Chapter One
Ethan stood over me and shook the remaining ice in his coffee mug nearly drained of its whiskey. “There is a party going on here, Merci. In our honor.”
I couldn’t stop reading the mayor’s deposition the DA’s assistant had faxed me—totally off the record. My anger churned, another storm brewing on my horizon, or perhaps it was only the echoes of this last tempest. “He’s denying Cartwright Construction offered him bribes. I mean, we found proof and he’s still lying.”
Ethan sighed and sat on the corner of my desk, stretching his long legs out before him. “We got Cartwright. The Mayor is three seconds from going down himself. Let the police handle it.”
He snatched the faxed pages from my hand and replaced them with my untouched mug of celebratory whiskey, which had been sitting forgotten on the desk. I studied the navy blue cup that read “World’s Best Partners” and chuckled. The matching set had been a congratulatory gift from Emily, his wife, after we landed our first eight inches above the fold. The Cartwright bribes were just the latest in our long history together.
Which is why I knew that he would understand.
“There are some things learned best in the calm, but most are learned in the storm.”
Ethan rolled his eyes at my Willa Cather. “It’s a party, Merci. Take three seconds to appreciate what you’ve done.”
“Correction: what we’ve done,” I said as I leaned back in my chair. “Without your picture of the mayor’s tan line from his watch, I wouldn’t have thought to even raise a question about his family vacation to Hawaii.”
“But you were the one who cracked the travel agent, got her to admit that Cartwright was the one who booked and paid for it all.”
“And the rest is front page.”
“Above the fold.”
I grinned at that accomplishment and took a whiff of the cheap whiskey our boss had bought for the celebration. “Hayne’s got the good stuff in his office. You know that, right?”
“Yeah, but it’s an office party. Isn’t the liquor supposed to be cheap as long as the company is good?” He lifted his mug toward me for a toast. “To staying out of trouble?”
I clinked mine against his. “To staying out of trouble.”
I took a sip of the whiskey and winced. It burned all the way down to my empty stomach. It made the store-bought chips and salsa at the party almost appetizing.
Ethan laughed. “Come on, Merci. Let’s go be social. I think Hayne wanted you to give a speech or something to fire up the newbs.”
It was my turn to roll my eyes at the suggestion. “There is not enough alcohol in the world. Have we forgotten the Founder’s Roast when I was asked to speak?”
Ethan’s brown eyes widened and his mouth opened. “Oh, God. That’s right. When you joked about the Board Director’s new boat costing as much as his second wife’s boob job and it turned out to be true? I’m not sure he ever fully recovered.” He laughed, taking a childlike glee in remembering one of my less-than-stellar moments. “Why don’t we have video of her chasing him around with a purse?”
“Nondisclosure?” I shook my head and spun the coffee mug in my hands as I surveyed the newsroom.
Ethan liked these kinds of things, the family of the newsroom, the camaraderie, the celebration of a job well done. It just wasn’t my kind of scene. I was more of a one-on-one person. Big crowds made me nervous.
“Go. Have a good time. You know I don’t play nice with others.”
“Yes, you do, Merci Lanard. Underneath all those layers and sarcasm, you want to help people.”
“Correction: I just want to get paid.”
He scoffed. “Correction: You want to make the world a better, more honest place.”
I couldn’t correct him there. “I do want to make Philly a more honest place but rehashing the investigation for the newbs isn’t going find out why the mayor is denying proof about accepting bribes for city bids. We still have work to do.”
Ethan groaned in frustration, but I saw the playful glint in his eyes the moment his thoughts and tactics changed. “But what if rehashing this story inspires one of the newbs to dig deeper, work longer, go harder. What if telling this story makes them make the world a better, more honest place?”
I just looked up at him, eyebrow raised. “Is that seriously the story you’re trying to sell?”
“Yes, and I’m sticking to it.”
I snorted. “Did the cheap whiskey kill that many brain cells?”
“Nope.” His smile beamed down at me. “Well, maybe.”
“No wonder you didn’t last two days on Metro and Hayne punted you behind a camera.”
Ethan set his cup down on the desk. “Please, Merci. I just want one drink with my best friend before everything hits the fan again. Can’t you just put it on pause for one night?”
Truth was, I didn’t know if I could. Not without whiskey to drown out the building storm of questions I was already preparing for the mayor. I just didn’t work like that. But for Ethan, I could try to drown them out, but this cheap shit was not going to cut it.
