Unsympathetic Magic - Laura Resnick [14]
He drew me as close to his body as the cell bars would allow, rested his forehead against mine, and closed his eyes. “You saw a stranger being attacked on the street at night, and you jumped in to help him?”
“Well, um . . .” It felt so good to be touched by him. So good to feel the warmth of his skin and the soft tickle of his breath on my cheek. I had tried—with varying degrees of failure—not to think about this since he had broken up with me. And it was the last thing I had expected to experience tonight, given the circumstances.
“Esther, that’s . . . dangerous,” he said quietly.
I tried to snuggle closer, frustrated by the iron bars between us. “More dangerous for Darius than for me, as it turned out.”
“Listen to me,” he said, his hands moving from my waist to my forearms, stroking my flesh. “I’m very serious about this. When you see something happening—something like that, I mean—it’s much better to call nine-one-one than to go diving in like that. Do you understand?”
“Nine-one-one!” I pulled away just enough to meet his gaze.
“Yes.” He touched my cheek. “I know you want to help people, but—”
“No, I mean, that’s why I ran out to Lexington Avenue and, er, bothered people. Darius was severely injured, and that creature had stolen my phone, which was in my purse. I was trying to find a phone to call for help!”
His expression cleared. “So that’s why you were wandering in traffic on Lexington?”
“Yes,” I said with relief, realizing it actually sounded sensible this time around, now that I was explaining it with relative calm to someone who didn’t think I was a violent crack whore. “No one would stop to help me. Because of the way I’m dressed, of course—but I was so freaked out by what had just happened and so focused on getting help for this guy, I totally forgot about what I look like tonight. So I got desperate. And then the first person I stopped was so abusive, it kind of sent me over the edge. The next driver who stopped wanted me to, um, gratify him—”
“What?” Lopez’s spine went stiff.
“I notice that he didn’t stick around to complain to the cops,” I said. “The next one after that is probably the guy who claimed I was grabbing his crotch.”
“You were trying to grab his phone,” Lopez guessed.
I nodded. “And I did try to steal the next person’s phone—he was actually a pedestrian, not a driver—because I was frantic by then. But then the cops arrived, and, well . . .” I sighed and let my shoulders sag a little. “I wasn’t coherent or courteous, I have to admit.”
“And since you looked like a hooker and had no ID . . .”
“It didn’t go well.” I shook my head, recalling the ludicrous scene. “Anyhow, then they brought me here and they booked me. And when I was finally allowed to make a phone call . . .” I shrugged. “After my calls to the Dirty Thirty production office and to Thack didn’t get me anywhere—”
“Thack?”
“My agent,” I said. “Thackeray Shackleton.”
“That can’t be his real name,” Lopez said.
“I have no idea. Anyhow, then I phoned . . . um . . .” I stopped awkwardly.
He looked puzzled for a moment, then made an exasperated sound, released his hold on me, and stepped away from the bars of my jail cell. “You called Max,” he said in resignation.
“Yes. I called Max.” And, I realized irritably, I had no reason to feel awkward about that. Max was a trusted friend who had saved my life. The fact that Lopez mistakenly thought he was demented, dangerous, and probably drugging me was one of the sources of tension between us. But since Lopez wasn’t dating me anymore, I owed him no explanations about my friendship with Max. “But Max has only got one phone, and it’s in the bookstore, on the main floor. At this time of night, he’s probably upstairs and asleep, like everyone else. So he didn’t answer.” The other possibility was that Max was in the cellar beneath the bookstore, working in his laboratory all night long, as he sometimes did; he wouldn’t hear the phone down there, either.
I said, “So, you see,