“What are you talking about?”
He spat out seeds. “I was planning on keeping tabs on Naylor, from a safe distance-get a handle on his routine, his associates, all the rest; give you a little more to work with. But it’s not turning out that way. He didn’t show for work today. His parents haven’t seen him since last night, and they say this is out of character; the father’s in a wheelchair, it’s not like John to leave his mammy to do the heavy lifting on her own. Your Sammy and a couple of floaters are taking turns sitting on his house, and we’ve told Byrne and Doherty to keep an eye out. For whatever that’s worth.”
“He won’t go far,” I said. “This guy wouldn’t leave Glenskehy unless he was dragged away kicking and screaming. He’ll turn up.”
“Yeah, that’s what I figure. As far as the stabbing goes, I don’t think this cuts one way or the other; it’s a myth that only the guilty ones run. But here’s one thing I do know: whatever has Naylor running, it’s not fear. Did he look scared to you?”
“No,” I said. “Not for a second. He looked furious.”
“To me, too. He wasn’t one bit happy about that interview. I watched him leave, afterwards; two steps from the door, he turned around and he spat at it. That’s one very pissed-off bogger, Cassie, and we already know he’s got a temper problem-and, like you said, he’s probably still in the area. I don’t know whether he’s gone missing because he doesn’t want us surveilling him, or because he’s got something up his sleeve, or what; but watch yourself.”
I did. All the way home I kept to the middle of the lanes, with my gun cocked and ready in my hands. I didn’t put it back into my girdle until the back gate had clanged behind me and I was safe in the garden, at the edge of the bright tracks of light from the windows.
I hadn’t rung Sam. This time it wasn’t because I’d forgotten. It was because I had no idea whether he would answer, or what either of us would have to say if he did.
17
Rafe showed up in the library the next morning, around eleven, with his coat buttoned wrong and his knapsack swinging carelessly from one hand. He stank of cigar smoke and stale Guinness, and he was still pretty unsteady on his feet. 'Well,” he said, swaying a little and surveying the four of us. “Hello, hello, hello.”
“Where have you been?” Daniel hissed. His voice had a tense edge of anger, barely suppressed. He had been a lot more worried about Rafe than he’d let on.
“Here and there,” Rafe told him. “Out and about. How are you?”
“We thought something had happened to you.” Justin’s whisper cracked, into something too loud and too sharp. “Why didn’t you ring us? Even text us?”
Rafe turned to look at him. “I was otherwise occupied,” he said, after considering this. “And I didn’t feel like it.” One of the Goon Squad, the mature students who always appoint themselves the Library Noise Vigilantes, looked up over his stack of philosophy books and went, “Shhh!”
“Your timing sucks,” Abby said coldly. “This was not a good moment to take off on a skirt hunt, and even you should have been able to figure that out.”
Rafe rocked backwards on his heels and gave her a deeply miffed look. “Fuck you,” he said, loudly and haughtily. “I’ll decide when I do what I want.”
“Don’t talk to her like that any more,” Daniel said. He didn’t even pretend to care about keeping his voice down. The entire Goon Squad went, “Shhh!” at once.
I tugged at Rafe’s sleeve. “Sit down here and talk to me.”
“Lexie,” Rafe said, managing to focus on me. His eyes were bloodshot and his hair needed washing. “I shouldn’t have left you on your own, should I?”
“I’m fine,” I said. “I’m a happy camper. Want to sit down and tell me how your night went?”
He stretched out a hand; his fingers trailed down my cheek, my throat, slipped along the neckline of my top. I saw Abby’s eyes widen behind him, heard a quick rustle from Justin’s carrel. “God, you’re so sweet,” Rafe said. “You’re not as delicate as you look, are you? Sometimes I think the rest of us are the other way around.”
One of the Goon Squad had dug up Attila, who is the narkiest security guard in the known universe. He obviously went into the job in the hope of getting to crack the heads of dangerous criminals, but since these are thin on the ground in your average college library, he gets his kicks by making lost freshers cry. “Is this fella giving you any bother?” he asked me. He was trying to loom over Rafe, but the height difference was giving him trouble.
The wall went up straight away: Daniel and Abby and Justin snapped into attitudes of cool, poised ease, even Rafe straightened up and whipped his hand away from me and managed to look instantly, effortlessly sober. “Everything’s fine,” Abby said.
“I didn’t ask you,” Attila told her. “Do you know this fella?”
He was talking to me. I gave him an angelic smile and said, “Actually, Officer, he’s my husband. I did have a barring order against him, but now I’ve changed my mind and we’re off to shag deliriously in the Ladies.” Rafe started to snicker.
“There’s no fellas allowed in the Ladies,” said Attila ominously. “And yous are causing a disturbance.”
“It’s all right,” Daniel said. He stood up and took Rafe by the upper arm-the grip looked casual, but I could see his fingers digging in hard. “We were just leaving. All of us.”
“Get off me,” Rafe snapped, trying to shrug off Daniel’s hand. Daniel steered him briskly past Attila and down the long aisle of books, without looking back to see if the rest of us were following.
We gathered up our stuff, left in a hurry through Attila’s awful warnings, and found Daniel and Rafe in the foyer. Daniel was swinging his car keys from one finger; Rafe was leaning lopsidedly against a pillar and sulking.
“Well done,” Abby said to Rafe. “Really. That was classy.”
“Don’t start.”
“But what are we doing?” Justin asked Daniel. He was carrying Daniel’s stuff, as well as his own; he looked worried and overloaded. “We can’t just leave.”
“Why not?”
There was a brief, taken-aback silence. Our routine was so ingrained, I think it had stopped occurring to any of us that it wasn’t actually a law of nature, that we could break it if we wanted to. “What’ll we do instead?” I asked.
Daniel threw the car keys into the air and caught them. “We’re going to go home and paint the sitting room,” he said. “We’ve been spending far too much time in that library. A bit of work on the house will do us all good.”
To any outsider this would have sounded deeply weird-I could hear Frank in my head, God, they’re rock ’n’ roll, how do you stand the pace? But everyone nodded, even, after a moment, Rafe. I had already noticed that the house was their safe zone: whenever things got tense, one of them would steer the conversation onto something that needed fixing or rearranging, and everyone would settle down again. We were going to be in big trouble once the house was all sorted out and we didn’t have grouting or floor stains to use as our Happy Place.
It worked, too. Old sheets thrown over the furniture and cold bright air flooding through the open windows, crap clothes and hard work and the smell of paint, ragtime playing in the background, the naughty buzz of ditching college and the house swelling like an approving cat under the attention: it was exactly what we needed. By the time we finished the room, Rafe was starting to look sheepish instead of belligerent, Abby and Justin had relaxed enough to have a long comfortable argument about whether Scott Joplin sucked, and we were all in a much better mood.
“First dibs on the shower,” I said.
“Let Rafe have it,” said Abby. “To each according to his need.” Rafe made a face at her. We were sprawled on
