Page 29 of Five

We’ll stop at a drive-through on the way home, I try to placate him. I’m not in the fucking mood, and he knows it.

Inside the garage, the red Suzuki Jimny that Rague bought Sully is parked near his company pickup. I quickly get in, and a minute later, I’m driving toward the Fulton River District and my apartment. At a red light, I check my phone. There are multiple texts from work that I’ll check later, one voicemail from Evelyn telling me she found a new temp PA, and several missed calls from Linda, my foster mother.

I find Rami’s contact and call him, placing my phone in the cupholder as the light changes to green.

“Yo!” he answers after a single ring. “You okay? No rusty parts, no bolts in need of a changing?”

I ignore his taunting. “Lori’s grandmother.”

“What about her?” he asks, and then I hear him cussing through the line before saying, “George, you scared the shit out of me!” That’s Dare’s pet snake. When Rami moved in with Hunter, he also started living with the triplets, the eighteen-year-olds: Ash, Ren, and Dare. Hunter took them and their pets in a couple of years back.

I wait for him to stop swearing. “How did she die?”

“And why so curious about Lori’s life all of a sudden, C-3PO?”

I know my silence drives him crazier than any response.

“I don’t have time for this now, need some sleep before Grizzly decides to go at my ass again.” Rami always shares too much formy liking. “She had cancer. Died soon after she was diagnosed. Lori and she were pretty close. She raised him,” he surrenders easily.

“At what hospital did she die?”

“In her apartment. Some terminal cancer patients prefer to share their last moments in familiar surroundings.”

There’s nothing fishy about it. Maybe Ollie’s odd wording was caused by worry for his friend. And Lori’s guilty conscience could be related to something else he did.

Don’t care. Hungry, my caveman alter reminds me.

“I want to know who the people in that gallery room at the club were,” I tell him.

“Do you want to go all knife-y on them?”

Lori’s agonized, twisted face appears in front of my eyes for a moment as I remember the snickers coming from the gallery.

“Yes,” I say matter-of-factly.

“Wow. Okay. How about the sex video?” Rami suddenly asks.

“Fucking burn it!” Bez replies. His overtaking maneuvers are increasing, and after years of steady balance, it’s unsettling to say the least.

I’ve never been very fond of change, even though it is the only constant in life. I’m very aware that nothing can stay the same. Things eventually morph into something different. But changes in my condition? I have a strong feeling that Lori Boone has the power to turn our life upside down.

And we’re getting there, Bez growls.

“Bez?” Rami asks in a shocked tone. “How have you been, you careless fucker?”

“Fuck. You,” Bez replies in an almost bored tone.

“Same old, same old, then,” Rami snorts.

“Burn the video, Rami,” I order him.

I hang up, pushing the button on my phone a little too hard as I turn into the diner drive-through. After getting a coffee and some waffles, I drive the last twenty minutes with the window down, enjoying the summer night air. I stop the car inside the underground parking garage of my building. The elevator ride to my apartment is spent thinking about another parking garage and the guy who assaulted Lori there.

Rami said that the security cameras were down—since I’m changing them—so Serena couldn’t track the guy outside the building when he ran off. It seems a little too convenient.

Who was he?Bez asks, strangely interested.

Lori said he didn’t know him, I remind him.And we have never seen him either.