Boyfriend from Hell (Saturn's Daughters) (18 page)

The Miata might be toast within a week, but at this point, I was beyond caring. I kept telling myself the house was
outside
the Zone as I knew it—albeit by a few blocks. “Would it be all right if you keep your last
tenant’s deposit and I pay him back should he ever show up?”

She looked at me shrewdly. “Do you have the first month’s rent?”

“I do. And references from my current landlord. I’ve never missed a payment.” That wasn’t a lie. I was very responsible. In that one area.

I wrote her a check to impress her.

She gave me the keys and nodded approvingly. “Andre says you’re a good girl. I think you’ll do.”

Oh, double crap.
Was there anywhere the man
wasn’t
?

O
kay, I’d moved a thousand times before, but they’d always been “have to” moves. This one—this one was for me. I
wanted
that gorgeous old Victorian. I was quite willing to forget surveillance vehicles and hot-air corpses in my excitement. Being closer to Max-in-a-mirror was actually a
plus
in my new mood.

Jane dropped me off behind the tenement and promised to locate her guy with a truck. I think she was a little jealous of my good fortune, but she really
didn’t grasp the price I’d already paid for working in the Zone.

Well, it wasn’t exactly a price. I hesitantly glanced at myself in the dresser mirror before heading off to work. I was still short, still had a hawk beak and crooked teeth. But the swingy curls and great legs . . . Even partially concealed by a skirt, the legs looked good. I needed to go shoe shopping.

The mirror thumped as if a fist had struck it, and Max appeared. He was blurrier here outside the Zone, and I shivered at what appeared to be smoke swirling around him. He looked both furious and worried.

“
You need help, Justy,
” he pleaded inside my head. “
Get out!
”

But he was gone before I could rebut. “You’re not telling me anything I don’t know,” I told him, keeping my hands on the glass, just in case he was listening. “But my choices are kind of limited right now.”

A final week of school, and then I could land a real job, pay someone to clear my record, take the bar exam, and get on with my life. Hopefully.

While untangling my life, I had mostly done just enough to survive, to skate by. Except now I seemed to have taken on a few additional causes—which I wasn’t handling very successfully, I reminded myself before I got too cocky. I still didn’t have the funds to hire the Geek to hack the bank. I was pretty clueless with this detection business—both literally and figuratively.

Afraid the bugging devices could suck information out of my neighbor’s cable lines—which was where I
stole my Wi-Fi—I didn’t even dare Google the names Cora had given me for the diplomatic plates. I dragged out my backpack of textbooks, added my netbook and some cleaning supplies. I stuck some instant coffee, a pot, a few other kitchen necessities, and a change of clothes into a shopping bag. I wasn’t hanging around to be spied on any longer.

The turds in the Escalade knew where I went every day, so I just gave them the finger as I sallied out the front door to my Miata. Let them think what they would of my excess baggage.

After taking the interstate and ascertaining that I wasn’t being followed, I veered off before the bridge and circled back to the Victorian to drop off my stuff. Then I drove straight to Chesty’s and parked in the alley. The guy in the suit leaning against a telephone pole on the corner spoke into his phone. I still couldn’t believe anyone was actually bothering to stalk me, but if they were, I was giving them no reason to suspect I was anything other than a student and an underpaid flunky. I was still hoping they would go away when they got a taste of just how boring I was.

I should have asked Schwartz if there was some way of bugging telephone poles and Escalades, but I really needed to know whose side he was on. I’d taken him for the straight-and-narrow sort. Lying—or fudging the truth—on a police report pushed him closer to my territory. Or maybe he’d been corrupted by the Zone.

I didn’t anticipate being ambushed the moment I walked in the back door of Chesty’s. I nearly dropped
my deposit bag as one of the cooks emerged from the kitchen, grabbed me, and lifted me from the floor in a bear hug. He chattered in what could have been French or Hindi for all I knew.

