“Why?”
“Our father was a Marine.” He scrubbed his palms over his thighs. “He died in the line of duty when I was eleven, and Mindy fifteen.”
“She didn’t want to lose you, too.”
“She lost me anyway. We haven’t talked at all in the past fifteen years.”
Her head tipped sideways, as if she was studying him. “Do you miss her?”
“No,” he shot.
One corner of her mouth pulled up. “Bullshit.”
It always struck him how some words escaped that sweet mouth, and how clean they sounded anyway. His chuckle carried his frustration. “I don’t miss her. Would I like to see her every now and then? Probably.”
“Call her.”
“I called her when we were in Georgia.”
“See?” She slapped his leg, triumphant. “You took the first step, now you only have to keep going in that direction.”
“It’s not that easy.”
“Yes, it is. Where does she live?”
He thought about a million things to do that would take him away from her, but didn’t move. “A hundred miles north from here, not far from where we grew up.”
“That’s amazing! I guessed you were from someplace in the south. How was growing up in here? I bet it was amazing, with all the beaches and–”
“Ann.”
She stopped. She knew what he wanted. He couldn’t help but find amusing the way she tried to take a way out. “Later.”
It amused him a hell of a lot less how much he wanted to take that way out with her as he asked, “Did Mary tell you anything when she came to your place?”
She glared at him. “That we had to leave, quickly, no time to waste.”
“Nothing about Snow?”
“In July? Why would she?”
“Snow was one of the girls working there. I talked with this guy at the club while he waited to be…” Mark looked for the lightest word. “Served, up on the second floor. He said Snow wasn’t available, and that’s when I took you away.”
He rested his elbows on his knees, clasped his hands together. “It looked like Mary got into drugs. I went back, and I hooked up with a different guy. He told me about a girl he liked. She went by a fake name, Snow.”
He waited to give her a little time to take in what he told her. Ann swallowed hard, her hand pressed together in a tight grasp. “I’m okay. Go on, please,” she hurried him.
“I walked up with him. Nobody asked me for ID or anything. Controls were lax, whoever’s running the club now is probably still trying to deal with Mary’s disappearance. I got to the second floor, saw the rooms, realized what was going on and got away.” With a long breath, Mark leaned back on his chair. “Snow’s last night at work was the night before you got attacked. A coincidence?”
She moistened her lips, staring at him with pained eyes. “Do you think she’s dead?”
“I don’t know. Tomorrow morning, as soon as they boot the computers downstairs, we’ll see if there’s something on her. For now, it’s late and we need to sleep.”
When the lights went down, neither of them could stand the empty space between their heartaches. Exhausted, shattered, they found a little peace and a little strength in a wordless embrace.
* * * * *
The computers dozed on the big, iron table in the middle of the otherwise empty room. Overstuffed office chairs looked like a black necklace all around them.
Ann gave the room a 360-degree look. It was spotless, stylish and practical, and she hated it.
Mark booted up a machine as she took place at his side with a pad and a pen.
“We can’t Google Snow the prostitute,” she said, trying her hand at dark humor and finding it helpful.
“No, but we can go through local newspapers, see who died in the last weeks.”
Website after website, from the biggest titles to the neighborhood gazettes, they looked at every picture, read every obituary. Paper cups with a memory of coffee piled up on the desk.
Ann walked around in small circles behind Mark when, after hours of being perched on the chair, her legs started to leak life and ache. “Maybe she’s not dead,” she said, bending over to touch the floor with her open palms to stretch out her limbs.
“She is. Look.”
On the screen appeared a small article in a volunteer-run, online-only newspaper covering the North West part of the city. A group of friends was complaining about the police, said they did nothing for their missing friend. The police said nobody ever reported the case.
“I remember that girl,” Ann whispered staring at the picture on the top of the article. “She worked at the Club. She and Mary were very close, she’s the only one I’ve ever met from the Club.” Her hand flew to her mouth. “She was a…”
Ann wouldn’t say the word. The girl had been so young, with the sweet, chocolate eyes of African Americans. She was beautiful. Ann had envied the regal way she moved her long, lithe body like a dark gazelle. It just didn’t seem respectful thinking about her in term of a prostitute. To her, Snow was her sister’s friend and nothing else.
“According to one of her co-workers, she didn’t show up the night our friends paid you a visit. The same day Mouse called me,” Mark said. “Mary left Miami in a hurry the same evening Snow didn’t show up at work.”
“Mary was scared when she arrived at my place, she must have been the same when she left Miami.”
Mark nodded. “When Mouse called me to check on you, he told me a friend had asked him for help the night before.”
Ann scribbled names, times and what they knew had happened on her pad while she summed up that night. “Mary gets scared, calls Mouse. She flies to New York the day after, when Snow doesn’t go to work.”
“Mary comes to your place. They break in. You run, I get you. Mouse keeps digging. He’s killed.” Mark leaned back, rubbed a hand over his head. “Where’s the link to Mary and Snow?”
“They were friends.”
“And friends talk.” Mark’s frown deepened. Absorbed in his thoughts, he took her hand and started playing with her fingers.
