Craving (24 page)

As we left the diner, I walked backward before him. “You honestly think that those files would be above board? Wouldn’t they keep things like that safe, if they had anything that needed hiding?”

He shrugged and took out a cigarette. “Possibly, but if they do, I’m thinking you’d know where the line got fudged.”

I smiled. “You have such faith in me and my talents!”

He lit the cigarette and narrowed his eyes, looking exactly like Sam Spade, minus the hat.

“You like me don’t you, just admit it!”

He shook his head, but didn’t manage any vitriol. While he stood outside, I went into the shop and trotted up the stairs. As usual, Arthur looked like he’d been swallowed whole by a library. A portion of shelves had been cleared and all of Eva’s books rested exactly as they had in her apartment. He was staring at the first red volume, frowning in concentration the likes of which I’d never seen from him.

Without warning, I put my arms around him and hugged, but as usual, he did not flinch.

“Did you enjoy the pie?”

I laughed. The way he said “pie” made it sound like an unearthly delicacy. “Yes.”

“Did Unger?”

Behind him, I crossed my arms. “Is ‘pie’ a euphemism for conversations pertaining to you, had behind your back?”

His head tilted. “Hmm.”

“Are you irritated?” I teased.

He detached his eyes from the page and turned to look at me, expression soft and ambivalent. “It is his cautious nature that makes him strong and useful to you. I would no sooner have him change that, than I would have him quit his job.”

“Then you know he doesn’t trust you.”

“Nor should he.” He stood up and stretched.

I think my eyebrows got lost in my hair. “Can’t you
be
trusted?”

He was looking at the ceiling vaguely, hands braided behind his head. “I can, but that would make things much more difficult for me, in many ways.”

I frowned at this, wondering what a man did that was better accomplished in the
absence
of trust. “He’s given me a mission. I need Sam.”

He looked at me for a time and then gave a slow nod. “He’s a free agent. Just be careful.”

I clicked my heels together and saluted, to his amusement. “What about the journals?”

My question brought back the recollection of whatever logical wall was damaging his handsome cranium; his brows drew closer together. “I think I might procure outside help with these.”

“Wow,” I marveled, “Arthur Godard claiming ignorance.”

He smiled that perfect smile. I sang inside. “It happens, but please don’t let it color your opinion of me.”

“It couldn’t,” I admitted. “If anything, it convinces me of your humility.”

His eyes slid shut and I knew it was his way of saying good-bye without coming any closer. I gingerly poked my stitches.

Of myself.

I went downstairs repeating the words in my mind, cursing myself again for finding Arthur irresistible, despite my better judgment. Sam was at a table, leafing through papers and adding numbers on a calculator, his military tattoo twitching as his fingers moved. When I sat down, he looked up.

“Ever been to the County Records Office?”

He blinked at me and shook his head.

“Wanna?”

One eyebrow dropped. “Okay.”

After he cleaned up his books and put them behind the counter, we walked to the parking lot and got into his Honda. As he drove across town, I practiced clenching my fist, working the damaged parts of my arm to regain strength, channeling all my will into a speedy recovery.

He glanced at my clasping hand. “Did you take your meds?”

“Why are you always asking me that?”

He looked away. I went on flexing.

“What are we looking for?”

“Blueprints.”

At a stoplight, he tapped the wheel with his thumbs and the tattoo twitched again.

“Sam, what branch of the service were you in?” I inquired, pretending that I didn’t care, though I was dying to know.

“Army,” he said tersely.

I watched him out of the corner of my eye, imagining pasts for him that Arthur would never be so ill-mannered as to hint at. So demure and easy-going, how had someone like Arthur met him? How had they become friends if at all? From the several interactions I’d seen, I got the feeling that Arthur admired him and that in return, Sam felt strangely protective. Sam had invested money in the coffee shop project, whereas Arthur, to my knowledge, had not. Sam owned the building that housed Arthur and his books, but rented a small flat nearby. Sam ran the business, did the shopping, and even the chores. Though I had never seen Arthur leave a trace of himself beyond the scattered pages of unbound books, there had to be a reason Sam put up with it.

