I spun around and faced them, shooting frenzied looks around the place, trying to figure out if I could dodge them and make a run for the street. They were still on the other side of the car, moving slowly, almost creeping. Dez was nearly to the front of the Jag.
“So what’s your real name, little girl?” Dez said.
“It’s not Isabel Bristol,” Michael growled. Isabel Bristol was the name I’d used when I first met him.
“And it’s not Suzanne,” Dez said, no shyness about him now, only a sinister sneer. “C’mere, little girl.”
I took a step back, then another. I was backing myself into the locked door, I knew, but the only impulse my body could muster was to recoil from Dez and Michael. My eyes swung wildly. Where was their security guard?
I took another step back. My bare feet stepped on something oily, then on the heels of my own shoes. Swiftly, I reached down and picked them up, thinking of some TV show I’d seen once where a stiletto was used to kill someone. I tucked my purse tighter under my arm. I brandished my high heels like ridiculous satin-covered weapons. There was nowhere else to go.
I tried to think of something to say, but it was clear there would be no chatting with these guys, no talking my way out of the situation.
It didn’t matter anyway, because Dez charged around the car toward me. Instinctively, I moved back again, bouncing against the door. And then I was propelled forward as the door opened behind me. I was only a foot from Dez now, Michael behind him.
I felt a hand grip my arm and yank me back, hard, into the stairwell. The security guard. It must be.
“No!” I yelled, thrashing against him. “No!”
But the guy pulled me in farther, and then he did the strangest thing. He slammed the door, right on the puzzled faces of Dez and Michael.
It was black in the stairwell. I could see nothing. Dez’s and Michael’s fists battered the door from the outside, sounding like tribal drums, loud and menacing and alerting everyone of more danger to come.
I struggled against the grip of the security guard, and to my surprise he let me go.
“You’re okay,” he said.
I trembled a little, wanting to run but unable to see anything, not knowing where to go. It sounded as if Dez and Michael were pounding the door handle now, trying to break it.
“You have to leave,” the man said. “You need to get out of here.”
Why did his voice sound familiar, as if I were listening to the note of a song I had heard only a few times?
I felt a touch on my wrist. “Stop!” I yelled out of sheer instinct, pulling it away. In the deep dark of the stairwell, the movement made me feel dizzy, and I willed myself to stand straight.
“Let me show you the banister,” he said. “Walk down the steps and out onto the street. Get away from here as fast as you can.”
“But…”
Scratching sounded from the direction of the door handle now, as if Michael and Dez were putting something in the lock.
“Hurry,” the man said. “They’ll be in here very soon.”
Enough of a threat to get me moving. I tucked the purse tighter under my arm and clutched both shoes in my left hand. The man touched the wrist of my right hand again, and this time I let him lead me to the banister.
“Hold tight,” he said. “Be careful. But please go as fast as you can.”
I took one step, then another. Then I stopped. “Thank you,” I said.
“You’re welcome.” Again, there was a distantly familiar quality to his voice.
I turned and put one foot on the lower step and then the next. I began to get the hang of it, despite the blackness around me. When I got to a landing, I shuffled my feet forward, looking for where the next steps began. Upstairs, I could hear more thrashing at the door.
Then, for a moment it quieted, and I heard the man speak. “Go. You’re okay now, Boo.”
The pounding at the door continued. An injection of fear kept me moving, finding the staircase, taking the steps faster this time, until I reached the street and pushed open the door, the streetlights hitting my eyes like a blast. I blinked and looked around. No sign of Michael or Dez. Not yet.
I saw a cab, lights on, across the street. I ran to it, yanked open the door and hopped into the back. Breathlessly, I gave my address on Eugenie Street.
It was only when the cab had driven eight blocks that I stopped looking behind me. Then I closed my eyes, laid my head on the back of the seat and let myself hear the last words the man had said.
You’re okay now, Boo.
Was that right? Had he actually said that?
I forced myself back to that moment, listening intently to the memory.
You’re okay now, Boo.
Boo was the nickname my mother used for me. No one else had ever called me that. Except my father.
And he had been dead for almost twenty-two years.
2
“Let’s get tattoos.”
I looked at my friend Maggie. “What are you talking about?”
It was Monday, the day after my night with Dez Romano, and needing a warm and welcoming face or two, I had texted my best friend, Maggie, and my former assistant, Q, and was happily surprised when they were both available for lunch. Q, who was also unemployed but living with his very wealthy boyfriend, picked me up and took us into the Loop to meet Maggie at a pub near her office.
Maggie and I ordered the fish and chips. Maggie ate greedily, the way she does when she finally remembers to stop working and eat, while I sort of picked at the fries and poked at the fish with my finger, unable to muster an appetite. Q, who was eternally on a diet to avoid a persistent belly, his personal nemesis to the perfect gay physique, gave a sullen stab at his plain chicken breast and pushed it away.
You’re okay now, Boo.
I’d called Mayburn when I got home last night, telling him about the debacle at Gibsons, about being chased, about hearing those words. He wasn’t too impressed by the “Boo” thing, but he’d been worried and upset about Michael and Dez being after me. He told me to keep a low profile, to watch for anyone tailing me. I don’t think he would consider having lunch in the Loop “low profile,” but sometimes you’ve simply got to be with friends.
“We need something new,” Maggie said. “At least I do.” She dunked a piece of battered fish into a ramekin of tartar sauce and popped it in her mouth. “And a tattoo is a way to signify something new in your life, like a new chapter.”
“Who told you that?” Q asked.
She shrugged. “That’s what people say.”
“That’s what they say after they get a tattoo, so they can justify it. So they can live with themselves.”
Maggie stopped eating and gave a slightly dejected look.
“Mags,” I said. “Your family would kill you if you got another tattoo.” Maggie came from a big South Side Irish family, and they barely tolerated the tiny shamrock she got on her ankle during a college spring break.
“I’m thirty,” she said. “I can do what I want. I don’t care what they think.”
Q and I laughed. Maggie did, too. Yes, Maggie was very much an adult, helping to run the criminal defense practice started by her famous lawyer grandfather, trying cases in courthouses all over the state. But her family was as thick as the thieves she represented. They spent most of their free time together, they knew everything about each other, and Maggie very much cared about their opinions.
I bit into a french fry, thinking about my recent exposure to tattoos. The last guy I dated-a twenty-one-year-old wunderkind of the computer world named Theo Jameson-had boasted a plethora of tattoos around his stunning body. A gold-and-black serpent slithered sexily around one arm, a red ribbon on the other. High on his left pec was an Asian-looking symbol. I’d never learned what it meant. We only dated a short time. He’d been too young for me, although that wasn’t why we broke up.