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  As if to prove her point, she stabbed some tortellini and started cutting up the chicken. "Knock yourself out," I said as she did just that, diving into the food like she hadn't eaten in a month.

  "Don't look at me like that," she said, lowering her eyes at me. "I eat fatty stuff like this maybe once every two or three months. It's here in front of me and I have every intention of pigging out."

  I held my hands up, palms out. "Babygirl, you stuff your face. Something sexy about a woman enjoying her food." To that, she choked on her mouthful, bringing her hand up so she didn't spit it out. "Drink?" I asked.

  She waved me toward the wine rack and I moved to it, not bothering to hide my smirk. It was no secret I had enjoyed my fair share of women. More than, if I were being perfectly honest. It was rare that one genuinely surprised me. After growing up surrounded by women then spending my teens and adulthood successfully chasing them, it was hard to find one who threw me.

  Elsie threw me.

  She was simply a mess of contradictions. Rich girl who liked to eat out of takeaway containers, who had the money to get lasik but wore huge dorky glasses instead, who gave me bedroom eyes then went upstairs and eased her sexual tension then practically blushed when I used the word 'dick' or said it was sexy to watch a woman eat, who seemed straight up and down in every way that mattered but was getting herself involved with a fucking street gang.

  I picked a bottle at random, opened it, and poured into glasses that were beside her sink like she used them recently and rinsed them out and left them to dry. Unlike her coffee mugs, her wine glasses apparently got used.

  "Gonna save any for me?" I asked, pulling up a stool and sitting down next to where she was leaning over the counter steadily devouring both meals somehow simultaneously.

  "Darwin," was her mouth-filled answer, her hand up masking her lips.

  "What?" I asked as she reached for her wineglass and took a long sip.

  "Survival of the fittest. It isn't my fault you're weak," she said, putting her wineglass down with a clink and diving back in.

  Not more than ten minutes and maybe six bites later, the food was gone, mostly into Elsie's body. She finally reached out for a stool and pulled it up to sit on as she topped off her wine.

  "So you have no clue what the warehouse is for, aside from telling me it's not to make heroin or store prostitutes."

  "Right," I agreed. "And you're not going to tell me why the fuck you're sticking your pretty little nose in street gang business."

  "Right," she agreed with a small nod.

  "So that's it?" I guessed, at a loss for how I could get her to tell me anything more than what she had already.

  "That's it," she agreed, standing, making it clear dinner was over. "I'll walk you out," she said, turning and walking off toward the front room, leaving me very little choice but to follow behind. She had pulled the door open and was standing off to the side. "Thanks for the chemistry lesson and dinner."

  I felt my lips tip up and nodded, moving out onto the front step before I changed my mind and swung back around, pushed inside, and pressed her up against the door in her entryway. My hands went to her hips, my thumbs spanning across her stomach as my head dipped down.

  "Listen, Elsie. I get it if you have some shit you're in and you think you need to handle it on your own. But don't get yourself in too deep without back-up. If things look like shit and you need some help, find me, okay? I don't want to read it in the society pages that you got yourself killed because you were too fucking stubborn to ask for help." My fingers dug in, pressing her harder against the wall as her mouth fell slightly open. "Got me, babygirl?"

  Her lips pressed together and she swallowed hard. "Ah, yeah. I got you, Paine," she agreed with a small nod.

  "Good," I said, trying to force my hands to let her go, but all they did was sink in harder as they lifted upward, bringing her up onto her tiptoes as she gasped. My lips crashed onto hers hard and fast before I tore myself away and threw myself outside, slamming the door behind me before I turned around, stormed back in and fucked her right there in the open doorway.

  Five

  Elsie

  The next day went as follows: got up, didn't think about the kiss, got dressed, didn't think about it in the shower, got to work, didn't think about it during coffee breaks, set up an appointment with the Barrett guy, didn't think about it while stopped at the god damn red lights on the way to said appointment...

