Authors: Megan Crane
‘This party is boring,’ Richie said from Tommy’s side, making him start with surprise. He immediately stepped away from Richie under the guise of snagging a drink from a passing waiter, but that wasn’t the real reason. The real reason was that she’d warned him about Richie – and apparently, he listened to the ravings of madwomen.
‘Of course it’s boring,’ he replied calmly, as if his crazed stalker hadn’t accused Richie of plotting his death, and as if that accusation hadn’t taken root somewhere inside of him. He raised his drink towards the mass of people around them. ‘Look who’s here.’
Richie sighed, and looked around. Tommy looked at Richie. The real issue was not that Jenna had planted suspicions of Richie into Tommy’s head. The issue was that no small part of Tommy
wanted
Richie to do something, he was forced to admit to himself. Bash him over the head with his wine glass, knock him out,
anything
that proved Jenna right. Tommy couldn’t accept the time-travel thing, of course, but he’d overlook it if the murder thing panned out.
He realized what he’d just thought to himself, and was appalled.
‘What’s going on?’ Richie asked then, frowning slightly. ‘You look annoyed.’
‘Tired,’ Tommy said.
‘I think I’m going to leave,’ Richie said. ‘Play some cards, if anyone asks.’
‘Fine.’ Tommy knew that by
anyone
, Richie meant Duncan. Sebastian never seemed to want to know Richie’s whereabouts – which Tommy had always assumed meant he either knew them already, or preferred not to know, an issue that Tommy had no interest whatsoever in learning more about.
After his band mate walked away, Tommy sucked down the rest of his drink and felt sorry for himself.
His life was completely empty. That was not exactly news, of course, but it hadn’t hurt as much before Jenna had made him dream about something different. Something more. But that wasn’t his life – this was. He was standing in a room packed full of people, all of whom would claim him as a friend, none of whom knew him at all.
He felt like a ghost.
Later, Tommy sat in his expensive apartment and stared out at his expensive view. He cared about neither.
He’d bowed out of the party not long after Richie had left, and had made his way back uptown alone despite the offers of several enterprising ladies. Now he sat in the dark and brooded. About being a ghost. About the choices that had led him here. He thought about Jenna, of course
– he couldn’t seem to avoid it. Specifically, he thought about what she’d almost said out in that alley, before he’d interrupted her.
What if I’m not making all of this up?
It wasn’t that Tommy suddenly believed her. He didn’t. Of course he didn’t – she was a nut.
But if his life had taught him anything, it was that everything could turn on a dime – and given the opportunity, probably would. A wise man was not likely to take the advice of an unhinged woman who was obviously a deranged fan, with Hinckley aspirations. A wise man would do exactly as Tommy had done, and distance himself from that train wreck as far as he could.
But a wise man, because he had seen a few things in his day, might take a few precautions.
Just in case.
When he woke up the next morning, he called his lawyer.
It had been easy to track Nick around the city, Jenna reflected sourly while clutching her third cup of deli coffee between her palms. She’d ordered each cup extra light and extra sweet, because after the night she’d had, she needed a boost – and she was about fifteen years away from a Starbucks on every corner, complete with a shiny espresso machine and luscious frappuccinos.
But she digressed.
Nick was a creature of habit. He liked the same bar, which he went to every single evening he could, because the bartenders knew him and he could be as famous or as anonymous as his mood dictated. All of which Jenna knew because of the weeks she’d spent hanging out with the band, learning their idiosyncrasies while supposedly spying on them for Duncan.
Richie, on the other hand, was not Nick. He did not have the temper or the predictable bar routine. In fact, the only thing Jenna knew for sure that Richie liked was
Sebastian. She had therefore installed herself at the bodega across from Sebastian’s preferred residential hotel, and waited.
And waited.
The coffee kept her warm, and jittery. The half-and-half was entirely too delicious, and she couldn’t help but love the sugar. Who didn’t love sugar? It was an extra light, extra sweet treat – practically dessert.
And Jenna definitely felt like she deserved extra desserts.
