Dingy exposed brick outlined the window, and I pressed my hand against it. The uneven stone bit into my palm, and I closed my eyes and reached for my magic again, letting the cool power flow through me, attuning myself to the smallest vibrations embedded in the brick.
Nothing. Just calm. I concentrated, going deeper and deeper into the stone, until it felt like a part of me. A natural extension of myself I could examine and analyze the way I might my own fingernails. I felt more calm and... the sense of someone waiting. Not particularly bored, but not excited either. Just waiting... for the right moment to come along. An emotion, an action, I knew all too well.
My frown deepened. I opened my eyes, dropped my hand, and stepped away from the brick. I looked at the room again with a more critical eye, putting all the facts together.
There was nothing in the apartment, no trash, no shell casings, no emotions, because Jake McAllister hadn't been here. He wasn't smart enough, wasn't calm enough for this sort of action. This - this was the work of a professional.
An assassin, just like me.
My gray eyes narrowed. So Jake, or more likely Jonah McAllister, had hired a big boy to clean up his son's mess.
Now I was really annoyed.
But still... I couldn't shake the feeling I was missing something. Something important. Vital. Obvious.
My reading, my sense, of the vibrations in the stone was correct. I knew it was. Even from an early age, I'd been able to hear the stone murmuring to me, and my power to understand and interpret it had only sharpened and strengthened over time. And would continue to do so until I died, hopefully at the ripe age of a hundred and fifty or so.
From the vibrations I'd picked up, the shooter had been waiting the better part of an hour. Maybe longer.
Sophia came in early, usually by nine, to start baking the day's bread. I usually showed up around ten, and the restaurant officially opened for business at eleven. But the shots hadn't been fired until almost noon.
Why? Why had the assassin waited so long? I'd been moving through the restaurant all morning. Cooking, cleaning, wiping off the tables and booths, flipping the sign on the front door over to Open. He could have taken me out at any time during the morning. So why hadn't he taken a shot before lunchtime? Why then?
I went back over the shooting in my mind. I'd been standing behind the counter when the shots had been fired. A tough shot to make, even for a professional assassin, no matter how good with a gun he was. Maybe he'd wanted an audience when he killed me. Maybe that's why he'd waited. Finn had been in the restaurant, standing off to my left. The girl had been there too, more or less in front of me -
And I realized what I'd been missing. The shooter, the assassin, hadn't been firing at me.
He'd been aiming at the girl.
Chapter Six
The girl, Violet. The shooter had been aiming at her, not me.
That was the only thing that made sense. The assassin could have shot me any time I'd been close to the storefront windows. But he hadn't. Instead, he'd sat in this apartment for almost an hour, waiting for her. She'd been sitting in a booth in the back, out of sight of the storefront windows, so he'd had to wait for her to finish her lunch. When she'd paid and started for the front door, that's when he'd taken his shot.
My mind processed the information and moved on to the next question. Why shoot her inside the restaurant?
Why not wait for her to step outside onto the street? Why not just do her in some back alley?
The answer came to me. The robbery. The assassin must have seen the story in the newspaper about the botched robbery at the Pork Pit.
Maybe the assassin had realized that if he took out the girl in the restaurant, there was a good chance her death would be connected to Jake McAllister and the robbery last night. No doubt the cops would have had the same first thought as me - that Jake or whomever he might have hired had been aiming at me, not the girl. That I'd been the target. That Jake had wanted to silence me and make all the charges against himself just disappear. Given all that, the police wouldn't be inclined to look too hard in other directions, to consider other theories. Like the fact the girl had been the intended victim all along.
And if laying the blame on Jake McAllister didn't work, well, there was another option. The Pork Pit wasn't officially located in Southtown, but it was only a couple of streets over, which meant the whole area had its share of crime. Drug deals, shootings, domestic disputes. One or more of those happened every day of the week.
