With just enough force to let me know it was there, he placed a hand around my throat and pushed me back against the brick building. For a long moment, he only stared. A plethora of emotions flashed across his face. Anger. Frustration. Fear.
“That would be a very bad idea,” he said at last. It was a warning. A cutting desperation laced his smooth voice.
“My uncle’s a cop, and my dad’s an ex-cop. I can help you.” Heat drifted off him, and I realized he must have had a fever. Standing out in the frigid cold with only a T-shirt could not be good.
My audacity seemed to astonish him. He almost laughed. “The minute I need the help of a sniveling brat from the Heights, I’ll let you know.”
The hostility in his tone threw my determination askew, but only for a moment. I recovered and charged forward. “If you go back in there, I’m calling the police. I mean it.”
He clenched his jaw in frustration. “You’ll do more harm than good.”
I shook my head. “I doubt it.”
“You don’t know anything about me. Or him.”
“Is he your father?”
He hesitated, stared impatiently as if trying to decide how best to get rid of me. Then he made a decision. I could see it on his face.
His features darkened. He stepped closer, pressed the length of his body against mine, leaned into me, and whispered in my ear. “What’s your name?”
“Charley,” I said, suddenly afraid, too afraid not to answer. Then I tried to say Davidson, but he pulled the scarf down to see my face better, and Davidson came out as one mangled syllable that sounded more like—
“Dutch?” he asked, scrunching his brows together.
He was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen. He was solid and strong and fierce. And vulnerable. “No,” I said in a whisper as his fingers drifted down and brushed intrusively over my breast. “Davidson.”
“Have you ever been raped, Dutch?”
The knowledge that he was aiming for pure, no-holds-barred shock value didn’t lessen the question’s impact. I was stunned and thoroughly terrified. I tried to resist the urge to run, tried to stand my ground, but self-preservation was a difficult thing to squelch. A quick glance at Gemma for support did little to help. My sister stood wide-eyed with mouth agape, absently holding the camera as if it still mattered, and somehow managing not to get a single moment on tape.
“No,” I answered breathlessly.
His cheek brushed across mine as his hand eased back up to lock on to my throat. To an ordinary passerby, we would look like lovers playing flirtatiously in the dark.
He forced a hard knee between mine and spread them, gaining access to my most private area. I gasped at the intimate contact as his free hand dipped between my legs, and knew instinctively I was in way over my head. I grabbed his wrist with both hands.
“Please, stop.”
He paused but kept his fingers cupped at my crotch. I put a hand on his chest and pushed gently, coaxing him off me. “Please.”
He eased back and looked into my eyes. “You’ll leave?”
“I’ll leave.”
His gaze remained locked with mine a long moment; then he raised both arms and braced them on the brick wall above my head. “Go,” he said harshly.
It wasn’t a suggestion. I ducked under his arm and ran before he changed his mind, grabbing Gemma along the way.
As we rounded the building, I turned back and stopped. He’d climbed onto a crate and was sitting atop it, staring up at the window. With a forlorn sigh, he rested his head against the wall, and I realized he wasn’t going back into the apartment. He just wanted to keep an eye on that window.
At the time, I had wondered whom he’d left inside. I found out two days later when I spoke to an angry landlady. The family in 2C had moved out in the middle of the night and stiffed her for two months’ rent and the costly replacement of a plate glass window. That whole self-preservation thing kept me from mentioning the particulars of the window. When I finally got her to stop harping about lost revenue, she told me she’d heard the old man call the boy Reyes, so Reyes it was. But the burning question was whom he’d left inside. Then the landlady told me.
A sister. He’d left a sister inside. And she had been alone. With a monster.
“I can’t believe it,” Cookie said, pulling me back to the present. “Is he, you know, dead?”
Cookie found out long ago that I could see the departed. She’s never held it against me.
“That’s what’s weird,” I said. “I just don’t know. This is so different from anything I’ve ever experienced.” I checked my watch. “Crap, I have to get to the office.”
“Oh! That’s probably a good idea.” She chuckled. “I’ll be there in a jiff.”
“Okey dokey,” I said, rushing out the door with a wave. “See you in a few. Hold down the fort, Mr. Wong!”
Chapter Five
Jenius.
—T-SHIRT
As I trudged the fifty or so feet across the alley and into the rear entrance of my dad’s bar, I contemplated possibilities for why all three lawyers might have stayed behind instead of crossing over. My calculations—allowing for a 12 percent margin of error, based on the radius of the corresponding confidence interval and the surgeon general’s warning—concluded that they probably didn’t stay behind for the tacos.
I took a sec to put my sunglasses in my leather bag and allow my eyes to adjust to the dim lights inside the bar. To put it mildly, my dad’s bar was gorgeous. The main room had a cathedral ceiling with dark woods covering every available surface, and framed pictures, medals, and banners from various law enforcement events covering most of that. From the back entrance, the bar stood on my right, round tables and chairs perched in the middle, and tall bistro tables lined the outer edges. But the reigning glory of the speakeasy was the elaborate, hundred-year-old ironwork that circled the main room like ancient crown molding. It spiraled around and lured the eye to the west wall, where a glorious wrought-iron elevator loomed tall and proud. The kind you see only in movies and very old hotels. The kind with all its mechanisms and pulleys open for its audience to enjoy. The kind that took forever and a day to get to the second floor.