“One drink. And only if we can convince Hayne to toss this crap and get the good stuff.”
“Done,” he said quickly and he sprang off the corner of my desk.
Ethan’s infectious smile pulled me from my chair but only halfway across the newsroom floor where the rest of the staffers were busy congratulating themselves on the paper’s part in getting another corrupt institution exposed and completely scooping the competition.
The phone in my back pocket buzzed and I pulled it out. I didn’t recognize the number that flashed across the screen, but I rarely did. When a person needed to spill secrets, they never did it with caller ID. “Lanard here.”
“It’s Benny.”
I stopped my trek across the newsroom and turned away from the party. It wasn’t just that my favorite informant was calling, it was that he sounded stressed and shaky over the static of the payphone line. “What is it, Benny?”
“You up for another hit?” he asked.
My skin tightened and tingled in anticipation. “What you got?”
“You know those new players in town?”
“Yeah.” I tried to play it cool, but my skin sizzled like butter on a hot skillet. Ethan and I had heard whispers and pulled together half-strewn stories of those who had survived a new menace on the streets and were willing to talk for a few bucks. We matched that to an uptick in missing persons around the time that these guys started really pulling their weight. It’s why I’d asked Benny to look into them. Ask a few questions in the darkness where even I couldn’t go. See if there was a connection between the two. “You find them?”
“Better. Got Names.”
Lightning crackled through me. Names meant addresses, paper trails. It meant the hunt was on and Ethan and I could sniff it out.
“Can we meet?” he asked.
I found myself back at my desk, grabbing my messenger bag from my bottom drawer. I didn’t have a choice in the matter. The storm within me would never settle. No matter how many mayors we exposed or how many drug rings we took out, it would never be calm skies. “Where and when?”
“Tonight. Cambria and Rosehill. There’s an empty corner store.”
I jotted down the location in my notebook already out on my desk and waiting for the next story. “You and your abandoned stores, Benny.”
“Can you make it?”
I scanned the room. The party was in full swing now with Hayne booming out a story—probably something about his heyday before he was editor-in-chief—and Ethan was laughing along with the rest of them. No one would miss me in this celebration.
I glanced down at my watch and calculated my exit strategy and the traffic. “Hour?”
“Sure.” Benny slammed the receiver down and I jumped at the sound.
Something had him wound tight, but then again, who knew what he was high on this week.
I double-checked my bag for my usual tools: audio recorder, roll of cash, and a Taser, because you never knew what you might be walking into.
Ethan strode quickly across the floor when he saw me sling on my coat. “You are not seriously going to get in the Mayor’s face about his deposition tonight. What happened to the one drink?”
That is what you get with two years of side-by-side work in a handful of perilous situations, a person who could call you on your shit because he knew you better than you knew yourself.
He loomed over me, his hands on his slim hips. “I thought we were going to stay here, drink bad liquor, and take one night off.”
I defiantly dropped my notebook into my bag. “Benny said he has a lead on those new guys we keep hearing about and wants to meet.” I was playing dirty. I knew that Ethan was as interested in the story as I was. “Names, Ethan. New doors to knock on, trails to follow.”
He wasn’t buying it. “The names will still be there tomorrow, Merci. And doors don’t go anywhere.”
I closed my messenger bag and rested my hand on the top. “You don’t need to come. I got this. It’s just Benny.”
“Everyone’s better with a partner, Merci.” He recited Hayne’s cardinal rule as he ran his fingers through his hair and it flopped back across his forehead. “I was supposed to help Emily set up her classroom for the open house tomorrow.”
“And you can. It’s a simple face-to-face, Ethan. I just need to know he’s not lying.”
“Right. No one can resist that Lanard Charm.” Ethan snorted. “The girl who always gets the truth.”
He wasn’t wrong. The Charm, as Ethan had jokingly named it, wasn’t just the sweet smile I developed while people yelled at me, though sometimes that was enough to get under their skin. It was the years of watching people lie their tails off, studying lips and eyes and arms, and being the one to catch them in their deceit with hard-fought proof. It was the sizzle of looking someone in the eye and knowing they wanted to lie and not letting them, not giving them room to breathe to even get the lie out. It was knowing the truths I needed and never stopping until I knew the whole story.
And he was right, I always got the truth.
I watched as Ethan weighed the party and his obligations at home against another night fighting the good fight. The argument raced across his brown eyes.
