get you killed. Stop. Let me help. Trust me.”
It was all falling down around me. The room started to spin, and I sat down in the nearest chair. I had to look away when I saw Nick glance uncertainly at Angel.
He was treating me like I’d gone insane.
Maybe I had.
“But Samson Grift was known for framing people,” I said. “My father was framed. And Robert—he was trying to tell me something.”
Nick crouched down in front of my chair. He fell just short of reaching out to pat my hand.
It was probably good that he didn’t. I might have cried. Or punched him in the face.
“Robert also said not to dig up a box in a flower bed behind Farrow’s house,” he said gently. “There aren’t any flower beds. We both looked. I was Robert’s friend. I knew him, and I wanted to find solace in his words, too. He was confused. Samson Grift wasn’t your father. He didn’t frame your father. This was all a coincidence, Jette. I’m sorry.”
All I was left with was my own lingering, nagging doubts, and the knowledge that I was right back where I had started.
My father was imprisoned on charges that I believed were false, but I was the only one who believed. I didn’t have any proof, and I didn’t know of anyone who would have wanted to frame him.
The Bleak claimed they had proof of his guilt. There wasn’t any proof of his innocence beyond my belief that he wouldn’t have done those things. Being his daughter, I wasn’t exactly unbiased. And thanks to one lousy photograph of a mystery man in a hat, I had doubt.
I didn’t know what that left me to believe about him.
I STAYED IN THE CHAIR for a long time. Angel sat at the kitchen bar, griping about rescheduling her consultations on my behalf and texting away on her phone.
Nick sat across the coffee table from me, poring over his printouts and looking things up in the database. He was very carefully and deliberately not looking at me.
“I’m not crazy,” I said finally.
He still didn’t look. “I didn’t say you were.”
“You’re acting like what I did was normal. It wasn’t.”
He exhaled a low laugh. “You were hit hard by tragedy and you were looking for someone to blame. You were trying to find the reason.”
“Don’t psychoanalyze me.”
“Fine. You’re batshit crazy.”
I fell back into my moody silence.
Angel stared at me from where she was lazily slumped in her chair. “Are you going to stay here tonight? My car is still parked in front of your house. I can drive yours back for you, if you want.”
I flicked my eyes back to Nick, and we held the gaze a beat too long.
“We’re not like that,” he said to Angel. “But if Jette wants to stay, she knows she’s welcome.”
I got up and moved toward the door. “I have a cat.”
Angel rolled her eyes as she got up. “You two deserve each other.”
She donned her coat and followed me out.
“Feel any better?”
I glared at her.
“Yeah, I thought so. I’ll find another bar to pick a fight in, if it’ll make you feel better.”
I couldn’t help myself and smiled weakly. She dug in her bag and offered me gum as we got on the elevator.
I took it. Just as I would expect of Angel, it was one of those weird tropical fruit and mint flavors.
“Your father was taken for treason?” she asked.
I nodded. “When I was fifteen.”
She pursed her
lips and shook her head. “I’m sorry. Are you ever going to tell Nick?”
I slowly turned to look at her. “I just did.”
She watched the floor indicator lights as we descended and leaned back against the cool metal wall. “I meant that you like him. He likes you.”
The magic flared anew and it felt like I’d plunged my hands into ice water as a sound like a strong wind whooshed in my ears. Angel’s treatment plan must have been working, though, because nothing visibly changed.
I contained the flare.
“He doesn’t want to burden you,” Angel went on as though we were discussing a soap opera next to the water cooler. “He knows you’ve got shit to figure out. Personally, I think you could use more distractions in your life.”
I licked my lips. She still annoyed me, but I was beginning to see why Nick liked her. The truth was a brash thing. Speaking with someone who knew too much and didn’t care certainly took the edge off.
“I promised Robert I’d take care of him,” I said. “And this thing with my dad... I don’t know what I’m going to do. And if I do the wrong thing, even if it’s for the right reasons, he’ll get hurt. And he’ll get hurt worse if we let it go there. So it’s not something that’ll ever be something more.”
Angel nodded. She took a breath as she diverted her eyes to the floor. “I get it. I think you’ll come to regret that decision someday, even if it would’ve broken both of you. That’s a damn shame, but I get it.”
The feeling of my hands gone cold to the elbow made me think of Millie and her black opera gloves. She was a dark and twisted person inside for everything she’d been through in life, but no one knew it to look at her. My own reflection, warped in the brushed stainless steel of the opening elevator doors, was nothing like hers.
On the inside, though, we were frightfully similar. I was already pushing people away, like George and Millie, because I had something worse than enemies: I had self-destructive tendencies. I was no longer convinced my father was innocent, but part of my brain was still whispering to proceed with the plan. Proceed at all costs—I’d already come this far.