The rest of the cooking staff poured into the hall to pat me on the back or head or wherever seemed reachable. At least some of these spoke English, and I gathered I was being awarded a hero’s welcome.

No one seemed to think it was unusual that I was three inches taller and not limping. Apparently, keeping my head down and my mouth shut meant no one had known I existed, until now.

I noticed Sarah wasn’t anywhere about, and I wondered if she’d fled our fair bar for safer territory.

“I didn’t do anything, folks,” I protested. “I was just there. How’s Diane? Has anyone heard from her?”

“She’s all right,” one of the English-speakers said. “Andre told her to take the week off. Ernesto is pissed, because she’s one of our best workers.”

“Did Ernesto actually
do
anything about the lighting in the alley?” I asked, more comfortable with these practicalities than with being lauded as some kind of hero.

Still, I was fine with the big bowl of spicy chili and the plate of tacos they set in front of me once they’d led me into the kitchen. My breakfast donuts had worn off.

“New lights installed first thing this morning,” the cook said proudly. Tall, skinny, and younger than me, if I could judge by the acne hidden by beard scruff,
he held out his hand. “Jimmy Jones. I’m the soup and bread chef.”

I had a notion there were fancier terms in fancier restaurants, but this was the Zone. For all I knew, Jimmy stole tires for a living before he landed here. Chances were pretty good he never graduated cooking school.

“Pleased to meet you, Jimmy. This chili is delicious.” I had to wonder where people in the Zone bought ingredients, but I wasn’t insulting my newest best friend by asking. I might as well get used to chemical poisoning if I wanted to eat anyway.

The others introduced themselves, and I tried to keep a running list in my head, but the brain cells were limited. At least I knew I had pals in the kitchen who wouldn’t be trying to lop off my head in their knife fights. Not soon, anyway.

I noticed the gray-haired weirdo carefully bagging a plastic chili bowl on the other side of the kitchen. “Who is that?” I whispered to Jimmy, tilting my head in the guy’s direction. Surely, if the kitchen was feeding him, he wasn’t one of the spies.

“Crazy guy, used to work at the plant,” Jimmy whispered back. “May still work there for all I know. Andre said to feed him, so we do. Sometimes he brings us what he calls his latest invention, but we’re all afraid to test them after one blew up the pantry.”

“He gives me the willies,” I murmured back. “He keeps staring at me, and he looks kind of familiar somehow.”

Jimmy shrugged. “We just call him Paddy. Don’t know more.”

At least he’d not attacked me with a tire iron. He’d simply warned me away from his family, so I guessed I’d label him harmless.

Paddy ambled off without giving me a second look. I scraped up the last of the yummy chili and carried my glass of Sprite out of the kitchen as the head chef yelled at everyone to get back to work. The waitresses wouldn’t be in for a few more hours, but preparation was already under way for the evening crowd. I got out of their way.

I nearly dropped my glass in astonishment when I entered the bar and found Max’s pals Gonzo and Lance sitting there.

“Tina, looking good!” Lance bellowed as I juggled the glass to the counter and ran around to give the big lug a hug. “Cool place to work. How can I get me one of these jobs?”

I laughed. He was eyeing the nude murals on the wall and the stage, which seemed to have mutated to babes with whips and leather just for these boys here. Who needed artists when we had the Zone?

Max’s biker buddies were about as reliable as six-year-olds. They did what they wanted, when they wanted, and no more.

“You’re the wrong sex for bussing tables here, buddy. And they already have a bouncer.”

“And I bet he’s a fairy. Can’t let the studs in with the mares.” Lance nodded wisely. He wore his dirty brown hair in a ragged ponytail at his nape. A scar
from a knife fight marred his otherwise nice jaw. He never said, but I had a feeling he was one of Max’s college friends who’d gone off to war and come back a little warped.

I punched his bulging bicep, but the leather jacket could take the blow. “Macho turd. Now put me down and tell me what’s brought you down here. And why do I think Max wouldn’t approve?”

