She untangled her legs from the light quilt and managed to walk to the bathroom without stumbling, then managed to shower without crying. Fifteen minutes later she stood in front of her tiny closet with her hair wrapped in a towel, wearing her bra and the short black skirt with the small front pocket for her iPhone. She pulled out a white sleeveless cashmere turtleneck, yanked off the towel, pulled the sweater over her head, and slid the phone into the pocket so she’d remember to charge it. She looked over her shoulder at him. Matt was steadily going about his business, avoiding her eyes. “Make sure you charge that,” he said.
“It’ll be fine as long as I don’t make a call,” she replied. “I need makeup more.”
She stood back to let him into the shower, the thin plastic curtain like a brick wall between them. She dried her hair and scrunched the waves into a simple style. She’d begun to dab concealer under her eyes when she heard a soft thump and a single knock at the door.
The UPS guy, delivering her latest shipment of boxed groceries she’d ordered online. She walked out of the bathroom, gently unchained and unbolted the door to the landing, and crouched down to grab the small white box.
She looked up into the barrel of a dull black gun. Lyle held it, staring down at her, expressionless. Staring at a gun looked just as unremarkable on television as getting shot at, but in real life Eve’s entire body went numb.
Lyle took the box from her and shoved it onto the counter beside the door. “Downstairs. Now.”
“I’m not going anywhere with you,” she said, as her brain kicked into overdrive. In a split second she ran through the circumstances. Matt’s small arsenal was in the bedroom on the nightstand. He was in the shower, defenseless. She was an idiot.
“Sure you are, Evie,” he said gently. He gave her a smile so full of toothy malice the hair stood up on her arms. “Because if you don’t I’ll shoot you. And then I’ll leave you here and go and shoot your father, your mother, your motherfucking brother. I’m sick of this fucking bar and all the trouble it’s caused me. It ends now.”
She went utterly still. Natalie, her best friend, or Cesar, supporting his family, or Pauli, who was just a kid. Her family.
The shower shut off. In a few seconds Matt would dry off and walk through the bathroom door, and maybe Lyle would shoot him too.
But he didn’t know Matt was a cop.
Matt would find her.
She hurried past Lyle, out the door and onto the landing.
“Nice and quiet going down those stairs,” he said, eyeing her four-inch heels. “Don’t want lover boy getting alarmed.”
No, they didn’t want that, not until lover boy had gone and gotten all of his biggest friends with their semiautomatic pistols and concussion grenades. Lyle gripped her arm, hustled her across the parking lot, and shoved her into the backseat of the SUV. His cell rang. “Keep an eye on her,” he snapped at Travis, sitting in the driver’s seat, then slammed her door and took the call with a snarled “Yeah?”
Twisting sideways to fumble for the seat belt, she pulled her iPhone from the pocket of her skirt and slipped it between her thigh and the seat. After she fastened the belt she swiped her thumb across the screen to wake it, and tapped the phone button.
“Hey, Travis,” she said as she lowered the volume. She bent over and pretended to adjust her heel, dialing a memorized phone number, praying adrenaline would make her fingers accurate.
Voice mail. The voice was faint, audible only to her ears as the relentlessly pleasant female operator asked the caller to leave a message. She hung up, waited a few seconds, pressed Call twice to redial the number.
Oh shit, Matt! Oh shit oh shit oh shit! Please answer your phone!
Travis wouldn’t meet her eyes in the rearview mirror. She’d known him her whole life. He’d always worked to ingratiate himself into whatever circle was closest. The fact that he wasn’t chatting her up, let alone looking her in the eye made her stomach lurch. Driven by the most basic impulse of all—survival—she reached for the door handle.
The locks clicked shut. She looked over the back of the driver’s seat at Travis, who still wasn’t looking at her.
“They’ll meet us at the warehouse,” Lyle said as he slid into the Escalade’s leather seats. The truck pulled away from Eye Candy, into traffic.
*
After a firefight, routine mattered. Shower and dress. Jeans, polo, running shoes, gun at his right ankle, knife. Stick to the routine, the last stand against feelings, memories, images. Eve walking up the stairs with a sociopath. Eve taunting him, Eve trembling under him until he’d wrung every last drop of fight out of her and she turned to flame in his arms. The misery on her face this morning.
The silence in the living room triggered a mental alarm. Maybe she was in the office, doing paperwork. He walked into the living room and saw a package on the counter, but the office door was closed.
“Eve?” he called as he opened the door.
The office was dark, the door leading down the spiral staircase to Eye Candy’s dance floor closed and dead-bolted from the inside. No light shone through the curtains covering the floor-to-ceiling windows.
“Eve!” he called again. His voice tauntingly bounced around the cavernous space as he hauled open the door and launched himself at the stairs, his hands skidding down the curved railing. He jogged into the storeroom, the dish room, then behind the bar. Nothing.