No matter what Mace said, I needed the Rock Chicks.
No way in hell I was going to be able to pul this off without the Rock Chicks.
“You’re gonna be good,” I promised. “Mace, I mean Kai, has a lot of friends. Good friends. Good people. We’l take care of you and we’l take care of him.”
“If you say so.”
Last night, during my planning, I realized that I had to keep Lana (and now Chloe) protected. Not only did we have Sidney Carter to worry about, we had Preston Mason and maybe that jerky George guy too.
“Don’t book a hotel. You have to stay with friends,” I told Lana.
“Oh, we couldn’t impose.”
“You have to,” I said quickly. “Kai would never forgive me if I didn’t take steps to keep you safe.” Silence, then, “Oh.”
“That’s okay too. Safe is these people’s middle name.” I was thinking about the Hot Bunch. They had other middle names like “Bossy” and “Scary” and “Badass” and “Hot” but I decided not to share those middle names with Lana. She was already freaking out.
“Okay,” Lana said.
“Let me know your flight numbers. I’l send someone out to get you at DIA. Okay?”
She gave me the flight numbers and I wrote them down on Mace’s tablet. Then I ripped the top sheet off, folded it up and put it in the back pocket of my cutoffs.
While I was doing this, Lana cal ed, “Stel a?”
“Yeah?”
“Thank you.”
I did another happy shiver, a different kind that didn’t involve Mace, his voice, eyes, hands or mouth. But it was happy al the same.
“No, Lana, thank you,” I said back.
*
I programmed Lana’s number into the phone under “Bogey One” just in case Mace saw it. I wanted a warning if she phoned again.
Then I sat on the couch and thought about my options.
Then, because I couldn’t decide, I cal ed Fortnum’s. I’d talk to whoever answered the phone.
“Hel o, Fortnum’s Used Books,” a woman said and I knew it was Jane, the super-thin, kind of weird, pathological y shy woman of indeterminate age that had worked there since before Indy inherited the store from her grandmother.
“Jane?” I asked anyway, just to be sure.
“Who’s this?” she sounded guarded.
“It’s Stel a.”
Effing hel , now I had to pick someone.
It hit me.
Duke.
Perfect.
“Is Duke there?” I asked.
“No,” Jane answered.
Beautiful.
Maybe my luck hadn’t changed.
Plan B.
“Okay, then, can I talk to Tex?” I blurted.
“Sure,” I heard the muffled noises of a hand covering a mouthpiece, then, “Tex?”
I also heard Tex’s muted, impatient boom. “What?”
“Phone,” Jane told him.
“I figured that, woman. I got, like, five hundred customers.
Take a message.”
“It’s Stel a Gunn,” Jane informed him.
“Shit. She’s not riddled with bul ets, is she?” I rol ed my eyes to the ceiling.
“Are you injured in some way?” Jane asked me in al seriousness.
“No,” I answered but Tex would be if he didn’t fal in line with my plan, pronto. “Just tel him it’s important.” More phone muffling then, “She says it’s important.” I heard incoherent grumbling then Tex came on the phone and instead of saying hel o, he said, “I’m gonna fuckin’ kil whoever’s talkin’ to the papers. It’s a fuckin’
madhouse in here. And most of ‘em are new which means they don’t know the dril , like, what I say fuckin’ goes. They expect me to be nice or somethin’. One told me I needed a customer service trainin’ course. What the fuck is that? ”
“Tex –” I tried to cut in but it didn’t work.
“Trainin’ courses! Yeah, we need trainin’ al right. These fuckers need to learn that I make coffee and they drink it. It doesn’t come with a ‘hi’, ‘how you doin’’ or ‘have a nice fuckin’ day’. They order, they move to the end of the counter, they get their coffee and they cease to exist for me.
Fuck! ” he finished on a boom.
“Tex, stop saying ‘fuck’ so loud!” I heard Indy shout in the background.
“Fuck!” Tex shouted back. “Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck! ” Oh dear.
“Would it kil you to be a little nice?” I asked when he’d quit saying fuck.
“Yes,” he answered immediately.
Okay, I didn’t have time for this. We needed to move on.
“Tex, I need a favor,” I told him.
“Does it involve me kickin’ someone’s ass?” he asked.
“No.”
“Great. Fuckin’ great. I need to kick someone’s ass. But do you need me to do that? No! You fuckin’ do not. Jesus Jones, what is it?”
I told him about my strategy, Mace’s Mom and Stepmom’s imminent arrival and I needed the Rock Chicks in on it but sworn to secrecy under threat of certain death if they breathed a word.
“I get to kil ‘em if they let the cat out of the bag?” Tex asked.
“Knock yourself out,” I replied.
“Leave it to me.”
Disconnect without even a good-bye.
I ticked that off my mental list.
Onward.