Текст книги "Surviving Ice "
Автор книги: K. A. Tucker
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Текущая страница: 6 (всего у книги 22 страниц)
“You’re two hours late. You’ll have to reschedule.” Sebastian’s perfectly still and limber, seemingly unbothered.
Sebastian is fucking crazy.
And if he gets pummeled into the ground—or worse—I’m going to feel responsible, and I have enough guilt to carry on these narrow shoulders of mine right now. He may be able to launch a steel chair over his head, but going toe-to-toe with a guy like Bobby, who I’m sure doesn’t fight fair, is only going to mangle that face I like looking at. He doesn’t know who he’s up against here.
I force myself in between the two men, placing a hand on Sebastian’s stomach—the hard ridges beneath his shirt were begging for my attention. “Your design is going to take a lot more time than I have tonight, anyway. Come back tomorrow and I’ll start it for you.”
I don’t think he heard me. He’s not moving, not even acknowledging the contact.
“Hey!” I snap. That works, pulling his gaze down to me, to my hand still on him. “Can you come back tomorrow?” Will he be working? What does he do? Is he from around here?
“Yeah. Fine. See you tomorrow.” He steps away, leaving my fingers hanging in the air as he strolls around us and down the alley, as if he doesn’t have a care in the world.
“Ballsy fuck,” Bobby mutters, eying his back with disdain.
Hot, ballsy fuck. Who could be stretched out in my chair right now, if we’d gotten behind locked doors one minute sooner. “Come on, Bobby.” I sigh, taking in the bulky mass in front of me. I’m guessing his gut will be well on its way to a trip over his belt within two years.
Not exactly the same.
Definitely not something I’ll be thinking about alone in my bed tonight.
“You all right?” Bobby squints, peering down at me through deceptively pretty baby blue eyes.
“Fine,” I force out, wiping the last of the ointment over his arm and then tossing the paper towel into the trash. “We’re done here.”
He frowns. “Aren’t you even going to show it to me, to make sure I like it?”
“There’s a full-length mirror right there.” Two feet over from where he’s sitting, the lazy ass. I start pulling apart my machine as he eases himself out of the chair and wanders over. He turns his body and twists his arm to get a good look at the underside, where I’ve incorporated red and blue into the zombie princess’s cape just like he asked, to represent the American flag. Ironically, this one-percenter is also patriotic to the country whose laws he regularly breaks. “Happy?”
“Yeah.” He eyes me warily. “It looks great.”
“Good. You owe me six hundred.”
His eyebrows spike and he starts to laugh. “Are you kidding me?”
“Two hours at three hundred per. The last I checked, that equals six hundred. I can bring you a calculator if you want.”
He shoots me a flat glare. “Three hundred is Ned’s rate.”
“It’s also my rate when I’m finishing my dead uncle’s work for you, when all I want to be doing is cleaning this place up and getting the hell out of here!” I’m yelling at him and I don’t give a damn, because raising my voice is the only thing keeping the tears at bay.
It finally started sinking in today. Listening to the familiar buzz of my tattoo machine for two hours helped chip away at the shock that’s dulled my senses up until now. Ned’s gone. My uncle, who taught me everything I know about this industry, who took me under his wing the day I finished high school, who was my guinea pig when I was cutting my teeth on technique—judging skin depth, offsetting movement, gauging pain levels—who never once made me scrub a toilet during my apprenticeship, who inspired a passion that I expect will live with me until I’m too old to hold a needle steady, is dead.
And the person who did it—that psycho Mario—will probably get away with it.
My teeth have been gritted for two hours, my answers clipped as I listened to that buzz that brought with it no serenity, no joy. All it did was remind me about the last moments of Ned’s life, when I couldn’t do anything but cower in the back room.
“Okay, Ivy.” He pulls his wallet out and pulls out a stack of bills. I don’t want to know how he earns his money. I really don’t care right now. “And here. You let me know if you need any help with anything else around here. It’s a lot for one person to handle on their own.” He hands me a business card: BOBBY AND BROTHERS TOWING AND AUTOMOTIVE.
“Thanks.” I chew on the inside of my mouth as guilt chews on my insides, watching him lumber out the door. Because, once again, I’ve been a complete asshole to someone who doesn’t really deserve it. “Hey, you’d tell me if you heard anything more about what happened to Ned, right?”
He turns to meet my eyes, an exaggerated frown turning his mouth down. “Nothin’ on our end.”
“ ’Kay. See ya.”