“Snow’s in,” Ann said, tightening the grip on him. “And since she worked with Mary, it means the Club’s in, too. There has to be some record of what happened the night before they attacked us. I told you, Mary was paranoid about tidiness.”
Mark mulled over the timeline they built. He didn’t seem to notice he rubbed the back of her hand against his chin, back and forth, the stubble a soft rasp of pleasure on her skin. Ann was well aware of that contact, and forced words out just to distract herself from it. “We have to go back to her office.”
“I don’t get it,” he said, his warm breath turning her blood into an untidy heap of longing and heat. “There’s nothing about your sister. Or you. Not in the newspapers down here, not up north. It’s like nothing ever happened.”
She shrugged. “We weren’t that important.”
“Are you telling me that your people from the Center didn’t find it weird that you weren’t at work or home?”
Lust faded away quickly from her mind. “What if something happened to them?”
“The more people get hurt, the more difficult to cover up. They probably bought a lame story about your absence and got on with it. But whoever this is, has some friends in the right places. I’m talking big friends.”
“Do you still think the Team’s involved?”
“I can’t say.” He bit a little at her fingers, probably mirroring the mental munching over the possibility and sending Ann’s system in higher gear. “I found Mouse close to the desk in Savannah, he must have been working. They might have got him as he did his research. He was careful, but these people most likely had the tools to track him down. He told me something was off.”
Unable to take more of that unintentional seduction, Ann broke the contact. He looked startled for a second, as if he’d just realized what he did and cleared his throat. “You don’t have the key to the Club but t
omorrow’s Monday, we can break in in the early morning, when there’s no one.”
He cleared the browser history and turned the computer off.
“We have a free day. Are you ready for your second self-defense class?”
She couldn’t wait for another session of closeness, of his hands guiding her in the right moves, of touching and rubbing. There was a lot of that on her mind, but within a completely different scenario. She forced a smile, and nodded.
Chapter 14
When Mark opened the curtains, older memories mingled with what shone in front of his eyes. Light rose fast from the ocean, pushed by an overzealous sun; soon, that yellow ball would emerge and conquer the fading darkness.
He’d been woken up many times by it, and by the heat seeping through his body, rusted after a night on the beach.
Once again that morning, the Floridian sun-his sun-beckoned at him with its burning halo like an old friend. And like an old friend, Mark nodded with a little smile before turning his back to it.
“Ann?” he called gently, prodding at her calf with his knuckles.
She emerged from under the pillow in all her sweet languor, with hair that looked a lot like the sun’s crown of light, her frown still full of sleep. “Yes,” she murmured. “Gimme five.”
She waddled to the bathroom, a blond baby doe still learning how to walk.
Mark sat at the table, took the clip off his gun. He heard his own body shouting insults at him for the night before – enough with sleeping wrapped around her! Yeah, well, his body had better shut up, for he wasn’t gonna stop.
He punched the voice away and got on with checking the gun. It was a soothing process: the gentle friction of the slide coming off, the wiping, reassembling the pieces back together. The trigger clicked, clean and ready for action, the clip slid in place, ammo filled his pockets. He could have done it with his eyes closed. In fact, he’d done this in places so full of death, so empty of hope, that the hotel room was a paradise. Their mess was nothing compared to what he’d been through in the years of duty.
But Ann… for her it was all new. She’d lived a normal life, ups and downs, bad hair days, common tragedies and happiness.
In the past week she’d seen her sister disappear, coped with her death, saw a man murdered and almost died a couple of times. She found out that her sister had been lying to her all along.
And there she was, minutes after dawn, getting ready to go with him, not knowing what she would find next. Still able to smile, to hope, to fight without losing kindness and warmth. Feeding his own faith.
Ann walked out the bathroom, chased her tennis shoes out from under the bed with movements still awkward with sleep.
She made him want to believe her, believe the buzz in his brain droning that yes, he could see the end of this crap and lose himself in her. The thought enticed him, dangerous and sweet.
She stood in front of him, hair in a ponytail and a tight smile on her lips.
“You ready?” he asked without meeting her eyes.
“Sure.”
She wasn’t, as she hadn’t been from day one, but she would soldier through it all one more time. With the right training, she would have made a great Marine. Pride for his angel inflated his chest, made him feel stronger, invincible. “It’s not going to be dangerous,” he said. Riding that wave of confidence, he dared looking at her.
“Good. I’m not eager to put your teaching to the test.” She took a long breath. “Let’s go?”
He nodded, but didn’t move.
She would be so beautiful on white sand, her ivory skin kissed by the sun, wearing a small red bikini and a white hat with a gigantic brim. He would take her to unknown paradises, stop at every secluded beach all the way up to Georgia. He remembered the spots where a boy and a girl could really turn the heat up on a summer night.
His fingers reached up for her, skimming the elegant neck and his thumb brushing her lips.
She froze. Her lips parted, waiting for him. Wanting him.
All of his body tensed as the built-in alarms in his head went off.
He stepped away, secured his gun in the holster and locked away all that useless dreaming and need.
