Flight

“You’re right,” Myles said. “It isn’t good for us to stand out here where we might be seen. Although I doubt many police officers lunch at the Cliffside. A bit above your touch, isn’t it?”

“How did you know—”

“Hold your hands out to your sides,” Myles said, suddenly stepping very close to him.

Hitch’s legs felt wobbly. The bastard was going to take his weapon from him. He knew he shouldn’t let him do it, but Hitch couldn’t find it in himself to resist. He wanted to weep from the fear and shame he felt as Myles reached for the button of his suit coat and unfastened it. Myles smiled down at him again, a hard, icy smile. Myles’s hand moved slowly inside the jacket — then he startled Hitch by plunging that hand into Hitch’s pants pocket and pulling out his keys.

Myles stepped back, still smiling, and tossed them to one of the other men.

Hitch felt a rush of relief that Myles all too apparently observed, so that the relief was quickly followed by anger and a deeper sense of humiliation than he had felt when the other man was touching him.

“What?” Hitch said with false bravado. “All of a sudden you need keys to get into my car? Or were you just copping a feel?”

“Let’s go,” Myles said in a bored tone, then turned and started walking toward a white limo.

“Fuck, no!” Hitch said, knowing whose limo it must be. “You’ve probably just blown everything. What is it with you guys? You were fool enough to show up at that funeral, one of his other men causes a scene — at a flower shop, for God’s sake—”

Myles kept walking.

“I’m telling you, the department is watching his every move!”

Myles stopped, turned, and said, “Do you want to see me in a mood as foul as your language?”

Hitch hurried after him.

Myles held a door to the limo open, making a mocking “after you” gesture.

As he bent to enter, Hitch hesitated. The interior of the limousine was warm and white and smelled of sex.

He saw the woman first — her white stiletto heels, her lacy underwear around her slender ankles, her white silk skirt pushed up almost to her hips, her nipples dark beneath her thin white blouse, her full red lips, her blue eyes, her long blond hair. He had seen her a few times before, of course, but never this close. She wasn’t young, maybe in her thirties, but he had seen plenty of women in their twenties who didn’t have half of what she had going for her. Even in his anxiety, he responded to her. She leaned back lazily, posing alluringly in the corner, her long legs falling slightly apart at the knees.

Hitch blushed. She smiled at him.

Then he saw Dane. If someone had dumped a bucket of ice water on his crotch, it could not have more effectively taken his mind off the woman.

He had known Dane would be in the car, of course. Dane wasn’t looking at him, or at the woman, but he felt sure that Dane knew he had been staring at the woman’s thighs, at the way her nipples showed through her blouse. Dane’s own clothes were not in the least disarrayed.

“Get in,” Myles said behind him, and Hitch climbed in, perching his large body on the edge of the long leather seat opposite Dane. Through the tinted rear window, he saw his own car pull up behind the limo.

Myles entered after Hitch, shutting the door. As soon as it closed, the limo began moving, pulling out of the parking lot. The driver of Hitch’s car followed.

The woman leaned over to pull her panties up from around her ankles.

“No, Tessa,” Dane said, not looking at her. Tessa sat back, seemingly untroubled by the idea of leaving the panties where they were.

Hitch averted his eyes, not looking at either of them for a time. But soon he found himself watching Dane, and only Dane.

Dane sat silently, looking out the window nearest him, his head turned so that Hitch saw only one side of his face — the left side, the side on which he wore the eye patch. Hitch was always uneasy when beholding that black wedge on Dane’s pale face, and it now seemed more menacing than ever, as if that unseeing profile were all- seeing, as if his every thought had been scanned by that darkness, his fears absorbed through its cloth into Dane’s awareness. It stared at him, and nothing could be hidden from it.

He remained silent, knowing that Dane would not take kindly to an initiation of conversation. He had learned this early on. He did not ask questions, although his head was full of them. Or at least one question.

It was not Where is he taking me?

It was Is he going to kill me?

Hitch felt his fine midday meal roiling in his stomach. The martinis threatened to rise with it into his throat. He looked for a switch to lower a window, but found none.

“An old friend of yours is in town,” Myles said, startling him.

“Who?” Hitch asked, a little tremor in his voice making him sound, even to his own ears, like an ailing owl.

“Elena Rosario — but please, don’t ask any other question to which you already know the answer.”

Hitch looked over at Dane, who hadn’t moved.

“Mr. Dane has questions for Ms. Rosario,” Myles said.

“Look, I haven’t seen her in ten years. She won’t talk to me about anything, so I can’t help you. I didn’t even know she was back — someone told me she might have been the veiled woman at the funeral yesterday—”