“We never forget to give copies of the BOL,” the woman bristled. “You must have misplaced it.”
Jessi sighed. “Okay, fine, I misplaced it. Regardless, I don’t have it.”
“Ma’am, we do hundreds of deliveries a week. Without an invoice number, I have no way of knowing what delivery you’re talking about.”
“Well, you can look it up by last name, can’t you?”
“The computers are down for the night. They go off-line at eight. You’ll have to call back tomorrow.”
“It was an unusual delivery,” Jessi pushed. “You might remember it. It was a late-night drop. A recent one. I can describe the guys who brought it.” Swiftly, she detailed the pair.
There was another long silence.
Then, “Ma’am, those men were murdered over the weekend. Garroted, just like that professor man that’s been all over the news. Police won’t leave us alone.” A bitter note entered her voice. “They been acting like my husband’s company had something to do with it, like we got shady dealings going on or something.” A pause, then, “What did you say your name was again?”
Feeling like she’d just been kicked in the stomach, Jessi hung up.
She didn’t go straight to him.
She refused to do that.
The thought of such a swift show of defeat was too chafing.
The past few days had been a study in humility for her. Not a single thing had gone according to anything remotely resembling The Jessi St. James Plan For A Good Life, and she had the bad feeling nothing was going to for quite a while.
So she stubbornly toughed it out in the university café until half past midnight, sipping still more coffee that her frazzled nerves didn’t need, savoring what she suspected might be her last moments of near-normalcy for a long time, before caving in to the inevitable.
She had no desire to die. Crimeny, she’d hardly even gotten to live yet.
Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans. Her friend Ginger had given her a coffee mug with that quote on it a few months ago. If you spun it around, the other side said: When did having a life become an event you had to schedule? She’d stuffed it way in the back of her cupboard and not looked at it again, the sad truth of it shaving too close to the bone.
No, she certainly wasn’t ready to die. She wanted at least another sixty or seventy years. She hadn’t even gotten to the good parts of her life yet. Problem was, she didn’t suffer any illusions about her ability to, as he’d so succinctly put it, “see death coming.” She was a college student, an archaeology major, at that. People were not her forte. Not living ones, anyway. She was no slouch with the dead ones, like the Iceman or the Bog People, but that wouldn’t get her very far with an assassin. Sad fact was, Death could probably stalk up to her wearing a hooded black robe and toting a scythe, and she’d get all distracted wondering about the age, origin, and composition of the scythe.
Ergo, like it or not—and dear God, she didn’t—she needed him. Whatever he was. The professor was dead. The deliverymen were dead. She’d been next. Three out of four down. She felt like one of those ditzy heroines in a murder mystery, or one of those fluffy romance novels, the loose end that needed tidying up, the one the psychopath kept coming after. The helpless, girly girl. And she’d never considered herself helpless in her entire life. Girly, maybe, but not helpless.
Now, standing outside the door to Professor Keene’s office yet again, she stiffened her spine, mentally preparing to fling herself upon an impossible being’s mercy.
Either he would protect her as he claimed, or he really was some cosmically evil villain, justly imprisoned and lying through his teeth, who planned to kill her—the way things had been going for her lately—gruesomely and with much blood, right there on the spot.
If that was the case, she was damned if she did and damned if she didn’t, her demise a mere bit of squabbling over place and time, so she should probably just buck up and get it over with.
She glanced at her watch—12:42 A.M.
Good-bye life as she knew it, hello chaos. Hopefully not just good-bye life.
She pushed open the door and stepped into the office. “Okay,” she told the silvery surface with a sigh, “I think we can make a deal.”
He was there before she’d even fully formed the word “think.” She finished the rest of the sentence a bit breathlessly.
A slow, exultant smile curved his lips.
“Deal, my ballocks. Get me the bloody hell out of here, woman.”
* * *
6
“Don’t give me excuses,” Lucan snarled into the phone. “Roman is dead. I need Eve in Chicago now.”