great quotes. I made her promise not to tell you, ’cause I knew you and Mom would freak if you knew I was going out to see her.”
“No,” I said defensively, “we’d have understood.”
“She’s actually a very nice person,” Angie said.
“Yeah, for sure. She is.”
“It’s not the sort of thing I’d like to do for a living, though, you know?”
I nodded. “Well, I don’t like to judge.”
Angie smiled. “I hope you’re not pissed.”
It was my turn to smile. “I’ll get over it. Listen, you really should get checked out.”
She turned and there was Trevor, trying hard to look nonchalant in his long black coat, but you could see it in his eyes, that he was rattled, that he’d been through a night like no other. Morpheus seemed a bit drained, too, standing at Trevor’s side, leaning into him, his long tongue hanging in front of him.
Angie approached Trevor, smiled. “Thank you,” she said. She leaned in and gave him a light kiss on the cheek. “Thanks for being there. I guess I’ll give you shit later about how you happened to know where we were.”
He said, “Nothing I ever did was meant to hurt you. It was meant to protect you.”
“Yeah, well, I think you got lucky on that one.”
“I wasn’t the only one,” he said, as if to remind her that her good fortune was linked to him in some small way. “I think this is one of those defining moments.”
“What?” Angie said.
“A moment that defines who you and I are, what we mean to each other. We’ve been caught together in a confluence. I don’t see how either one of us can ignore that.”
The attendants were closing the ambulance door, leaving Angie with nothing else to say, but she waved her fingers at me and mouthed, “I love you.” I waved back and watched her face through the window as the ambulance pulled away.
I got out my cell and phoned home. It was going to be hard to explain to Sarah that Angie being at the hospital, in the overall scheme of things, was actually the best news I’d had to share all evening.
“Hello?” she said tiredly.
“It’s me,” I said.
“Hey, what time is it? Oh my God, do you know what time it is?”
“It’s late, yeah, sorry.”
“It’s the middle of the night. Wait, I’m going to see if Angie’s back.”
“Just listen a sec. The first thing I have to tell you is, everybody’s fine, we’re all okay.”
You just know, when someone starts off the conversation that way, everything you’re about to hear is going to be bad.
The cops kept me, and Trevor, for hours. I guess they had others interviewing Trevor, but me they put in a car so that we could all take a trip to Bullock’s place, where I showed them the haul from the Brentwood’s heist, the room where Angie’d been held, Pockmark and the Barbies shot. Pockmark wasn’t there, but was picked up early in the morning in the ER at Mercy General. There was blood on the garage floor, presumably from where Blondie had shot Trimble before putting his body into the Annihilator.
I told them Bullock, or possibly one of his two henchmen, had put Lawrence Jones into the hospital and killed the
I told them about how I’d bought a car at a government auction that had supposedly, at one time, been loaded with drugs, and how Eddie Mayhew had hoped to pull a fast one on Lenny Indigo’s people by sneaking the drugs out and selling them to a rival organization. About how the only cop I felt I could trust was the last one in the world I should have called, and how Trimble’s apparent moves toward redemption had come too late to make a difference.
There were lots of other details to fill in, but I gave them the broad strokes. And then I called the city desk and said that, after I’d gone home and had a bit of sleep, I’d be coming in.
I had a story to write.
A couple of days later, we had a few people over to the house. Sarah made a chocolate cake. A Betty Crocker mix, with icing out of the can. Angie’s favorite. I wore some more of my new clothes.
Trixie drove in from Oakwood. A few of the people from the paper, friends of Stan’s, came by. Bertrand Magnuson even dropped by, briefly, and took me aside. “If it’d been me,” he said, “I’d have shot that fucker in the nuts instead of the leg.” A detective I’d spent several hours explaining everything to dropped in for a short visit, long enough to grab a piece of cake. It was a low-key affair, no speeches, no toasts, just a chance to celebrate quietly that Angie was okay, and that this whole mess with Barbie Bullock and his gang was behind us.
Trevor Wylie was there, wearing his shades in the house, shadowing Angie as much as she’d allow it. At one point, when they were both in the kitchen, I heard him pressing her to take a short walk with him, to get some air. “Maybe later,” Angie told him.
What I learned was, she was expecting some special company. “I’ve invited Cameron to come by,” Angie said while Trevor was out of earshot. She sidled up next to me as I used one of our carving knives to cut a piece of cake for a guest. I knew we had a pastry knife and lifter somewhere, but that was the kind of thing only Sarah would be able to find.
“That’s great,” I said.
“He’s been really worried about me, after all that happened, so I asked him to come over. It’ll give you a chance to meet him. He’s really a nice guy, and I’m ready to introduce you, provided you don’t go wandering around his house late at night when I’m already upstairs asleep.”
“That’d be nice,” I said, trying to suppress a smirk. “I’m sure he’ll be interested to meet me, too.”
Trevor interrupted us. “Can I get you anything, Angie?” he asked.
“No, I’m good.”
“You want to catch some air now? Because there are some things I’d like to talk to you about.”
Angie glanced at me, the back of her head to Trevor, and her eyes rolled. “I can’t just walk out now, Trev, not with all these people here, okay?”
“I’ll be around,” he said, slipping out of the kitchen.
Quietly, Angie said to me, “I know he was there for me, for us, at the right time, but honestly, he’s freaking me out. But there’s like some Chinese or Indian tradition or something going on here, that he feels he’s obligated to watch out for me forever now. You save someone’s life, you have to hound them till the day they die.”
“I know,” I said. “It’s awkward, isn’t it? Considering.”
“Yeah. You know what he told me?” I leaned in. “He said we’re linked cosmically. At first, I thought he said ‘comically,’ and so I laughed, and that was definitely the wrong thing to do. He tells me, if he’s not with me, he won’t ever be with anyone. It was like he wanted to add I wouldn’t ever be with anyone else either.”
“Let me think about a way to handle it,” I said. Angie gave me a look. “I’ll talk to your mom. I won’t do anything crazy. How you doing, otherwise?”
“I don’t know if it’s all hit me yet. It’s hard to believe it all really happened. Like maybe it was just a bad dream.”
“That’s kind of how I feel,” I said, and kissed her on the forehead before Angie went back to talk to our guests.
There was a knock at the door. I opened it and came face-to-face with my attacker: Angie’s boyfriend Cameron. I’d never had a good look at him, and he was a good-looking boy, about my height, trying to grow a bit of hair on his face and not having a lot of luck with it.
He eyed me curiously, leaned back to double-check the number above the front door.
“Uh, are you Angie’s dad?”
I admitted it.
“I came by to see her? She said there was sort of a thing going on?”
“Sure,” I said, and when I turned to open the door wider, he was able to see what was left of the bruise on
