I made a face, scowling down at the formal dress I still wore. “Something like that,” I admitted.
“Kat.” Sloane’s voice held a note of warning, and I knew that she was reminding me that this guy might just as soon kill me as look at me.
I straightened my shoulders and cocked my head, forcing myself to appear confident as I looked at him. “You offering to give us a hand?”
“Depends. I’ll tell you this much on the house—if you white bitches be looking for the motherfucker who trashed that nice set of wheels, you be looking in the wrong place.”
“You know where he is?” I asked.
“I know where he ain’t. He ain’t around here no more, that’s for damn sure. But the mo-fo did some serious damage to my block here before he kicked it into gear.”
“Damage,” Sloane repeated. “You mean wrecking his car into the newspaper machine?”
“Fuck no. That car barely tapped it. I mean taking his tire iron out and beating the shit out of that thing,” he said, waving at the crumpled hunk of metal that once had dispensed newspapers.
I caught Sloane’s eyes. I still didn’t know what had worked Cole up, but if he’d gone postal on the machine, I knew that it was worse than I’d thought.
“Did you see where he went? Did he walk away? Call somebody? Catch a cab?”
He laughed, and it wasn’t a nice sound. “Shit, bitch. You think this be fucking New York City? Folks just step into the street and wave down a cab? You need to go back to the fairy tale you came from.”
“Maybe I do,” I said. “So you tell me. What happened? Where’d he go?”
“Why should I tell some blond bitch comes asking around about a brother?”
“I’m his girlfriend.”
“The hell you say. Your tiny princess ass couldn’t handle that motherfucker.”
“My tiny princess ass has mad skills,” I said. “Now where the fuck did he go?”
“Lady got balls,” he said with a nod that might have indicated respect. “No idea where he blew off to, but he tossed three grand at my boy Kray and bought himself a nice new bike right out from under my boy. Sweet set of wheels. Could be anywhere by now.”
“He’s right,” Sloane said. “Without the GPS, we’re flying blind.”
“So where would he go?” I ran my fingers through my hair.
“I don’t know,” Sloane said. “Why did he come here? Because it was home?”
“Maybe. Let me think.”
We took a moment to thank our informant, who actually pulled the gentleman card and told us to get our lily-white asses out of there because it was getting dark, and the next mo-fo we met might want more than to talk about my crazy-ass boyfriend.
Since that seemed like a good idea, we got back in Sloane’s Lexus and headed back toward the highway.
“Wait,” I said, and Sloane slowed to a reasonable speed as I dialed Bree in Los Angeles.
I’d hoped that she’d heard from him, but when she said that she hadn’t, I asked her to tell me the address of the house he grew up in.
“Is everything okay?”
“I hope so,” I said honestly, then promised to call her with an update as soon as I knew anything.
Sloane eased the car by Cole’s childhood home—one room on the second floor of a filthy brick building that looked ready to collapse at any moment. There was an old woman on the stoop, and when we asked, she told us that nobody was inside. I considered going in to see for myself, but when Sloane pointed out that the motorcycle Cole had bought wasn’t parked anywhere in sight, I agreed that it was better to just get out of there.
“Just go to my place,” I said, my whole body feeling heavy and battered. I wasn’t sure if it was because I was worried about Cole or simply overwhelmed by the poverty and misery of the neighborhood he grew up in. All I knew was that I wanted nothing more than to curl up and cry.
Well, almost nothing more.