She clicked off her torch. Lights had come up in the other room, a sheet of fulgurate yellow shot under the door and across the floor.
She could hear muted voices and the distinct clunk of someone shutting the apartment’s front door.
“. . . not bad . . . better at the Crowing Bistro in Nevergreen . . .” A man’s voice percolated through the wood, muffled and nearly unintelligible.
A second man’s voice sounded spirited but tired.
“. . . that what . . . nobody . . . awful.”
Sena crept to the corner of Zane’s considerable desk. A pillar of darkness filled the center of the yellow light streaming under the door. Someone on the other side was fumbling with a set of keys.
“I . . . ever . . . profusion of ungodliness. It’s a fucking shame.” The lock turned, the door opened and a figure hewn from backlit darkness stood facing Sena’s hiding spot, talking as if to her. Sena heard the baby bird in her pouch make a faint tentative scratch.
“Anyway,” the man was saying, “with progeny like that what can you expect? He’s like a,” he paused, searching dramatically for words, “like a . . . libelous milk-livered cheese curd.”
The second voice came from behind the first man, out of Sena’s sight.
“What the fuck is that supposed to mean? Libelous?”
The first man spread his hands as though appalled by his companion’s stupidity. “Libelous . . . it means you talk shit about somebody. You know, like libel, like they take you to court over. You’re supposed to be a criminal!”
“Yeah, I don’t enjoy this aspect of the job . . . unlike you. I’ve got a wife—”
“My condolences.”
The man in the doorway reached inside and groped around the wall.
Sena heard a slow hiss and then a pop as a single gas lamp lit. Ensconced on the wall near the door, it cast enough light to jeopardize Sena’s position and she eased back into the dark, peering through a crack between a wastebasket and the desk. For the first time she could see most of the room as one unified tapestry of texture and shape.
Bookcases lined the walls. Several stuffed chairs and a potted plant occupied space on a tapestry rug before the windows. It was sparse like the outer rooms, lacking a certain believable quality, as though it had been staged.
“Just hurry up, will you? Ol’ Zane’s dust-bugger is probably getting antsy. Southern piece of gorabi shit!”
“Hey, shut up!”
Sena’s heart skipped a beat as he said it, thinking he might have heard the sudden fit of tiny scratching in her pouch. The additional light and voices were agitating the chick. “You obviously haven’t been around long enough to know Mr. Silent’s just like Vhorty. They both like to catch you off guard.”
Sena saw the man’s eyes pause and scrutinize the room. When he seemed satisfied that the study was indeed empty he continued.
“If you’re smart, which you’re not, you won’t say anything derogatory . . . ever.”
“There you go again with the words. Didn’t you just call the boss a cheese curd?”
“Shut the fuck up.”
The outer door opened and a third voice, a smoother voice with a southern accent, curled into the room.
“What’s taking?”
The man in the doorway found a new sense of urgency despite his nonchalant reply. “I’m hurrying. I’m hurrying. Sheesh. It ain’t like we’re going to meet her holiness at Hullmallow.” He walked into the room and headed for the desk.
Sena edged quickly backward, making very little sound. Rather than crawling underneath and cornering herself under a piece of furniture she kept the desk between herself and the man.
The outer door clunked again.
“Is he gone?”
Sena heard the other man’s smile. “No.”
The man in the study took the chair from behind the desk and rolled it across the floor to the bookshelves. He then used it as a stepladder to one of the shelves and from there stretched out and opened a square in the paneled ceiling.
Sena saw him fumble with some items before he took what he wanted from his pocket and stashed it in the ceiling. He closed the panel, jumped to the floor and brushed off the seat of the chair before rolling it back behind the desk.
Good. Now hurry along, thought Sena.
But the man did not hurry. When he reached the doorway he stopped. There was a click from the outer chamber. A strange thunk and he slumped face-first into the doorway between the rooms.