“No, she’s here,” Myron said. “She walked in that very door twenty minutes ago.”
The black man took a step closer to Myron. “Are you calling me a liar?”
Myron was tempted to snap his knee into the man’s groin, but that wouldn’t help. “Look, we can go through all the macho posturing, but really, what’s the point? I know she came in. I know why she’s hiding. I mean her no harm. We can play this one of two ways. One, she can talk to me quickly and that’s the end of it. I say nothing about her whereabouts. Two, well, I have several men positioned outside. You throw me out the door and I call her father. He brings several more. It all gets ugly. None of us need that. I just want to talk.”
The black man kept still.
“Another thing,” Myron said. “If she’s afraid I work for her father, ask her this: If her father knew she was here, would he be this subtle?”
More hesitation.
Myron spread his arms. “I’m in your place. I’m unarmed. What damage could I do?”
The man waited another second. Then he said, “You finished?”
“We might also be interested in a threesome,” Big Cyndi said.
Myron hushed her with a look. She shrugged and kept quiet.
“Wait here.”
The man headed to a steel door. It buzzed. The man opened it and went inside. It took about five minutes. A bald guy with spectacles entered the room. He was nervous. Big Cyndi started giving him the eye. She licked her lips. She cupped what might have been her breasts. Myron shook his head, afraid she’d drop to her knees and pantomime lord-knew-what when the door mercifully opened. The man with the sunglasses poked his head out.
“Come with me,” he said, pointing to Myron. He turned toward Big Cyndi. “Alone.”
Big Cyndi didn’t like it. Myron calmed her with a look and stepped into the other room. The steel door closed behind him. Myron looked around and said, “Uh-oh.”
There were four of them. Various sizes. Lots of tattoos. Some grinned. Some grimaced. All wore jeans and black T-shirts. None were clean-shaven. Myron tried to figure out who the leader was. In a group fight, most people mistakenly believe you look for the weakest link. Always the wrong move. Besides, if the guys were any good, it didn’t matter what you did.
Four against one in a tight space. You were done.
Myron found a man who stood a little in front of the others. He had dark hair and more or less fit the description of Katie Rochester’s beau given to him by both Win and Edna Skylar. Myron met his eye and held it.
Then Myron said, “Are you stupid?”
The dark-haired man frowned, surprised and insulted. “You talking to me?”
“If I say, ‘Yeah, I’m talking to you,’ will that be the end of it or will you come back with ‘You talking to me’ again or ‘You better not be talking to me’? Because, really, neither one of us has the time.”
The dark-haired man smiled. “You left one option off when you talked to my friend here.”
“What’s that?”
“Option three.” He held up three fingers in case Myron didn’t know what the word three meant. “We make sure you can’t tell her father.”
He grinned. The other men grinned.
Myron spread his arms and said, “How?”
That made the man frown again. “Huh?”
“How are you going to make sure of that?” Myron looked around. “You guys are going to jump me — that’s the plan? So then what? The only way to shut me up would be to kill me. You willing to go that far? And what about my lovely associate out in the front room? Are you going to kill her too? And what about my other associates”—might as well exaggerate with the plural—“who are outside? Are you going to kill them too? Or is your plan, what, to beat me up and teach me a lesson? If so, one, I’m not a good learner. Not that way at least. And two, I’m looking at all of you and memorizing your faces, and if you do attack me, you better make sure I’m dead because if not, I’ll come after you, at night, when you’re sleeping, and I’ll tie you down and pour kerosene on your crotch and set it on fire.”
Myron Bolitar, Master of Melodrama. But he kept his eyes steady and looked at their faces carefully, one at a time.
“So,” Myron said, “is that your option-three plan?”
One of the men shuffled his feet. A good sign. Another sneaked a glance at the third. The dark-haired man had something close to a smile on his face. Someone knocked on the door on the far side of the room. The dark-haired man opened it a crack, talked to someone, closed it, turned back to Myron.
“You’re good,” he said to Myron.
Myron kept his mouth shut.
“Come this way.”
He opened the door and swept his hand for Myron to go ahead. Myron stepped through it into a room with red walls. The walls were covered with pornographic pictures and XXX-rated movie posters. There was a black leather couch and two folding chairs and a lamp. And sitting on the couch, looking terrified but unharmed, was none other than Katie Rochester.
CHAPTER 43
Edna Skylar had been right, Myron thought. Katie Rochester looked older, more mature somehow. She twiddled a cigarette in her hand, but it remained unlit.
The dark-haired man stuck out his hand. “I’m Rufus.”
“Myron.”
They shook hands. Rufus sat down on the couch next to Katie. He took the cigarette from her hand.
“Can’t smoke in your condition, honey,” Rufus said. Then he put the cigarette between his lips, lit it up, threw his feet up on the coffee table, and let loose a long plume of smoke.
Myron stayed standing.
“How did you find me?” Katie Rochester asked.
“It’s not important.”
“That woman who spotted me in the subway. She said something, right?”
Myron did not reply.
“Damn.” Katie shook her head and put a hand on Rufus’s thigh. “We’re going to have to find a new place now.”
“What,” Myron said, pointing to a poster of a naked woman with her legs spread, “and leave all this behind?”
“That’s not funny,” Rufus said. “This is your fault, man.”
“I need to know where Aimee Biel is.”
“I told you on the phone,” she said. “I don’t know.”
“Are you aware that she disappeared too?”
“I didn’t disappear. I ran away. My choice.”
“You’re pregnant.”
“That’s right.”
“So is Aimee Biel.”
“So?”
“So you’re both pregnant, both from the same school, both ran away or disappeared—”
“A million pregnant girls run away every year.”
“Do they all use the same ATM machine?”
Katie Rochester sat up. “What?”
“Before you ran, you went to an ATM machine—”
“I went to a bunch of ATM machines,” she said. “I needed money to run away.”
“What, Rufus here couldn’t spot you?”
Rufus said, “Go to hell, man.”
“It was my money,” Katie said.
“How far along are you anyhow?”
“That’s none of your business. None of this is your business.”
“The last ATM machine you visited was at a Citibank on Fifty-second Street.”
“So?”
Katie Rochester sounded younger and more petulant with every response.
“So the last ATM machine Aimee Biel visited before she disappeared was at the same Citibank on Fifty-second Street.”
Now Katie looked genuinely puzzled. It wasn’t faked. She hadn’t known. She slowly swiveled her head toward Rufus. Her eyes narrowed.
“Hey,” Rufus said. “Don’t look at me.”
“Rufus, did you…?”
“Did I what?” Rufus threw the cigarette to the ground and jumped to his feet. He raised his hand as if about to slap her backhand. Myron slid between them. Rufus stopped, smiled, raised his palms in mock surrender.