Greywalker - Kat Richardson [113]
She squeaked, “Are you OK? Sounded like an explosion out here.”
“Uh . . . one of my clients . . . slammed the door pretty hard on his way out.”
“Oh. OK. You sure you’re all right?” She probably thought I was crazy, or that my clients were. I expected I’d see their offices up for lease inside six months.
“I’m fine. Honest. I just—I need to get the glass fixed,” I finished.
She perked up at the thought of familiar action. “Oh! I know a board-up service. Should I . . . should I call them for you?”
I raised my eyebrows. “You would do that?”
“Well, yeah. If you want.” A phone burred. She looked around. “Oh, no! Ohmigod, that’s my phone!” she exclaimed, dashing away.
Alone, I slumped onto the desktop and tried to reorganize my brain. I was shaking. I felt torn apart and put back together with cheap glue and a lack of attention to detail. Everything seemed to ache or itch. My job was going straight to hell. But I didn’t know what else to do, so I shut off the gibbering part of my brain and did what I’d been trained to do: I made phone calls.
I called the Danzigers and arranged to see them later—I had a lot of questions. Then I called Sarah, who said she’d talk to her brother as soon as she saw him and have him call me.
Twenty minutes later, men with plywood arrived to fix my door and window until I could get the glass replaced. The office felt close and dark without the windows.
In the new gloom, I picked up the Edward file and stared at it, resisting the work, aching all over. Unthinking, I reached up to rub the spot on my shoulder where Wygan’s claws had dug into my flesh. The skin felt raw and hot as a sunburn. I winced as my stomach curdled around my lunch.
I’d been dancing in a minefield and was lucky to still have all my limbs. Alice scared me, but I understood what she wanted and how she wanted to use me to get it. As dreadful as Carlos was, I understood him a little, too. But Wygan I could no more understand than I could understand whales singing, and that frightened me most. I did not know what he wanted of me, but I suspected he was finished for a while.
He didn’t think much of Alice, but I feared her ambition. I wasn’t sure I could hold up against her a second time. I had to admit that challenging Sergeyev had been a mistake, and combined with the strange attack by the organ, whatever strength I had was near exhausted. I didn’t know if it would return or if I wanted it to.
I knew my time was running out with Edward. Alice wouldn’t hold off much longer. I had to use her agitation to my advantage and not be caught in the blast. But my ideas all assumed Edward’s motivations were, essentially, human, and I knew that wasn’t true. Ambition, power, and hate were the tools the vampires had lent me—all I had of my own was hope and a detective’s steady plod. I didn’t like my chances.
I buried myself in paper, trying to shut off my bodily aches and scratch the mental itch of almost-knowing. Much of the TPM file made no sense to me. I started looking for patterns, familiar words, oddities, pretty much anything that hooked to other information. TPM had fingers in lots of pies. It owned businesses and real estate all over Seattle and the near communities on the western side of Lake Washington, though TPM had nothing on the Eastside.
I started reading the list of businesses and something finally jumped out at me: TPM owned Dominic’s night-club.
Steve had said he was helping out the owner the day he spotted Cameron—except TPM wouldn’t have asked him to come move furniture. Steve had given me the information just when I was also snooping around TPM’s business. And Cameron had claimed Steve lied about knowing Edward, who had to work for TPM. So why had Steve called? Was he assuaging a prickly conscience, or had someone told him to give me Cameron? It had certainly pulled