Not that she was brooding over last night’s hideous interaction with Tommy, because she wasn’t. She refused to give in to brooding. She refused to give him the satisfaction – as if, from across the city, he would sense her brooding somehow.
And, anyway, she was slightly concerned that she might have sprained her tear ducts. Or cried them raw. She’d wept herself into the exhausted sleep she’d desperately needed when she’d finally gotten home last night, but had still managed to drag herself out of bed and across town by noon today. If that wasn’t dedication to one presently horrible man, she didn’t know what was. She hoped Tommy was sleeping soundly, surrounded by feather pillows and his bedrock belief that she was a crazy person.
Sebastian, she knew, jerking her thoughts away from Tommy, liked to get up early and spend a few hours at the gym every day. Richie, on the other hand, preferred to be known as a more old-school rock-star type, and had often complained about the early hours at the recording studio. He was, he’d claimed, the kind of guy who liked
to roll in around dawn, and rarely got up before the afternoon. Which meant he’d staggered in bleary-eyed and muttered,
this fucking sucks
or
why the hell does this have to happen at dawn
to whoever happened to be sitting there, that being whole treatises of discussion where Richie was concerned.
Jenna was therefore pretty sure that noon was far too early for Richie to have roused himself. It certainly felt far too early for her, and she did not have any rock-star street cred to worry about. So she planted herself near a display of fruit, bought a satisfyingly pre-Tina Brown
New Yorker
to read, and waited.
Waiting was even more boring when there was no possibility of a Tommy sighting, she concluded glumly some time later, when she was getting herself yet another delicious cup of coffee, the better to avoid succumbing to the cold. She was considering a second hot dog from the guy on the corner – her protesting stomach be damned – when she saw Richie barrel through the doors of the hotel and head off down the street on foot.
Startled, Jenna tossed her coffee into the trashcan on the corner. She pulled her turtleneck sweater high up on her chin – it was one of those awful
Facts of Life
-ish sweaters, all ribbing and big arms and an unfortunate blazing red colour – and her baseball cap lower over her forehead. (Aunt Jen, apparently, was a Red Sox fan in a Yankees town, a fact which at least two gentlemen had already taken exception to. Loudly and profanely.) She’d braided her hair and tucked it into the back of her sweater, hiding
it and hopefully disguising herself without use of another wig. Jenna had not dared look in the mirror on her way out of the house, but she felt reasonably certain that if Richie glanced in her direction he wouldn’t recognize her immediately.
She set off after him, keeping the back of his head in sight as she walked south. On some level, following various Wild Boys around New York was probably an exercise in futility. Sure, she might learn something new about Richie today – like she’d learned about Eugenia and Duncan and their unlikely feelings for each other, for example. Anything was possible. But the reality was that most people lived boring lives. Even superstars. And even if they were killers plotting away merrily, they wouldn’t necessarily put up signs to that effect while walking into Hell’s Kitchen.
The fact that they were in Hell’s Kitchen – the scary Eighties version rather than Jenna’s beloved twenty-first-century neighbourhood – was her first clue that Richie was perhaps the exception to the rule. She watched him go in and out of about three different places along the increasingly crappy street – never for more than a moment or two – before he disappeared into a dry-cleaner’s. After he’d been gone about ten minutes, Jenna ventured closer and peered in the window. The interior looked pretty much the way a dry-cleaner’s was supposed to look. And Richie wasn’t standing at the counter.
Jenna felt herself biting down on her lower lip, and stopped herself. There was no point dithering about it. She
couldn’t think like Jenna Jenkins, Eighties Encyclopedia – she had to think like her idol Veronica Mars, Kickass Private Detective. Which meant she had no choice but to go in. She opened the door and eased herself inside, looking around carefully – half expecting Richie to leap at her from one of the plastic-covered garments hanging on a hook beside the counter.
‘There was a man …’ she said to the impassive woman behind the counter – the one who was looking at her as if she’d just discovered Jenna on the bottom of her shoe. The woman’s eyebrows, already plucked perilously thin, arched high.
‘There’s always some man, honey,’ the woman replied, snapping her gum and rolling her eyes simultaneously. She snorted with laughter.