I clean and pack everything up into my case as I do after every shift, wondering if Sebastian will still come by tomorrow. I’m hoping that he does, because I’m desperate to shake the unease I felt today. I need his canvas in order to do that. Maybe working on him will somehow be different.
I’m wired. There’s no way I’m falling asleep anytime soon, and I can’t just sit around in Ned’s house with his ghost, so when my phone buzzes with a text from Fez, I jump on the chance to do my next favorite thing to inking skin.
Inking walls.
I have plenty of options. The owner of a building over on Forty-second and East Twelfth—who is coincidentally the owner of the sub shop down the street from Black Rabbit—has offered to pay me to paint a mural on his wall as part of the antigraffiti movement. Or, there’s an already colorful cube van parked off Lombard that draws in artists like three-year-olds to a bowl of gumballs. Heck, I could even vandalize the inside of Black Rabbit, seeing as it’s all being painted over on Friday.
But it’s eleven at night and I don’t feel like going the legal, good girl route. That’s why I’m in the bowels of San Francisco—inside one of the many abandoned buildings in the Mission District—with a box of spray paint and my portable speaker. Two things, aside from my tattoo case, that I never go anywhere without. I really shouldn’t be doing this. Ned warned me that the city has upped the punishment for vandalism to a misdemeanor. And I feel like I’ve outgrown that period of time when charges might pass as cool and excusable. At twenty-five, I’d just be a giant loser.
But it’s quiet inside this remote and derelict office building and the windows are all boarded up. Frankly, I should be more concerned about the junkies and homeless that will no doubt filter through here than the cops. That’s why I don’t come to places like this alone.
“Ivy, tunes?” Weazy, a twenty-nine-year-old Mexican with a well-known passion for depicting jungle scenes, to the point that his work is almost as good as a fingerprint, sets up one of his battery-powered lights. We have four in total. Enough to light up one corner of this building while leaving many others dark and accessible to any creepers who may want to hide. And they do.
That should bother me but most of them are harmless, I’m in a group, and . . . fuck it. Ned’s dead, Ian’s gone, the few good friends I have are nowhere around, and I’ve never been the kind of girl to cry on someone’s shoulder. This is the best way I have to work through my grief.
I crank the volume and my pocket-sized cube speaker pumps out a deep, rhythmic song. “It’s my playlist tonight, just in case you were wondering.” I hang out with these guys once every couple of weeks. They’re pretty cool. Other than Fez, none of them hit on me. I’m pretty sure Weazy is convinced I’m a lesbian. Whatever makes them leave me alone.
“As long as it’s slammin’, I’m down!” Fez hollers, swinging around the chain that connects his wallet to his jeans, his cargo pants staying on his scrawny hips by the grace of a belt.
“Seriously, Fez. Stop talking.” I can’t listen to that all night. If it wasn’t dangerous to put earplugs in around here, I would.
He waves his middle finger at me in response, but he takes no offense. He’s used to being told to shut up by Ned, every time he came in to deliver a pizza.
The ball in the bottom of the can rattles with my shake, as I size up the wall before me. It’s already been marred by taggers. Talentless fools with a can of paint. Nothing I can’t cover, though, and I will, even if it takes me all night.
“Who wants?” A guy I only know as Joker waves a bottle of Don Q in the air, his beady eyes settling on me first.
“Rum. Gross. Not me.”
The others flock to it, but I pull out my flask of whiskey instead, taking a small swig of it before I climb to the top of the three-step ladder. Not too much. Just enough to ease the tension out of my limbs.
With a spray can in my hand, I’m already feeling better.
TEN
SEBASTIAN
I have an obsession with time that I can’t readily cater to here, in my dark, dusty corner of this dump, the stench of urine and vomit permeating the stale air. Any flicker of light from my phone or my watch will go noticed, if not by the group of four graffiti artists in my line of sight, then by the many crackheads and vagrants that hide out like rats in rafters.
Watching with interest. Or, perhaps, for opportunity.
I’m really no different.
The last time I checked, it was two in the morning. Hours must have passed since, but Ivy doesn’t seem ready to leave yet. She must be a nocturnal creature, like me.
Ivy.
I’m no longer thinking of her generically. She’s no longer simply “the girl” in my thoughts.
Worse, I gave her my real name. Why the fuck did I give her my real name? I never do that and yet, in a split-second decision, I convinced myself that I wanted to. That it was harmless, because she’s not guilty of anything, and I’m not going to hurt her.
At least, I don’t want to hurt her.
