Page 27 of Thief of Night
She tried to ignore that incredibly tempting offer. “What, did someone bake you a cake with a file in it?” she asked Mark instead. “How did you break out of prison?”
“I didn’t,” he answered. He really did look pathetic. Still, she couldn’t help thinking of the hole in the glass of her window, the confusion before she realized what had happened. The blood.
I’ve met him before,Red said.
She really couldn’t deal with that right then.He was a thief. Like me. Salt might have used him.
“How are you here?” Charlie demanded, hand on her hip. A few of the stylists glanced over. Maybe that had come out a little loud.
“My conviction got overturned,” he said, a grin slowly moving over his face. “My brother submitted an affidavit that I didn’t know he was going to shoot you. He even took a lie detector test. It’s the truth. I hated you, but I didn’t want you to get hurt.”
That was not even a little bit true. “What about the guy he murdered?” Charlie asked.
Mark blinked, as though he’d forgotten that his brother had also shot the person sitting in her passenger seat. A hookup, not someone Charlie had known well. A man who had made her laugh at a bar, and died for it. “I thought there were blanks in the gun.”
“Bullshit.” Charlie met his gaze, determined to show him that she didn’t care. “Get out of here. This is a private party.”
“Does that mean the booze is free?” he asked, his grin turning into the same smile that had persuaded a lot of people to make a lot of mistakes.
“Get out,” Charlie repeated. “Before I call the cops and tell them you’re harassing me.”
“You’re not going to do that,” he said, smirking. “I know you’ve got some game going. You always do.”
“I’m retired,” she told him.
“Sure you are.” He smiled, looking more certain with every minute. “Look, I’ll see you around, okay? We can talk more.”
Charlie put her hands on the bar top and lowered her voice. “If I see you again, I am going to bury you.”
His smile flagged. He’d never been the tough guy; that had been his brother. Mark was just a grifter. She hoped he was canny enough to disappear into the world like a drop of water into the ocean.
But Charlie’s hands were still shaking as she poured a line of shots.
An elderly, white-haired man in a gray pin-striped suit walked out of Odette’s office, looking deeply uncomfortable. He was almost certainly the gentleman Don had told her about, the one her boss had been entertaining in the back. She hoped the stylists wouldn’t mind yet another stranger crashing their party.
For her part, Charlie was glad for the distraction. She glanced toward Don, who was shaking up a martini. On the shelf next to him, his phone buzzed over and over.
When she walked past, she saw the name “Erin” light up the screen. Don’s girlfriend. The last time Charlie had seen them together was at Barb and Aimee’s place. She’d been there for a late-night hang-out and stumbled into an intense argument that they were having in the kitchen about which of them had been mean to the other first. Don had been crying and trying to hide it. Charlie had sympathized. She’d cried at parties plenty of times herself.
But she was still reeling from Mark’s visit, and the buzzing phone felt like an alarm.
The elderly man in the pin-striped suit stood expectantly at the bar. She knew him, she realized. It wasn’t his face she recognized. It was his watch—the Vacheron Constantin that Vince had spotted on his wrist back when the man had scuttled into the bar the month before, trying to avoid being spotted by parking in the back.
He was one of Odette’s longtime clients, one of the reasons she was only asemi-retired dominatrix.
“What do you have back there that’s expensive?” he asked.
Charlie raised her eyebrows. They had nice liquor, but given he was wearing an accessory that cost as much as a new car, she wasn’t sure what would impress him.
“We have a twenty-five-year Macallan for two hundred dollars a pour.” They had a few scotches and bourbons that were about fifty or sixty dollars per, but nothing close to the Macallan.
“I’ll have a double,” the man said, peeling off four hundred-dollar bills and two twenties. “She told me to tell you that it should be straight up, in the dish, please.”
Charlie hadn’t been asked forthatin a while. Reaching under the cabinet, she brought out a stainless steel dog bowl. The woman with the snake looked intrigued.
Charlie poured two generous shots of scotch directly into the dog bowl and swished them around before placing the whole thing on the floor just outside the bar.
A few of the stylists noticed something interesting going on and crowded around.