* * * * *
The Club had the same empty feel as a church on a Monday afternoon: naked and huge. Just few glasses gathered on the counter, a forgotten broom rested on the floor, aside a small mound of balled up receipts and heavy dust. The soft beat of their shoes on the black marble floor filled the quiet.
She followed Mark up the stairs to the second floor. A door let them into the setting of a different story. Gone were the neon lights bouncing over glass. Gone was the contemporary mood of metallic handrails and white, minimal couches.
A waiting room, Ann guessed from the few rounded sofas and small coffee tables, the sweet scent of cigar lingering, lazy. A waiting room of gold and brocade, chandeliers and opulent woodwork framing mirrors. It was lavish and decadent, made for modern day bored aristocrats in need of new ways to satisfy the most basic hunger.
Six doors, three at each side of the hall, were closed, the last curtain of reality before the lawless fantasy. Ann pointed at them. “Is that where Mary–”
“Yes.”
“I want to see it.”
He halted his stride. “No.”
“Why?”
“There’s nothing to see.”
“But–”
If she had a mind to see, she changed it at his words and at the gentleness of them. “Don’t do that to yourself. Remember her as she was with you, not as you’d imagine her in there.”
He was right. She had enough bad memories of Mary from the last time she’d seen her, she wouldn’t add to them. She walked to him, stroked his arm in a silent thank.
At the further door, where Mary’s office was, Mark reached for the door handle, swore when he found it locked. He crouched in front of it with a pick and a tension wreck.
“Mark?” she asked, leaning on the wall. “Do you think Mouse knew my sister…That way?”
He glanced at her. “Like a client?” He winced as regret crossed his face in a dark flash.
She didn’t like his words either, but it didn’t make them less accurate. “Yes, like a client. If she was… you know?”
“Could be.” His frown never left the lock. “We had time off between jobs, he liked it down here.”
“He was very young. My sister wasn’t.”
When the lock clicked open, he didn’t rise. He looked at her, a shade of sweetness lightning the hard lines of his mouth. “Look, Mouse wasn’t an idiot. He wouldn’t drag the Team into some slut’s trouble. He respected her and held her dear enough to call us.”
“A new take on Pretty Woman?”
“You don’t believe Mary was a prostitute.”
“What if I’m wrong?”
“Let me be the pessimist jackass, will you?” He pushed to his feet, towering over her. “He called her a friend. None of us do that easily.”
“So he really liked her? I mean, for who she was, not what she did.”
He nodded, took the first step inside the room but stopped. Her fingers wrapped around his hand and held him in place. “What?”
“You’ve been here before.”
“Of course I have. I told you, a girl brought me up here with a bunch of freaks. Come on.”
She pulled at his arm again, forcing him to give her attention. Displeasure for the delay showed in his narrowed eyes and in the intake of breath; Ann didn’t care about his displeasure. “You were gone for a long time last night.”
His frown darkened. “And?”
“Did you um… try the service?”
He tilted his head, his eyes two black slits. “Are you out of your mind?”
“It’s a reasonable question. Come on, Mark, are you telling me you’ve never used services like this?”
If it were any other subject, she would have smiled at his cross embarrassment for the subject, at the outrage shining beneath it. It
made him grumpier that usual, and sweeter. “Okay, so you didn’t. But you had women. Have you been safe?”
His eyes flashed as he rose in all his stature. She pushed the question away with a quick wave of hands. “Never mind, of course you were safe. So, you didn’t use this service, last night.”
She wanted an answer, a clear one. She didn’t want to think of him, having hot sex with a stranger when she was in a hotel room wishing he would have hot sex with her.
Mark rubbed a hand over his eyes. “I did not.”
The weight on her chest disappeared. “Good. Let’s go.”
Ann switched on the light to an airy, organized room.
Her sister lived in small things – a pocket mirror abandoned on the desk, a cherry lip-gloss, pens and markers perfectly aligned on the right. Her fingers toyed tenderly with a butterfly hair clip. She would hold the memories she had, carry them like Mary had done with the postcard from LA clipped to the frame of a dull still-life poster. Ann had sent it to Mary during the last vacation they’d taken together as a joke.
Now, it was the only thing that spoke of Ann, of Mary’s life outside the Club. Mary had hidden her little sister like a treasure, had protected her with the only thing she had, obscurity. With that postcard, Mary brought Ann in a part of her life they couldn’t share. “She loved me so much,” Ann whispered, tears ready to overflow. “It wasn’t a lie.”
She sensed Mark’s body behind her, leaned into it to steal some of its strength.
His hands run up and down her arms, comforting. “No, it wasn’t.”
Ann took the postcard. She would take it home, keep it on her nightstand as a memento of something that was gone, but will never disappear.
“Thank you,” she told him.
Mark watched her as she started to open drawers and cabinets with resolute calm.
He wasn’t sure what her thank you was about. It could be for the little time he gave her before getting to work. He could stretch it to thank him for being there. He liked the idea.
“Everything’s in order,” Ann noticed, snatching him from his pondering. “Maybe they didn’t come here.”
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