Chapter 6: What Was in the Cooler

Nico walked me out the back of my own house with a hand flat between my shoulder blades.

The man on the kitchen door was asleep in a chair with his mouth open.

Nico stepped over his feet.

"What did you do to him?" I whispered.

"Put something in his coffee."

"You poisoned a guard?"

"I gave him my mother's sleeping pills. He'll wake with a headache."

He opened the trunk of the grey sedan behind the garage, and Gina climbed out stiffly, holding the lid.

She was bruised along one side of her face.

Her cardigan was gone, and her blue scrubs were stained at the hem.

When she saw me, she took off her glasses and held them in both hands.

"You came back for me," she said.

"You came out of a window for me first."

"I did not think you would walk in that dining room."

"I did not either."

We drove across the river in the dark.

Nico's safehouse was the flat above a shuttered tailor shop in Harrison, which had belonged to his mother.

It had a cot, a gas ring, a sewing machine under a sheet and a staircase to the roof.

Gina sat on the cot with a mug of tea and told us what the doctor had said while she was strapped to the chair.

He had asked her where the drive was.

She had told him it was in the river.

"He believes you?" I said.

"He believes I'm too stubborn to give it up, which makes him want to hurt me more."

She held out the mug, and I saw that her fingers shook.

"Get some sleep, Gina," Nico said.

"One thing first."

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