Chapter 17

The first I saw of Honey was a hand.

It was small, the skin milky white, the fingers long, dexterous, prettily tapered to long, narrow nails perfectly manicured and polished to a deep and decadent red.

It slid beneath the dark curtain, a movement both simple and sensual, and her fingers flicked the window’s catch open.

Then it was gone.

I waited for a moment, but the hand didn’t reappear. I picked up the fallen goon’s gun, the latest addition to my growing collection, and slipped it in my jacket’s outside pocket. Honey might need it to defend herself.

If, I thought, she even knows how to use one.

I decided that her hand’s brief appearance was the only invitation I was going to get and pressed both hands against the glass of her window. It slid up easily just a whisper of sound and seated firmly into the top of its track. I lifted one leg and stepped inside, ducked as low as my lanky frame allows to follow it inside.

“Honey?”

I kept my voice low but didn’t whisper. The long stretch of room I saw beyond the dark curtain appeared deserted. I stood where I was, one foot on the old shag carpet of Honey’s flat, the other on the fire escape, bent painfully low with the arch of my back scraping against the bottom of the raised window, and let my eyes adjust to the darker interior of the room.

Not bad.

They’d transformed the pit of a flat into something stylish, comfortable. Tapestries covered the windows overlooking Main Street, an aged adobe wall and crumbling staircase overgrown with flowering vines, a high window overlooking a garden paradise sewn into cloth.

“Hey, Honey.”

No answer.

I stepped the rest of the way inside and when the curtain fell in place behind me, I saw that it wasn’t a curtain, but another tapestry.

To my left was a small kitchen, what Honey undoubtedly thought of as a kitchenette, partially separated from the rest of the big flat by a folding partition.

“Psst!”

No reply.

I reached for my Beretta then decided against it. She was probably already scared. I didn’t want her hysterical.

There was a narrow door to my left, open just enough to see the bathroom. Next to the bathroom another door was deadlocked and chained. Across from the bathroom another partition stood, blocking my view of a large piece of the room.

Only two places to hide, the bathroom most likely. It had a door.

The place was lightly furnished, a silk-draped futon, two squat armchairs with a coffee table between them, two floor lamps that threw more shadows than light.

A potted plant hung from the ceiling where a light fixture should have been. Its reaching vines crept across the ceiling, suspended by unseen wires or strings. Devil’s Ivy. Fitting.

“Honey!” A little louder now. I didn’t want Finke to hear me, but I had to risk it. Time was short. The bad guys were going to run out of patience soon and come busting in. If someone discovered Scooter and his suspicious friend, the cops were likely to show up soon as well. Maybe they would be straight cops, maybe not. I didn’t feel like taking the chance.

My eyes had adjusted as well as they were going to. I crossed the room in a rush, ducking beneath the Devil’s Ivy, pushed the bathroom door open.

“Honey?”

“I don’t know who you are or what you want from me...”

I spun on the spot, my aching muscles moving with adrenalin speed, and saw Honey in the corner of the room cut off by the partition. This was obviously the part of their shared flat where she rested her pretty red head at the end of the day, whenever her day happened to end.

Honey sat, half reclined against the plush red cushions of a narrow wicker futon. Another small table beside her supported another dark lamp, a glass of something on the rocks.

Thick, silky red hair, flawless pail skin, full lips, red as cherries, shining like a wet dream. Her body, so perfect it was impossible not to stare, its shape not hidden by the short and filmy black dress that barely covered it.

The gun in her hand.

It was pointing at me.

Not one of Finke’s crappy 9mms. I recognized the make and model from one of Posey’s gun bibles, a .357 Glock subcompact, the extra four inches on the barrel having nothing at all to do with penis envy. A small gun that would make an impressive hole in whatever, or whoever, she shot with it, sufficiently suppressed that she could pop an intruder without waking the neighbors.

She looked relaxed, almost bored. The Glock looked far too comfortable in her hand, and that hand did not shake.

I, on the other hand, was shaking, partly in fear, partly with an uneasy emotion that was almost lust. One a little more than the other.

“...but you have only thirty seconds to win me over, or I’m going to put a very large hole in you.”

* * *

Why, goddamnit why, does everyone keep threatening to shoot me?

