“This’ll give them something to talk about.” She pushed between them and walked down the whitewashed hall to the kitchen. “I hope you don’t think I’m going to offer refreshments.”
Cade snorted as they followed her into the large room. It was all glossy red cabinets and stainless steel appliances. Maria took a bottle out of the fridge and poured herself a glass of wine; red liquid nudged right up to the lip of the glass.
“So?” she asked as she climbed up onto a stool next to the island. “What do you want? So I can tell you that you can’t have it.”
“We want to talk to Piper,” Marlow said. The words felt weird in his mouth. It wasn’t something he’d expected to say.
“Well, he doesn’t want to talk to you,” Maria said. She held up a finger to shush Marlow when he went to speak. “And before you ask, that’s straight from Piper’s mouth. He said everything he was going to say to the San Diego Police Department when they arrested him.”
Cade leaned back against one of the counters and crossed his arms.
“That’s fine,” he said. “Marlow’s the cop, not me. I don’t give a fuck what Piper did or why. I care about who’s taken over from him.”
A sly smirk tucked the corner of Maria’s mouth. “Yeah, you don’t need to worry about that.”
“Because it’s you?” Marlow asked.
“I’m not an ambitious woman,” Maria told him. She gestured to the books laid out in front of her. “You think if I was a kingpin, I’d be marking Spanish homework for suburban kids who don’t know how to conjugate irregular verbs?’
“Do you know Lance Rilkes?” Cade asked.
Suspicion flickered over Maria’s face for a second. She covered it with a gulp of wine, then wiped the corner of her mouth with her thumb. Once she’d gotten control of her reaction, she shook her head.
“Doesn’t ring a bell.”
“Liar,” Marlow said off-handedly. She glared at him, and he mirrored the corner-of-the-mouth wipe for her. “Your tells haven’t changed.”
She made a sour face at him and turned back to Cade.
“So maybe I do,” she said with an annoyed shrug. “What’s it to you?”
“Nothing,” Cade said. “But Piper kept in touch with him, didn’t he? So he’ll probably want to know that someone from the Night Shift tried to grab him tonight. They wanted to know what he knew about Piper, about the business.”
Maria pinched the stem of the wineglass between her fingers and turned it in small, nervous circles on the counter.
“I can’t imagine he’d know anything.”
“Are you sure about that?” Cade asked. “Enough to make the call on your own?”
She licked her lips and then lifted the glass to drain it in one quick, abrupt toss of her head.
“He’ll want proof,” she said. “That it was Lance.”
“Check the news,” Cade said.
Marlow straightened up and took a step forward. He pulled a sheet of someone’s homework toward him and picked up a pen. It was green, not red. He supposed that was meant to make corrections friendlier. He flipped the page over and scrawled on the back of it.
“He told me who really did what needed to be done.”
At the end of the sentence, he hesitated. It felt like there should be something more to add, something he needed to say to the man who’d tried to kill him. He underlined it instead.
“Tell him that,” he said as he slid it back over the table. “Exactly.”
Maria glanced at the paper and pulled an unimpressed face. “I’ll see what I can do,” she said. “But he’s a busy man, lots of demands on his time. Anything else?”
No. Marlow supposed there wasn’t. Not here, anyhow.
“Coffee?” Marlow asked as Cade pulled up to the curb outside his house. It sounded awkward and out of place, too normal for the adrenaline that still itched under his skin and made his knee bounce.