At the office, I disarmed an older gentleman with a smile and was shown the records we required. It was a box filled with wilted sheets of large photosensitive drafts mixed in with reams of paperwork. The dust burned my eyes and I sneezed hard enough that I felt the stitches in my wrist pull.

“I’ll do it,” Sam offered.

We sat at a plastic card table, unfurling sheet after sheet in silence. I watched him all the while and could tell the scrutiny did not go unnoticed. I wanted him to tell me more. I was certain, more than usual, that Sam had secrets to tell, and for some reason, I desperately wanted him to reveal them to me. I thought of Ursula’s passion for the truth and for blood and tried to put the desire out of my head, but it was impossible. I sat there watching my mostly mute companion, wondering if it was possible to catch the Arhat’s gifts by association.

While I worked my fist, he glanced between me and the plans until it finally bothered him to distraction.

“What?”

I smiled and nudged my chin at his tattoo.

He looked back at the plans and, as if he was uncomfortable, pushed the words out. “Special Forces.”

I said nothing. Letting Arthur’s example guide me, I knew Sam would tell me about it only if he needed to, and that otherwise, it was none of my business. I had offered up my ear, and to do anything else would be an imposition. 

“I went to Iraq,” he said.

I pressed my lips together, determined not to speak, and let my eyes be an open and convenient place to keep his secrets.

“I saw a lot of things,” he went on, almost unable to look at me.

My fingers ached, I was clenching so hard, but something in the tone of his voice made the pain less significant. I continued to squeeze.

“I took a piece of shrapnel to my throat. They got most of it out, but I had to come back.”

One ream of pages was set aside and another picked up. I glanced at the top page. It was a permit for construction on the empty lot that had preexisted AMRTA.

“Things were different. They told me I couldn’t serve anymore. They said—” He hesitated. Saying it meant that it was true, even if he disagreed with their assessment. “They said I had PTSD.”

I understood. That was what the first therapist had said about Eva right after our parents had died, during the two years when she had refused to speak and her journals had become her only voice.

He sniffed and unrolled the plans dated as the most recent. “I got discharged. For a while, I was broke, wandering around like a damn fool, pissed off about everything. I got in fights, got drunk a lot. One night, I got into it bad with these three assholes in Atlanta.” His calloused hands spread out the dark blue sheets veined with white lines. “They left me for dead.”

My hand was cold. I relaxed and blood seeped back with the feeling.

“Arthur found me,” he revealed. His usually guarded face had relaxed and his brown eyes were almost shimmering. “I was bloody and fucked up, lying in an alley. He . . . helped me,” he said with a shrug. “We ended up here and he sort of said it was a good place for me to start again. After that, I got a loan for the shop and he helped me put everything together. If not for him, it would have been a stupid dream that I would never even have admitted having.”

I smiled. Arthur
did
have a way of making sense of other people’s dreams. “How did you find out about
them
. . . the Arhat?”

He looked over my shoulder with a sharp eye and then leaned closer. My fingers curled toward my palm again and tightened their grip on nothing; I felt no pain.

“One night, almost right after the grand opening, this man came to the shop right as I was closing.” His expression hardened. “He looked like he’d been hit by a car, you know? Bashed all to hell. I’ve only seen that kind of stuff in combat.”

My mouth opened on a silent question.

Sam shook his head. “Arthur said he knew the guy. They started talking in this other language, right, and then the guy just dies, right on the ground where the front table is.”

“Did you call the police?” I whispered.

“Sure, but when they got there, Arthur disappeared. Wouldn’t talk to them. I lied for him, because I didn’t know what else to do. I left it for a long time, wouldn’t ask about it. Not my business, you know?”

I looked away with a nod. Of course a man with as violent and painful a past would never think to dive into areas that would have driven me mad with curiosity. Most of Sam’s youth had probably been spent learning to never question, to watch every back, not just the ones he liked, and to come to a grudging acceptance of everything he could not change.

“But . . .” I looked up and it seemed the memory still haunted Sam. “He died on
my
floor. When I finally asked, and Arthur told me, I don’t know.” He sat back winking in the low light. “I just believed him. Since then, I’ve seen it with my own eyes.”

