Page 11 of A Murderous Crow
I met up with him, took her from him, and led her carefully down to the main floor.
“What’s happening?” she asked, and she was ghostly pale.
“They’re handling it, and you’re coming with me,” I told her, while scooping up her laptop on the way out the door.
“Wait,” she protested, and I stopped and looked at her.
“It’s either me, or the cops. And I promise you, that you don’t want any of that mess.”
She swallowed hard and went with me. I felt like a spider, winding its prize into ropes of silk to stash away for later.
I can’t tell you how much that got me off.
Chapter Seven
Savannah…
A strange sort of hollowness, I didn’t know how to describe it, overtook me. No, that wasn’t right. I didn’t know how it came to be. All I knew was that one minute we were out the kitchen door, Corbett Prescott carefully lifting me over broken glass and not putting me down until we were on the driveway, and then we were at his rather ostentatious yellow Porsche. He shoved me into the passenger seat.
It was dark now, well past sunset, and I stared in horror at the shadows moving around up in the windows along the stairwell on the third floor.
“What’s happening?” I asked, and he set my laptop and its cord in my lap.
“Don’t worry about it,” he said, and I jumped as the engine fired up and he swept us backward out of the lot and onto the lane, heading for…shit.I didn’t know where we were going.
“Where are we going?” I demanded.
He said again, “Don’t worry about it. Tell me what happened.”
I coughed and stammered things out, waffling back and forth between events, and meandering through the things that’d happened that were all a shaken mess in my mind.
“Okay, so shoes, keys, the Jag is yours – anything else?”
I pulled my phone out of my pocket and said, “I broke my phone – after I texted, before I could call 9-1-1.”
“Shit happens, buy you a new one,” he said, and I shook my head.
“Who were those people?”
“Mypeople, and that’s all you need to know about it,” he said.
I asked quietly, “Are you going to kill me, too?”
“No,” he said and pulled into a carriage house on a street I knew I should know, butfuck, everything was a blur.
“Come on.” He got out of the car and came around, opening my door for me. Taking me by the elbow, he led me across the courtyard, out from under the carriage house to the main house.
A common structural thing here in Savannah.
He brought me into a small but cozy kitchen, then through into a sitting room that was part library, and sat me down in the wing-backed chair in the corner, switching on the lamp overhead.
“Let me look at you.” He gripped my chin and tipped up my face, turning it this way and that, in the light. “Good girl,” he murmured, and asked, “He hit you?”
I reflexively wrapped my arms around my middle, clutching my laptop over it like a shield, and said, “He gut-punched me.”
“You got him good with your heel, yeah?” he asked.
“Yeah… um… wherearemy shoes?”
