Page 36 of Eyes in the Shadows

She eyes me warily, trying to hide her surprise. “Yeah, okay.”

“That man worked for Jacob Rossi, a businessman, landlord—”

“I know who he is,” sheinterrupts.

“—murderer, wife-beater, thief, gun-smuggler and all-around dick,” I finish, eyeing her. She swallows audibly. “I—we—were running a mission to take him and most of his guys out before they could sell their most recent shipment of AK-47s, explosives and other automatic weapons.”

“So, you’re trying to tell me that you’re a sniper with a moral code?” she replies, boiling it down to its essence as she inhales shakily and turns to look out the window. “Give me a break.”

If anyone else said that, I could easily brush it off. I need her to understand. I need her to believe me… but I also need her to be a little bit afraid so she’ll stay vigilant and be careful. “Morality has nothing to do with it, but yeah, they’re scum. So, my job was to put him down. But you walked in on me, the mission went sideways, and now Rossi is out for blood. I don’t know how they found out about you, but they must have.”

“Someone saw the light come on in my apartment that night,” she says, and her voice is so small, it hurts.

Of all the piss-poor luck… That light couldn’t have been on for more than a minute. I’ll have to ask how she knows when it’s my turn for questions. But right now, she gets her answers because she’s been through a lot and she’s taken it all on the chin.

“No matter what that guy said, he was going to kill you—if you’d talked or if you hadn’t, it wouldn’t have mattered. They were looking for information on, well, me basically. Me and my associates.

“We’re bad people, Eleanor. We kill people. We tried to kill him and we failed. So now Rossi is going to try to kill us. And you’re in the middle of it. So, I’m taking you back to my place.” I finish with a little sigh. I want to reach out and take her hand, but she lifts them from her lap to cross her arms over her chest.

Her eyes narrow at me. “Nice speech. How do I know that it’s not all just a bunch of lies?”

“I won’t lie to you. I only did that one time when you thought I was an exterminator.”

Her mouth falls open. “Thatonetime? That was a… a whole thing! It doesn’t count as one lie!”

“Why not?”

She ticks them off as her eyes flash with the kind of vitality I haven’t seen since before the sauna. It fires me up, too. “Because the uniform was a lie, the hat was a lie, those glasses were a lie, the words out of your mouth about being an exterminator were a lie. Everything about that interaction was a lie—except, apparently, your name? Which I really cannot fathom.”

I can safely assume she heard some of my exchange with Felix, then.

This temper is good. Anger, I can deal with. It’s the cold, afraid, timid Eleanor that worries me. “Okay, how about this: I haven’t lied since then. And I won’t, that’s a promise.”

She heaves a sigh. Her stare is burning a hole into the side of my face, but I keep my eyes forward. If I turn, I’m not going to be able to stop myself from pulling over. If I pull over, I’m not going to be able to stop myself from touching her. And she probably doesn’t want me touching her right now. Not yet.

“How did you know where I was? How did you get here so fast?”

I didn’t expect to have to curse my promise not to lie so quickly, but here we are. “I followed you.” When she says nothing to that, just sucks her bottom lip into her mouth to chew on it, I continue with the story, “I saw him pull into the lot after you, wait in his car, then go in after you’d been in there a while. I thought he looked familiar. I called to check on you.”

“You really did save me,” she says, almost as if to herself. “Why?”

Why? She wants to know why? I shake my head a little. “I’m not ready to answer that.” It’s not technically a lie—she’snot ready for me to answer that, so I’m not ready for it either.

The truth is, I’ve decided she’s mine to protect. But women don’t often take kindly to obsessive, possessive declarations before you’ve even learned each other’s last names.

Her shoulders slump and her hands fall back into her lap. I eye the one closest to me, itching to take it, but I make myself use both hands for my next turn to give them something else to do. “Now, my turn. How did you know that someone saw the light?”

“It’s what they said when they came to my door. He was pretending to be a detective.”

“They?”

“Um, the guy you just… um… him, and there was an officer there, too. Really Irish name… McCloskey, I think.”

I frown. Why hadn’t I heard any of it? “They came to your door? When?”

“Um, Thursday. I went to the movies and when I got back, they were standing there”—makes sense, they were outside the apartment, out of range of the bugs—“and asked me if I was home that night and showed me a picture of some guy I didn’t know. Said he was a person of interest or something.” She winces. “I, ah, don’t think I did a very good job lying. I was really freaked out.”

“What made you think the other guy was a cop?”

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