It had been a long drive from Rochester. Despite the fact that Paige had made longer trips in a much crappier car, she felt every mile as if each one had knuckles to rap against her temples. She missed the rattling comfort of the Chevy Cavalier that had served her so well before sputtering its last breath. What little solace she could gain from the two-door Hyundai she’d rented had been eroded by the company she’d been forced to keep.
“Are we there yet?” Rico groaned. When he saw the death glare Paige shot him, he flashed an expanse of blocky teeth. “Just kidding.”
“Wasn’t funny three hours ago and it ain’t funny now.”
“Why didn’t the nymphs teleport us to where we needed to go?” asked the young Skinner who’d passed off a fake ID well enough to sign the car’s rental agreement. “Are the Mounties cracking down on tittie bars on Canadian soil?”
“I already told you. After the Nymar set us up to take the fall for all those cops that were killed, the nymphs want to keep their distance from us for a while,” Paige explained.
The man in the passenger seat wore a thick biker’s jacket wrapped around a solid muscular frame. After several days of hopping from one cheap motel to another, Rico’s face had become overgrown with the promising start of a graying beard. It was the best opportunity short of surgery to separate himself from the pictures that had been making the rounds on the national news networks after the legal trouble started. Rico was no stranger to scraping the law the wrong way. Even though the last several weeks had been filled with enough running and hiding to make the Skinners feel more like prey than hunters, he hadn’t missed a wink of sleep.
Paige sat in a relaxed posture behind the wheel, with one elbow propped against the window frame so she could keep the tips of her fingers pressed against her forehead. Whenever the car skidded on a patch of wet pavement, she corrected with an instinctive tilt of the wheel or pump of the brakes. “Is there a reason you decided to bring up the nymphs again?”
“Yeah,” the man in the backseat replied. He extended one finger to point at a billboard on the side of the road that read: TURN RIGHT FOR ANDREA’S CHAMPAGNE ROOM. LIVE DANCING AND BUFFET.
When Paige looked at the other Skinner, using the rearview mirror, she found a man in his late twenties with light olive skin, a large nose, and hair cut into a flat top that could be found on any soldier after his first day of boot camp. He’d been fidgety ever since she picked him up at a safe house in a wooded section of New York’s Wayne County. The nervousness was easy enough to explain, since all Skinners had either been burned out of their homes by Nymar or placed on the Most Wanted lists by local and federal authorities. “What makes you think that’s a nymph bar?” Paige asked.
“The buffet. We could stop in and check. Or maybe you could call Tristan. She’d be able to tell us where to go for—”
“Oh she’ll tell us where to go, all right. Besides, it’s too late to need any help with transport. The Nymar we’re after is in Toronto, and we’ve been in Toronto for fifteen minutes.”
“What about gettin’ home?” Rico asked. “You tellin’ me we gotta drive all the way back to St. Louis from here?”
“We’ll figure something out.”
“Just like you figured out with Cole?”
Paige’s foot slammed against the brake pedal, putting the car into a skid that made a stomach-wrenching sound of rubber brushing against pavement that still glistened with rain. They were on a section of the Gardiner Expressway that looked down on a row of squat gray buildings to the left and had a view of an ornate structure with tall towers topped with small green domes on the right. Several cars honked at her, which did nothing to prevent her from coming to a stop on the side of the road.
Her hair had been clipped into a pointed bob the previous summer, and although she tried to maintain the style in the following months, it had grown out into a simpler shape that was only slightly longer along the sides than it was in back. Anger filled her brown eyes, and the nostrils of her subtly bent nose flared as she asked, “Just what the fuck was that supposed to mean?”
“You heard me, Bloodhound. You were at that warehouse in Denver when the shit went down with the Nymar and those dead cops. Or, I should say you were there at the end when you were flown in via helicopter like a goddamn rock star.”
“Yeah,” the guy in the backseat chimed in. “What’s the deal with that?”
Paige jabbed a finger at the younger man as if she meant to shatter the car’s rear window. “You don’t get to talk to me like that. In fact, do yourself a favor and stop talking altogether.”
When the guy prepared to defend himself, Rico waved at him and said, “Best listen to her, Steve. You weren’t there.”
As she shifted her eyes toward Rico, a hint of pain could be seen amidst the ever-present fierceness. “Any reason you decided to spring this on me now after we’ve been in the car all this time?”
“I was hoping you’d tell me on yer own. After all we been through, it’s the least you could do.”
“It’s between me and Cole,” she said while cranking the steering wheel so she could reenter the flow of eastbound traffic. “And when are we supposed to talk? We’ve been on the run, living off of beef jerky and coffee for two weeks.”
“Then we had that split after nearly getting pinched by those cops in Bismarck,” Rico chuckled fondly.
“We’ve been hiding in ditches and laying low in basements until we got into New York. Ever since then we’ve had that one tagging along.”
Responding to the scarred hand being waved back at him from the driver’s seat, Steve grunted. “You can trust me. I’m a damn Skinner too.”
“So you keep saying,” she told him. “You may have plenty of people vouching for you and a good record in MEG’s files, but you still need to earn your stripes with me, And it’s funny to hear you so concerned about Cole, Rico. Last time I checked, you hadn’t even gone to look in on him.”
“When did you check?”
“Does it matter?”
Suddenly, Rico became concerned with adjusting the vent so warm air from the heater was hitting his face at precisely the right angle. “All right, you got me. I ain’t exactly eager to walk into another prison. Odds are about fifty-fifty of me not walkin’ out again. Besides, after you left to back Gerald’s play when he moved to Chicago, you stopped bein’ me and Ned’s partner. You never checked in on us until you needed help in St. Louis.”
Paige shook her head while weaving between cars on the sloppy expressway. “Are you trying to come off like you stood by Ned no matter what? You expect me to forget about you going rogue in the Badlands or doing work for the mob?”
“Allegedly,” Rico corrected as he snapped an uneasy glare over his shoulder. He shifted in his seat and focused on the road in front of him. Despite being only a few hours away from New York, he could feel a difference in his surroundings. It wasn’t exactly foreign soil, but Canada had a calmness to it that struck a Skinner like the tranquil look in a deer’s eyes when it had no clue how many rifles were pointed at its head. “Maybe me and Ned weren’t exactly sentimental, but that still don’t mean you get a pass on what happened in Denver.”
The bulk of the city was behind them, leaving a wide open expanse of concrete to fill the windshield. The evening rush hour was over, but just barely. Rain that had fallen weeks ago remained pooled on the side of the road, illuminated by the dimming rays of the sun and streetlights that were too weak to cast more than a glow before night fully took hold. Paige scanned the signs marking the upcoming exits and allowed herself to settle into her seat. “What happened in Denver is what needed to happen. I’ll see to it that it gets explained to Cole, but I don’t need to explain it to anyone else.”
“The hell you don’t. I’m the only one of us that trusts you anymore. The only way for that to change is for you to come clean because you sure as hell can’t survive in this fight alone.”
“So when you talk about the other Skinners, are you referring to the ones like Abel and Selina who joined up with Hope and Tara to set us all up for this fall? Yeah, I really want to make sure they don’t think badly of me.”
She didn’t have to look over at Rico to know he was glaring at her. “Some of ’em double-crossed us,” he said sternly, “but there are plenty out there just trying to stay alive. We lost some good people when Liam and those