  Yeah, so Paine kissed me.

  One minute, I was walking him out the door. Everything was chaste, calm, somewhat normal. The next second, he had me pinned against the wall, his strong hands on my belly and holding on tight, pulling me almost off my feet. And, let me tell ya, for a tall girl, that was quite a feat. Then he was offering me backup if I needed it.

  And then his lips were on mine.

  Hard.

  Crushing.

  I felt it down to my freaking toes. My toes. Like a middle-school girl getting a kiss from the most popular boy in school. It went through my whole system, pinging rather intensely at the nerve endings between my legs before it journeyed down.

  Then not more than five seconds later, I was collapsing against the wall without his hands holding me up. The door slammed and my hand moved up to press into my lips that felt electric from the contact.

  That was just what my under-utilized sex drive needed.

  It goes without saying that I did a really bad job not thinking about that kiss. Never mind that it was barely even a kiss, just a meeting of lips. No motion, no tongues, no nothing. But, regardless, it was effective. And it was impossible to not think about.

  So as I parked my car across from the police station and climbed out, I was thinking about it. Which was why it didn't immediately strike me as odd that the PI had his office across from the NBPD. But as I beeped my locks and rounded my car to look at the building, well, the strangeness started to settle in. Because not only was it across the street from the police station, but it was completely windowless and the door was a simple white wooden one. I use the term 'white' loosely here. It had, at one time, presumably, been white. In current times, it was more... brown thanks to what looked like mud smatterings all up the front of it. The only way you'd know there was an office there was because there was a small plaque under one of the windows that said Barrett Anderson Investigates.

  On a loud exhale that sounded a lot like second-guessing, I reached up to knock on the cleanest part of the door that was well above eye-level as I reminded myself that there was always the Sawyer guy to fall back on if the Barrett guy turned out to be a flop.

  I waited, shifting my feet for a second as I looked over my shoulder toward the eerie alley to the side between Barrett's 'office' and the Chinese food place next door, the smell of broccoli, garlic, and soy sauce making my stomach growl in anger.

  There was shuffling inside the office, the sound of several things crashing to the floor and sliding across it, a soft curse, then the door flew open.

  And there was Barrett Anderson.

  And I was pretty sure I needed to put out a call back to the Sawyer guy.

  Because Barrett looked like a mess. He was in his late twenties, tall and lean in an almost underfed kind of way, with shaggy brown hair, warm brown eyes behind glasses that looked eerily similar to the ones I wore the night before around Paine, pants that were a shade roomy and a thick gray sweater with brown elbow patches. Yes, elbow patches. And a dark blue beanie.

  Okay. I was being a snob.

  Maybe he looked homeless because he was an uber-genius or something. You know, smart people were known for being rather absentminded about normal, every day tasks like haircuts and... eating proper meals. The clothes, well, some guys just genuinely didn't know anything about what did and did not go together, let alone what was and was not in fashion.

  All the awful clothing aside, he was actually pretty good looking. A good couple square meals to get some meat on his bone
s, he would actually be really attractive in a sort-of hipster kind of way.

  "You ready?" he asked, giving me quick eye contact before turning away and disappearing behind his office door.

  Alright. Not having great social skills wasn't unusual either if he was smart.

  I took a deep breath, shook my head slightly, and followed him inside, closing the door at my back.

  Yeah, well. If you ever stopped to consider what the office of some of the great writers in the twentieth century before computers were a thing looked like, offices like Bukowski or Salinger might have inhabited, yeah, that was what Barrett Anderson's office was like. Meaning it was a small room with a simple black office desk and chair with a chair for visitors and a hip-level office cabinet on the side. But every single surface was stacked with books, with paperwork, folders. The walls had newspaper clippings, online printouts, pictures, and handwritten notes pinned with colorful thumbtacks to above my personal eye level.

  Barrett was already behind his desk, shuffling papers that made the five or six discarded coffee cups sitting on top of some of said stacks of paper wobble ominously.

