Blood Always Tells, Hilary Davidson [good book club books .txt] 📗

Max tell you anything about my sister? Her name was Dominique Monaghan.”

“Dominique?” The name was familiar, like a fragment of a nightmare she’d forgotten. She tried to remember where she’d heard that name. When she did, a shiver ran down her spine, as if someone stepped on her grave.

The man took her reaction for bafflement. “What about my name. Desmond Edgars?”

She shook her head.

“What did you do to Trinity?”

“Nothing!”

“She’s dead, Polly. You were just up here. Seems like quite the coincidence. And I don’t believe in coincidences.”

“I don’t know what happened. She was sitting there, snorting up cocaine when I left. She told me to leave. That was all that happened.”

“That’s strange. You deliver drugs to Trinity and she dies. Just the other day your boyfriend got himself killed.”

“My boyfriend?”

The man stared at her hard. “Tom Klepper. You know he’s dead, right?”

His voice washed over her like a tidal wave. She didn’t consider Tom her boyfriend. She only spent time with him because her brother said she had to. But, even so, she had a tender spot for Tom. He was kind, but also so silly, so hapless. She thought of him as a domovoi, a house spirit covered all over in hair. That wasn’t an unfair description of Tom. Naked, he was grotesque.

“But… how did he die?”

“He was strangled.”

“I don’t believe you!”

“Google it if you don’t believe me. The police are investigating it. They’re searching for his killer.”

Her head swam. For a minute, she thought she might faint, and she put her hand up to her temple. She stared around the room and noticed that the Unsmiling Tsarevna’s foot was twitching like a fish flopping about in a boat.

“What’s that?”

He turned his head to look. “What the hell? Is she alive?” He went to Trinity’s side, kneeling and pulling out his phone. When he spoke into it, he gave the police their location. He wasn’t watching her. She crept down the hallway, then broke into a run, tearing out of the apartment and into the elevator. Just before the doors shut, she saw him, enraged as a bull, rushing at her. She heard him crash against the doors, but by then she was headed down, down, down.

Chapter 50

She rushed out of the building, ignoring the startled doorman and his reflexive half-wave. Fear had burrowed into her chest back in the apartment, but her brain was surging on adrenaline now.

Get out of the building, she ordered herself. She had a head start. The elevator went directly from the lobby to the penthouse. The man was going to have to run down eighteen flights of stairs.

Head across Fifth Avenue, directly into Central Park. It would be a lot harder to identify a person jogging in the park than a woman running along a well-lit street.

Somehow get back to my brother. She didn’t want to, but she had no choice in the matter.

She ran across Fifth Avenue, even though she didn’t have the light and there were cars and a city bus racing toward her. But she made it to the other side and scrambled down the block. She looked around as she went in, catching sight of the man, diagonally across the avenue and one block up. He was fast, she had to grant him that.

She ran into the park, emptying the pockets of her coat, pulling out her phone and her hat, and tossing the coat on a bench. Within a minute there’d be some homeless person claiming it.

She ran off the path, pulling her hat on and tucking her hair inside. She heard running footsteps behind her. A man was yelling. She went deeper into the darkness. Her mother had, early on, instilled a fear of parks at night into her, but she’d shed that fear along with her coat. It was cold, but her head was clear.

A man grabbed her arm.

“Where you going in such a hurry?” he hissed. There was alcohol on his breath and a strange, sweetish smell coming off him. This was why her mother was afraid of parks at night. Polly had no time and no patience. She didn’t care if the man only wanted to shake her down for money. How could she tell? She swung her elbow around and hit him in the throat, just like her brother had taught her. The man went down, making a pathetic, wet gurgle.

She kept running.

Finally, she exited the park on the west side, just as an empty cab rolled by.

“Kind of a cold night not to have a coat,” the driver commented.

“Seventh Avenue and Forty-Second Street, please,” she told him. She couldn’t go straight to the hotel, because she didn’t want the driver to remember the odd girl with no coat.

“Seriously, you’re going to catch a chill without a coat.”

Inwardly she groaned. Most of the time, New York taxi drivers didn’t speak to their clients. Many of them barely spoke English. But occasionally, you would get a chatty old-school type.

“Sorry. No English.” She stretched it out to Eeeeengleesh. She’d grown up with Russian tales and worries embedded in her soul, but she knew almost nothing of the language. Her parents had never tried to teach her. That was their private vocabulary for fighting.

“Oh.” The cabbie sounded disappointed. “Where you from?”

She opened her eyes wide, as if working to understand him. “Seventh Avenue and Forty-Second Street, please?” she repeated.

The cabbie muttered something and turned up the radio. Polly sank back in her seat, relieved.

At Forty-Second, she handed some bills to the driver and got out. She headed back up Seventh Avenue, because the cab driver couldn’t follow her in that direction. If that seemed paranoid, fine. You never knew what detail people would remember. She turned west at Forty-Third Street and rushed to the hotel, which was really at Eighth Avenue. When she got to the Westin, she went in and kept her head down. She took the elevator up to the room. She rapped on the door before using her key. Always knock