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She didn't say what we were both thinking: that
Fletcher was gone now. That he wasn't around to protect her from Grimes anymore.
But I was.
I'd made a promise to the old man in his office, and it was the same one that I'd made to Sophia and Jo-Jo too, even if I hadn't said it out loud to them, even if they didn't realize it yet.
"Don't you worry about Harley Grimes," I said, reaching out and laying a hand on her shoulder much the same way that Owen had done to me when he'd given me back my knives earlier. "I'll make sure that bastard never hurts you or anyone else ever again. I'm going to finish what Fletcher started and kill him for good this time. That I promise you, Sophia. "
She nodded, but the thick muscles in her shoulder bunched under my hand, and the tension in her face didn't ease. After a moment, she shuffled forward, keeping low and moving away from me and over to another patch of daisies. I let my hand fall away from her shoulder, but I didn't follow her.
Instead, I stood there with her in the dark of the night as she picked flower after flower, as though she could strip away all her bad memories as easily as she could separate the delicate petals from the stems.
But she couldn't, and we both knew it.
Chapter Twenty-eight
The next morning, I went to the Pork Pit and opened up the restaurant right on time, just like usual.
Despite the fact that I was being hunted by a couple of Fire elemental psychopaths, I still had a barbecue joint to run. Besides, Grimes was looking for a woman who said that her name was Gin Blanco, and everyone knew that the Pork Pit was mine. I only wondered how long it would take him to realize that I really was the Spider and come here to confront me.
The only thing missing from the restaurant was Sophia. She was still stashed away at cooper's house, along with Jo-Jo. I'd told the sisters to take it easy and rest up, that nothing was going to happen today. That I had Finn tracking down some leads and was formulating a plan on how best to deal with Grimes.
I didn't tell them that I'd already worked everything out with Finn, Owen, Phillip, and Bria. I didn't want Sophia and Jo-Jo involved in my scheme, and I didn't want them anywhere near me, not when I was waiting for Grimes to make the first move. They'd already faced him twice, which was two times too many. I was going to handle things from here, like I'd promised Fletcher. I didn't want Sophia and Jo-Jo to set eyes on Grimes ever again - at least, not until after I'd killed him.
I didn't think that the sisters really believed me, but they'd reluctantly agreed to stay put, especially since neither one of them was a hundred percent. Despite the fact that cooper continued to use his magic on her, Jo-Jo was still weak, and Sophia, well, Sophia had been shot, kidnapped, and tortured. She needed some time to recover from that and from all the grievous wounds that she had on the inside, the ones that no magic could ever fix.
It made me a little melancholy, stepping into the restaurant and not seeing Sophia standing behind the counter, slicing up her homemade sourdough rolls for the day's sandwiches, or hefting a big pot of Fletcher's secret barbecue sauce onto a back burner to bubble away. But it was good that she wasn't there. If she was, all I would do was worry about her, and I couldn't afford to do that. I couldn't afford to be distracted for a moment, not when Grimes and Hazel were coming for me.
So I did my usual sweep of the restaurant for bombs, explosive runes, and any other nasty surprises that someone might have planted on the doors, inside the storefront, or even back in the restrooms overnight. When I was satisfied that no one had been inside the restaurant who shouldn't have been, I flipped the sign on the front door over to Open , tied a blue work apron on over my clothes, and switched on the appliances to start cooking.
The waitstaff showed up about half an hour later. A few were surprised when I told them that Sophia wouldn't be in for the rest of the week, but nobody said anything to me about it. They were all too worried about what I might do to them as the Spider to give me any lip about working a little harder because we were a man down.
But the day passed quietly. I cooked, waited on tables, cooked some more, and even managed to read a few chapters of Dr. No by Ian Fleming, which I was reading for a spy-literature class that I was going to start over at Ashland community college in a few weeks.
People came and went, flowing in and out of the restaurant in a regular, familiar, comforting rhythm. No one entered the Pork Pit who shouldn't have, and no one tried to kill me. All in all, it was a rather boring day.
I knew that it wouldn't last, though. And I was looking forward to showing Grimes that I really and truly was the Spider.
Grimes's men showed up at the Pork Pit just before noon the next day.
Oh, they tried to hide who they were by trading in their usual old-fashioned suits in favor of jeans, cowboy boots, and western shirts, complete with pearl-button snaps. But their clothes were obviously new, judging from the stiff, starchy look of their shirts, the sharp creases in their jeans, and the fact that there wasn't so much as a speck of dirt on their fancy boots. Plus, one of them brought his brown fedora into the restaurant and threw it down onto the booth beside him, a hat exactly like the ones all of Grimes's men had worn.
For all intents and purposes, the two men looked like a couple of wannabe cowboys who'd come to the restaurant in search of a good, hot, greasy meal. But their eyes tracked my every movement, and they paid more attention to me than they did to their food. Pity. The strawberry-peach pie was quite excellent that day.
Either they were there to kill me and prove what badasses they were to the rest of the Ashland underworld, or they were watching me on Grimes's orders. Since they didn't try to murder me in front of the cash register or lie in wait and jump me in the alley when I took out the trash, that meant that they were most likely on a reconnaissance mission.
The two guys lingered in the restaurant for more than two hours, ordering second helpings of everything, including the pie. I hoped they enjoyed their last meal.
While the men were finally, slowly, finishing up their second servings of pie, I plopped down on my stool behind the cash register, pulled my cell phone out of my jeans pocket, and called Finn.
"Finnegan Lane, always at your beck and call," he answered in a cheery tone.
"It's on for tonight. "
"Are you sure?" he asked.
I opened my book to the page that I'd marked earlier with a credit-card receipt, as though my conversation with Finn was so casual that I could read a few pages and talk to him at the same time. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see one of the men shoving a bite of pie into his mouth and staring at me.