I tried to soothe them. “I can get the names by myself and we can run them in the morning. You can go home and have a spontaneously romantic night with Emily.”
“Should I call your lawyer before or after that romantic night?” Ethan’s gaze landed on me, that friendly, wide face usually so welcoming etched in concern. His voice was low, pained. “You really can’t stop, can you? Not even for one night.”
The silence after that statement echoed between us. I licked my lips of the cheap whiskey and confessed, because I couldn’t lie to him. “You know I can’t, Ethan.”
The obsession for the truth wouldn’t let me sleep if I didn’t go, chase, hunt. Moving toward a story, seeking out the truth, was the only thing that eased the electric-like anxiety in my brain when the compulsion of a story hit, quieted the millions of questions milling around in my brain. Where others only saw the tenacity of a journalist, Ethan had seen what really happened when it wasn’t sated. The obsession. The compulsion. The sleepless nights. The empty bottles. Another less glamourous bonus of being partners.
“We can still have that drink.” I held up my mug and gulped down the rest of the whiskey and took a moment to recover from the burn.
“What kind of partner would I be if I let you go alone.” Ethan exhaled and examined his mug. “So much for staying out of trouble.”
He finished off his whiskey and coughed out the sting of the liquor, before setting his mug down to mirror mine. “I’ll call Emily on the way.”
I slung my bag over my shoulder, ready for the night, and crossed my heart. “Tell her I promise to have you home at a fairly decent hour.”
Ethan laughed as he grabbed his coat and camera bag from his desk across from mine. I heard the clink of his filter cases as he made sure he had everything he needed. “Right, you mean like for her birthday when we were supposed to meet her for dinner and we ended up bringing breakfast tacos?”
“But we brought enough for her whole class with a dozen roses. And cake. I think we’ve made it up to her by now.”
He smiled, giving into the thrill of the chase. “Ladies first.”
As the two of us walked out of the newsroom, I vaguely heard Hayne yelling across the newsroom as the elevator doors shut, but my boss yelled so often it was ambient noise.
It didn’t matter. That sizzle hummed along my skin now I knew I wasn’t going to have to go this one alone. He was right. I was better with my partner. And Ethan and I would solve this like we had solved everything else.
* * *
“Where the hell is he?” I checked my watch for the twentieth time in the past thirty minutes, then rubbed my hands up and down my biceps. I could see the fog of my breath in the darkness of the abandoned corner store. “We promised to get you home before bedtime.”
“It’s Benny. He’s always late.” Ethan adjusted the woven strap of his camera over his shoulder, seemingly impervious to the cold. “Have a little patience.”
I huffed. “You know I don’t do patience. Especially when I’m freezing.”
Ethan chuckled. “It’s Philly in November. What did you expect?”
He untied his scarf and pulled it from the collar of his coat. He looped it over my head and threw one end over my shoulder. “Two years of stakeouts and you never remember a scarf.”
“Why would I need to when I’ve got you?”
For a moment, I was enveloped in the body heat still lingering on his scarf. I snuggled in, letting the itch of the wool scratch at my neck before I wrapped it around tighter. It smelled better than the mix of dust and decay that filled the disintegrating store.
Ethan shook his head with a chuckle and started walking around the small convenience store. He lifted his camera and snapped a few shots of the worn counter and the bulletproof glass still in place. He checked the pictures on the view screen and then clicked away some more.
I wrapped my arms around my chest tighter and sank deeper into his scarf as I watched him walk across the striations of golden light on the white tile. He did this a lot, taking random pictures, switching out lens. I never saw the pictures he took, but he had to have enough images of light and darkness to fill a gallery.
Ethan dropped the camera from his face, head cocked as if listening to the night.
“Something is coming.”
“What?” I scanned the place. In the dim streetlight, I didn’t see anything, but Ethan standing there listening, his camera still cradled in his hands.
I never got my answer. The light vanished. Not like streetlamps going out, but more like something had stolen the light and pitched us into a swimming pool of black. I couldn’t see my hand as I reached out into the sudden cool of darkness. “Ethan?”
“Merci,” he called back.
“We need to get out—” Ethan’s voice was cut off by a hard grunt.
Hands out before me, I shuffled toward the sound of Ethan’s voice when a hulk caught me in the midsection and slammed me down on the floor between the empty shelves. My head cracked against the linoleum and bright starbursts flashed in my vision.
Rough hands rolled me to my stomach and a knee rammed into my back, grinding my ribs into the ground.
