Cookie whispered behind me. “Charley, what? What’s going on?”
I turned off the light and closed the door. “I’m so sorry, Cook. Two men just broke into my apartment.”
“Why the fu—?” Reyes began, his voice loud enough to wake Amber.
“Reyes,” I said in a breathy hiss, “not here.” He was angry with me once again. Men and their mood swings. Women had nothing on them.
I led them both back to my apartment, and the minute I closed the door, he tore into me. “What the fuck was that?”
He wasn’t wearing a shirt, and the button on his jeans had yet to be fastened, so it took me a minute to respond. “What? They threatened a friend. They said if I didn’t find some chick in forty-eight hours, my friend was dead.”
“And?” he asked, getting closer to me. His anger undulated around me, hot and pulsing.
“And if they are holding a friend of mine, I couldn’t have you severing their spines, now, could I?”
He whirled away from me with an angry growl.
Cookie was holding a hand to her chest, not sure what to make of everything. “Two men broke in?” she asked, glancing around.
“Yes. Oh! The paper.” I hurried back to my room and brought out the paper he’d practically stabbed into my chest. It was a picture of a woman with a name underneath. That was it. “Okay, I have forty-eight hours to find this woman or my friend dies.” I shrugged. “Like I only have one. Which friend?”
“I don’t know,” she said, lowering herself onto a chair. “Maybe we should call everyone we can think of. Make sure all of your acquaintances are okay. I mean, did it sound like they were actually holding a friend of yours?”
“Kind of,” I said, thinking back. “I’m not sure. It happened so fast.”
Reyes was busy pacing like a caged animal, and I couldn’t help but note the fact that he was becoming more attuned to my emotions. He’d appeared the moment alarm rose within me. It was uncanny.
“I’m sorry, hon,” I said, walking to him. “I just couldn’t take the chance. I needed to know why they were there before I sentenced them to life in a wheelchair.”
I stopped talking when I noticed the look on his face. He was still angry, but his expression had softened.
I reached up and tucked a lock of hair behind his ear. “What?”
When he spoke, his voice was hoarse, ragged. “You called me hon.”
A soft laugh escaped me. “It’s a term of endearment.”
He blinked as though he didn’t know what to think.
“Hasn’t anyone ever called you hon before? Honey? Sweetheart?”
“No.”
I wondered what his human parents had called him when he was a baby. “I bet you have, you just don’t remember.”
“You should have let me rip them to shreds.”
“That may be and I may regret that later—in fact, if my track record holds true, I’m fairly certain I will—but for now, I’m fine.”
He ran a finger down my forearm, not wanting to show too much in front of Cook, most likely.
“Shouldn’t we call the police?” Cookie asked.
“They said no cops. I’ll call Uncle Bob and fill him in tomorrow morning.”
She nodded and rose to go back to her apartment.
“Yes,” I said, following her out. “Go, get some rest.”
“Rest?” She pointed to Mr. Coffee. “You start the coffee and I’ll get dressed. We’ll start making phone calls immediately.”
God, I loved that woman.
* * *
We called every friend I’d ever had since the day I was born. Not really, but it felt like it. My friend Pari, a tattoo artist who’d been banned from computers for hacking, complained for twenty minutes that I’d woken her. After an eternity, she finally shut up long enough for me to ask her if she was being held hostage by a group of men in ski masks. Then I had to suffer through another twenty minutes of what a stupid question that was.
“It wouldn’t have seemed stupid if you really were being held hostage by men in ski masks,” I’d argued. Either way, that was the last time I’d call her at four in the morning.
By six, I was pretty much out of people that I could call friends. Not that it took me that long to go through the list. It just took that long for people to answer their phones. We had to call some repeatedly, a fact that they did not appreciate one bit.
Next time, I’d just let the bad men keep them.
Uncle Bob came over around six thirty, and we explained what had happened. He kept checking out Cookie, worried about the events but dying to know how her date went. I wasn’t about to tell him.