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He grinned appreciatively and tipped his hat to me. “Boss man wants to see you, ma’am.”
“I assume this is your boss man, rather than my boss man.”
“Sure thing ma’am.”
“And who are you?”
“Just the driver, ma’am.”
“The question is do I want to see your boss man?”
“He certainly thinks so ma’am. I’m to take you the prison right away. Car’s outside.”
“The prison. That explains everything. I’ll be with you right away.” I pointed my finger at him and then at the door, making it clear I wanted him to leave.
He stayed standing where he was. He shoved a hand into his jeans pocket, pulled out a slip of paper, and slid it across the counter towards me. “Boss man told me to give you this. Said you’d know what it was about.”
I was about to slide it right back across to him when I saw what was written on it. A name that made me pause. The cowboy was wrong. I had no idea what this was about, but I wanted to know and badly. Because this itch had been scratching me all day and it was high time I put it to rest.
I stabbed the name with my forefinger. “Is this your boss man?” I asked.
“Sure thing, ma’am. He says he’s been waiting for you.”
Chapter 5
DIANA
I told the cowboy that I was working and that he should come back later. He said he’d wait. And he did, because when I shut up the shop in the evening, there he was parked up outside in a powder-pink, open-top Cadillac cabriolet.
I whistled in appreciation. “You have got to be kidding me.”
He grinned when he saw it was me. He had been lounging in the back seat, his feet up, reading a paperback. He threw the book into the front passenger seat and bounded out of the car in one swift movement to open the back door for me.
“It’s the boss’s car, ma’am. I drive what he tells me to drive.”
It was just as well that it was mid-August in London and we were enjoying a brief spell of hot weather. I wondered what he drove the rest of the year. The sense I got from him was that he was exactly what he seemed to be. A guy who had had his struggles in life and was now interested in an easy life even if it meant working for the bad guys. This guy was at total ease with himself. The almost-music emanating from him was just the usual background hum of someone who was maybe not entirely innocent of all wrong-doing, but was not particularly dangerous either. He wasn’t about to pull a knife on me. I could pretty much trust him. So I ignored the door he was holding open and got into the front passenger seat. He shrugged and joined me.
As he started up the car, I asked, “So what’s a nice cowboy like you doing working for a villainous vampire like Steffane Ronin?”
He shrugged. “He pays well.”
“What’s your name? Or do you go by cowboy all the time?”
“Cowboy suits me just fine.”
I looked pointedly at his manicured hands. “Some cowboy.”
He grinned a big toothy grin. “Perk of the job, ma’am. A man can’t live the hard life forever.”
As he drove, I took the time to sit back and think. Was this cowboy really taking me to see Steffane Ronin? And how the hell did Ronin know that I wanted to see him? And why the hell did I even want to see him? He was a killer. Just because his case had been tickling at my subconscious didn’t mean I needed to go digging around in it. I could just imagine what Storm would say if he knew what I was up to. He would be seriously unimpressed at the very least.
This made me giggle. Perhaps he deserved to be unimpressed.
The thing was that saying could no to seeing Ronin was going to get me nowhere, and saying yes might actually get me somewhere. Listening to the weird tickling of my psychic subconscious was the one thing that I really knew how to do. It always had landed me where I was supposed to be. Not listening to it would be like not drinking water when I was thirsty. Pointless, and eventually painful. The Ronin case might only be a nagging itch now, but give it time and left untended it would become full-on nightmares and insomnia. Past experience had taught me this.
And heck, perhaps this Ronin case was how I was finally going to douse my deadly little desire. Maybe this Ronin guy deserved a killing by a supposed Angel of Death.
Cheered at the thought, I sat back to enjoy the ride. But this open top car malarkey was not all it was made out to be. My long hair in its loose bun came loose the moment we hit an empty patch of road and the cowboy put his foot on the gas. The wind whipped through it tangling it all up, no matter how often I tucked it back into the neck of my jacket. By the time we had arrived at the prison, which was on the outskirts of London, my hair was thoroughly snarled. I looped it back up in a messy bun again as I followed the cowboy into the prison.
