Page 18 of Price of Angels

Ghost was staring at him, eyes narrowing, expression contemplative. “You alright? You look tired.”

“I’m fine.”

But Ghost wasn’t buying it. “Things have been crazy around here the last couple of months. If you wanna take some time off, stay home a few days, maybe you ought to.”

Another insult, this one worse than the first. “I don’t need any time off.”

Ghost made a face like he disagreed. “Everybody needs some time off. Take it if you want it. All this killing will kill you.”

Four

Matt touched the end of the match to the candle wick, and a soft glow welled and pooled across the top of the bar. Three seconds into burning, the candle began to give off the scent of vanilla. It was a tall, white pillar candle, stately in its makeshift candelabra of an overturned ash tray. They all stood around it, hands clasped, silent. A moment of respect and remembrance for Carly. Several of the girls were crying into tissues, cheeks streaked with mascara.

Holly’s eyes were dry, but she shivered on the inside, chilled down to her bones. She’d had relentless nightmares, dreaming of the ropes again, and she’d awakened with fear in her veins, a fear that refused to abate. She grieved for her friend, but the grief couldn’t quite touch her heart, because the fear was so great. She knew,knew, that this couldn’t have anything to do with her. Just a random act of violence. A stroke of evil against their bar; a chance killing, the life taken Carly’s, instead of hers, just because of timing.

She didn’t want to think that Carly had been killedbecauseof her. That she’d finally been found, and that from behind, small and dark-haired Carly had been mistaken for her. That was too awful to contemplate. She wanted to believe Michael; wanted to feel sure that this wasn’t her fault. How could she live with herself if it was?

Vanessa broke the silence. Sniffling, she said, “Weren’t you supposed to close last night?” And lifted her tear-brightened eyes to Holly with an accusatory twist to her trembling mouth.

“I was,” Holly said. “I wasn’t feeling well and Carly offered to cover for me.”

Every pair of eyes came to her. Matt seemed sympathetic, but all the girls had something dark and angry lingering in their gazes. Holly was the newest waitress at Bell Bar, the one without local connections, without friends. She was the outsider anyway, and now she felt the chasm opening up between herself and the others. She could feel their blame, their anger and resentment.

“It could have happened to any of us,” Matt said, consolingly.

“But it happened to Carly,” Meg said.

Holly bowed her head, staring down at the toes of the little wedge-heeled sneakers she wore with her work uniform. “I wish I’d stayed,” she said. “I wish it had been me instead.”

There were no comments, but someone gasped softly, like she couldn’t believe Holly would say such a thing.

A hand landed on her shoulder and squeezed: Matt. “It was an awful thing that happened, but it was nobody’s fault. We’ll have to be more careful, from now on.”

Yes, they would.

“And you do this all the time?” Mercy asked, with a considerable amount of doubt, as he scanned the familiar environs of Bell Bar. The place was evening-dark, even in the middle of the day, and that made him feel fractionally better, but not a lot. “Just…in the bar like this?”

Ratchet gave him a blank look, like he didn’t see what the problem was. “Yeah.” He’d ordered a damn Jaeger bomb and took a sip of it like it wasn’t the nastiest shit anyone had ever tasted. “So?”

Mercy lowered his voice a fraction, reaching for his water. Water. Ugh. Ava was pestering him about drinking during the day. He was relenting…when she wasn’t around to see him. “So you meet drug dealers in public. In bars.”

Ratchet nodded.

Mercy shrugged. Whatever. This wasn’t his usual sort of gig. If Ratchet did this routinely, who was he to judge? He was just the muscle.

Their waitress today was Holly, the little brunette with the old Hollywood curves and the big green eyes. She breezed around their table and settled with a swishing of her silk uniform shorts – blue, today, with a white shirt – and whipped out her order pad with a certain uncharacteristic quickness. She wasn’t a flirt – unless you counted her talking at Michael as flirting – but she was usually more solicitous than this. Today, she’d been fast and distracted, her smiles slender and false.

Probably had something to do with one of her coworkers getting murdered last night. When he’d heard, he’d felt the blood drain out of his face. How many times had he and Ava met for dinner here? Granted, never at three-thirty in the morning, but still; they didn’t live far from this place. The idea of a killer running loose made him want to put knives in people.

Clearly, it made Holly the waitress twitchy.

“What can I get you?” she asked, voice a ghost of its usual chirp.

Ratchet ordered the grilled chicken sandwich, veggies instead of fries, because he was a health nut. Mercy thought about the sore places in his bad left leg, the one that had been trapped beneath the bike and been operated on twice, and thought about his weight loss, his need for protein. “Burger,” he told her, “and the soup.” That would give him two servings of beef, and he expected a comment, a laugh, even a twitch of eyebrows from Holly, but she didn’t react at all.

“Right up,” she told them, and whisked away as quickly as she’d come. She’d always been a frightened-seeming girl, Mercy reflected, and now it was amplified.

He didn’t get to dwell on it anymore. Ratchet said, “I think that’s them.”

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