The Last of August (Charlotte Holmes #2)(43)

A pause. “Go home, James. You know that you can’t offer her anything.”

My hand was almost free. With my elbow, I felt as unobtrusively as I could for the location of the door handle. “I do make a pretty mean pasta carbonara.”

The car slowed. Were we coming to a stoplight?

“Go home,” the voice said sadly, “or we’ll call your father.”

I laughed. I couldn’t help it. “Please,” I said, “I haven’t talked to him in a few hours, he’ll want an update,” and when I jerked my hand out of the tie, I pulled the door open and tumbled out of the car.

Wheels skidding on concrete. My fingers yanking off my blindfold. Honking, someone shouting, and a mess of cars pulling around me, but I’d learned at least one thing in the last few months. Before I crawled the two feet to the curb, I committed the black car’s plate number to memory.

I TOLD THE CRYING BYSTANDER THAT I HADN’T BEEN KIDNAPPED. I told the other one that she didn’t need to call the cops. She did anyway, so I told the police my friends and I were doing a German fire drill. No, I didn’t know the name of the driver, or the person the car was registered to. I’d just met them today. No, I didn’t want to make a statement. Yes, I’d pick my friends better in the future. No, I was fine walking down the block to Greystone, because that’s where we were, within sight of Milo’s headquarters, and I wanted to be spared the indignity of being driven the final five feet.

I limped the rest of the way there. I’d sort of wrenched my shoulder in my roll out of the car. Scratched up my hands. They were still battered from a run-in I’d had this fall with a two-way mirror, and it didn’t take much for them to start bleeding again. The guards at the Greystone front door took pity on me. This time, I was only subjected to a retinal scan.

I needed to find Holmes, though I wasn’t looking forward to it. Breaking news: I got into a strange car where someone told me I was useless. How was your afternoon?

No one in our shared room. No one in Milo’s penthouse, at least the areas I was allowed into—I definitely wasn’t going to ask the guard in the hall to let me search his bedroom. I asked her if she’d seen Holmes or August, and she shrugged, like it was beneath her to answer.

“Well, is there a lab here? One that’s usually off-limits to Holmes?”

“If you’re referring to Charlotte, then yes. Ninety-four percent of this building is ‘off-limits’ to Mr. Holmes’s sister.”

“I’ve had a very bad day,” I told her, “and I’m one hundred percent sure you know where she is. Will you just take me there?”

Down three floors and around the corner, and the weary guard led me to a keypad-locked door. She punched in the code and nosed the door open with her rifle. “Our audio-visual laboratory.”

The lab was the kind of bright-white clean I associated with the dentist. Computer terminals were set up in a cluster in the center of the room, and big buglike speakers and screens mounted on the walls. Holmes sat below a cluster of those screens. She’d taken one apart with a screwdriver—at least I assumed that’s what she’d done, because she had a toolbox beside her—and now she was plucking at a series of black wires with a pair of pliers. She was whistling something tuneless and gleeful, so I assumed it was going well.

August Moriarty had scooted up a swivel chair behind her. He leaned over her shoulder, saying something into her ear.

“I have a Watson for you, Miss Holmes,” the guard announced.

Neither of them moved.

I cleared my throat. “A bleeding Watson, who’s been kidnapped.”

August stood up. Holmes wrenched her head around.

“Thanks,” I said. “If I want to get your attention next time, should I be an actual bomb?”

For the record, I was in a really bad mood.

“Your hands,” Holmes said, and she crossed the room to me. “What happened to your hands this time?”

I held them up, letting the blood drip on the floor. “Black car, plate 653 764. Lavender air freshener. Two people in the car, maybe three. I’m not sure. I was blindfolded, I didn’t get the particulars, but I think they drove around in a circle. It took about five minutes—”

“Watson, I don’t need a report just now—”

“They told me I was useless. That I should leave you here and go home.”

She looked at me steadily. She didn’t say a word.

“And when I rolled out of the car, I think I dislocated my shoulder. August, could you? I need it put back into place.”

He went pale. “Isn’t there a doctor on the Greystone staff?”

“Oh, for crying out loud,” Holmes said, “what on earth did they teach you at Oxford,” and after mapping my shoulder with her palms, she made me lie on the floor. Then she stuck one foot on my stomach and jerked my arm back into place.

I shouted. Louder than I needed to, maybe. I took a breath. Straightened. I tried my shoulder. The pain wasn’t any worse—it had lessened slightly.

“It would probably be a bad idea for me to ask you for painkillers,” I said to her as she helped me to my feet.

“Probably,” she said. “Though I might have something in my shoe, if you want me to look.”

I looked sharply at her, which set off another spasm of pain, and she put up her hands. “Watson, please, I’m joking. The plate number you gave me is one of Milo’s cars. The cars in his personal fleet all start with 653. I’m sure he’s just worried about your safety. This isn’t exactly your mission.”