Book of Night(45)

* * *



Back home, Charlie was full of nervous energy, and a lot of caffeine. She washed the dishes in the sink left over from the Bolognese. Wiped down the counters. And when that wasn’t enough, she started to clean out the whole refrigerator. Not just her usual sweep, dumping out the most offensive things—a forgotten cucumber that had caved in on one side and become colonized with mold, a tiny piece of cheese that had turned white and hard and no one was going to eat, a sealed container full of grayish noodles that bulged alarmingly. This time she took out everything, condiments included, and wiped the shelves down with towels soaked in diluted bleach.

“You need help?” Vince asked, coming in from the bedroom and reaching for the coffeepot.

She startled at his voice.

He appeared to be the same man she’d lived with for months. Blond hair mussed from sleep. Stubble along his jaw. As he moved around the kitchen with no mention of the night before, it seemed impossible to believe he’d snapped a guy’s neck and then fucked her on some broken steps in the moonlight.

And lied.

And lied and lied and lied—

“Can I borrow some cleaning stuff from your van?” Charlie asked.

He hesitated. “Let me get it for—”

“Great,” she said, cutting him off cheerfully. If he didn’t want her rooting around in his van herself, it was probably because he had something else to hide. Maybe she’d find a head rolling around in the back.

Or maybe he was just being nice, offering to get the stuff for her.

Or maybe Hermes’s body was in plastic-wrapped pieces and he wanted to spare her the sight.

Charlie turned back to the fridge with renewed vigor. She scrubbed it as though she could scrub away all her desire for him, all her foolishness.

Vince brought in cleaning stuff and went out to clean the gutters, mug in hand. And hide the head, Charlie’s mind unhelpfully supplied.

Posey got up even later than usual, around four. She looked ragged as she staggered into the kitchen and filled a cereal bowl with all the remaining coffee, then stuck it in the microwave.

Charlie had dated a fellow burglar for a couple of months, before he skipped town with a pair of earrings she’d managed to convince him were set with diamonds. He’d told her that when he’d first started breaking into houses, he’d thought rich people would keep their really expensive stuff in safes, but it turned out that people mostly kept things where they could see them. Wealthy people kept a key under the mat like everyone else, because they misplaced their keys too. They wound up locking away birth certificates, marriage licenses, and legal paperwork instead of valuables. Jewelry was in the primary bedroom closet, even the really good stuff, because people wanted to wear it. Laptops were on desks or sofas. TV on the wall. Expensive liquor on the bar cart. Guns in the first drawer of the nightstand.

People like their stuff close by, including their secrets. What makes you feel safe when you go to sleep at night? Being able to check and see that your secrets are still hidden.

If there was something for Charlie to find, there was a good chance Vince kept it in their bedroom.

Once she had the thought, it caught like a burr.

She needed to get him out of the house—and soon, before temptation overwhelmed her common sense and she went through his stuff while he was likely to walk in on her.

An hour later, Vince came inside, his hands sooty. By then, she had her story ready.

“Katelynn wants me to meet her for coffee tonight,” Charlie said, trying to sound offhanded.

He washed his hands in the sink, soap all the way to his elbows. “The tattooist. With the moth-eating cousin.”

“Right,” she said, unnerved. She hadn’t noticed them talking at the party. “I’m thinking about getting something new.”

“Oh yeah?” he asked, wiping his wet hands on his black jeans.

The expression on his face—slight smile, seemingly honest interest, no judgment for the trouble of the previous night—unnerved her as well. He really seemed to care for her. He’d killed someone to save her.

She wanted to trust him.

“Vince?” She took his hand and looked up into his pale gray eyes. “How did you lose your shadow? For real this time.”

His gaze slid away from her. “I didn’t. I—” He stopped, then started again. “I didn’t understand the danger we were in.”

He wasn’t necessarily lying. The truth was often complicated and hard to explain. “What danger?”

He shook his head and picked up their compost bucket—bought by Posey, online, in an effort for them to be better environmentalists, now filled with slimy cucumber remains and other fridge remnants, plus a lot of coffee grounds.

“That’s not an answer,” she called after him.

But whatever she’d been looking for, she didn’t get it. He only went outside to dump the compost into a weird worm bin that none of them was sure was working. With all the coffee grounds they added, the only thing Charlie was certain of was that those worms were wired. If a bird ate one, it was going to fly directly into the sun.

By the time he came back in, he had his phone to his ear. He’d been called in for a job. A residential double homicide.

“I can stay if you want,” he said to her, turning the phone away from his mouth. Faintly, she could hear his boss yelling at someone. Before that moment, she hadn’t been sure if Vince had faked the call, just to avoid talking.