Envy the Night

8

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The sign on the door said CLOSED, and there were no lights on in the office. Frank was early, too. So had she forgotten, or was she planning to come back? It was only five twenty. He stood on the sidewalk in front of the body shop with two full grocery bags in his hands and wondered what the hell he should do.

She didn’t seem like the type to forget. Too put together and in control for that. Things had gotten a little hectic there, with the gray-haired guy rushing everybody, and it was possible. She’d said six, though, and that was a while off, so maybe he should just wait.

He set the bags down by the front door and looked around, wondering what Nora Stafford drove. The only car parked on this side of the street was a black Dodge Charger a block away. No cars in the handful of parking spaces in front of the shop. Maybe she’d gone out on another tow. He’d check to see if the truck was still parked behind the shop. If not, he’d wait. If so . . . maybe wait a little less.

Leaving the groceries where they were, he walked around the building and into the back parking lot. There was a wire security fence around the lot to protect the towed vehicles, but the gate was open, suggesting she hadn’t left for the day. He went through the gate and into the parking lot and saw the tow truck parked there, his battered Jeep behind it. Okay, she wasn’t out on a tow. But the gate wasn’t locked, either. So where the hell had she gone?

At first, he thought he’d imagined the cry. Short and muffled, not a scream but a mild sound of outrage, or maybe pain. He tilted his head and listened and heard nothing but silence. Took a few steps toward the back door. Still no sounds, but now he could see light on the other side of the door. Then something fell inside, a clang of metal on concrete.

He saw them as soon as he opened the door. A tall man with his back to Frank, shoving Nora Stafford against a toolbox on the far wall. He had her arm twisted behind her back and his other hand covered her mouth while he used his weight to keep her pinned against that toolbox and spoke in a low voice. Frank probably could have made out the words if he’d tried, but he was already moving, crossing the concrete floor fast and quiet, sidestepping enough to keep himself positioned behind the tall man’s back, out of his line of sight.

It was maybe fifty feet from the back door to where they stood, and Frank made about forty of it before the guy heard him or sensed the motion. He twisted his head, saw Frank coming at him, and shoved Nora Stafford away. A small pile of bolts and a socket wrench hit the floor with her, bouncing off the concrete in a jingle of metal as the tall man reached under his jacket and brought a gun up.

For his thirteenth birthday, Frank Temple’s father gave him a musty hardbound book with a blue cover. Kill or Get Killed, the title. A close-quarters combat text. His grandfather’s book, then his father’s, now Frank’s. Read it, his father told him. All of it. Frank had. Two weeks later, his father challenged him to try to take a gun out of his hand. The first of many lessons.

The gun facing him now was a 9 mm automatic, and the man who held it was used to the sight of a gun having some stopping power on its own, because he kept lifting it, passing over Frank’s body and aiming for his face. He wasn’t planning to shoot. Frank knew that as he closed the rest of the distance between them. Put a gun in the face of most people, they’ll stop moving. That was the expectation. The reality was going to be a little different.

Frank’s first strike, delivered a quarter of a second before the next, was with the edge of his left hand on the wrist that held the gun. He moved his head down and to the right as he did it, and then the gun was pointing harmlessly away from him. The second strike was really two at the same time—he hit the tall man’s chin with the heel of his right hand while he brought his right knee up and into the groin. It was a simple move, using the momentum he already had from his forward rush, but it was effective. He actually missed with his knee, hit on the inside of the man’s thigh instead of the groin, but since the guy’s head had already snapped back the blow was enough to keep him going. He hit the same toolbox that he’d pinned Nora Stafford against, and now Frank caught the man’s wrist with his left hand and slammed it into the metal edge of the toolbox. The gun came free and bounced away. Frank ignored it, got his hand behind the other man’s neck while he released his wrist and then slammed him forward, using his leg to upend him and spill him onto the floor.

The guy took the fall well, rolled back onto his feet and lunged upward just in time to be greeted with the socket wrench Frank had recovered from the floor. He laced it downward with an easy stroke, about fifty percent of his strength going into the blow, but it was plenty. Caught the guy right across the back of his skull and dropped him back onto the floor.

It should have been done, but Frank was caught by the tide now, unsatisfied with just how damn easy this had been, wanted to grab that gun off the floor and put it to the bastard’s knee and blow a cloud of blood and bone onto the concrete. He went for the gun, saw it wasn’t on the floor, and looked up to see Nora Stafford standing with the weapon in her hand. Her eyes moved from Frank to the man at his feet, and then she held the gun out.

“Here.”

It was a Glock, no safety to remove, just squeeze that trigger and watch the thing kill. Frank knew the gun well. By the time it touched his palm, though, the flush of rage was gone, a cool calm sliding back into its place. He slipped the Glock into his waistband, cast one glance at the unconscious man on the floor, and then turned back to Nora Stafford.

“It would seem,” he said, “that you should probably call the police.”

Frank was worried about her until she came back out of the office. Was she going to fall apart, get hysterical, give him another problem to deal with before the cops showed? Then she stepped back into the room and stared at the tall son of a bitch stretched out on the concrete and he knew she was fine. The look was laden with anger and disgust, not fear.

“You’re early,” she told Frank.

He nodded. “Didn’t want my milk to spoil.”

A smile tugged at the corner of her mouth. “Wouldn’t want that, no. Thanks for the help. He just walked right in here . . .”

“You don’t know him?”

“No. He came in this afternoon and asked about the Lexus.”

Frank tilted his head. “Car that I hit?”

“You got it.”

He blew out a long sigh as a siren began to close on the body shop and looked to the side, where the partially disassembled Lexus stood.

“That guy was all wrong. Shit, I’m sorry. I should have said something earlier. Had a bad sense about him, but I was trying to ignore it. Figured it had nothing to do with me.”

That was total bullshit—Frank’s original sense about the guy was a personal thing indeed, but he didn’t see what would be gained from explaining that to Nora.

“I had the same sense, and told myself the same thing,” she said, “but I didn’t count on this.”

She was holding her right wrist with her left hand, rubbing it gently, and Frank saw for the first time the dark red streaks left on her skin, left by a firm and no doubt painful grasp.

“You okay?” he said.

“Fine.” She dropped her arm as if embarrassed to have her pain noted.

“What did he want?” Frank gestured at the unconscious man with his toe.

“To know where your buddy in the Lexus went.”

“No kidding?” Frank looked at the guy on the floor. He’d arrived pretty damn fast after the car was left at Stafford’s Collision and Custom. And if he didn’t know where Dave O’Connor had gone, then how had he found the Lexus?

Frank slid the Glock out of his waistband and looked at it. Good gun, not uncommon, but the sort of thing preferred by people who knew what they were doing. The guy he’d taken it from hadn’t been that bad, either. Just hadn’t expected Frank to be any good, that was the difference. The way he’d shoved Nora past him and cleared the