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Chapter Thirty-Three

Liam

A big-name showcase was about to begin, and I’d gotten stuck in the crowd on my way out.

I shoved my way through the crush, having finally extricated myself from Mandrake’s clutches.

Something inside me was pulled tight, and it kept getting steadily worse.

When that part of me finally snapped, I did not know what was going to happen.

I just knew that I didn’t want it to happen in public.

A high-pitched commotion was taking place.

I tried to wiggle around it, but the press of bodies filing into the hall was too thick.

It was the singer who was married to the butthead.

Enid. She was having a snit fit. I didn’t want to know the details, but someone was wheeling a fucking piano into the hall, and it blocked my way.

“... cannot believe that guy! That asshole! Can you believe what he said to me?” She caught my eye and promptly directed her outrage toward me before I could slink away. “He shoved me!” she shrieked. “And called me a slut! How dare he?”

“Calm down, baby. Don’t freak. There are concert presenters everywhere,” the butthead pretty boy muttered desperately. “You don’t want to look unhinged, okay?”

“Calm down? Screw you, Petey! I was, like, attacked in public, and all you can say is just calm down?” She turned her bulging-eyed gaze to me. “He shoved me!” she repeated shrilly. “I almost fell! Right on my ass!”

“Who shoved you?” I asked her, out of sheer reflexive politeness.

“The producer asshole! But you know what I think? I bet he wasn’t a producer at all.

I mean, he didn’t look like one. He didn’t have that Hollywood gloss, you know?

Plus, he was big and beefy, and he had bad breath.

Like, nobody’s beefy with bad breath in Hollywood, right?

And why would he want to talk to Nancy, and not to me?

I mean, like, I’m the talent, right? She’s just—” Enid struggled for a word sufficiently dismissive—“administrative help!”

The hairs on my neck prickled. Ice cold talons sank into my gut.

No. Big beefy guy. Bad breath. Wanted Nancy. Oh no, no, no, no, no.

I grabbed Enid’s arm. “Did he go with her? Where did he go?”

She goggled at me, and I gave her arm an impatient little shake.

“Do you mind?” she sniffed, wrenching away from my grip. “He went after her, toward the restaurant. She’s welcome to him. Rude, violent, sick son of a bitch!”

“What does he look like?” I demanded.

“Hey!” the butthead blustered. “Don’t touch my wife!”

“Fuck off.” I didn’t even turn to look at him. “What does he look like, Enid? Hair color, eyes? Talk to me, goddammit!”

Enid had started to look scared. “Um, longish black hair, slicked back?” Her voice had gone small and uncertain. “A goatee, and, um, a black leather jacket.”

I lost the rest, already shoving my way through the crowd amidst shouts and grunts of protest. Fear propelled me toward the restaurant at a pounding run.

I’d lose too much time if I stopped to get out the gun and load it. I had to run after her without it. I jogged through the restaurant, checking tables. No Nancy.

Think, meathead. Think. The door to the kitchen burst open. A harried-looking waitress came bursting out. Behind her, there was some sort of commotion in the kitchen. People were yelling.

Good enough for me. I pushed through the swinging door. A woman caught sight of me and ran forward, holding up her hands to bar my way.

“Hey! No customers in here!” she yelled. “Get back! Right now!”

“What happened?” I demanded.

“It was so gross!” a girl confided. “This lady was sick to her stomach, and the guy gets the bright idea to drag her through the kitchen? Like, that’s so unhygienic! She could have had some disgusting virus, right? The Board of Health could shut us down for—hey! Where are you going? Hey!”

I barreled through the press of people in the kitchen, ignoring shouts of protest. I slipped, arms flailing, in a long, harrowing slalom down the straightaway between two rows of range tops, sliding in a skid of yellowish sauce, barely keeping my feet.

I lurched out the door, reeling. This was a loading bay. Garbage dumpsters. Nothing moving here. I took off, heart thudding, for the parking lot.

I scanned the lot. Saw a harried mother pushing a stroller.

A young couple. A retirement-age man and his blue-haired wife getting out of a sedan, arguing.

Their raised voices floated over. A big guy with shaggy hair in a yellow fringed coat was rolling a string bass behind him.

There was no black-haired goateed guy, no black leather jacket.

No Nancy. Goddamnit. Think.

I looked around the parking lot again. The man and his wife passed by, still haranguing each other. Their babble did not penetrate my mind. I stared at the parking lot and everyone in it, feeling with my senses. Trying to still my mind.

