Page 19 of Rapture's Edge (Night Prowler 3)
“When have I ever wanted to talk about it?” D muttered. The camaraderie from hours earlier had evaporated along with the scotch, and D was surlier than ever. He knew from experience that drinking only dulled the pain but didn’t numb it, and that ache beneath his breastbone would need something stronger to kill it than an eighteen-year-old single malt. A machete might do the trick.
“So we’re just going to sit here all night and stare at the walls?”
D glanced up at Constantine, and a hot flash of anger lit through him when he saw the pity on his face. “I seem to remember it was you who insisted on coming,” he snapped.
“If I’d known your little pity party was going to be this much fun, I wouldn’t have.”
D bristled and sat up, glaring at Constantine. “I’m not feeling sorry for myself!”
“Right, you’re just drinking this much because you’re happy.”
“Screw you, Constantine.”
“Get real, D. You need to get a grip on yourself, brother. This can’t go on forever…”
Constantine kept talking, but D didn’t hear the rest because his attention was diverted by the flat-screen television hung above the pool table across the room. It was tuned to a news station, and the picture on the screen froze his blood to ice.
Eliana. Good God, it was her.
Hands cuffed behind her back, dressed only in a man’s wrinkled white button-down shirt, she was being hauled out of a police car by a pair of uniformed gendarmes sporting enough weaponry to outfit a small army. Though her head was turned, he saw her clearly in profile, and the image instantly seared itself into his mind. The proud lift of her chin, the elegant line of her neck, the elongated limbs that lent her the look of a ballerina, pixie-like and delicate. She was exactly as he remembered, except for hair dyed the color of lapis lazuli and an ominous bloodstained bandage wrapped around one bare calf.
The television was muted, but the caption on the screen screamed, “French police apprehend notorious thief!”
Everything around him vanished.
Gone was the dim, smoky room with its rickety tables and tacky décor, gone was the humid fug of cigarettes and stale beer, gone was the flickering neon Peretti sign in the window and the empty scotch bottle on the table next to his left hand. There was only her. Every nerve, every cell and atom of his body came into brilliant, throbbing focus and began to roar: Eliana! Eliana! Eliana!
Frozen, he stared at the television and watched as the two gendarmes swiftly maneuvered her—limping—past a crush of shouting reporters and up a wide flight of marble steps toward the double glass doors of the entry to an enormous brick building. Just before she disappeared through the doors, she glanced over her shoulder and looked directly into the camera.
Wide-set doe eyes, liquid soft and black as midnight, stared at him. Through him. D’s heart stopped dead in his chest. He shot out of his chair and at the top of his lungs shouted the only word that came to mind.
“Shit!”
Despite this outburst, none of the other bar patrons chanced a glance in his direction. He came to this dive bar fairly regularly, and they’d more than once seen the huge, glowering, tattooed male beat someone to a pulp for no discernible reason and had learned to keep their eyes averted or risk a beating of their own.
“Nice,” said Constantine dryly as he drummed the fingers of one big hand on the scarred, sticky tabletop between them. His back was to the television. “Is that just a general observation, or are you experiencing some kind of emergency with your bowels?”
“It’s her! On television! It’s her!” D sputtered past numb lips.
Constantine closed his eyes for a second longer than a blink and sighed. “You’ve had about a liter of scotch, D. You’re seeing things. Why don’t you take a seat and we’ll—”
“Turn it up!” D shouted at the skinny bartender, silencing Constantine and launching the bartender into motion. He leapt over the counter and flung himself at the television as if his life depended on it. His shaking fingers found the volume knob, and as Constantine, frowning, turned in his chair to look, a female reporter’s modulated voice filled the dim, smoky room.
“…eluded authorities for the past several years in what has become the most infamous string of art thefts in France’s history. Some of the country’s wealthiest citizens and political figures have been victimized, including the prime minister himself, Francois Fillon, whose personal collection of original Picassos valued at more than five million euros was stolen from his home last year while he and his wife were sleeping.”
The picture changed to a scene of a grinning, middle-aged man standing shirtless and tanned with a glass of champagne on the glistening deck of his massive yacht.
“At this point it isn’t known if she was working alone,” the reporter continued as the picture switched back to the crowd milling around the front of the brick building, “but for now the thief known simply as La Chatte is in custody, and we imagine Paris’s beleaguered police chief is heaving a very loud sigh of relief that this protracted chase is over and the elite’s personal fortunes are, once again, safe. Reporting live from the Paris prefecture of police, this is Lisa Campbell with CNN International News. Back to you, Bob.”
D stood staring at the television long after Bob-the-balding-reporter had segued into another story. His breathing was erratic, his heartbeat was wild, and his hands twitched by his side, but all that was secondary to the storm of howling white that raged in his skull.
La Chatte. The Cat. Infamous, elusive thief.
Eliana, love of his life, source of his joy and his pain and three years’ worth of the kind of soul-searing agony he wouldn’t wish on his worst enemy, was La Chatte. Now in police custody in France.
D’s big hands curled into fists at his side.
In spite of his bulk and the array of weaponry hidden beneath his long black coat, Constantine rose gracefully and soundlessly from his chair. “D,” he said sternly, reading what was plain on his face, “don’t even think about it.”