“Seen what?”

“All kinds of stuff, the abilities they have. When Eva started . . .”

My fist shook a bit, the tremble tugged on my mind until I let the hand fall limp. “How well did you know her?”

“Not well,” he confessed. “She came in all the time, to talk to Arthur, and we spoke a couple times. When I asked about her, he told me all about what was happening. He asked me to leave her to him.”

I believed him. “So you’re the muscle?”

He shrugged. “I guess, though so far, all I’ve done is a little surveillance. Arthur’s kind of non-violent.”

So he
was
the stalker, by accident. I chuckled. “Yeah, I got that. So, what was the dead guy’s story?”

“That’s just it,” Sam mumbled, turning the plans in a quarter-circle, “he didn’t say. Just told me that the guy was a friend, someone he’d known awhile, someone who helped him with his dharma, and I let it go.”

Wide-eyed, I squeezed again. “I guess the guy didn’t have Special Forces training.”

“That’s what I thought,” Sam agreed. He went back to the plans, narrowing his eyes as if he could slip his gaze between the lines and see things that weren’t really there. Shaking my head in perplexity, I put my hands on the table and closed my eyes.

“Shit, Lilith,” he hissed.

“What?” I looked at him. His face was pointed at my wrist.

Through the bandages, blood had seeped, but I had felt no soreness whatsoever. “Damn,” I marveled.

“Let’s go.”

“Oh no,” I protested, pulling my arm away from him, “we finish what we came here to do. You’re a soldier, I’m a ninja. Deal.”

He seemed taken aback. “What is it with you and ninjas?”

I shrugged and laid my injured arm in the crook of the opposite elbow. “Black is slimming.”

After a few minutes of staring, he sighed and jabbed the plans. “This is the area labeled ‘file storage.’” He indicated the basement substructure. “These were the final plans, but if you look here”—he picked up an older set and put them across the recent ones—“you see that the space is twice as big.”

“So which do you think got built?”

“I don’t know, but a lot of times groups that have secrets worth keeping…” He cleared his throat. “Don’t want anyone knowing they planned to build that last cupboard.”

“But it’s in the original plans because the architect drew them up without knowing the intended use.”

He nodded.

“I don’t want to know how you know that.”

He gave me a smile. “Wonder what they keep in there.”

“Probably the records Eva was organizing.” I sat back and sighed, trying to see it from her eyes. “A place like that, a young, impressionable girl, she’d do what was asked and never wonder.”

“Until she did.”

I looked up at the drop-ceiling and fluorescent light fixture. “What would they have there that was worth four-hundred-thousand dollars?”

“If only she had left a note,” Sam grumbled sarcastically and I knew he was seeing a set of unreadable volumes bound in red leather, but there was no way of knowing if they had anything to do with her AMRTA assignment.

While he gathered our finds together and persuaded the clerk to aid him in photocopying them, I mused.

“If you had someone with that kind of power, would you make use of it?”

“Damn right I would.”

Sam may have Special Forces training, but I didn't. If I tried to go in physically, I would put myself and the search in jeopardy, and that was something I was sure Eva didn't want. Arthur would also scold me for being so caught up in my eagerness for answers that I didn't think about my circumstances. Club Trishna was enough of an experience with jumping in the deep end without a plan to know such risk-taking was a bad idea. So, why not make use of all the powers my unavoidable transformation made available? That had to be what Eva had intended, after all.

I closed my eyes and made a mental list. Both visions had foretold traumatic events, given me a heads up, almost like a defense mechanism. It was a long shot, but if I
knew
a situation was risky, couldn’t I purposely trigger one and use the information if I concentrated hard enough?

I clenched my fist and grounded myself in the physical. I pushed my thoughts from muscle to bone, to my blood vessels, and then into my own blood.

Spirit Ninja.

Chapter 17

Sam came back from the copy machine and put a hand on my shoulder. “Lilith?”

Caught in the middle of meditation when I had no business attempting it with my limited education, I leaned back and looked up at him. “Yo.”