Page 13 of To the Grave

Iyawned in the passenger seat of Otis’ blue Corvette Stingray as it careened around the sharp mountain corners on the way into town. It was early — before ten a.m. — but I was still getting used to our new schedule.

Otis and I had agreed to get up with Daisy and drive her into the gym every morning, both because we didn’t want her running around town alone and because we wanted to give her moral support, wanted to keep her from falling back into the darkness of her depression.

But I missed the days of sleeping in on her days off, kissing her awake, listening to her trade verbal jabs with Jace over coffee.

I missed Jace too. It was weird not having him around.

I wondered if Otis felt the same way, but there were things Otis and I didn’t talk about and Jace was one of them.

We passed through the north side of town — bustling with tourists on their way to apple-pick or leaf-peep and locals grabbing coffee before work — and then entered Southside. The vibe was different here, sidewalks empty, shops still closed,the Orpheum looking like no one had set foot inside the place in decades, probably because everyone was either hungover or nursing bruises.

Otis pulled up next to the curb and turned off the car. I got out and stretched, fighting another yawn, and we made our way into the abandoned warehouse where Aloha kept his cyber lab.

“She’s doing better,” Otis said.

He didn’t have to tell me he was talking about Daisy. We were always talking about Daisy.

“I think so,” I said. “She seems more like herself.”

We entered the old parking lot, separated from an empty lot by a rusted chain-link fence. The warehouse loomed on one side of the empty lot, a giant brick building with a ramp and metal roll-up doors. Once upon a time, trucks had used the ramps to pull up to the doors and load the floral wire that had been made here.

“She didn’t go to the cemetery yesterday,” Otis said as we walked up the crumbling concrete steps to the metal door set into the brick.

“I noticed that.” I pressed the buzzer, then glanced up at the security camera mounted above the door, a small light blinking red.

The door buzzed and we stepped into the shadowy ground floor of the warehouse.

“Think it’ll stick?” Otis asked.

“I hope so.” Watching Daisy sink into depression after Jace’s wake had been a fucking nightmare, like watching her slip beneath the surface of a fathomless black sea. Like grasping through the dark water for her hand only to find her gone a second later.

We’d been losing her, and nothing in my life — not killing Blake, not going to prison — had ever scared me more.

We made our way across the concrete floor of the warehouse toward the metal wall that stretched across the back third of the cavernous space. We waited outside another metal door and showed our face to another security camera.

Then we were buzzed into the massive metal box that was Aloha’s cyber lab.

I blinked, willing my eyes to adjust to the lack of light, because as dim as the rest of the warehouse was, the cyber lab — windowless and lit only by the array of computer screens — was a hundred times darker.

We found Aloha where we always found him — parked in front of several computer screens, including two laptops. He was wearing the darkest glasses I’d ever seen, the lenses entirely blacked out, and staring into space.

“Wait,” he said.

What the fuck?

We stood next to him, and I lifted a hand in greeting to the gorgeous bald woman who always seemed to be working with him. He’d never introduced us, and since this wasn’t a place where you pushed introductions, I didn’t know her name.

For a long minute, the only sound in the room was the hum of the computer equipment and the quiet tapping of computer keys. Then Aloha took off the glasses and turned to look at us, blinking like he was trying to clear his vision.

“Are those the new Vitures?” Otis asked him, tipping his head at the glasses.

Aloha nodded. “The resolution is sick.”

Sitting down, he almost looked like a normal-sized human, but I knew we was huge, well over six feet tall with the meaty muscle of a former football player. His shaved head gleamed in the light from his monitors and his salt-and-pepper beard was well trimmed.

“How’s it going with the phones?” I asked.

Aloha spun around in his chair, reached across his work station, and spun back with two phones in his hand. “This one was a cryptic motherfucker.” He handed me Blake’s phone. “That’s the one you want back, right?”

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