  As I walked toward the guest chair, I immediately rethought my impression that Barrett was the tech-savvy guy his website implied. Because, well, he didn't even have a computer in his office. No computer, laptop, fax, phone... nothing. How the hell had he even made the website in the first place?

  "Not what you were expecting?" he asked, reading my expression with a small smirk.

  "Where's your computer?" I blurted out as I sat down.

  "What do most people think is the most valuable thing in their houses?" he asked, but it was rhetorical because he went on with barely a pause. "High end jewelry, the TV, stereo system... no. It's your computers and laptops. If I broke in, I wouldn't even have to steal it. I could just use a zip drive with some specific malware on it, stick it in the USB port, let it do its thing, pull it back out, and I have access to every password to every bank website, investment website, 401K website you have ever visited. I also have all the dirt on everything you've ever looked at online. A computer should never be left out where someone else could access it for even a couple of seconds."

  Well. Didn't I kind of feel like an idiot?

  "But the paper trail you have here?" I asked, waving a hand around.

  "Take a closer look," he invited, nodding toward the paperwork on his desk.

  Curious, I reached for the closest stack and picked it up to read. It was some kind of mathematical papers and while there were words, they weren't in English. "Is this... Russian?"

  "Polish," he said, taking them back from me. "They're also in code."

  "Quite fastidious," I nodded, feeling a bit more secure in my choice, and also making a mental note to start storing my laptop in my safe when I wasn't in the house.

  "What do you need help with, Miss..."

  "Elsie is fine. And I guess, for right now, I need help figuring out what is going on at the warehouse on Kennedy."

  "The warehouse on Kennedy," he repeated, brows drawing together.

  "Yes."

  "That's all you're gonna give me."

  "Does knowing my motivations somehow change the information of what is going on inside the warehouse?"

  "See your point," he said, reaching for a drawer and pulling out a fresh piece of loose leaf paper, scribbling notes in, I imagined, coded Polish. "So you want information of the people coming and going, items being brought in or out," he kept babbling as he grabbed his coffee with his left hand, brought it to his lips, took a long sip, then settled it back down. "Do you want full workups on every person?"

  "Full workups?"

  "Jobs, past jobs, habits, financial records..." he trailed off, looking up at me from behind his glasses, the expression there very much intimating that he thought I was an idiot for making him explain.

  "Ah, sure," I said, shrugging. "Whatever you can find."

  "Anything else?"

  I pressed my lips together to keep them from twitching. I'd been on more than my share of consultations with various professionals over the years: attorneys, accountants, doctors, etc. Never had I been in a meeting as clipped as this one with the strange, sloppy, hungry-looking Barrett Anderson.

  "A word of advice?" I offered and his head snapped up, one brow raised. "I think whatever is going on at that warehouse involves the Third Street gang. So you might want to be... careful."

  "Right," he said in a rough voice, the way his lips had thinned out implying he was angry or insulted. "Is that all?"

  "Do we need to fill out any paperwork?"

  "What for, Miss. Bay? If I need you, I know right where to find you. Word of advice?" he threw my own words back at me. "Stop checking in on social media every time you go somewhere. From your Facebook alone, I know: you go to Shane Mallick's gym over on Willow; you have dinner at your father's every Sunday; you get to work early and stay late; you go to Chaz's with your girlfriends; you go out to eat way too often with Roman Matthewson; you get your hair done over at that expensive salon on Monroe; you..."

  "Okay. I get it. I am making myself a perfect target for a stalker," I bristled, annoyed. I mean, I had privacy settings for God's sake. I wasn't an idiot. Only friends were supposed to see things like that. But apparently, Barrett had found a way around all that. "Sorry I bruised your pride with the warning. Excuse the heck out of me for thinking you look more like a future college professor than some badass who can take on a street gang. No need to be an ass."

  I stood abruptly, slinging my purse back up on my shoulder.

