Strike Me Down - Mindy Mejia Page 0,74
whose dark hair gleamed in the setting sun.
Logan.
Nora stopped, gasped, and clutched a stitch in her side. At the noise, both of them looked up the trail. Henry’s face was hesitant, but Logan smiled, her eyes tracing down to Nora’s braced hand. Instinctively she dropped it, not giving away any weaknesses. As she walked down the hill, she forced her breath back to a facsimile of normal.
“Hey, Mom.” Henry’s voice was suddenly young and unsure. “This lady just asked if I knew you.”
“He is the spitting image of you, Nora Trier.” But Logan stared at Nora as she said it.
Without taking her eyes off Logan, Nora reached in Henry’s direction, palm up, and waited. He kicked a rock, putting off the inevitable.
“You told me I could play with them.”
“Not here. It’s dangerous and illegal.”
“That sounds like half the fun,” Logan said, her mouth crooking up as she held Nora’s stare. She still hadn’t moved from her spot against the bench, and didn’t seem at all interested in explaining what she was doing in the middle of Nora’s woods.
When Henry finally produced the box of sparklers and the lighter, though, Logan’s hand shot out and grabbed the contraband with catlike reflexes, making him jump.
She shook one of the sticks out of the box and lit it, watching the wire hiss to life. “I haven’t done one of these since I was a kid.”
Nora stepped forward, putting herself between Logan and her son, and took the box and lighter. Henry wasn’t content to be protected, though. He edged around her elbow, drawn like a moth to the fire.
Logan jabbed the sparkler around, writing secret messages in the air. “Just because something’s dangerous doesn’t mean it’s not worth doing.”
Running an involuntary hand over Henry’s hair, Nora pulled him closer. She tried to calculate the best way to proceed, to find a way out of the woods. She chanced a glance at the darkening path on either side. They were miles from everything and she had no idea what Logan Russo wanted badly enough to bring her here, to this unmistakably deliberate nowhere. What dangerous things did she think were worth doing?
Logan looked up from the sparkler, her eyes burning with the same intensity Nora had seen on a thousand billboards, packages, and screens. The stare that had haunted Nora the entire way home, not an invitation but a dare. Take me, if you think you can.
And Nora realized, all at once, that the person who needed to disappear wasn’t her. It had never been her. It was Logan Russo.
“Henry, go on ahead. I’ll meet you at home.”
“Are you mad at me, Mom? Can we still go see the fireworks tonight?”
“Go.”
She waited until he made it to the other side of the meadow, which seemed to take an age, until his taffy-stretched legs and chunky shoes were swallowed safely back up in the shadows of the trees.
The sparkler sputtered and died.
“Why are you here?” she asked.
“You said you ran in this park. I came last night, too, but I didn’t find you.”
She’d been at the hospital last night, reconstructing Corbett’s accident and trying to figure out what had brought him to a dark alley, how her best friend could possibly be connected to a dead young trainer. The answer, to that question and so many more, was right in front of her. Her pulse raced, there was no way to control it, but the investigator in her needed to know everything. “I have some questions for you.”
“What a coincidence.”
Logan pushed away from the bench, rising to her full height. Nora could smell the UV on her skin, could see a trickle of perspiration gathering in the hollow of her collarbones, and she wondered how long this kickboxing god had been prowling the woods looking for her.
Run, Henry, she thought. Keep running.
RATIONALIZATION
GREGG
FRIDAY.
The final championship. I’d visualized it for months, maybe longer. Years? The germ of it went all the way back to that first night at the MGM in Las Vegas, as I inhaled the dazzle of lights, the violence and victory, the sex and bright, flexing feats of power. For two decades I’d worked to build an empire big enough to house that colosseum and here it was. Finally.
Sleep had been impossible last night. I’d obsessively devoured news coverage on two different laptops in my office, tweeting, reposting, emailing into the morning hours from the couch where I’d spent every night of the past week. I composed at least five messages to Nora and