Bloodshot - Cherie Priest [63]
He swallowed, and cleared his throat. “And if she isn’t alive anymore?”
“If she isn’t, then maybe I can give you closure. Even if I can’t give her back.” I knew I couldn’t give her back. Not even if I found her, and she’d escaped, and all was well and she was happily sipping a too-true-to-description Bloody Mary in a nightclub, and sleeping with the drummer of the skeezy house band. But I needed to know, and I swore to myself, if not out loud to the trembling mister, that if I learned anything benignly useful or helpful, I’d hold up my end of the charade and pass the information along.
Since he seemed disinclined to keep talking, I tried nudging him again. “Please, if there’s anything at all you can tell me about what happened to her, or—”
“Her brother,” he whispered.
“I beg your pardon?”
He glanced over into the kitchen, where the missus was loudly banging glasses and pans around, pretending to do something. Maybe she was angrily making coffee. I don’t know. But he said again in that lowered, soft-shoe voice, “Her brother. Adrian. He went looking for her.”
The brother again. I seized on it, and asked, “Did he have any luck?”
The mister stiffened. He said, “I could not say. I do not know. But I think he might have.”
“What does that mean?” I asked too fast, almost dropping my Cool-Professional-Cop-Voice. “Your son went looking for your daughter and you what … you just didn’t ask about it?”
“He is no longer part of this family!” he said almost loud enough to halt the banging in the kitchen, but not quite.
“How does that work?”
“He isn’t … He’s not like us. He never has been like us,” the mister said, leaning on his words for some emphasis that I was just too thick to parse. Did he sprout antlers? Take up cannibalism?
“Not like you … how?”
The mister was getting frustrated with me, but that only made the feeling mutual. He grabbed for a phone stand and seized a piece of paper from it, then scrabbled around until he’d found a pen. “You don’t understand,” he mumbled, writing quickly.
The noise in the kitchen stopped and he froze, as if he’d been caught doing something naughty. Then he wrote faster, wrapped up his brief message, and shoved it into my hand.
The missus emerged from the kitchen with a Crock-Pot inexplicably in hand. She grumbled in top volume and rapid-fire Spanish and the mister whined back, denying something. I squeezed my fist around the scrap of paper and could guess exactly what she suspected.
They argued for another few seconds, and I rose from my seat, stuffing the note into my pocket and announcing that I was going to leave before the missus had a chance to throw me out. I barely made it; she was ushering me to the door before I could even reach the hall to make my big exit.
I felt bad for the mister, standing behind her as she herded me out. His head was bowed and he was still holding the pen he’d used to tell me something—something important, but unspeakable. He didn’t look up as I left; he turned his back and stood in his living room, or that was the last I saw of him as the missus shut the door with a slap, a click, and then the subsequent sound of locks being reset.
I wanted to yank the paper out of my pocket, uncrumple it, and read it on the spot, but I waited until I got back to my car. I wanted to be out of that woman’s reach. She scared me. Sort of. Her type scared me, anyway. I half expected her to reach out through the living room window and snatch it out of my hands.
I locked my car doors because, well, I lock everything. And I was sitting in the dark, parked on a street in a Not-the-Best-But-Not-the-Worst part of town. I wasn’t really worried about being mugged, but I didn’t want to be interrupted. Maybe if I’d been hungrier I might’ve welcomed a bit of thuggish attention, but I wasn’t hungry and I didn’t want it.
I stuck my feet down past my car’s gas and brake pedals and straightened my body enough to reach into my pocket for the paper. The car’s overhead lamp was yellow and feeble, but with eyes like mine it