I saw him walking across the crosswalk in a dark suit with a blue shirt open at the collar. His black hair caught the wind, and his eyes scanned every plane and surface.
“Mr. Santon,” I said when he reached me, “what a coincidence.”
“You believe in those?” He sat down.
“No. I’m assuming my lover sent you to talk me out of seeing his ex-wife?”
“Close. But no. I can’t tell you what he hired me to do, except I’m not supposed to be sitting at a table with you.”
“You must have put your own cameras in the house. If you know where I’ve been, I don’t know how. I haven’t seen you.”
“That was off the table, obviously. We’re not watching you. We’re watching the other one. And you’ll never see us, Ms. Faulkner. Any trace of us is gone before we even are.”
“Big scary ops guys. My dad always said he could take any of you in a brawl.”
“The idea is to avoid the brawl in the first place. Knowing what I know, which is too much, everyone involved wants to avoid a clusterfuck. Except you and Ms. Carnes. So I am going to sit here and enjoy a cup of tea, until night if necessary. If anyone joins you, I’ll be right here. Then I am going to drive you home.”
I leaned forward, elbows on the table. “How do I shake an ops guy?”
“Guys. Plural.” He glanced at a guy on a cell phone halfway down the block. He gestured and spoke loudly to make himself just another piece of furniture. Someone standing quietly with a phone to his ear would attract notice. Then Santon glanced at a black Toyota at the light and waved to the driver with a flick of his wrist. The driver flicked back and drove off when the light changed.
Great. Even if I ran away and jumped in a cab, I’d have to shake the other two. “He needs to trust my loyalty.”
“That’s between you and him.” He twisted around, hailing a waitress. “Personally, I don’t give a shit.”
The waitress came, and he ordered himself a cup of coffee and a muffin. She flirted with him, a nervous grin crossing her face. He was a nice-looking guy. I’d forgotten to notice.
“What’s with the pinkie ring?” I asked when the waitress left.
He held up the simple gold band always present on his pinkie, not an affectation or accessory as I’d assumed. “My wife’s.”
“She wearing yours?”
“Around her neck, with her dog tags. We swapped when we re-upped. Weren’t there four weeks when she took sniper fire half a mile from the Green Zone.”
“I’m sorry.”
“It was messy. Death always is.”
“You understand, I’m just trying to protect him.”
“I’m just trying to do my job.”
I sipped my tea, and we sat in silence as his coffee was brought. A black Mercedes stopped at the light. A blonde driving. Jessica. The parking lot was around the corner, and her blinker flashed for the turn.
I looked at Santon, and though his eyes appeared to be on the scalding black coffee he was about to swallow in a single gulp, he gazed in the halfway point between the table and the street. Blank sidewalk, but Jessica and I would be in his peripheral vision.
Jessica saw me, and I shook my head. She nodded and turned off her blinker. Will Santon could take me home. Motherfucker.
Chapter 20.
I knew Will wasn’t gone for good. I had a gig at Frontage that was well-attended, including a table of five guys in agent-gear by the warm speakers. I greeted them, played, and said goodbye with a stinker of a smile, but my heart felt made of lead. Jonathan hadn’t called, texted, written. No contact besides Will Santon’s unwelcome presence.
Could he be that mad?
Was that how he got mad? Falling off the face of the earth? How was I supposed to react?
Irrelevant questions. What I needed to ask myself was how I wanted to react. So I called him. It went to voice mail, which I didn’t want. There would be no angry, terse, or blustery messages. I texted.
—Are you shutting me out? WTF?—
I had friends who had given men their hearts only to find them turned to ice directly after. Or slept with them after declarations of indefinite amounts of attraction, but the indefinite amounts lasted no more than a week. I wondered if that was what I was dealing with. Had my commitment to him chased him away? Or did he expect my submission to be an abdication of control over my decisions? Was obedience required inside and outside the bedroom? Had I missed that point on the list?
I couldn’t have. I never would have allowed it, and neither would he.
I had just gotten home when my phone blooped. I dug around my bag and found it, hoping against hope that it was Jonathan. An outsized level of disappointment flooded me. It was Jessica.
—I’m at Make on Echo Park and Baxter. I believe you’re nearby?—
That presented a problem. It was a block and a half away, but I had to get there. I believed Santon when he said I wasn’t being watched, but Jessica was. That meant something or someone would stop us from meeting in that block and a half.
Fuck it.
I looked out the back door. My house was built on a lot that was nearly vertical toward the rear. A retaining wall of cinderblock held the hill at bay, barely. Behind it, untouched chaparral stretched five hundred feet to a walkable dirt alley kids used to get into trouble. The whole stretch was unlandscapable without a bunch of money, which Dr. Thorensen had, apparently. His plot was terraced into vegetable gardens, private spaces, and a little utility area with a shed. My part of the hill, naturally, had fallen to scrub and brush. A hundred-year-old ficus with exposed roots was on the downslope, and wildflowers bloomed in spring. In the first weeks of December, dead thorns twisted around the trees, weeds turned to sticks, and brown was the new black.
I’d have to go through that to get to the path, then get spit out onto Echo Park Avenue. Of course, it wouldn’t work. I’d get bitten by a rattlesnake or something. Worse, Santon, who’d probably taken a vow to never sleep again, would be waiting for me on the street.
I dug my old cowboy boots out of the back of the closet, and a pair of jeans I didn’t care about. I’d spent the whole day trying to get this done, and I wasn’t giving up yet.
My yard needed some love. I hadn’t trimmed anything at the end of summer, so the flagstones and garden patches were covered in dead leaves and detritus. I tossed the pink and orange balls back over the fence to the Montessori school and made for Dad’s tangerine tree. He’d planted it for me before he and Mom moved away, saying it would feed me if I got hungry. It just kept growing and was high enough to hug the spaghetti of power lines crisscrossing the sky. I used it as leverage to climb the wall onto the overgrown slope.