I do need her to trust me, though. I found nothing of any interest in the dead shop owner’s files. No property holdings, no safety-deposit boxes, nothing. Which means I have no choice but to get my answers out of her, one way or another.
Either Ivy’s a fantastic liar or she doesn’t know a thing about this videotape, or her uncle’s blackmail attempt. She’s just a twenty-five-year-old tattoo artist with a prickly exterior, who lost her father figure and is trying to move on.
It will take creativity now, to question her about the existence of this videotape without her realizing it. To find out where her uncle may have hidden it. It will take time. I guess it’s good that I’ve had this grim reaper tattoo in mind for the better part of five years.
The day I received my official discharge letter from the U.S. Navy, Bentley pulled up next to my parents’ San Francisco house where I was staying and told me to get in the car. I had no idea what I was going to do with my life, or what he would be proposing. He had left the navy a year prior, and took his skills, his reputation, and his family money, and founded Alliance. It was still very much in its infancy stage then, but he had big ideas and even bigger connections, which were already landing him major security contracts in Afghanistan, the exact place we had been battling suicide attacks and ambushes while we toured together.
I hoped that he would hire me to go back, to continue putting my skills to use. To prove myself.
But he had other plans for me. I was someone he trusted like no other, someone he would pay well. Someone he needed to execute assignments that are never documented, that no one “officially” talks about, and that the world would never have any proof actually existed.
I would become a reaper of sorts, delivering an end to those who needed it.
Without medals, without fanfare, but with quiet honor.
Getting this tattoo buys me seven hours with Ivy. And if that’s not enough, I’ll have to buy myself more time in other ways. Maybe that’s what drove me to bait her earlier, lifting my shirt to my forehead to wipe the sweat off my brow. A childhood of Krav Maga and boxing lessons, two years of intensive SEAL training, and almost eight years of daily conditioning have honed my body into what most women want.
I already know that she finds me attractive because of last night’s phone conversation with her friend, but if she noticed my not-so-subtle move, she didn’t let on. Her ability to school her expression, to feign indifference is impressive. Or maybe this idiot, with his spiky black-and-blue hair and pants hanging halfway off his bony ass, and holes in his ears where the metal rings have stretched his flesh out—maybe that’s what breaks her out of her hard shell.
I had hoped to find that out tonight, instead of lurking here in the shadows. But that fucking biker showed up. She didn’t want to work on him, she wanted me. I could tell. And she was protecting me by stepping in. Worried about me going up against a soft, slow man on a motorcycle. Probably assumed I didn’t recognize the insignia, because why would I? Why would I familiarize myself with the gang the police are focusing their efforts on in her uncle’s murder?
I could have had that guy in the Dumpster with the rest of the trash in under ten seconds. If Ivy wasn’t standing right there, I might have. But I had to step away instead, because taking him on would have caused a scene, and I need to be a ghost. So I climbed back into my car and waited on the street for hours, until I saw her little Honda whip around the corner and head home.
Now I’m back to tailing her, learning about her. I haven’t learned much, though, other than that she hovers on the abrasive side with everyone—not just me—and her body doesn’t stop swaying when there’s music playing.
And she’s not just some miscreant tagger, marring city streets with spray paint.
She’s one hell of a talented artist.
She also surrounds herself with half-wits. These guys . . . I shake my head. I’m guessing at least one of the three—probably the one with the shaved head whom they call Joker and who moves like a street brawler—has a criminal record. I don’t think she intentionally seeks them out. They just have common interests. Biker gangs that love to get tattoos at her uncle’s shop, local petty criminals she hangs out with when she’s spraying walls. Who the hell knows why Bentley said she associated with the IRA. There’s likely another coincidental connection.
The more I learn about her, the more I’m convinced that she has no idea what kind of trouble her uncle was caught up in and that she’s just a young and edgy tattoo artist who simply doesn’t want to settle down.
As I refocus my attention on her, I realize that perhaps that’s only what I want her to be.
She’s shed the light jean jacket she wore over here, revealing an oversize white tank top that’s thrown over a second, tighter black one. It’s a casual I-don’t-care look. But with her skintight black pants and her boots, it’s sexy as hell. All the more so because I’ve already had a good long look at what’s hidden beneath. She shouldn’t be dressed like that out here. I wouldn’t trust the guys she’s with, let alone the junkies in the shadows.
She’s not at all concerned, though. If she were, she’d be glancing over her shoulder frequently. But she’s in her own little world under the glow of the lanterns, working on a disturbingly accurate portrayal of the man in the inset of the newspaper article. Her uncle, a person she clearly loved very much. Her twiggy little arms, tense with effort, work tirelessly with sweeps of blues and purple shadows, until she’s managed to capture finer details of his eyes, nose, and mouth.