  "I'm good at my job, Miss. Bay," he said, standing as well, but fisting his hands onto the surface of his desk, hunching slightly forward.

  "Good. Then prove it," I demanded, turning and walking out of his office.

  Sometimes leaving on a bitch-note was the best bet. It sounds counter-intuitive, but it was one of the few things my father taught me that I felt actually did have practical applications in daily life. Yes, sometimes it was good to kill people with kindness, but something was telling me that Barrett Anderson was too smart to fall for the honey trap.

  --

  I didn't hear from Barrett for two days. I had six un-returned phone calls and emails out to him. Now, I can be patient in the way of- I put the work in and I am willing to wait for the results to come in. However, when all control is taken out of my hands and I have nothing to do but think and stress about said situation that I have no control over, well, I get decidedly less patient.

  I tried taking a couple extra nights at the gym, thinking to sweat out the anxiety. I went out with Roman and one of my girlfriends for dinners, I stayed late at work to keep myself busy.

  But, well, I was done just waiting.

  So, on my way home from work around seven-thirty, I detoured back into the industrial part of town and parked out front of the police station for added security. What can I say? It was dark; I loved my car; I didn't want to come out to find parts of it missing.

  There was no way to tell if Barrett was in his office given that there were no windows to see if the lights were on or not through them. I clutched my keys a little tighter as I ran across the street toward his door.

  My feet faltered right outside, hearing shuffling and feeling a tiny bit of anger rise up. So he was in his office. He was just ignoring my calls. That ass...

  But then the shuffling sounded decidedly unlike actual shuffling and a lot more like an altercation.

  Okay, so I'm no hero. When it came to fight or flight instincts, mine leaned quite heavily toward flight. Whenever danger seemed evident, I got that weird swirly feeling in my belly and instinctively shrank away from whatever the perceived danger was. Personally. But when there seemed like something bad was happening to someone else, like the time I had been walking out of Chaz's bar to get some air and I had seen some musclebound jerk grab his girlfriend's face and shove her back against a wall, something protective in me welled up
and I flew at him, screaming like a banshee loud enough to draw a crowd that ensured that I wasn't going to get my ass handed to me too.

  So as I stood outside Barrett's office and heard what was undoubtedly the sounds of someone getting hurt, and that person very likely being skinny, underfed, nerdy Barrett Anderson, well, I didn't think. I didn't run back across the street and get a cop. I just did what my gut told me to do. I grabbed the handle and threw the door open.

  Barrett was already on the floor, the front of one of his old man sweaters held in the giant fist of the man towering over him, his other arm cocked back. I couldn't even draw a breath to yell before he swung forward toward Barrett's face, a face that was already so bloodied and swollen that if it weren't for the shaggy hair, I wouldn't have recognized him, and smashed into some sweet spot that made Barrett's skinny body go boneless, suspended in air by the front of his shirt only.

  "No!" I gasped, my heart slamming in my chest as I watched Barrett's, looking for the telltale rising and falling. It took a long second before I saw him draw breath.

  But by that point, I was already screwed.

  I knew this because suddenly Barrett was no longer suspended, but crashed down to the floor in a weighted way that made me cringe. I also knew this because suddenly the back of Barrett's attacker wasn't toward me anymore. He had stood fully and swiveled, a small smirk toying at his lips.

  All I could think at that point was: run.

  See, my good old flight instinct kicked in.

  I turned back toward the door and was all of one foot outside before I was tagged from behind, one strong arm going around my throat, pulling me up and off my feet, the other going tight around my middle, anchoring me back against him. With his forearm pressing into my throat, I couldn't even draw a breath to scream. I was pulled back a few feet, the door slamming behind me, cutting off the chance of someone seeing in. Seconds. It was just seconds, but I was starting to feel light-headed from the pressure on my neck and had the horrifying realization that I was going to pass out. God only knew what kind of things could be done to me while unconscious. My nails clawed at his arm as I tried to wrench my body out of his hold.