Given the rough neighborhood, the girl's death today might have just been chalked up to random violence in the area, if the cops were feeling particularly lazy. Some sort of drive-by or gang shooting that she'd been unlucky enough to get in the middle of. A ten-year-old kid and his younger sister had gotten caught up in one of those last week, less than a half mile from the restaurant.
Either way, nobody would think it had been a planned hit. The best assassinations were always the ones that looked like something else. A nice, neat, easy plan all the way around.
Maybe the assassin had been following the girl, looking for just such an opportunity. Maybe he'd known she was coming to the Pork Pit today to eat lunch and ask about somebody named the Tin Man. Either way, when she'd gone into the restaurant, he'd decided to make sure that she never came out again. It would have been easy for him to slip into the building unseen, find the empty apartment, and jimmy the lock. All he would have ahd to do after that was wait for the right moment, the right angle, and then pull the trigger.
I stared at the cracked storefront of the Pork Pit. He would have hit her too - four kill shots clustered in her chest.
If the restaurant didn't have bulletproof windows.
No, this didn't have anything to do with Jake McAllister and me. The girl - it was all about the girl. Somebody wanted her dead.
As I stood there brooding, the front door of the restaurant opened. Violet stepped outside and hurried away.
"Fuck," I snarled and sprinted from the apartment.
The assassin was long gone, so I didn't bother reaching for my Stone magic to harden my skin again. Besides, he wasn't after me anyway. Instead, I ran down the stairs and out of the apartment building. I hung a left and sprinted down the block in the direction the girl had gone.
She must have been power walking because she was already a full block ahead of me. She raised her arm, and a cab slid to a stop at the curb in front of her.
"Hey, you!" I yelled. "Stop!"
The girl paid no attention to me. I was too far away for my voice to carry over the traffic on the street. Even if she had heard my cry, she probably wouldn't have thought it was directed at her. Hey, you wasn't the most personal of greetings. So I picked up my pace, running at a full sprint. If the street had been empty, I might have reached her. But every five steps, I had to duck right or left to avoid someone talking on their cell phone.
I reached the end of my block. On the corner across from me, the girl had settled into the cab. I stepped out onto the street, my eyes fixed on the bright yellow vehicle -
Beep! Beep!
And abruptly stepped back as a car horn blared out. A second later, a minivan zoomed by, running the red light.
The driver shot me a dirty look.
"Red means stop, you twit!" I screamed.
She didn't see me flip her off. Too busy nattering away on her cell phone to do something safe, like pay attention to pedestrians and traffic signals. And she'd cost me any chance I'd had of catching the girl. Up ahead, the cab had already pulled out into traffic. Five seconds later, it turned right, disappearing from sight.
Gone. The girl was gone.
And I had no idea where she went or more importantly, why someone had tried to kill her.
I stood there a moment, cursing my own stupidity. I should have known the second the girl asked for the Tin Man that something was seriously wrong. That it wasn't just a fluke or an accident or dumb luck. That trouble had just walked into the Pork Pit.
Trouble that had gotten away from me.
"Fuck," I snarled again before turning and heading back to the restaurant.
I tucked my knives up my sleeves and slowly, calmly, quietly strolled the block and a half back to the Pork Pit.
No need to draw any more attention to myself today. If I kept this up, somebody might call the police and report a crazy woman. Not too long ago, I'd spent several days in Ashland Asylum on one of my jobs. I had no desire to pay the facility a return visit.
A couple minutes later, I stepped into the Pork Pit.
Sophia was adding some red pepper and paprika to her macaroni salad. Finn sat on his usual stool, sipping another cup of chicory coffee and reading the rest of the financial section.
"Problems?" he quipped.
I gave him a sour glare.
"I only ask because a) you're not smiling and covered in someone else's blood, and b) I saw you run out of the building across the street like there were a pack of hungry vampires after you," Finn said. "I take it Jake McAllister managed to allude you?"
I shook my head. "It wasn't McAllister. The shooter wasn't even gunning for me. He was aiming at the girl."
