Last Lullaby by Denise Hamilton

Author:Denise Hamilton
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scribner
Published: 2004-12-15T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 16

I shook my head in disbelief.

“Are you following me?”

Shoving down the antenna of his cell phone, he turned it off and slipped it into his pocket.

“No,” he said decisively. “I’m not.”

“I thought you had to meet someone on the West Side.”

“I do, but now that’s not happening until later.”

He glanced at my hand to see if I held a valet parking stub, then smiled, remembering, probably, that I didn’t like handing over my keys to strangers. We hadn’t had money for valets back then anyway.

“Walk you to your car?”

“I’ll be fine,” I said stiffly. “I’m four blocks away. Near the Vista.” It was a theater we had once frequented for foreign films and midnight cult movies.

“Do the gams good. Come on.” He loped off, then turned and inclined his head. “I’m not going to bite,” he said.

I had to go that way anyway. “All right,” I said.

We walked several blocks down Vermont, where the sidewalks were thick with people getting out of cars, heading for the clubs, sitting over late-night espressos, and digging into dinner.

“Just like old times, eh, Eve?”

In the old times, this neighborhood had not yet gentrified. In the old times, there had been only a couple of vintage clothing stores, an independent bookstore, a few restaurants, and a scruffy coffeehouse called The Onyx run by a cheerful Beat poet who served burned espresso in chipped Fiestaware. In the old times, we had been together.

Soon we neared the Vista Theater. It had always felt so safe to me, my old hood. That was the problem. It felt safe until suddenly, it wasn’t. And then it was too late.

Tim walked fast, his black shirt billowing in the night breeze, and I scrambled to keep up with his long, lanky stride. At the same time, I kept my eyes on the old sidewalks, scanning for protruding tree roots and buckled concrete that could trip me, make me fall. I didn’t want to fall.

“What are you working on these days?” Tim asked, looking at me sideways.

I told him a bit about the melee at the airport, and he said he remembered seeing it on the news.

“So anyway, I’m trying to track down that little girl,” I said.

He slowed down to let me catch up. “Any luck?”

I looked up from root patrol, remembering how I had snapped at Silvio when he asked me the same question. Tim was staring ahead, and I caught only his ragged profile, the nose that jutted from his face and gave him his rough, appealing character.

“I was at a hotel the other day where the sheets were still warm, but she was gone. Then I traced her to a medical clinic where they had treated her.”

“Oh yeah? Where was that?”

I stopped, struck by a surge of anxiety, some warning flare going up inside me. He kept walking. Strider, I had called him a long time ago. When we hiked, he’d bring along a worn walking stick with a carved wooden handle that had come down from his grandfather in Donegal.

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