“He hated the Zone,” Gonzo rumbled, dropping some oily mechanical parts on Ernesto’s clean bar. Gonzo resembled a Mack truck more than anything human: big, square-built, shiny roof, with a few teeth missing from his grill. But he was a mechanic par none, including Max.

Yeah, mirror-Max clearly had no fondness for my workplace, but he’d never said anything in the months we’d been shacking up. I really hadn’t known the man, I was realizing.

“Why?” I asked. “And why didn’t he tell me?”

They looked uncomfortable. Even with my new five-five height, I was only half their size, and there were two of them. They still looked as if I was about to whip them.

“I killed a man last night,” I told them casually and watched their eyes widen with question marks.

I didn’t feel casual. I still wasn’t entirely certain what I’d done, but a man was dead, and even if he was a demon—or worse yet, a government spy—I’d sent him to hell.

I’d sent him to hell. Like Max.

Not ready to go there yet—especially after that
last fiendishly smoky image. So I got in their faces.

“He was hurting someone and I had to stop him. See, I’m a big girl now. If there’s something I need to know, spit it out.”

Gonzo redirected my question by holding up a greasy cable. “The brakes were cut.”

That stopped me in my tracks. Gonzo wouldn’t have hauled just any old brake line down here. I went behind the bar and poured whiskey for them and topped off my Sprite with vodka.

Gonzo shoved another mechanical piece at me. “Steering mechanism tampered with.”

“My Escort?” I whispered, staring in disbelief. I couldn’t tell a cut brake from a fishing line, but the cable he was showing me had been neatly severed at least partway.

“Max didn’t like the Zone. The Zone didn’t like him,” Lance said enigmatically. “Babe, I think you better get out of here.”

That was what Max kept telling me. From hell. Or purgatory. Or my imagination. I took a stiff drink of my Sprite. The boys did the same with their whiskey.

“He never said anything when he was alive,” I said angrily, newly fortified with alcohol. “Why didn’t he make me leave then?”

“You were his best spy. A few of us helped him out a time or two, but we get too busy and you’re steady. His old man is some bigwig at Acme and Max didn’t like him knowing he was watching.” Lance took another swallow and wiped his mouth. “Max should have told
you, but he didn’t know this was all going down so fast.”

Crap. I was mourning the bastard, when all I was to him was a spy? I contemplated taking out my compact and stomping up and down on it. “Who was I spying on? I never told him anything that everyone down here doesn’t know. And what does his dad have to do with anything?”

Lance shrugged. “He didn’t talk about it much,” he admitted under my glare. “He just wanted his dad hanged from the highest tree and you were one of his ways of gathering evidence. His dad has something to do with the chemical companies that make nerve gas weapons. It’s all hush-hush.”

“You think his
dad killed him
?” I asked in horror, finally connecting the dots.

“Someone was sure hoping to get you or him or both.” Gonzo pensively examined his oily parts. “We kinda thought you ought to know as soon as we found out. Max liked you a lot. He’d want us to help you get out of here.”

I couldn’t take it all in. I was just a lowly law student and underpaid bookkeeper. I didn’t know anything anyone would want to kill for. But I couldn’t think of any good reason the guys would lie to me. That they thought Max liked me didn’t ease my anger or guilt. I was just one terrified, roiling stew of emotion.

“I can’t quit school now,” I murmured. That this occurred to me first showed my twisted mind. Earning my law degree was more important than my life. I’d
spent a lifetime searching for justice, and the paper to put me on that path was nearly at my fingertips. If I couldn’t right wrongs, what was I?

I could answer that one—
nothing.

Milo had climbed out of my bag when I dropped it to greet Lance. Now that I held my head in my hands, with my elbows propped on the bar, not paying attention to him, he rubbed against my jaw and purred.

I stroked him, reminded that I had friends here. Those kids to avenge. A job to do. A new apartment I wanted very badly.