appropriate.
CHAPTER FIVE
Midtown Down
“Micah? Micah, wake up.”
Something… someone pinched my shoulder. I wasn’t
interested.
“I hafta go…” The voice petered out, then came back
strong. “It’s one of yours.”
Yeah, yeah, on my way.
No, I’m not at home.
Friend’s…
How long…
No, not Terrence. I want Chen.
She’s been…
I lay straddling the bed diagonally, fully dressed,
face planted in a pillow, listening. Dull ambient light shone through the
bedroom window, neither light nor dark, just… a presence. The digital alarm
clock cast a greenish glow behind me, not that I could see it. Not that I
wanted to.
I’d gone into the goodnight without an argument for
once, and whatever passed for sleep had been dreamless, and a blessing I didn’t
deserve.
“Micah, did you hear what I said?”
Yeah, I did.
“She had one of your cards on her.”
Shit.
Now I was awake, sucker-punched into awareness.
“What time is it?” Like that mattered.
I rolled off the bed and nearly went down, the
vertigo drilling me hard, driving bile in a gush up the back of my throat. I
made it to the bathroom but it was a close call.
“You okay?” O’Hearn wasn’t asking out of concern. He
wanted answers, and my state of disarray was seriously cutting into his
patience zone.
“Yeah, fine.” I wasn’t and had no idea where that
was coming from.
All I could think was… Sasha. Sasha with the long
legs and soft little girl voice, staring up at me with baby blues so sweet I’d
about melted. Even now my cock hardened, remembering leaning in, imagined
tasting those ripe lips, making a promise to help.
“Damn it.”
“What?” O’Hearn was shrugging into his shoulder
holster, fumbling with the ammo carrier. He was a lefty.
“Nothing.”
My rig still lay on the small end table by the
hallway. The tee-shirt I’d slept in was sticky with sweat. The leather straps
ground the wet into my skin as I slid it over my shoulders. It’d been a Walmart
special but the Sig P239 nine liked it just fine and the swivel plate in the
back made adjustment easy most days. This wasn’t going to be one of them.
“Where do you think you’re going?”
“With you.”
He didn’t argue and that told me volumes. We took
the stairs two at a time and rolled out the door onto a street oddly quiet; but
a few lights winked on, upper floors, as solid citizens tumbled out of bed to
tackle the beginning of another work week.
O’Hearn’s piece ’o shit ride was parked out front of
my building. How he’d managed that was a miracle. He chirped it open and I slid
into the passenger seat. Fingering the dash-mounted strobes, he weighed in on
being annoying or running silent. It was unlikely we’d hit much traffic this
early in the morning. He made the right choice for which I was grateful. I
wasn’t awake enough for the drama.
I still didn’t know the time. Not that it mattered
but curiosity got the better of me so I glanced at the display. Four seventeen
in the fricking a.m.
He pulled out without looking and headed us uptown.
I had a rough idea where we’d be going. Most of the street action centered on
midtown east, though with the advent of the internet a lot of the higher-end
girls booked early and conveniently from the comfort of a pimp-provided
boudoir.
Not ‘my girls’ though.
The first two had been deposited around the usual
locations, between fortieth and fifty-ninth. The last one, the one in the tub,
had been discovered in a fairly upscale boutique hotel a few blocks north.
That was the one I’d seen… and wished now I hadn’t.
It’s one thing to look at a body on a slab, listen to Chen chatter on about
lividity, watch her point a blunt, blue latexed finger at puncture wounds in
the neck… and quite another to stare at a body still cooling down. What
bothered me was the lack of mess—a few streaks of blood on the tiled wall, a
bit about the vic’s mouth, like a mannequin in