vulnerable and raw than I wanted to admit. Going for Aubrey-going for anyone-was a normal kind of screwup to make. Lonely little girl reaches out to the first kind face that wanders by. Pathetic? Okay, I could accept that. I just wouldn’t let it happen again.
I wondered if Ex and Chogyi Jake knew about Kimberly. Ex, maybe. It would explain why he’d seemed so pissed off at the two of us going out. I thought Chogyi Jake would have warned me. Maybe. Or maybe not. They were quick enough to hide the bodies of the people I’d helped kill, but maybe that didn’t really put them on my side.
Whatever my side was.
“Fuck you, Aubrey,” I said to myself. “I needed a stand-up guy, and I got you instead. How fair is that?”
People came in and out of the coffee shop, mostly students, I guessed. The barista worked her machine in bursts of steam and the gurgling of espresso. Ray Charles calling his friend to go get stoned segued to a cover of “Yesterday” that pointed out how clean and soulless Paul McCartney really sounded. It was nice sharing a little morning pain with Ray, if only because he put me in perspective. I finished my coffee, left the pastry half eaten, and headed out to the street. It took a while to find a taxi, but I managed, and twenty minutes later I was home.
“Sweet fucking Jesus,” Midian said as soon as I walked in. “I figured you for dead.”
“Not dead,” I said, and tossed my purse on the couch. “Where is everyone?”
“Out looking for you,” Midian said. “Aubrey came by a couple hours ago looking like someone stole his dick and said you’d gone missing.”
“Well, you can tell him I’m back,” I said. “I need to get into some clean clothes.”
“Not such a good date, eh?” Midian asked. It was hard to tell with his ruin of a voice, but I thought he was a little amused. I didn’t answer.
I’d changed into jeans and one of Eric’s white button-down shirts when I heard Aubrey and Ex arrive. Their voices were harsh, like they’d been fighting. I stretched, summoned up my righteous anger, and headed out to take the bull by the horns.
Ex was livid. He wheeled on me as soon as I appeared in the living room.
“What exactly was that little stunt supposed to-”
“Jayne,” Aubrey said at the same time, “we need to talk about-”
I put my palm out toward Ex, shutting him down, and turned to Aubrey.
“We need to talk?” I asked.
“Yes,” he said. “Please, I understand what happened, and I know what it seems like, but-”
“Are you and Kimberly divorced?” I asked.
Aubrey blushed and looked down at his feet. Ex’s jaw actually dropped. I’d always thought that was just a figure of speech. Apparently he hadn’t known.
“Aubrey?” I said.
“We’re separated,” he said.
“Not divorced,” I said.
“No.”
“So then still married.”
“Yes.”
“And you didn’t tell me,” I said.
“No,” Aubrey said. “I should have.”
“Okay,” I said. “We’ve talked.”
I brushed past Ex and into the kitchen. It was probably only my own embarrassment and humiliation that made me read Ex’s expression as delight. When he and Aubrey followed me in a moment later, they were both perfectly sober. Midian was sitting at the kitchen table, the telephone handset to his ear.
“Jake,” he said, pointing at it. “He put me on hold. It’s okay, though. You two were loud enough back there I followed everything.”
“Good,” I said. “It’s Friday morning, almost ten o’clock. This time tomorrow, Randolph Coin’s going to be dead. Let’s try to focus on that, okay?”
“Fine by me,” Midian said, and then, into the handset, “Yeah. She’s back. Everything’s fine, or, well…fuck it, it’s close enough. Get your ass back to the ranch here, and we’ll finish up. Yeah, what?”
He paused, frowned, and shook his head.
“No. If they don’t have yellow onions, I’ll think of something else. Just bring me the rest of it,” he said, and then put the handset back in its cradle. “Since he was out anyway, I asked him to pick up some stuff. Didn’t figure we’d be going out for dinner.”
“Yeah, probably not,” I said. “Let’s go over the plan again.”
No one suggested anything else. I took out the maps and schematics, and Ex walked through the whole thing again, quizzing the three of us. Aubrey answered his questions in a clipped, hard voice and sat with his arms crossed. When Chogyi Jake appeared with a bag of groceries, Ex made him go through the whole thing by himself while Midian made ham sandwiches with fresh tomatoes and hot mustard for lunch. My brain was a storm of anger, betrayal, and humiliation, but I forced myself to follow the details of the plan. Midian and Chogyi Jake at the southeast edge of the property. Ex in his car to the north, me in among the railroad tracks to the west, and Aubrey in his minivan to the south. Three different angles, so that no matter where Coin stood, at least one of us would have a clear shot. When Chogyi Jake and Midian had drawn Coin out past his protections, Midian would give the signal by raising both hands. If for any reason he couldn’t do that, Chogyi Jake would drop to the ground. The plan to go out and look at the place physically seemed to have fallen by the wayside in the day’s drama. I didn’t bring it up.
The air between me and Aubrey should have bent with the tension, but Chogyi Jake either didn’t notice anything or, more likely, dedicated himself to ignoring it. Anything that Ex felt was covered by his drill sergeant attitude.
I felt my mind starting to get fuzzy at about one o’clock. I’d been up since eight in the morning the day before, too excited by the twin prospects of going shooting and my ill-fated date to sleep in. That put me at about twenty- nine hours awake.
“I’m going to crash for a while,” I said. “Knock if something happens.”
The silence that accompanied me out of the kitchen told me that the house would have to be on fire before anyone disturbed me. That suited me just fine.
I stripped and crawled into bed, one pillow under my head, one over it to block out light and sound. My muscles seemed to vibrate with fatigue. This time tomorrow, it’ll all be over, I told myself. I’ll be safe and rich and God as my witness, I’ll be straight the fuck out of this city. I could go back to ASU. Paying tuition out of pocket would be easy. I could get my degree. I could transfer to some other university. Hell, I could probably buy my way into the Ivy League with a few weighty donations here and there.
It was a strange thought. In a way, everything was ending tomorrow. The shot that took out Coin and broke the Invisible College also freed me. No more tattooed ninja hit squads breaking down my doors. No more need for bodyguards like Ex and Chogyi Jake. Or Aubrey.
I imagined myself going back. Driving up to the dorms in a chauffeured Rolls-Royce, maybe. I pictured Cary’s reaction, seeing me rising like a phoenix from the ashes and salted earth I’d left behind me. I slid from that to going home, paying off the mortgage on my parents’ house, buying my mother a car, telling my father that I wouldn’t go to church on Sunday if I didn’t want to, and watching him realize that his power over me was gone. Even his power to drive me away. Somewhere in it, I had become the primary funding behind the hospital in Chicago, dressed in a good Armani suit with Nicole Kidman-esque Kimberly asking my permission to go ahead with her work. I didn’t notice the shift between daydream and dream until I found myself in the nightmare of wings and Coin’s massive eye and woke with a shout.
The door thumped, someone throwing a shoulder against it. Someone was calling my name. Ex, I thought, the last shreds of dream fading. Ex was screaming my name. But at least he was pronouncing it right.
“I’m okay!” I shouted back. “Leave the door alone. I’m fine.”
“What the
“Bad dream,” I said. “I’m fine. I’ll be out in a minute. Just calm down.”
I’d been asleep almost four hours. I hauled myself up out of bed, vague and hungover. My skin felt sticky with
