“If you’re feeling like you need to go out,” I said, letting the words filter out ever so slowly, “why don’t you just go and enjoy a fine evening alone?”
“That’s no fun,” she said. We’d passed whining into whatever lay beyond. Whimpering, sniveling, I dunno. It wasn’t just tap-dancing on my nerves; it was a herd of elephants in tap shoes Riverdancing on them. “Come with me. Show me your beloved America.”
“I’m really more interested in my beloved scotch at the moment,” I said, holding my shit together by a thin thread so as not to lose it all over her. I glanced at the clock. Two minutes. Thank heavens.
Like thunder from above, a knocking came at the door in an almighty fury. I froze in my chair and Eilish’s eyes widened next to me. She looked like she was about to shit kittens, maybe squeeze out a brick.
I regained my calm and meta-whispered to her. “Just don’t answer it. It’s probably no one.”
She looked at me like I was stupid. “Someone’s knocking, it can’t be no one. Empty air doesn’t bloody knock.”
I controlled the eye roll, but only barely. “I mean it’s probably no one important, just a solicitor or something.”
She made a confused face. “Why would a lawyer be knocking?”
“A salesperson, you UK baby,” I said. “Not a lawyer.”
“You Americans. Your word choices are just strange.”
The knocking came again, even harder, and I looked at the clock on the TV screen.
One minute to go.
I took a steadying breath, in through the nose, out through the mouth. I got up, started to make my way over to the beverages in the corner. The knocking sounded again, loud and horrendous.
“What if it’s Reed? Or one of the others?” Eilish asked.
“They have keys,” I said, brushing off her tiny, irrelevant, annoying concerns.
“What if it’s the police?”
“They wouldn’t knock, they’d bust the door down and shoot us, holding any questions until after they’d processed us at the morgue.”
“Sienna!” someone shouted through the door, and I froze about two feet shy of my scotch.
A cold, clammy, crawling sensation worked its way up my arms, turning the skin all bumpy with gooseflesh. It made its way up the back of my neck and across the top of my head, down my forearms and wrists to stop at my hands, and, for good measure, went ahead and made it feel like someone had slid an ice cube or twelve down the back of my pants at the base of my spine. An icicle-based tramp stamp.
“Sienna, open up!” the voice came again. It was female, kinda small, but clearly pissed off. The knocking came again, a rattling, and then I heard a wheezing cough from the person standing at my door.
“Oh, f—” I started to say, but it was interrupted by another round of knocking.
“I’m going to stand out here and make a scene until you open the door,” she said. “Because I know you’re in there, and—”
Closing my eyes for just a second, I whirled, crossed the distance to the door in a hot second, ripped it open, and dragged the person standing out there inside before she could so much as wheeze in surprise. That done, I closed it back up, locked it, and took a deep breath.
The skinny, dark-haired waif standing before me looked at me with heat-vision eyes, even though I’d grasped onto her person for about a second, tops, but she let go the succubus-to-skin contact and, instead, gave me a piece of her mind. “You owe me,” she said, cutting right to it, “and I’ve come to collect.”
I took a moment to sigh, then turned my back on her, and with a glance at the clock—it read 4:59—I broke my resolve and shuffled over to the bar, pouring myself a drink without ceremony. I filled it to nearing the top of the little glass, brought it up to my nose, let that peaty scent fill my nasal passages, and with an eye on the TV screen clock—it still read 4:59—I gave up on giving a shit and went ahead and sloshed it back, taking the whole glass down in one gulp.
“Holy hell,” Eilish said. “It’s not five o’clock yet.”
“Go for a jump with a pogo stick up your ass, Irish, I’m an alcoholic,” I said, feeling the scotch burn its way down my throat. That done, I poured another one as my invading “guest” stood in silence, just watching, her skin mottled as she clearly built on whatever internal ragey emotions had brought her to my door. I took another breath, and this time, I would savor my drink while I waited for the first to work. I waited for her to say something, but she didn’t, preferring the cold stare-me-down, as though waiting for my leave to speak, when I knew in reality it was no such damned thing.
Because I knew why she was here without her even having to say anything.
She said something anyway. “You owe me.”
That one caused some heat in my cheeks. I kept the glass clutched between my fingers as I stared at the little figure darkening my door—well, my entry rug, now. I took a breath, and it seared like the scotch. “I don’t owe you a damned thing,” I said, staring right back at her, “Cassidy Ellis.”
6.
Cassidy Ellis stood on my rug, this little slip of a girl trying to engage me—me, of all people!—in a staredown.
Like that was going to work.
“I helped you out of Scotland,” she said, pale face splotched with red. She looked like a Coke can.
“And you got paid ten million for it,” I said. I took a whiff of the scotch in my glass, sloshing it slowly around the circle of my crystalline glass.
“A serious discount to my going rates. I also lost my house, thanks to your brother.”
I looked her up and down and made a show of doing so. She was in pretty good repair, you know, compared to me. “You seem fine. Living at the Four Seasons now, with all your piles of money?”
She flushed. “No. They don’t have nearly the data line access I need—you know what, it doesn’t matter. You owe me, Sienna.”
“You keep saying that,” I regarded my drink with a lot more interest than I did her. “But I paid you, which was, as far as I’m aware, the extent of my brother’s bargain on my behalf.”
A small, very evil smile broke across her face. “You’re right. I guess I should be asking him for the favor he owes me.”
I started to say, “Yeah, why don’t you go do that,” but then I remembered what Cassidy was here for. With my glass halfway to my lips, and watching her out of the corner of my eye, I froze.
And saw the look of triumph in her eyes even without staring at her directly. Honestly, it was like looking at the sun, it was almost blinding.
“What do you want, Cassidy?” I asked, kinda wanting her to just say it, even though I knew.
She straightened. “I want you—or Reed, if you refuse—to track down that son of a whore that attacked my baby—”
“Simmons is definitely a baby,” I said, “a big one.”
“—I want this mutt dead,” Cassidy said, flushing brighter. “I want him—”