Doubts assailed me. Maybe Nancy was in the hall, safe and sound, conducting her business. And I was out here chasing phantoms created by my own overheated brain.

Then again … maybe not. Big, beefy guy. Bad breath.

I gave the yellow-coated man a second look.

He slowed to a stop and looked around over his shoulder at me.

Sun glinted off his mirrored sunglasses.

He looked at me for a second, and then turned away, but when he started to move again, he was moving slightly faster.

His big instrument case rattled and bumped behind him.

The case. The fucking case. Oh sweet suffering Christ.

I took off running. The guy was opening the hatchback of a longish sedan with its back seats folded down. He heaved the instrument into the vehicle, and slammed the hatchback down. He saw me racing toward him, and dove for the driver’s seat.

The motor roared. Brake lights came on. I was screaming. The car started to pull out, but it had to stop and correct. I flung himself at the back of the vehicle and yanked the latch of the hatchback.

It opened. The asshole had been in too much of a hurry to lock it. I flung myself inside, right next to the instrument case, which lay like a deformed coffin in a hearse. The guy screamed back incoherently over his shoulder.

I scrabbled for something to grab on to as the guy backed up with a violent burst of speed and then braked abruptly.

I slid out the back, dragging the case with me. It toppled and rolled on the asphalt.

Bam, the asshole shot at me. I jerked to the side. Zing, another bullet ricocheted off the asphalt, dangerously close to the instrument case.

A car window exploded. Glass rattled, tinkled. The upright bass case was lying right behind the vehicle’s tires.

I guessed the filthy fuck’s intentions on the fly and lunged to heave the case out of harm’s way, right before the car roared into reverse to run it over.

We landed between parked cars in the opposite row. I flung myself onto the case, in case the bastard stopped to take another shot at us.

Shouts, screams. People had heard the gun. The SUV peeled away, tires screeching. It tore out of the parking lot, ran a light at the corner, and was gone.

I slid off the case onto my ass, shaking violently. My face was wet. My nose streamed with blood. I turned the case gently right side up and unlatched it with trembling hands. My pounding heart felt like it was lodged in my throat.

Nancy was curled inside the padded interior, hair over her face. I felt her throat, and felt a strong, steady pulse. Oh thank God. Thank God.

I scooped her out into my arms and cradled her. Brushed the hair off her forehead, murmuring her name. Alive. Not shot, not broken, not taken.

I was crying now, like a little kid. I couldn’t seem to stop. I just sat there on the ground, while the commotion buzzed around me. Rocking her. Holding her. She was unconscious, after all. She couldn’t object to it right now. She would never know.

The ambulance came, and they pried her from my grip and loaded her up onto a gurney.

They dragged me along to get checked out as well, and I only consented to that because I couldn’t leave Nancy until I was sure that she was surrounded by armed people who understood exactly how much danger she was in.

The next few hours were a blur. I called her sisters. I let the doctors look me over. Everything hurt. I was all bruised up, with a broken nose and cracked ribs, they told me.

Minutes crawled by, which turned to hours. Nancy was still unconscious, which scared the shit out of me.

I told the cops who came to talk to me everything I knew about the kidnapper, including his last attack on Nancy in her stairwell. I told them our conviction that his attacks were connected to Lucia D’Onofrio’s death, proof or no proof. They looked skeptical, but I was used to that.

Nell and Vivi finally arrived, and Nancy was still unconscious.

I felt almost as if I should make some sort of announcement to them.

Explain why I couldn’t stay, that I no longer fit into their sister’s life.

But they just hovered over Nancy, ashen-faced and red-eyed. It was definitely not the moment.

I wanted to leave, but I couldn’t, until I was sure she would be okay.

Her eyelids started to flutter. Nell and Vivi started to talk to her excitedly.

That was my cue. I beat hell out of there.

I called a rideshare to get me back to my truck, parked in the lot behind the Amory Lodge.

I was fiercely glad I’d stopped the asshole from hurting her.

I only wished I’d managed to kill the fucker.

But this episode only made it clearer to me that I was ass-over-head in love with this woman.

No one else would do for me, not ever. It was Nancy D’Onofrio, or it was nobody, and this was not good news, because what had just happened, however dramatic, didn’t change who we were—the same incompatible people we’d been before that asshole snatched her.

If we kept trying to make an unworkable thing work, we would just hit the same hard, bone-breaking wall again and again.

Until it battered us into bloody pieces.