Angela snapped her fingers. “That’s it. That’s the guy. Thank you, Betty. I’m sorry but I have to go for now.”
“Half the time, with the medication, I don’t know what she means, but she does ask for you. Just now she asked something kind of strange.”
“What did she ask?”
“She asked me just now if it was the girl in the moon. It was kind of strange. Eerie. You know?”
Angela didn’t know what to say.
“When will you be able to come see her?”
“Soon,” Angela said. “I have to take care of some things first….”
“I understand. You take care of yourself, dear, and get better. Do you hear me? Get better.”
“I will. Thank you, Betty.”
THIRTY-ONE
Once she hung up, Angela started doing a search on her phone for the name Nate Drenovic. Surprisingly, there were a number of entries, but they were in other cities. Then she found one in Milford Falls: Drenovic Tactical. Under the name it said “Combat Martial Arts.” From what she remembered of him, that sounded like the same guy.
Angela knew roughly where the address was located. She replaced the knife in her right boot, the suppressor in the other boot, and the gun inside her waistband at the small of her back. It was uncomfortable leaning back in the seat of the truck with the gun there.
She reminded herself that the gun was not meant to be comfortable. It was meant to be comforting.
She felt safer having the gun on her, rather than left in the truck where it had been useless to her when she had needed it most—all because she had been following the law. But she knew that even having a gun wasn’t the whole solution.
She found Drenovic Tactical in a seedy strip mall set back from a busy four-lane street. She didn’t know if Nate would remember her. She’d been fifteen, maybe nearing sixteen at the time. She didn’t know if he was still into drugs, but since he had a business she was hoping not. If he was, she would simply find someone else.
With all the scary men at her mother’s place, she had thought he was one of the more decent guys who hung around the trailer. But he wouldn’t have hung around unless he did drugs or ran with people who did. At the least, though, he hung around with the wrong crowd.
There was also the matter of his manslaughter conviction. That worried her. She wondered what she might be walking into.
At the moment, though, he was the only one she could think of for what she needed. At least it was a place to start. If she didn’t like what she found, she could always walk.
Angela parked in front of the storefront window painted black from the inside, with the name DRENOVIC TACTICAL in gold lettering outlined in red. Because the window was painted over, there was no way to see what might be inside. She opened the typical strip mall aluminum and glass door, which was also painted over in black.
Inside, the place was basically all one open room. While not big, it looked like plenty of space for martial arts training. The bottom six feet of the walls were painted black, with a red band above the black running around the room, and white the rest of the way up to a high ceiling with exposed ductwork and vents. There looked to be a bathroom in back, and there was a desk with a few folding chairs up against the blacked-out window in front. Wooden benches lined one wall. Most of the room was covered with mats.
Two men were practicing some sort of arm locks and escapes in the center of the room. One of them pretty much fit her memory of Nate.
The other was older, more muscular, with a buzz cut, a wifebeater undershirt, and lots of tattoos upon tattoos upon tattoos. He was doing the kind of steroid-induced sniffing and shoulder twitching that made her wonder if she’d made a mistake coming into the place. The guy was clearly amped up. His eyes were bugged out. From lots of experience at quickly judging men as she had been growing up, she knew that he was trouble.
Both men disengaged from grappling and came over to Angela.
Nate was a ruggedly good-looking guy, at most maybe five or six years older than her. He had short brown hair that was pleasing in its disorder. The tight, black, short-sleeved T-shirt he had on showed that he was ripped, but not muscle-bound like the other guy.
“Hey, hot stuff,” the tattooed guy said as he circled in close beside her. He aggressively grabbed her ass cheek. “Nice.”
In an instant Angela had the barrel of her gun pressed up under his chin, lifting his head back a few inches.
He froze.
“Did you hear that click?” she asked.
“Uh … yeah?”
“That was the safety coming off. I’ve had a very bad day and I’m in a really, really bad mood. Right now I’d like nothing more than an excuse to pull the trigger.
“If you so much as fantasize about touching me again I’m going to send a bullet ricocheting around the inside your thick cranium. Do you know what ‘cranium’ means, dumb fuck?”
Her tone of voice turned him cautious. “Yeah, I know.”
“What? What ‘cranium’ means? Or that you’re a dumb fuck?”
He didn’t seem to know what she wanted him to say. “Uh …”
“All right, Malcolm,” Nate said, “listen to me—I know what’s going through your head right now and believe me, you’re just starting and you haven’t had enough lessons yet to even think of trying to disarm this pissed-off young lady before she could pull the trigger.”
Nate gently put his fingers on Angela’s forearm. “It’s all right. I swear I won’t let him touch you again, so why don’t you put the gun away?”
Angela glanced at his eyes. They were calm and confident. She put the safety back on as she pulled the gun from under Malcolm’s chin. She slipped the weapon back into its holster.
Nate put a hand against Malcolm’s sweaty shoulder, right over a tattooed nuclear radiation symbol, backing him away a few steps. “I think we should call it a day. We’ll pick it up from there next week.” He pointed a thumb toward the door. “See you then.”
Malcolm frowned in confusion at what had just happened and his quick dismissal. His bug eyes twitched back and forth between Nate and Angela.
“Fucking little cunt,” he finally said.
Angela glared at him. “Sticks and stones.”
“All right, that’s enough,” Nate told Malcolm as he started forward. “You know that one of the things I teach is when to walk away. This is one of those times. You don’t need to prove that you can beat up a hundred-fifteen-pound girl. You’ve made your point. I’ll see you next week.”
Malcolm looked between them once more and then finally snatched his shirt off the back of a chair. With the shirt clutched in his fist, he stormed out the door.
When she looked back, Nate had a puzzled frown as he stared at her. “Do I know you? You look familiar.”
She could see in his eyes that he was a killer, but in some mystifying way it was different from the eyes of every killer she’d ever seen before. Looking into his eyes brought on that same primal, bone-chilling fear of a predator, but at the same time there wasn’t the vicious quality to go with it. She also didn’t have any visions of him killing, only vague shadows fighting. It was oddly disorienting, because it was alarming but at the same time calming.
“Kind of. I’m Angela Constantine. Sally’s daughter. You used to come around to the parties at our trailer.”
He snapped his fingers. A pleasant smile spread across his features as he pointed at her.
“Right … Sally’s daughter.” He gave her a quick look down and back up. “Damn, girl. When you grew up, you did it right.”
She was not in the mood for flattery. “Are you still doing drugs?”
The question momentarily threw him off. He recovered quickly.
“Nah,” he said with a dismissive gesture rather than get defensive, “that was a phase. I was hanging out with the wrong crowd.”
“In my experience, people who say that are the wrong crowd.”