Page 6 of Bourbon & Blood

“No, not at all. I wouldn’t call you for none of that,” I said and it was true.

I took a deep breath and I partially lied to her.

“I met a girl, and I didn’t have my phone on me. She wrote her number on my hand and before I could put it in, the last couple of numbers rubbed off. Was hoping your man could help so I could, uh, run into her again. You know?”

There was a long pause on the other end of the line and finally Justice said, “Aww, that’s really sweet! Hang on, he’s actually in his den. Gimme a second here.”

I heard her get up and move across either a room or the house. She knocked lightly and I heard her man Radar’s voice muffled and indistinct.

“It’s La Croix,” I heard her say faintly, a little distant as she held the phone out or down.

“Yeah?” Radar had come closer and I heard some static as something rubbed against the phone’s mic as it was passed over. “La Croix! Man, what’s up?” he asked.

“I need a small favor,” I said. “A personal one. No club business.”

“Oh yeah? What’s up?”

“It’s about a girl…” I said and let my breath out slow and even. Somehow a knot of tension between my shoulders, that I hadn’t even known I’d carried, loosened as I thought back to my encounter with Alina Bouchard only minutes ago, out front of her building and the club’s compound.

At the way her wide, silvery eyes had looked up into mine. How it’d been the first time I’d even been close enough to look into those eyes.

They were a cool gray, the outer iris ringed in darker smoke – like the mist off the Bayou in the early morning light, before the sun had even finished clearing the horizon out through the cypress trees.

Her eyes reminded me of my most favorite time of day. Out there, in the swamps I grew up in, when the rest o’ the world was still silent and sleeping. When I felt the absolute most alone that I ever did, and I enjoyed the fuck out of my solitude.

“How can I help?” Radar asked in my ear and I closed my eyes and nodded slowly to myself.

Yeah. I wasn’t ready to let little miss Alina outta my sight. Not completely anyway.

I gave Radar what I had and downed the rest of the bourbon in my glass while he clacked at some keys on the other end of the line.

I stayed on with him, getting rife with nervous energy I just had to walk off. I wandered out through the club, letting my ugly fuckin’ mug stave off any unwanted attention by glowering something spectacular.

Outside, the heat and humidity were a slap in the face with a warm, dead fish. The smell of the river wafted faintly this direction and it wasn’t great. Most people disliked it, but to me it just smelled like home.

I stared out the open gate to the compound at the empty spot at the curb where the moving van had been parked. It was long gone, though. I looked up to the empty window of her apartment. The lacy, sheer, and ruffled curtains that framed the portal into her world were gone too.

Fuck.

I didn’t like that, and I didn’t like the anxiousness that I’d not see her again that knotted me up between the shoulder blades.

I wandered to the curb and stepped down into the street, wandering across and up onto the corner while I waited.

“What was the last name again?” he asked after a moment. “The spelling, I mean.”

“Bouchard. B-O-U-C-H-A-R-D,” I told him, spelling it out.

“Oh, shit. That’s why,” he muttered and went on about being a dumbass for having had it spelled wrong for a moment.

“Looks like she’s moved, or just moved. New address isn’t out there yet.”

“You got where she works?” I asked, scuffing the toe of my boot through the strip of dried brown grass between the sidewalk and the curb in front of her building. I wasn’t lookin’ for nothing in particular but I guess I found it anyway.

A glint of gold caught my eye, metallic against the golden twist and ruin of the desiccated grass under my feet. I bent at the waist, phone to my ear, and plucked the gold band from the weeds. It was bent, slightly, from having been stepped on, but the moment I brought it up where I could see it? I knew it was hers.

The delicate filigree, the simple elegance, and the small chip of gemstone in the setting screamed that it belonged to the woman with the freckles and the fiery red hair.

I wrapped my fist around it, feeling the bite of the metal into my palm and I swear, I could feel a tenuous connection to her, out there, somewhere in the city.

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