Call Down the Hawk (Dreamer, #1)(85)

“I’m thinking about the others. You might try it.”

Hennessy’s eyes simmered. “As if I ever think about anything else.”

Senko returned. He began to slowly assemble the alcohol and his gloves and his envelopes containing needles. The air crackled with tension, but he seemed oblivious.

“What is the closest you’ve ever come to death, Senko?” Hennessy asked, with aggressive carelessness, not meeting Jordan’s eyes. “I don’t mean a swerve in traffic. I mean a good, quality, brand-name near-death experience.”

Senko’s was generally a place of no-questions-asked-or-answered, so Jordan thought this one would be ignored. But Senko paused in the middle of examining his needles under a magnifying glass.

“Those bullet holes in the door,” Senko said.

“Don’t leave us hanging,” Hennessy said.

Senko turned to Jordan and began to wipe her throat down with the alcohol.

“Better not be swallowing like that when I’m working or you’ll turn this thing into a lily,” he told her. “Three guys came in here to rob us. Years ago. This wasn’t my shop then. It was my boss’s. Tubman. They were coming to rob Tubman. Nobody would rob me, I was an asshole. I had nothing. I was nothing. Tubman hired me to keep me off the street. Said I’d make an ugly corpse. I was an ugly tech, too. Good for nothing. I don’t know why Tubman himself didn’t kill me. These guys who broke in, they were tweaking. They got me down on the ground and they had a foot on my neck, a boot, just like this, and a gun right here, just like this, and they told me they were going to kill me. You know what I thought?”

I’ve never lived my own life, thought Jordan.

“This is the most boring thing to do on my back,” guessed Hennessy.

Senko quirked an eyebrow. For Senko, this counted as intense humor. “I thought, ‘I’ve never tried to fix anything.’ Not a car, not my life, nothing. I just messed over it. I just turned a few bolts. I never saw it through. I was going to die, and I was going to leave all this broken shit laying around I never really even failed at fixing. I just didn’t even try.”

“I hope this story ends with you explaining this to them and you revealing to both of us that those three yobs were Eliot, Pratt, and Matt,” Hennessy said. These were three of the other shop guys.

“I spat in the guy’s eye and took his gun and pistol whipped him, then shot the other guy three times through the door. Served two years for it, which is where I got interested in tattooing … and here I am today,” Senko said.

“Truly inspirational,” Hennessy said.

Jordan could feel her pulse pounding in her neck, right where Senko was about to place another flower, one step closer to choking the life out of her. She didn’t want this, she thought. She wanted to stop being afraid, and she wanted to be able to call Declan Lynch and give him something she’d painted with Tyrian purple, and she wanted to have a future that didn’t look exactly like her past.

There had to be something they could do.

This wasn’t living, it was just giving up while still breathing.

“You ready to go?” Senko asked Jordan.

Jordan sat up. She locked eyes with Hennessy. “I’m not getting the tattoo.”

“Oh, we’re doing drama,” remarked Hennessy.

Jumping up from the chair, Jordan thumbed a twenty out of her bra. “Buy yourself something pretty,” she told Senko, who didn’t look surprised, probably because he wouldn’t be provoked into changing his expression that quickly. She headed for the door. She heard Hennessy murmuring something wry to him before scuffling after her.

“Jordan,” Hennessy said, “you arse, come on.”

Jordan pushed out into the cold night. It was ferocious, suddenly freezing her nose and throat and skin. She heard cars howling on the distant interstate, honking on the highway. Someone was shouting several blocks away. She felt more awake than she had in one thousand years.

The shop door slammed behind her.

“Don’t be pissed at me,” Hennessy said.

Jordan swiveled in the lot, still walking backward to where the Supra was parked. “Then say you’ll ask him for help.”

Hennessy bit her lip, sealing in the answer.

Jordan spread her arms to say see?

“Why don’t you think of me for half a tick, then?” Hennessy snarled. “You aren’t the one bleeding black shit and turning inside out. You’re the dream. I’m the dreamer. I’m the one who has to live with this. I get to call the shots here.”

Jordan’s mouth hung open.

Hennessy didn’t back down from her words. She meant for them to wound, but Jordan was too shocked for even that.

She opened the Supra door.

“Have fun with that,” Jordan said. She got in, slammed the door, stared at Hennessy out the open window. “Get yourself a fucking Uber.”

She tore out of the lot. Jordan didn’t know how Hennessy felt about it, because she didn’t look in the mirror as she left her behind.

For the first time, she was very, very sure that she and Hennessy were living two different lives.





54

It hadn’t remotely occurred to Farooq-Lane that Parsifal Bauer might have lied about heading back to the hotel after he got out of the rental car. For all the many annoying facets of Parsifalness, untruthfulness didn’t seem to be one of them. And yet he did not come back to the hotel, and he did not pick up his phone or answer texts, except for the first one she sent. He replied: You are still talking. Farooq-Lane waited for him in the room for hours, simmering.