“Run, Merci!” Ethan screamed.
I fought with everything I had against the thing on my back, kicking my legs and screaming, trying to get a foothold on something to turn or spin, but I was pinned to the floor like a bug on a collector’s mat.
Another figure knelt by my head and wrenched my left hand up between my shoulders. I cried out as the pain tore through my side and left me momentarily unable to wriggle away. I could still scream, though.
“Ethan!”
Fingers grabbed my hair and slammed my face against the hard floor once again. Bright spots swam through my vision, taking a longer respite than before. My head began to spin like I’d downed an entire bottle of whiskey, bile rising in my throat. For a moment, I couldn’t feel the rest of my body, but I could hear the distinct rip of clothing. I knew the truth of what happened to a woman surrounded by a gang of men.
A burning sensation flew up my arm and the pain reached across my blind eyes in claws of red lightning. I couldn’t tell if I was kicking, but I willed everything in me to fight once more.
“Hurry,” the one on my left said.
A scream filled the night and I could feel my attackers freeze, my arm still pinned behind my back.
“Get him,” the one on the right barked.
My arm was released as the second man left. I seized in a breath and choked on blood running down my throat. I blinked a few times, trying to see anything. What was happening to Ethan. What this thing was doing to me. I tried to pull away from the fingers wrapped like tourniquets around my arm.
The man on my back dug his knee into my shoulder as he continued furiously shoving the arm of my coat up as far as the wool would allow, then ripping my sleeve. His breathing quick and labored, he grabbed my forearm and fire sliced into my flesh,
I cried out and the attacker delivered a sharp punch to my kidneys and I knew I was out. A gasp leapt from me as paralyzing pain seized my body again.
I heard the staccato sounds of fists meeting flesh, echoed by grunts of pain and exertion. Ethan was fighting, taking out all the others. He would save us.
Then it all went silent.
The men, the shadows, the thing holding me down, vanished as quickly as they had appeared and I was left, sputtering for air on the cold tile.
As soon as I could manage a lungful of air, I called out Ethan’s name.
A groan was my only response.
My left arm gained feeling first, and I pushed myself up from the ground.
Light slowly returned to the abandoned space. I had to blink a few times as the world came into focus. The first thing to take shape was a puddle of my blood on the white tile where my face had been. I curled my legs to me. They worked, but my side was tender. My head still spinning, I frantically searched to find Ethan.
He was sprawled on the ground not ten feet away at the front of the store. It felt like ten miles as I dragged myself across the floor.
Blood was everywhere, on the floor, on him, like thick crude oil in the low light, the scent of pennies replacing dust.
“Ethan?”
He hissed out something. I leaned over him to find a stream of blood flowing from his throat. Or where his throat should have been. A long gash ran from his ear down to his chest, and blood flowed out in waves.
As quickly as I could, I wrapped his wool scarf around his throat and put his head on my leg. My right hand seemed to be the better working one as I called 9-1-1. I gave the dispatcher my location and didn’t bother with her instructions to stay calm. I threw the damn thing across the floor and began a chant I’d heard before.
“Just hold on, Ethan. Hold on.”
I kept my hand pressed against the wound, but nothing in triage class could have prepared me for this. Bullet wounds I could handle. But this? No amount of gauze was going to fix this trench of gore down his neck. I wasn’t even sure there was enough neck to fix.
The truth of the situation seeped into me as I held him, brushed a curl from his forehead, matched his short, panted breaths with my own. Ethan was going to die. I knew it from the odd angle of his head as he looked up at me, the way his eyes couldn’t seem to focus on mine.
I bit back the sob forming deep within my chest.
Ethan smiled up at me, his teeth bloody. “You’re not going… to cry on me, are you… Lanard?” His deep voice was no more than a whisper between us.
“Contrary to what they say, I do have a heart.” I didn’t know if the cool streak on my cheek was a tear or blood.
“Tell Piper… I’m sorry,” he bubbled.
There were a million things that I needed to say, needed to tell him, but my brain stalled at the unknown name on his lips.
“Take this.”
His bloody, shaking hand grasped at his shirt and I had to help him find the silver medallion around his neck. He didn’t have the strength to break the chain, but he pressed the pendant into my palm and curled my fingers around it.
“Let Emily know … I loved her.”
His last breath caught half-formed in his throat, and I felt him die. His body went limp in my arms, and the warmth of him slipped away until he was nothing.
*************************
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