Had she lost her mind?
Down the hall, the deep rumble of a thank-you was followed by the front door shutting and his heavy footfalls coming back toward the kitchen.
Standing up fast, she put the two stacks of papers on the table and kept her eyes on them. She couldn’t look at him. Just didn’t have the strength at the moment.
“I think you’d better go.” Her voice didn’t sound right, but then, she didn’t feel right.
“Okay. I’ll call a cab.”
Crap. His bike was back at the station house, wasn’t it.
With a silent curse, she muttered, “That’s all right. I can drive you—”
“No, a cab is better.”
She nodded and brushed the front page of the report . . . right where Sissy’s vital stats and disappearance date were listed. “We’ll go through this in the office tomorrow morning.”
“Yeah.” As he pulled on his coat, the soft sound of fabric on fabric was loud as the doorbell. “I’m sorry.”
She crossed her arms over her chest and nodded again. “Yeah, me, too. I don’t know what got into me.”
But she damn sure knew what would have if dinner hadn’t arrived in the nick of time.
Moments later, he was gone, and he shut the door behind him so quietly it didn’t make any sound.
When she finally looked over her shoulder, all she saw was the pizza on the counter. Uh-huh, right, like she was eating anything right now.
The box went right into the fridge.
On her way out, she passed the table and found her panty hose on the back of a chair. Her scrunchie, on the other hand, was on the floor by the archway into the little dining room. Leaning over to pick the thing up, she went eye-to-eye with the Victoria’s Secret payload.
And realized that her bra was still waaaaaay out of place.
She left the bags where they were and fixed the immediate problem with a couple of jerks and a whole lot more cursing.
As she headed for the stairs, she thought, tomorrow she was wearing her old boring cotton underwear to work, thank you very much.
CHAPTER 12
“Question. Is it still B and E if you don’t actually break anything to get inside?”
Adrian let that little ditty fly just as Jim and the boys took form in Thomas DelVecchio Jr.’s front hall—and all things considered, the angel could have come up with a much worse comment. Or broken into an ear-destroying, off-key rendition of “Take Me Out to the Ball Game.”
Jim had never spent so much time praying for plugs and muffs.
At least the bastard didn’t try to rap.
“Well?” Ad said.
“Look, we don’t even exist,” Jim muttered. “So you could argue we’re not really here anyway.”
“Excellent point. Guess it’s legal.”
“Like it would bother you if the shit weren’t.”
The house was decorated in exactly Jim’s style: functional, nothing special, lot of empty floor space. The problem? Not a lot of personal effects, and they needed one that had some metal in it. Preferably gold, silver, or platinum. If they could get just an object with enough of Veck’s imprint on it, they could use that as a connection to get into the man’s brain from a remote location: According to Eddie, it was too risky to do it one-on-one in person. Not with Devina around.
“Let’s split up,” Jim said. “I’ll cover the second floor.”
As Ad and Eddie fanned out, he mounted the stairs two at a time. The master bedroom took up one whole half of the second story, although that sounded more impressive than the reality, because the total square footage of the place wasn’t more than twenty-one hundred, maybe twenty-two.
“Christ, here much, buddy?” he muttered.
There was nothing in the room but a big bed and a crappy bedside table with a lamp on it. No alarm clock— guy probably used his cell phone for that. No landline telephone, but why would you need one? Requisite flat-screen screwed into the wall with the remote in the tangled sheets.
Some dirty clothes were in a plastic bin in the corner, socks and boxer briefs hanging off the sides as if the thing were drooling black cotton. Closet revealed . . . shit actually on hangers, which was better than the duffel bag shuffle Jim had lived with for years. On the back of the door, there were a couple of belts with metal fittings, but there had to be something better he could use.
He headed for the bathroom. All the lights were off, but the guy didn’t believe in drapes, so there was enough from the streetlights to go by—
As soon as he stepped into the squat, tiled room, the back of his neck went wild, ants crawling over his skin.
“Where are you,” he said, turning in a tight circle. “Where the hell are you . . .”
The demon had been here—he could sense her presence lingering in the air, kind of like the stench of garbage hanging onto a trash bin even after the thing had been emptied.
And didn’t this lend a little credibility to Devina’s reveal at the diner.
As he turned to the sink, he frowned. The mirror was covered with a towel, and the tickling at his nape grew more intense as he reached up and pulled the terry cloth down.
Nothing except an eighties-vintage medicine cabinet sunken into the drywall. But the glass-front face of the thing was utterly contaminated.
Had she come through it somehow? he wondered.
The instant his fingertips made contact with the reflective surface, he retracted his hand. The medicine cabinet was icy cold.
Shit, Veck knew something was after him, didn’t he. Why else drape the thing? The question was, how far was that demon into him?
“What did you do to him, bitch.”
Replacing the towel, Jim opened the vanity drawers, rattling the backup deodorant and the extra toothpaste and the nail clippers—hey, maybe they would work. Except they were hardly something the guy would have an emotional connection with—
Light swept across the front of the house, blasting through the window Jim was standing in front of, and reminding him that he hadn’t bothered to go invisi.
Disappearing himself, he looked out of the window. Directly below e driveway, Veck got out of a Yellow Cab.
Jim ghosted away from the master suite and drafted down the front stairs, becoming nothing but a disturbance of the air. Over in the kitchen he found that Ad and Eddie had done as he had, and the three of them waited together, forming nothing more than a warm pocket in the far corner of the room.
At the far end of the front hall, the door opened and closed, and got locked. Then some heavy-ass feet came down toward where they were standing.
“Fucking . . . hell . . .”
The cursing continued as Veck entered the kitchen, tossed his keys and ripped off his jacket. Next move was to go to the refrigerator and grab a longneck. Cracking the lid and drinking hard, it was clear he’d had a whole lot of bad night wash over his transom—
Abruptly, the man leveled his head, lowered the beer, and looked directly where they were all standing.
He shouldn’t be able to sense them, much less see them.
None of them moved. Including Veck.
