Running in the Dark (7 page)

“What is BDSM?”

Uh
… “You’ll have to ask Mal. It’s not my place.”

Chapter Seven

Sore as I was when I woke, Soraya hadn’t actually broken anything. That was the good news. The bad news was that Tilde had recovered from her attempt to eradicate all the vodka in Chile in a single go and was back on the job.

“
Chica,
that is the last time we take you to a bar.” Jacinta slapped Tilde on the back and laughed her way to her car. “You can run, but you cannot handle drink.”

Tilde looked like crap, the lavender half-moons under her eyes visible through gold-tone makeup, her natural blush washed out by the harsh fluorescent lights of the garage. Her cherry-red lips were garish and dry. She gave Jace’s back the finger as she drained a liter bottle of water without pausing.

“Good to see you back,” I said, heading toward the office. Carla wore a wrapped turquoise blouse, chunky orange beads, and had company. I waited outside, watching the pair of vampires. One filled out delivery slips for a pile of thick, off-white envelopes. The other faced the window, scanning the street. His eyes never stopped moving, back and forth, high and low, and his head canted at irregular angles. Listening. But I didn’t see any tension in his body. If Soraya was already following me, she was being more discreet about it. That, or she was out playing vigilante, righting the wrongs done to women with swift, bone-crunching justice.

The vampires left. One moment they were there, the next they were simply gone. The bell on the front door jingled merrily as it swung shut on nothing. Carla glanced at me as she gathered the new deliveries. Her full lips were pressed tightly together.

She locked the front door and pulled the chain on the neon light to show Closed, meaning that she wasn’t taking any more deliveries for the night. I wasn’t used to that. At I&O, we were always open. Runners tripped over each other, in the process of breaking laws and possibly transmissions, for last minute calls. The price tag went up the closer we got to dawn, and so did the couriers’ percentage. I missed my eighty percent—cut nights.

“Tilde,” Carla said as she clicked into the garage on high, square heels. “So nice to see you. Tonight, we have some changes.” She handed out assignment sheets. Mine had returned to three pages, which meant I’d been shuffled back down to the low-rent run. I affixed the list to my clipboard, resigning myself to a pile of houses on Mediterranean, while Tilde got the reds and yellows and Jace smirked from the penthouse of her hotel on Boardwalk.

“We will no longer be servicing the Vega account,” Carla said. I bit my lip to keep my mouth shut. “Vega has changed his house management, and the new male has other loyalties. He’s moved their contract to Perralta.
Hijo de puta de mierda.
”

I didn’t know exactly what that meant, but Carla hated Perralta and his bigger, flashier shop, so I assume it was bad. Jace laughed and I relaxed a bit.

“Did Lalo…retire?” Tilde asked. A line burrowed between her eyebrows, and sweat glistened on her upper lip. My stomach flopped at the idea of what Lalo might have attempted with me had he not been interrupted. Maybe Tilde was tired and drinking heavily for a reason. Lalo had been her customer for weeks.

“No.” Carla organized the papers in her hand as if she were sorting playing cards. “He is no longer there.”

I stared down at my clipboard, pretty damn sure that Malcolm not only knew where Lalo had gone, but had something to do with it. He’d been so angry at the way that weasel had treated me. I didn’t feel bad exactly. Lalo was a menace. Still, the idea that I could mention something in passing and that he’d act on it—without even talking to me—didn’t sit well. What if I slipped and told him Jace irritated me, or that Soraya had manhandled me?

Actually, I didn’t think he’d do anything to Soraya. He was too familiar with her, and she didn’t seem like the kind of person who made that easy.

“This opens some space in our schedule, which is good.” Carla raised a handful of slips and smiled, dollar signs rising behind her eyes. “Because we have loads of last-minute packages tonight. Tilde will handle most of them. Jace, you have the four on the east side. Remember girls, keep your eyes on the road and your mirrors, and make sure you are in before dawn.” She turned back toward the office.

Wait, what?

Jace gave a war cry and started collecting her deliveries. I marched into the office on Carla’s heels, closing the door behind me. She dropped into her chair and slipped on her half glasses.

“What is it?” she asked in a voice that said she didn’t have time for anything I might say. Too bad.

“Loads of bonus runs and I get none of them? I finished
early
two nights ago, ran Tilde’s entire route without a single incident on my first go.”