For the first ten seconds I was able to say nothing, and immediately following that I managed a grunt that sounded more like a fart than speech.

Honey’s sleepy look hardened a little after the first ten seconds of silence. After the next ten seconds, her eyes began to widen in alarm, thinking that perhaps I meant to call her thirty-second bluff.

But I didn’t think she was bluffing.

I have had people bullshit me before, and I’ve done the same to plenty of people, and there is one thing all windbags have in common. Big mouths and no balls. They specialize in big talk and cheap shots, calling the cops when you won’t turn your radio down at night, or dropping an anonymous note to some douchebag’s boss to tattle on him for abusing the company credit card or jerking off in the bathroom.

When it came to life and death most threats are bluffs, and when you call them on their bullshit they give themselves away. They fidget, they stammer and stutter, they twitch, they sweat.

Mild alarm, or maybe it was only irritation, was as far as Honey’s anxiety went. I thought maybe she was annoyed about the mess she was going to have to clean up if she had to shoot a guy for breaking in, probably with no good in mind.

She sighed.

“Could you move a little to the left? I don’t want your blood to ruin my Trish Biddle.”

I actually stepped to the left, not quite getting the sense of her words until I looked over my shoulder and saw another of her fucking tapestries, this one of a flapper in an open back evening gown. The picture reminded me of her, actually, including the flapper’s hair, which was the exact same shade of burgundy as Honey’s.

Holy fuck, she’s going to do it.

I opened my mouth, presumably to speak, though I had no idea what I planned to say.

“The parrot’s waiting for you in my car,” I said, and felt a blush heat my cheeks. I’m not shy by nature, and I’m not easy to shame, but there was something about this woman that made me feel like a little boy.

For a second the look on her face suggested she was considering shooting me on general principles, then she lowered the gun a little, only a little. It pointed at my crotch now instead of my chest. Not a huge improvement.

I could feel my time running out, both inside this small flat and outside it. Finke’s boys were sure to discover their downed scuzzballs soon.

“It’s not a parrot. It’s a macaw.” This sounded like an often-used line, her answer to a minor faux pas, but something that happened with enough regularity to annoy her. “Where’s Candice?”

“At the bottom of the river,” I said.

Her reaction was not what I’d expected, not denial, rage, or tears. Her brow furrowed, the corners of her mouth dropped into something resembling sadness, but that was all. She gave a little nod of acceptance and lowered her pistol a little more, kneecaps now instead of crotch.

Getting better.

“And he’s come for me, so I won’t tell on him.” Now there was anger, in her voice rather than on her face, but I couldn’t tell if it was directed at Finke or her dead friend. “I told her what kind of man he is, but she kept going to him.”

She swung her legs off her futon and stood. She was tall, near six feet, slender, curvy, the avatar of sexy. I felt something trying to stand at attention, wanting to point at her as she’d pointed her pistol at me, and I reminded Little Butch there were more pressing matters.

“What kind of man is he?” I’d managed to form a pretty rock-solid opinion of him in the past few hours, but Honey seemed to actually know him. I didn’t know if understanding the enemy would help but it couldn’t hurt.

Honey looked at me, lifted her eyebrows, almost smiled.

I relaxed.

She has a very expressive face, easy to read, or so I thought at the time. I would learn differently by the end of the night. By the time this particular misadventure was finished I would come to realize that you only read what she wanted you to read, only saw what she wanted you to see.

Her expression then, bemused, then amused, suggested that I was being spectacularly ignorant, asking a dumb question.

“He’s a wolf, of course. A wolf who looks like a man.”

A knock sounded on the door then, and not a polite little knuckle rap. Someone on the other side meant business.

She turned from me to the door, then back to me. Her eyes raked me from top to bottom. “So tell me, big boy, how are we going to handle the big bad wolf?”

I told her.

She smiled, her pretty lips curving up to erase her anxiety, then those lips opened to reveal two rows of the most perfect and white teeth I’ve ever seen. That grin made her look a little crazy, and I was pleased to realize that Honey was no cowering little lamb of a woman, no fragile flower who would shiver her petals off at the first sign of danger.

“Butch, I think I like you.”

The feeling was mutual. Boy, was it ever.