Blood Echo (Burning Girl #2)(2)

It’s kind of cute, Richard thinks, that she’s acting like a leather expert, given she looks about nineteen. But maybe that’s how they train them at the Seattle Leather Company: Pretend like you just spent five years working in a tannery. Whatever you do, don’t act like you’re a University of Washington student who’s too good to shovel hash in the cafeteria.

She’s never seen him before, he’s sure.

But he’s been watching her.

The day before, he followed her from the store back to her dorm.

Her name’s Stephanie, and she wears her salon-perfect, sunflower-colored hair in a precise ponytail that sits high up on the back of her head. He’s willing to bet her corporate-looking outfits are store policy. But combined with her apple-cheeked, doe-eyed face, they make her look like some lady lawyer’s kid dressing up in her mom’s work clothes.

If he had to bet, he’d wager her parents are both tech billionaires who live out in Medina. Maybe her daddy or her mommy invented some stupid app that charges five billion people five cents a day, and now they’re putting their daughter through the motions of college just so they don’t feel like failed parents when she finally raids her trust fund. As for the few shifts a week she puts in trying to get downtown shoppers to buy overpriced leather products, she probably tells all her rich friends she only took the job because she likes being around nice things.

Maybe he’ll take her.

She’s not what he normally looks for in a woman. Lately, though, he’s been thinking about trading up. He’s been getting good. Much better than when he started. Adding a few challenges to the process will keep the whole thing from feeling like work.

Maybe. Soon.

But for now, the store’s his focus. The store and its glass shelves of cheap, bullshit chromium-tanned leather goods, all of which will end up looking like old sponge less than a year from now. But not before some fool who doesn’t know any better walks out the door with them, several hundred dollars poorer.

To get himself in the zone, he always needs a store, preferably with a female employee. Doesn’t matter if they look young and sweet like the girl before him now, or older and more world-wise, like that sour bitch he visited over at Cole Haan last time. Just as long as his satchel or his leather belt draws their attention. It doesn’t matter if they’re genuinely interested in his leather or just hoping to warm him up for a sale.

What matters is that when he offers to show them the wallet, they take it in their hands and run it through their fingers like Stephanie’s doing now.

God, he loves this sight; the sight of an innocent woman’s fingers traveling over the grain of his handiwork. He’s not hard yet, but he’s got all the symptoms. The tightness in his balls, the shortness of breath, the hot flush down his neck.

The store’s empty except for the two of them.

She’s left the glass door to the street propped open; maybe to invite customers in, or, more likely, because the landlord controls the heat and it’s one of those confusing Pacific Northwest days when blasts of sunlight alternate with sudden, drenching downpours, so that when the sun returns, reflective puddles blind you in every direction you look.

He hates days like this. Days that can’t decide what they want to be.

He prefers the oppressively gray ones, when the clouds and the treetops conspire to give you comfort and protection. This kind of day—erratic, jumbled, confused—is usually a sign from the earth. A sign that you should slow down, take your time. Not commit to a course of action until the sky’s made up its damn mind.

A delay is the last thing he wants when he’s getting into the zone.

Who are you kidding, friend? he asks himself. You’re not getting yourself in the zone. You’re just acknowledging you’re already in it.

“You seriously made this yourself?” Stephanie asks.

He nods, smiles, as if he’s immensely proud of himself, when really, he’s trying to imagine the expression that would contort her pretty little face as she took a shot from his Weatherby Mark V. It’s always there, he knows. He can usually hear the music a woman’s agony will make the first time he looks her in the eye; the tension in her smirk, the half smile she gives him under batting eyelashes, the soft, teasing sounds she makes under her breath—they’re all pretty good indicators of the type of sounds that will come ripping out of her as soon as one of his bear traps snaps shut around her ankle and she realizes she’s completely and entirely his.

But Stephanie’s lucky.

He prefers a different kind of prey.

Stephanie’s life, her bearing, her privilege, it all speaks of harmony.

He prefers the women who walk Aurora Avenue at night. He prefers to hunt parasites spun off by a world out of balance, a world that ignores the clear and comforting dictates of the wild. A world that doesn’t know stillness and focus and calm like he does. A world that’s fast losing the patience to take the thirty days required to vegetable-tan leather like the wallet Stephanie’s now passing back to him, her smile fading at the sight of whatever she’s noticing in his expression for the first time.

“What kind of animal is it?” she asks.

Well, Stephanie, she told me her name was Crystal, and she offered to blow me for fifty bucks. What kind of animal does that sound like to you?

“Guess,” he says.

“I don’t know. Goat? I saw this guy on YouTube who makes leather out of goats.”