Hilarious.
‘He came in a few moments ago?’ Jenna wished her voice had not gone up at the end like that. How wimpy. Veronica Mars would never be so fearful or cowed by someone standing bored and annoyed at a register. Veronica Mars would grind such a person beneath her sassy little shoe, or decimate her with a few sharp words.
The woman stared at Jenna for a moment, then sighed, and jerked her thumb behind her.
‘Go to the back,’ she ordered. ‘Can’t miss him.’
Interesting
, Jenna thought, because there was a certain inflection there that she didn’t understand. She smiled her thanks – and was, unsurprisingly, ignored. Carefully, slowly, she picked her way down the crowded aisle of the store, hemmed in by carousel machines and plastic-covered
clothing on both sides. She reached the back of the store and was confronted with three doors. She was starting to feel a little bit like Alice in Wonderland.
She went to the closest one and inched it open, mindful of the fact that she didn’t exactly want to hurl herself into some room containing Richie, because how could she explain herself? She peeked through the crack she’d made and saw a dark supply closet. She moved to the second door, put her hand on the knob, and then asked herself what the hell she was doing.
Possibly this was a long overdue question.
What if Richie was sitting there, right on the other side of the door? Seriously, what was her plan?
Oh, hi, I happened to be wandering around the streets of Hell’s Kitchen, as you do, and I saw that you came in here and didn’t come out, and I was worried about your
health,
so that’s why I have appeared here, at the back of a dry-cleaner’s
…
Jenna took her hand off the doorknob.
Because if Richie wasn’t the killer, it would still be an unpleasant scene. He would rightly accuse her of stalking him. He might call the police. He might call Tommy, which would be even worse than the police, since at this point Jenna would rather spend a night in Riker’s Island than have to see that look of contempt on Tommy’s face again.
Okay, maybe not.
But it was a close call.
And then, of course, if Richie
was
the killer, everything was even worse. Seriously, upsettingly worse. Maybe he’d kill her himself, then and there. For all Jenna knew, this
was one of his criminal hideouts. Or a place where he practised murdering his friends and colleagues. And aside from how very much Jenna did not want to die personally – how very,
very
much she would prefer to stay alive – she also didn’t want to die because that would mean no one would be around to save Tommy. And Jenna really couldn’t see the point of this whole exercise if Tommy wasn’t saved.
She rubbed at her temples in an attempt to force herself into a decision – and then froze as she heard heavy footsteps coming towards her from behind that second door.
Looking around wildly, Jenna leapt for the supply closet and closed herself inside, leaving only the tiniest crack open, so she could see out. Why had her life become reduced to critical moments in supply closets, anyway? Was that a metaphor? But she didn’t have time to ponder that, because her heart pounded frantically and then went into triple time when the door she’d been standing in front of slammed open and Richie walked out.
She felt almost faint with relief – that she’d moved, that she’d hidden, that she hadn’t opened that door – and had to hold her breath to hear what Richie was saying over his shoulder. She couldn’t, not over the churning clatter of the dry-cleaning machines all around them. But then another man came out, and it was impossible not to hear him.
‘Don’t give me that shit,’ he advised Richie, in one of those braying voices that had never known less than a dull roar. Jenna did not need to see his face to understand
that he was a scary individual with thug tendencies to match his overly-broad shoulders and that
I’ll mess you up
strut. ‘You show up here, with all the money you owe? What the fuck am I? A charity?’
‘After everything we’ve been through together,’ Richie said bitterly, facing Jenna’s hiding place so she could hear him this time, and not seeming as cowed by the thug as she felt he ought to be. ‘You won’t even throw me a bone?’
‘A bone you can have,’ the thug said, with a snort. ‘But a ten-grand buy-in? Like I owe you some Christmas present? Forget it. You’re a bad bet, Richie. A bad fucking bet.’
‘All I need is one good game—’ Richie began, almost wheedling. Almost desperate.
‘You’re running out of time.’ The thug’s voice was quieter then, but no less lethal. ‘You should think about that, and stop worrying about
one good game
, ‘cause it ain’t gonna happen.’