A Friend in the Dark - Gregory Ashe Page 0,49
elastic again, and this time, she produced a business card from behind the waistband. “You tell him to stop bothering me. I hurt for what happened to Jake. Broke me up pretty bad. But I’ve got my own pert ass to worry about.” She seemed to hesitate, and then she worked a stub of pencil out of somewhere. She scribbled something on the card and held it out. “That’s the address I gave Jake. And don’t you come around anymore either. Daisy was a long time ago.”
Rufus’s reach for the card fell short. Yes, Daisy had been a long time ago. But Daisy was also yesterday. And today. Daisy would be tomorrow too. And that stuck to him like a burr. Rufus didn’t say anything more to Juliana as he took the card and got to his feet. He offered it to Sam without reading the details.
On the click-wobble-click of the broken kitten heels, Juliana moved away from them. Off in the distance, someone was singing Kylie Minogue in falsetto, and the night air moved thickly in the oaks and sycamores and hackberry. Mixed with the lingering smell of mulch and grass and honeysuckle came a chemical cloud of mango—Juliana hitting that vape as she hobbled away.
Sam didn’t take a step, but he leaned in, the heat of his body flickering against Rufus. “What’s wrong?”
“Hmm?” Rufus put his beanie on and looked up. “Nothing’s wrong.”
“Right,” Sam said. “Nothing’s wrong. That’s great. You get all quiet, you won’t even look at her, but nothing’s wrong. Who’s Daisy?”
After a long minute, Rufus shrugged and said simply, “She’s a Rufus thing.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
In the dark coils of the Ramble, Sam processed what Juliana had just said: Jake’s partner. Had Lampo come to Juliana for the same reason Sam and Rufus had? To find out what had happened to Jake?
Footsteps moved somewhere close to them, and then a low exchange of voices. Sam came back to himself with a start. He packed up the revelation, caught Rufus’s eye, and nodded the way they had come. “Is there a shorter way back? Or are we taking the scenic route again?”
Rufus pointed in a different direction, opened his mouth, but his stomach let out an audible growl before he spoke. He snapped his jaw shut and rubbed sheepishly at his belly.
“Really?” Sam asked.
“Sorry. If we follow this path, we’ll get to Central Park West quicker than going back over Bow Bridge.”
“Romantic Bow Bridge,” Sam said, not even sure why he fucking said it. Then, hurrying on, “And when I said, ‘Really,’ I meant, ‘Really, you’re hungry again?’”
“My metabolism is a wild animal.”
Making a gesture up the path, Sam tried not to smile; he thought he did a decent job. “Food, then. And then back to Jake’s so we can figure out what the fuck is going on. Let’s go, fearless leader.”
Rufus led them out of Central Park, and he’d been telling the truth: they had taken the long way to get to the Ramble, and, yes, it had been a much nicer view of the park. Not that this second route was bad, it just wasn’t….
Romantic? Sam heard in his head.
He told that little voice to fuck off. It’d been cute, the way Rufus had said, The scenic route, as though he could squelch the little blush that had come into his cheeks. Sam liked that little blush. He liked the way Rufus’s eyes got wide and outraged at half the things Sam said that seemed, to him anyway, perfectly common sense. He liked the way Rufus’s ears got pink when Sam said things that Rufus liked but was embarrassed about. He liked that Rufus wore his heart on his sleeve in a million ways, hurt and happiness and excitement and amusement all right there for Sam to see, even though Sam knew that the real Rufus, all the real Rufus things, were locked away. Maybe hadn’t been shared with anyone. Ever.
The branches of a massive oak creaked overhead as a gust of warm, humid air swirled past them, winnowing the grass clippings along the curb and fanning them across the asphalt. A shadowed pair stumbled into an intersection of paths ahead of them, pausing, leaning against each other, whispered consultations that erupted into giggles and then a long, sloppy kiss before the pair staggered off again. Sam’s heartbeat climbed into his ears, drowning out this noisy, impossible-to-escape city for a moment.
He knew he should be thinking about Jake, Marcus, Heckler, Juliana. About kids dragged here from