She climbs down from the stepladder and backs up, simply standing there. She’s admiring her work. Or maybe just thinking about him, about her grief. Reaching down into the shadows, her hand comes back with a small pink object. She unscrews the top and brings it to her lips to takes a swig. Booze.
“Dat’s da bomb! Like a boss, yo!” The fucking moron with blue hair and pants barely holding on to his skinny thighs walks over with his idiotic limplike swagger to stand next to her, slinging his arm over her shoulder. Why does she associate with him?
It’s moments like these—seeing guys like this—that I wish the American government took a page out of other countries’ rule books and forced every eighteen-year-old male into the military to work this level of stupid out of him.
Of course, I don’t really believe that because most of these men—boys—couldn’t face a day of war. It would break them, just like it broke the strongest of us.
“Fez . . .” She turns to glare at him. “You sound like a douche bag. You realize that, right?”
“Whatchu sayin’? Everyone loves the Fez!” He actually sounds offended. Good.
“Not everyone.”
“Then how come I got over five hundred thousand followers on my channel?”
“Because their brains haven’t fully formed yet.” She swats his arm off her and steps away. “And don’t touch me unless I tell you that you can.”
I smile. But I’m also on alert now, wondering how he’s going to react to such a low blow to his ego. Wondering how I’m going to handle just sitting here and watching it happen, because I can’t spring out of the shadows to save her.
He simply scratches the back of his head. Maybe he’s used to this level of abuse from her. Maybe he likes it. “That’s a good one of Ned. He would have loved that,” he offers, suddenly switching to standard English.
A pause and then, “Thanks.” Her voice softens instantly.
“I guess you’re cuttin’ it now?”
She drags the ladder over to the mostly blank canvas of wall beside him. “I’m just getting started.” Her lithe body climbs the steps to the top, to stretch on the tiptoes of her Doc Martens, reaching as far as she can with seemingly no concern about falling.
With a sigh of relief, I settle back against the wall with arms folded over my chest, curious to see what she’s going to come up with now. People so rarely surprise me anymore, but I have a feeling she might.
The latest song ends and a new one begins, with a stronger, more mesmerizing beat. While she needs to keep her hips and feet still for balance, her free hand begins waving and dipping with the rhythm as her other hand lays waste to the wall with large sweeps of black paint. It’s another face, I can tell. Apparently she has a thing for drawing faces, if this and her sketchbook at home are any indication.
“Hey. You got a light?” A raspy whisper calls out from my left, about ten feet away, where the guy has sat quietly for the past hour.
“No.”
He shuffles over, closer, until the pungent smell of him has my nostrils flaring. “How about a twenty, then?”
I don’t answer. While my patience can be infinite for a specific task, it’s almost nonexistent for late-night junkies trying to accost someone minding his own business.
“Come on, man!”
I should have expected this. They don’t like it when you ignore them.
It’s unlikely our voices will carry over the music, unless this junkie gets more irate, which is possible. Ivy can’t be so oblivious to expect that they are the only ones here, but if she discovers me, there’s no way to explain why I am, too.
“I just need a fix and I’ll be good. Just help me out with—”
His voice cuts out as soon as my fist delivers an uppercut under his jaw. I grab hold of his filthy body to ease it down carefully. He should be out for a while.
Hoping that earns me some peace, I continue watching Ivy work, until the face begins to take shape. A man, with black hair and a long, slender nose and square jaw. It’s hard to tell what color his eyes are from this distance, and the poor lighting, but I can tell they’re dark. It’s not until she begins spraying the outline of a short, sculpted beard that I realize who the man is.
She’s painting me.
My face, on the wall of this dilapidated, condemned building.
It shouldn’t please me, and yet it does.
I smile. I’ve gotten inside her head without even trying.
I’ve been trained to resist the urges of sleep, to push myself longer and further than a normal human being. I’ve survived on no more than four hours of rest per night for weeks at a time. Many nights, I rely on Ambien to drift off. But I’ve been awake for nearly two days now, aside from that short catnap in my car, and my eyes burn with exhaustion.
Still, I tail Ivy as she walks the length of Ocean Beach, her sketchbook tucked under an arm. The rising sun and quiet streets make it more difficult, but I manage to keep my presence unknown, because that’s what I’m good at.