Carla pulled out her keyboard tray and jogged the mouse. “I made my decision.”

Dismissed. I hate being dismissed. Almost as much as I hate being underestimated. I slid a basket of potpourri out of the way—some eucalyptus-heavy concoction to tangle the vampires’ noses—and leaned on the desk.

“Why don’t I get any of these calls?”

“
Ten paciencia,
Aerin.” She leaned back in her chair and steepled her hands before her. “I need people who do not prove themselves in single runs or in a matter of nights. I need runners who can simply work. Who are…” Her brow furrowed.

“Reliable,” I ground out.

“Gracias.”
She nodded. “Reliable. I would like to grow this shop, to compete with the Perraltas and the corporate shops.”

I pressed my hand against my chest. “So give me more. I can handle it.”

“It doesn’t matter—”

“Like hell it doesn’t matter. Tilde’s limping out there. She was barely finishing her run on nights when she was a hundred percent, and now you’re running her into the ground.”

Carla shot up out of her chair. “Enough. You don’t know what it’s like—”

“Maybe you just don’t like me, Carla. Fine. But don’t burn out one of your employees while ignoring me. Or is this about Jace?”

She snorted. “What about Jace?”

“You told me not to challenge her, and now you refuse to even give me a chance to!”

“That’s not—”

“Then what is it? You want me to spend all night guessing?”

“Stop,” she yelled. “Just stop.” She took a deep breath, and I crossed my arms.

“I know what you can do. I see it. It is the others I need to test, to see how high they can rise if I need them to. For now, I have only the three of you, and soon I will need you to do the work of four, then maybe five. I cannot be obvious, can’t put more cars on the road before I’ve secured more work. If I do, the big boys will smack me down. They don’t know you, which makes you the…the ace up my sleeve.” She tilted her head and smiled, showing the beauty she must once have been, but her eyes were cold with calculation.

“I see.” One of the bay doors opened behind me, and I was glad Carla turned her attention to it so she wouldn’t see me trying to mask a sudden flare of pride.

“If you need extra money—”

“No,” I said, too quickly. “No, it’s…I just need to know where I stand. I don’t like being sidelined when there’s work available.” And maybe I was missing the position I’d held in Anchorage, where my opinion had mattered because I’d proven myself for years longer than anybody else. I turned away and Carla tsked at me.

“Stupid girl. You’ll get nowhere if you turn down money. Now, go. And be careful out there.”

I closed the door behind me and gathered up my deliveries. When was the last time I’d turned down money? Never, that’s when. Money kept the lights on, made the car shiny and fast, and went into a retirement-slash-escape fund. Except now I used candles, drove a car I hadn’t bought and my account sat idle. I’d never before chosen to rely on someone else. But then I’d never had a vampire interested in killing me. Malcolm wasn’t pushy, but depending on him still rankled me.

Tilde sidled up beside me.

“How are you?” I asked, trying to smile warmly to make up for the band of red stretching from the outside corner of one eye to the other and the black liner marking a thick line from my lower lip to the bottom of my chin.

“I’m well.” She nodded, too fast and too hard. “I was hoping we could meet up sometime. Maybe get to know one another.” She set her bag on the small table and slid envelopes in. If I hadn’t been paying attention, I might not have noticed the way she was avoiding eye contact, and my stomach slipped. The other night, before she’d drunk herself useless, she’d been trying to talk to me. She was alone here, I reminded myself, and probably more lonely than I was.

“Sure.” I arranged my packages in delivery order. Malcolm was still gone, and Soraya would be pissed if I stood her up, which made the prospect almost irresistible. “I’ve got to drop the POS off at Mickey’s garage after this shift. Do you want to meet me there, grab breakfast after?”

She nodded, smiling down at the table. I closed the flap of my bag, and she launched herself at me, wrapping her skinny little arms around me in a fierce hug. I froze, shoulders jumping up, cringing at the contact and wondering why she smelled so clean.

“Thank you so much.” She sounded close to tears. “Thank you.”

She trotted off to her car while I searched for something to muddle the odor she’d undoubtedly left on me. Someday, when Carla trusted me more, I’d talk to her about making sure her runners weren’t leaving their natural scents behind like bread crumbs in the homes of her vampire clients.