I filled Finn and Sophia in on my theory about the shooter being a pro and my conclusion his target had been the girl, not me.
Finn let out a low whistle. "Someone hired an assassin to take out the girl? She must have really pissed somebody off."
"Mmm-hmm." Behind the counter, Sophia grunted her agreement.
"I don't care who she's pissed off right now," I snapped. "I just need to find her before the assassin decides to make another run at her."
"Why?" Finn asked. "It's her problem, not yours."
I stared at him. "Because she comes in here asking about the Tin Man, asking about Fletcher, and a minute later, somebody's shooting at her. I want to know why. Why she came here, what her connection to Fletcher is, all of it."
Mainly, I wanted to make sure there was no way her almost or future murder was going to get laid on my doorstep or on Finn or the Deveraux sisters. Covering myself had been one of the first things Fletcher Lane had taught me.
"Now, what happened after I left? Did she say anything, do anything?"
Finn shook his head. "No. She sat there a minute getting her breath back; then she got up and left."
My gray eyes narrowed. "And you didn't try to stop her?"
Finn shrugged. "I figured as long as she wasn't screaming and calling the cops, it was all right. We both thought it was Jake McAllister shooting at you, not somebody else gunning for her."
I bit back another curse. Finn was right. It wasn't his fault. It wasn't anybody's fault. Still, I needed some answers, and the girl was the only one who could give them to me. But she was miles away by now. So how could I track her down? I thought for a second, then went over to the counter.
"Uh-oh," Finn muttered. "I know that look."
"What look?" I asked, lifting up the cash register.
"That look. The one that makes you resemble a hibernating bear someone just poked with a sharp stick. The look that says you're not going to let this go, even though it's not your problem."
I put my hand over my heart and batted my lashes at him. "You know me all too well."
"But how are you going to find her?" Finn asked. "She didn't exactly leave you a personal dossier."
My fingers probed the dark space under the cash register.
There it was. I pulled out a scrap of paper from beneath the register. The girl's credit card receipt from lunch. The one with her name on it. Violet Fox. Not as good as a dossier, but it was a place to start.
"Oh, I'm not going to find her," I said in a sweet voice.
"Don't say it," he pleaded. "Please don't say it."
I held the piece of paper out to him. "I'm not going to find her because you're going to do it for me."
Finn just sighed and took another sip of his coffee.
Chapter Seven
"Anything yet?"
Finn glared over his shoulder at me. "It's only been two hours, Gin. Keep your panties on."
I glared back and stuck my tongue out at him.
He grinned. "Don't stick it out unless you plan to use it."
I snorted. "You wish."
"Always."
After I'd told Finn to track down the college girl using her credit card receipt, he'd gone to his office to get his laptop and some other supplies and tell the money men he was taking the rest of the day off. While he'd done that, I'd scheduled an appointment for a glazier to come fix the storefront windows in the morning. Then I'd sent Sophia home, closed down the restaurant, and driven to Fletcher's house. That had taken an hour.
Finn had shown up thirty minutes ago. Now he relaxed on the faded plaid sofa in the den, while I puttered around in the kitchen. Given all the excitement, I hadn't had a chance to eat lunch at the restaurant, and I had a feeling it was going to be a long night. That's why I'd made chicken salad sandwiches on thick, honey-wheat bread, along with a fresh fruit salad.
I put the food on a tray, along with plates, silverware, napkins, and a pitcher of raspberry lemonade. Then I reached for my Ice magic. The cold, silver light flickered on my palm, centered over the spider rune scar, and I dropped several Ice cubes into the two glasses on the tray.
I took the whole thing into the den and set it on the coffee table.
I sat cross-legged in one of the recliners and munched on a sandwich. Celery, apples, golden raisins, lemon zest, and a sour cream - mayo dressing flavored the chicken salad, while the crusty bread provided crunch and contrast.
I alternated with bites of my strawberry-and-kiwi fruit salad, tossed with lime juice, vanilla, and just a hint of honey.
