Deja Who (Insighter #1)(61)
“Listen, my mother—”
“Should I bother to waste your time with condolences?”
“Probably not. Listen, get the hell off the streets, you understand? Check into the Ritz—”
“No way. They don’t have streaming. After a hard day of panhandling and feeding pigeons, I really need classic Daily Show.”
Ugh. “The Peninsula?”
“Pass. No room service after eleven.”
“Listen, I don’t care where, but do not loiter at your usual haunt, which would make it easy for my killer to kill you. Anybody who’s been watching me for more than a few weeks will know about you and where to find you . . . in the park. They won’t have a clue you’re the former mayor of the nation’s twenty-first-largest city.”
“Yeah, well. If this were a TV show—”
“TV is getting everything wrong this month!”
“—I’d say something tough yet caring, like ‘I can take care of myself’ and then promptly get my big ass murdered. So to Hotel Felix I shall go.”
“Is that really a hotel?”
“Yes, you plebian.”
“Sounds like the name of a hotel in a cartoon.”
“Wicked plebian.”
“Stop that. Maybe you should leave town altogether,” she fretted.
“If he knows me, he only knows Cat, not Catherine Carey. It’s a good idea, Leah.”
“So you’re going, right? Right now? You’re on your way? Right now?”
“Cripes, you’re a bigger nag than my handlers and my private school tutors combined. Yeah, I’m going.”
Relief made her knees buckle; she sank into a kitchen chair with more than a little gratitude. If the chair hadn’t been there, she’d be on the floor. “Great, Cat. That’s wonderful. Okay.”
A pause. “You did screw up the thing with Archer, didn’t you?”
“I had to get him away from me. This wretch went for my mother.”
“Yeah, he must have thought you loved her.” She could hear Cat’s sigh over the phone. “Friggin’ moron. So you . . . let’s see . . . went into bitch overdrive to drive him away?”
“Bitch four-wheel overdrive.” Was that a thing? Possibly not.
“But once you prevent your murder, you’ll fix it. Right? Leah? Right?”
“I . . .” She shook her head, viciously swallowed the lump in her throat. She had zero time for that nonsense. “I can’t imagine, Cat. And it’s just as well.”
“Friggin’ moron.”
“I suspect you’re not referring to my killer.”
“Come to the hotel with me. Stay as long as you want, we’ll get a suite. My treat. Because you’ve got that ‘I think I’ll do something so fuckin’ stupid I’ll top every stupid thing I ever did’ tone in your voice.”
“No more hiding.”
“That’s also something they say on TV, and it’s usually followed by the hero having to duck a hail of bullets.”
“Bullets, ha. If only. Go. Now.”
“Fer Christ’s sake think it o—”
Leah hung up. Archer was safe. Cat was safe. She, of course, was not. But she never was, not in any life. She had never, ever felt safe and for a moment she couldn’t help thinking of Maya the Clock Snatcher, who always felt terrified at how time slipped by no matter how much she tried to slow it down. Who died an untimely death, but not the one she’d been doomed to relive dozens of times.
Leah had no plans to be hit by a car while helping someone else who had been hit by a car, but she did know the variable in this life: Archer. He was the thing that never happened before. He was the key to tricking fate into cutting the shit already.
But the cost was too high. His life for hers? Never.
Oh, never.
She stepped to the kitchen window and looked down at the streets. Archer was out there somewhere, which was fine. Her killer was, too. Which was not.
“Come on, come on,” she breathed, fogging the glass. “You know you want me. Come and get me.”
FORTY
“You’re horrible and I could almost regret meeting you and I’m probably not the only guy out there who wants to strangle you—I’m literally not the only guy out there who wants to strangle you—but I’m not gonna just slink off into the sunset and let you get fatally stabbed a lot.”
“Huh.”
“That’s it.” Archer nodded so hard he almost gave himself a headache. “That’s what I’ll say to her when I see her again.”
“Might work,” Cat conceded. She and Archer were walking toward the downtown area. Archer had called Cat with updates, she gave him an earful, then orders, and he’d met her to walk her to the hotel. The day was too gorgeous, and they were both too keyed up, for a taxi. “Or you could just kiss her a whole bunch.”
“Plan B. Also Plan C through ZZZ.”
“Good to know. So you figured out her incredibly transparent ploy, eh?”
“Please, God, let it be a ploy.” He shoved his hands in his jeans and hunched while they trudged, Cat because she was loaded down with Target bags of just-purchased travel toiletries, he because he was dead like a dodo inside. Thanks to Leah, his heart was extinct. I need to remember to never say that out loud because, even to me, it sounds lame. “Pretty please? God probably owes me a favor, right? I do all sorts of stuff for Him.” Part-time job number five: bookstore clerk at St. Peter’s.