Chapter Nine

Eli

I circled the block to check on Nina that night, but she wasn’t on the street anymore. Worry stabbed at my heart. I had to let it go. Hell, if Nina was the daughter of the Darkmont kingpin, she was in no real danger, anyway. I was the one in danger for even being near her.

It was the middle of the week before anything forced me to think about Nina Gusteau again.

I swept down the floors, scrubbed the bar, and I didn’t think about Nina. I staked out a frequent site for robberies and drug deals, and I didn’t think about Nina. I showered her smell off of my skin, and I slept all through the night. She didn’t creep into my dreams. No high heels came clicking across the floorboards. She was gone.

So, good.

“I didn’t even know you had a girlfriend,” one of the regulars said to me. Linden Rodborough was a small man who could hold his liquor, and he always drank for free at Toasty’s. He fought in fucking Vietnam. And I’d made a habit of telling him way too much about my life.

“She’s not my girlfriend,” I reiterated to him, flushing out a dirty glass and glowering at him. “I was giving her a ride on my bike.”

“And worrying about her all week,” Linden added.

“It’s only Wednesday.”

“Counting the days.”

I shook my head and sat down the glass a little too loudly. “The only reason I might see her again would be to stake out her bookstore and wait for JP to visit again. She’s under his control, Lin. Brainwashed. She freaked out at the suggestion of JP being a criminal—and it was her suggestion!” I tried to keep the frustration and the bitterness out of my voice. Jon-Pierre ruined everything that he touched. My mother was proof enough of that. How could his own daughter possibly escape? “I’m lucky if she didn’t tell him everything she knew.”

“You think the investigation’s been compromised?” Linden asked.

“I don’t know,” I answered honestly. “It’s very—”

The cacophony of shattering glass broke off my sentence.

“…possible,” I finished, glaring at the gaping, jagged hole in one of my front windows. I slowly moved around the bar and approached the vandalized window.

“What was that?” Linden asked.

“I don’t know,” I muttered. There was a spray of glass on my barroom floor, and a brick wrapped in… rubber bands?

I scooped the brick up and turned it over. A folded piece of paper was pinned against the other side.

I fished it loose and unfolded the letter.

STAY AWAY FROM NINA…

Those were the first words I read before a blur of rage passed in front of my vision. My jaw clenched, and I closed my eyes, exhaling.

You can’t tell me what to do, you son of a bitch. I opened my eyes again.

…or the next one will be a Molotov cocktail, the sentence finished.

A distant crash distracted me, and I gripped the brick tighter, running with it in my hand. That sound came from the fucking garage.

Every bartender worth his salt has a shotgun behind the bar, and these motherfuckers picked the wrong day. I dropped the brick, scooped up the pump action, and stormed toward the garage.

“Do you want me to come with you, Eli?” Linden called behind me, but I barely heard him.

On the other side of the garage door were whispers and murmurs from at least two separate men. I pumped the gun and planted my boot into the door, sending it flying open hard.

The Kawasaki was on her side, bent and crippled.

“Motherfuckers!” I spat. A pair of black boots slipped through one of the three small windows at the top of my garage door, and I fired off a shot, exploding part of the window frame. I roared and slammed my hand down onto the controls for the garage door, charging at it with my shotgun ready against my shoulder.

Warped pipes littered the ground there. These might have been the assailant’s dropped weapons.

The garage door slowly shuddered up, but by the time I had a clear view of the street, the only thing in my sights were a gaggle of teenagers on the front steps of a condemned apartment building and an old lady walking her dog.

Her eyes bulged in alarm, and she hurried her pace.

“Mrs. Rosenberg,” I called after her, grimacing. I clicked the safety back on and lowered my shotgun. “I’m sorry, Mrs. Rosenberg!” But she didn’t turn around and acknowledge me at all, even though I was the one who found her damn dog after she lost him. I was the one who put posters on every telephone pole.

Black Boots was long gone. That slow garage door gave him a solid thirty seconds to escape, and the Darkmont Freaks knew these streets like their own dirty, thieving hands.

I punched the button on the side of the door, lowering it again, and trudged back to my fallen bike.

“Eli?” Linden’s voice came from the bar. “Is everything all right back there? Do you need me?”

My shoulders rounded. Broken glass. A missing window. My baby, crippled. Her tires flat. Her body dented. Oil and bolts on the ground. The brick. And the threat. STAY AWAY FROM NINA.

“I’m fine,” I called back to Linden. “It’s fine.” But under my breath, I added, “Fuck my life.”

Most of the small crimes in Montclair were random, the ripple effect from a greater disturbance in the waters. But this shit didn’t feel random.

Stay away from Nina, the letter said.

At first glance, it would seem like she told them all about me, and that was how they knew about my bar and my bike and our thing, whatever the hell it was.

But that didn’t sit right in my gut.

If Nina was truly a player in JP’s game, he wouldn’t need to send his gophers to bash out a window and warn me away from her. If Nina was truly a player in JP’s game, he would have used her to find out exactly what I knew. Learn more specific weaknesses than the obvious place of business and mode of transportation.

Or did they attack my bike because that was what I used to take Nina out of here and away from him?

Someone must have told him about us, but I wasn’t convinced that it was Nina herself.

Stay away from Nina, he commanded me.

Because Nina isn’t his pet.

She’s his prisoner.