Gathering Dark Candice Fox (e reader TXT) 📖

“I do.”

“What’s he after you for?”

“A friend of mine is missing.” I shrugged. “That’s honestly all I can think of that is driving him after me. I guess he thinks I know where she is, that I’ll lead him to her. Thanks for telling me.”

My whole body was tingling with physical desire for Alejandro. I imagined myself giving off visible waves of steam or heat. He knew it. The few times I dared to catch his eye, he was smiling knowingly. I locked my gaze on the floor and told myself that I would not sleep with a San Marino 13s gang lieutenant, as another seemingly huge awkward silence swept over us.

“Would you like a glass of wine?” I asked.

“Sure,” he said. I only had one nice wine glass. I filled it and a water glass, tried to hand him the nice one. He took the water glass of wine and sipped it, trying not to laugh.

“Is it that obvious?” I asked eventually.

“It’s like a big neon sign,” he said.

“How wonderful.”

“How long were you inside?”

“Ten years,” I said. “One year out.”

“Eleven years.” He nodded appreciatively. A silence, broken only by our embarrassed giggling. He fell quiet in time and took a step toward me, reached up and touched my cheek. I twitched with anticipation at the contact, a jerky movement, rusty gears and pistons grinding to life inside my mind, sparks flying. Just to be touched at all was nearly intolerable.

“We better take it slow,” Alejandro warned as I started unbuttoning his shirt.

Dear Dayly,

I think it’s time you came and saw me. I’ve enclosed the visitation forms.

John

BLAIR

Sneak was awakened by the clinking of my teaspoon in my coffee cup. She sat up on the couch and looked at me standing at the counter.

“So, that was not a San Marino 13s guy I saw walking out of here at sunrise,” she concluded.

“It wasn’t?” I suppressed a smile.

“No, because you’d be dead if it was.”

“I see.”

“Unless he wasn’t here to kill you. Unless he was here for something else.” She watched me carefully. I focused on my coffee.

“Huh! I thought I smelled burning pubic hair.” Sneak shook her head. “What the hell are you thinking, mixing with those guys? You can’t lick those tattoos off. Don’t let them tell you any different.”

“I’m not mixing with them, Mother Teresa. I slept with one,” I said. “It’s not going to be a regular thing. It was an accident.”

“No it wasn’t. You know how I know? Because of the gopher palace. Look at that thing.” She gestured to the tank by the window. “It looks like Disneyland. You didn’t buy that. That’s what a guy brings a woman with a gopher so he can make friends with her beaver.”

Sneak waited for me to defend myself. I sipped my coffee instead. The simple fact was that the hours after Alejandro had arrived at my door had been indefensibly good, a selfish, devilish indulgence I couldn’t possibly justify rationally. It had been something I couldn’t connect to the real world, to legal or emotional or physical consequences, to predictions of it happening or not happening again.

There was a knock at the door. Quincy. His apparently alcoholic mother was waiting for him at the curb, the engine running, the woman leaning forward over the wheel to eye me curiously. Obviously the child had decided that she could wait—nothing was more important than performance and chocolate. Sneak sat on the couch with her arms folded, decidedly miffed.

“Can you play ‘Desperado’ by the Eagles?” I asked Quincy wistfully.

“How ’bout ‘You’re No Good’ by Linda Ronstadt?” Sneak asked.

“I’ve never heard of either of those songs,” Quincy said. His mother beeped the horn.

“Just take a chocolate, honey. Your mom’s waiting.” I offered the box. My phone rang as Quincy bolted away across the lawn to the waiting car.

“You need to drop that cop. Sanchez,” Ada barked down the line.

“Everybody’s lecturing me this morning.” I set my coffee down. “I’m going to go back to bed in a minute, if you’re not careful.”

“I don’t lecture,” Ada said. “I don’t ‘ask’ or ‘advise’ people to do things. People do the shit I tell them to do or they get a squeezin’.”

I didn’t need to ask what Ada’s idea of “a squeezin’” was. I assumed it meant having body parts chopped off, bones broken, or significant parts of oneself submerged in desert sand, perhaps permanently.

“Sanchez rubs me the wrong way, so you’re gonna get rid of her.”

“You rub her the wrong way, too,” I remarked. “Just in case you were curious.”

“I wasn’t.”

I put Ada on speaker and told her what Jessica had told me about Marcus Lemon, my car, Dayly’s bank and phone accounts, Tasik’s concern about the Crips gang. Sneak sat watching me, listening, from the couch.

“What does a woman sell for eight hundred bucks?” Ada mused. “To someone who doesn’t want to be traced. You should ask the flabby ho-bag you’ve got crashing on your couch. She’d know.”

“You’re on speaker,” I said.

“Hey, skanky ho-bag!” Ada said, louder. “What does a person get from a dirty chicken-header in your gene pool for eight hundred clams?”

“I don’t know, why don’t we ask your daddy what he paid last time I stuck my thumb up his ass?” Sneak snapped.

I hung up before Ada could reply, and grabbed the keys to the Gangstermobile.

The I-110 freeway. Homeless camps, factories spewing steam into the yellow sky, the desert and the scrubby brown mountains beyond. I watched billboards for casinos on the way to Palm Springs. Neil Diamond in silver sequins. Rod Stewart’s blazing white teeth poking out from his turmeric-orange face.

“San Francisco,” I said.

“Hmm,” Sneak agreed, taking a hit of cocaine or the like from her handbag then dumping the bag on the floor.

“What can you do within three hours of San Francisco airport?”

“Three hours is not what we’re looking at,” Sneak said, checking her face in the mirror. “If she was there for six hours total, she’d only have been able to