I snagged a half-empty bottle of Bilz soda Jace had left beside her couch, poured it on my hands, then rubbed those over the front of my coat and sleeves, hoping the red dye wouldn’t stain. Tilde closed her door and smiled with a face like fatigued sunshine before backing her Peugeot out. God, she was so sweet I wasn’t sure I’d be able to stomach breakfast with her.

* * *

I pushed tentatively on a rusted gate that had been dragged out of somewhere—the weeds, judging by the limp fronds hanging off of the links—and propped against cinder blocks at the end of Livia’s driveway. A dark van was backed in near the front of the shanty at just the right angle that I couldn’t see the door. Fabulous. I smoothed my laminate and walked around the gate with one backward glance at the Tercel. I’d left it running, as instructed, and it was crowded into the narrow space between the gate and the road.

My boots crunched, the sound nerve-rackingly loud in the quiet industrial area, and an uneasy feeling spread outward from my chest. I glanced back twice, catching nothing behind me but my shadow, twisted and lengthened by the large exterior light of the building. I circled the van slowly. The windows weren’t tinted and a sticker low on the windshield showed the name of a local rental company. I stopped, perplexed because the vehicle wasn’t vamp proofed.

“Señorita Crane.”

I started at the sound of the voice, and rotated until I located Muttonchops. He was on the other side of the van, and the door of the building squealed as it swung closed ten feet behind him. Why hadn’t it made a noise when he came out, or had he been watching me the entire time and shoved the door for theatrics?

I stuttered through my spiel, then glanced at my watch to document the time and give myself another second to pull myself together.
“La hora es tres y veinti ocho.”
The clipboard was in my left hand, the pepper spray hung halfway out of my right pocket, and I had an eye out for a vengeful, bulimic lady sucker. Muttonchops rounded the van, moving deliberately slow, probably because I was jumpy—or because he remembered how quick I was on the trigger—and signed with slow rolls of the pen.

Maybe whoever had driven the van had a purpose for being here, like fixing a burst pipe or spraying for bugs. Except service contractors rarely worked at night, and the humans who regularly interacted with vampires met them in public, at much nicer places than this. Santiago was full of blood lounges. There was no reason for anyone, vampire or human, to slum out here. Unless Livia wasn’t receiving a service, but providing one. Maybe she had something premium the lounges didn’t provide. That was difficult to imagine, since her guy was wearing another threadbare sweater. At least this one was plain maroon wool instead of gondolier stripes.

I checked the signature. “Tungsten?”

He snorted. “Thurston. They don’t teach you to read in the United States?”

“Of course. It’s just that penmanship is a dying art.” I handed him an envelope and a small package, brown paper wrapped in lighter twine. Rain began to fall, splattering the back of my hand. “I hope Livia’s feeling better.”

He paused, his arm outstretched, fingers just brushing the paper. Then he snatched the deliveries away so quickly my eyes registered it before my hand discovered it was empty.

“My mistress is perfectly well.”

Ah. The old song and dance. Never admit weakness, even to people who’ve witnessed it. “Glad to hear it.” I pulled my hat lower and backed toward my car. Thurston took a step toward me, and we stopped at the same time. My hand twitched toward my pocket.

“You did not tell anyone. About what you saw.” His voice was low but not soft, and these weren’t questions. The rain fell harder, drops catching in his curly black hair and sideburns. It would have been comical, if his expression weren’t so grave. I thought of what Soraya had said, about Livia in such a state being
unnatural.
One night of gluttony and bad manners hadn’t seemed like that big of a deal.

I cleared my throat. “Well, we’ve all been there, right? Not with blood maybe, but…” I glanced awkwardly away, then frowned at a paper shoved low on the dashboard of the van. The curled white logo on the dark blue square was unfamiliar, but the name below it wasn’t. Goya Worldwide.

“Your discretion is appreciated.” Thurston inclined his head in one of those strangely formal moves that vampires pull out of their bags of long-lived tricks. I nodded stiffly back as I jammed the clipboard into my bag.

“You have company tonight?” I asked before I could stop myself. At least I hadn’t asked what Goya was delivering, since the paper I’d seen looked a lot like a purchase order. Big delivery. Oddly behaving vampires. Freaking pharmaceutical company. All we were missing was a neon sign that said “Get your madness on here, suckers.”