She heads toward the shoreline and settles herself onto a crop of stones, giving the surfer in the distance a moment of her attention. He’s impressive enough to distract even me, navigating the treacherous swells of the outer sandbar with the expertise of a seasoned surfer. He’d have to be. These are some of the hardest waves to surf in the world, especially in prime season, which we’re deep in the middle of.
Growing up in San Francisco, it’s only natural that I know how to surf. Still, it’s been eleven years since I rode these waves. Eight since I stood on a board in San Diego, near the base. At one time, some people called me an expert, too.
My experience with deep, frigid waters and sweeping currents certainly helped when it came to passing the intensive tests that are required to become a SEAL. Tests that only twenty percent of candidates ever pass. I blew through the basic physical requirements. In the intensive twenty-four-week-long BUD/S training program, I led my group for time in the physical conditioning and combat diving phases.
For a sport that I enjoyed so much, I’m surprised I’ve forgotten it so easily. I watch that surfer now with a small amount of envy, and promise myself that, when this assignment is over, I’ll coast on a barrel wave again.
Ivy has dismissed the surfer already and is now flipping pages over in her sketchbook, her hair fluttering around her with the soft breeze. Her head’s down and she has seemingly shut out everything around her. After a full night of spray-painting walls, I don’t know how she has any desire to draw, but I guess that’s why I’m not an artist. My creativity is limited to how I’m going to get past security gates and passcodes and barking dogs without being identified.
I simply lean against a lightpost and watch as she sketches from that rock for half an hour, as the sun rises farther in the sky and people in brightly colored latex outfits pass her, out for their morning jog—some alone, some in groups, some with dogs who veer off path with noses pointed toward her—until she closes her book, tucks it under her arm, and trudges through the sand toward her car.
Not until I’ve watched her drag her feet up the stairs of her home, her energy finally spent, do I leave her for my own rented bed.
“Yeah,” I say into the receiver, my eyes shut against the beam of midmorning sunlight shining directly on me. The thin and tattered cotton curtain hanging over the window is pointless for both shade and decoration.
“What’s the update?”
I sigh. “Negative for the house.”
“You’ve searched everywhere?” Bentley pants into the receiver. I assume he’s on his treadmill. The guy always loved going for a morning run.
“Top to bottom.”
“Dammit,” he mutters under his breath.
I reach over my head to pinch and tug at the lifted wallpaper seam until it begins to tear away, waiting for Bentley to say something. If he’s going to annoy me by checking up daily like this, then he can be the one putting effort into the conversation. And if he pisses me off enough, I can just go back to Greece.
Except I’m not going to do that, because for some stupid reason, I already feel a vested interest in making sure that video is found and nothing happens to Ivy in the process. Because even though I don’t have evidence for this, I have a gut feeling that she’s completely innocent.
“What’s your next move?”
“The shop. And her.”
“Keep me informed. If nothing turns up today, I’ll bring in help for you.”
“What? No.” My stomach tightens instantly. “You know I work alone.”
“And you know that this tape needs to be found or we’re all fucked!” he snaps. “This job of yours? Any future assignments? You can kiss it all good-bye.” He pauses, and when he speaks again, his tone is more calm. “They’ll be there to help turn over rocks.”
“I thought you said you didn’t want any more people involved?”
“I don’t. These two are the idiots who helped make the mess, so now they’re going to help clean it up.”
The two guys who killed Royce and Ivy’s uncle. Great.
“They’ll stay out of your way with the girl. I agree, it’s best you work on her alone.”
The dial tone fills my ear and I realize that he’s hung up on me. Tossing the phone onto the bed next to me, I simply lie there for a moment, listening to car doors slam and horns honk from down below. It’s cool outside, but that doesn’t translate in here, with the poor air circulation. The air duct on the wall across from me is meant for air-conditioning, but it’s being used for nothing more than the hidden camera that I found in my preliminary search, expecting as much. I covered it with a piece of cardboard for privacy and left it at that. The scrawny forty-year-old male receptionist downstairs doesn’t need to be jerking off to the sight of my unconscious naked body, but I’m not going to say shit about it, just like he’s not going to say anything about the torn wallpaper.
I give my forehead a hard rub, an annoyed whisper of “Fuck . . .” slipping out of my mouth. Bringing those two guys in means that they could connect me to this. I’m usually far removed from Alliance and for good reason. This is a mistake on Bentley’s part, but it’s his call. He must be desperate.
I reach up and pull another chunk off. Something to kill time with while I wait to resume the search for this damning video confession.
And see Ivy.
