So much for being lucky.
"I'd say I was born ready, but that's a cliché and doesn't make any sense," I said. I was born naked and crying, like everyone else.
"I'm ready," Leif said, without adding any smartass remarks for once.
I glanced at him to make sure he was feeling okay. He looked well enough. Maybe he was thinking of Sable, saving a few jokes for her. She'd appreciate it. Right?
Forrest nodded and strode out the door, leaving us to hurry to catch up.
While we made our way out of the building, Forrest pulled out his phone and tapped at the screen. "It looks like everything is in place."
"Are you sure this is going to work?" Leif asked. "I mean, I hate to say this, but what if Boner is wrong? What if she really left like her father said? What if this isn't going down at all? What if this is some kind of trap? What if we're about to make a fool of ourselves?" He spoke faster and faster with each sentence.
"What if you stop saying 'what if'?" I asked when he took a breath.
He let the breath out. "You know what I mean."
"I trust Boner," Forrest told him. "I trust my sons, and I trust Harlow St. James. If they say this is going down, then this is going down. If it makes you feel any better, worst case scenario, we walk in there, see everything is as Benjamin Kohl said it was, and we walk out again."
That wasn't the worst case scenario I could think of, but I wasn't going to say so. We all knew. This wasn't anyone's first rodeo. Besides, his worst case scenario was easier to swallow than mine was. His didn't end up with us dead.
We climbed into the waiting car and sat in silence while the driver took us the few blocks down to the address Boner gave me.
A fancy-ass neighborhood on the Upper East Side. Somewhere that screamed 'money.' The kind of place I never could have afforded to buy. Didn't want to, if I was honest. Not unless Sable was there too. She belonged in places like this. Me? I was just a guy who worked on the subway, fixing stuff. I had no aspirations to be anything more. Let the rich folk be rich folk. I was going to be me.
We climbed out of the car in front of the old firehouse. That's what it was when I was a kid, if I remembered right. It closed down so long ago, the memory was vague.
Now it was swanky. How many years of income would an apartment here be worth?
My guess? Approximately a hundred.
Forrest and Leif both seemed at home stepping out of the car in their wool suits. They could have owned the place, looking the way they did. Okay, I admit to looking good too, but not the way they did.
No one would question their presence here. No one did as we strode into the building. The doorman even nodded his recognition.
"Everything looks new," Leif remarked, looking around the foyer and the shiny elevator. "My guess is it was renovated within the last twelve months."
"Not one of your jobs?" I asked. Clearly it wasn't, since he didn't seem familiar with the place.
"No, so it doesn’t look quite as good as it could have." He smirked like a smug bastard.
I rolled my eyes. I'd walked into that one. Whatever, I'd humor him for a while by not telling him to fuck off.
"Third floor?" Forrest said, checking with me before he pressed the button.
"Yep," I said.
The elevator gave a happy little ping that made me want to punch it. What gave it the right to sound so cheerful? Did it realize what was going on upstairs?
Probably not, since it was an elevator. A piece of machinery like the subway. I should be more appreciative. After all, without elevators, we'd be walking up a fuck ton of stairs. I liked being fit as much as the next guy, but not when I was dragging heavy things upstairs.
Or dragging them back down, for that matter, like the occasional corpse. Don't ask me how many times I've had to drag a corpse into an elevator, because I couldn't tell you. The truth is, I couldn't remember. Yeah, it was that many.
We stood in silence until we reached the third floor. The elevator gave another happy ping.
I glared at it as I followed Forrest out across the corridor to the only apartment on this floor.
Forrest pushed the door open and led us inside.
