Page 13 of Take Her

“She said she wouldn’t tell me. But she said that if I called you, you’d approve it.”

And then I heard a woman’s voice shouting at volume, behind him, “Tell him he’d better fucking say yes!”

That was definitely Lia.

And she sounded . . . unhinged.

I heard a door slam, as Ruiz went and hid himself in the safety of his office. “She’s already bitten off all of her acrylics in front of me, man. She’s like a fucking tiger.”

I stared at the screen again, and then at all of the beauty surrounding me. Somehow I’d wound up in the outskirts of Central Park, surrounded by shaded greenery, and I felt a sudden pang. It’d been two months since I’d been up to the farm to see Gracie. I wondered how she was doing, and if she missed me.

I breathed in the slightly less citified air and came up with a plan. “Give her a key card right now, and clear it with security—and then tell her to go home and take a nap, and come back at 11 p.m. She’s going to work nights for you, cleaning every toilet in the building, and if she manages to finish that, send her down to the cafeteria and make her do the grease trap.”

“Uh,” Ruiz said, on the other end of the line, pausing. “She’s really pretty.”

By which he meant that she’d never worked an honest day in her life.

And fuck yes, she was.

“So give her gloves,” I commanded. “And,” I added quickly, before he could hang up, “tell her I’m going on vacation.” I looked around at the relative quiet. “As of now. Tell her I’ll see her in a week, if you don’t have to fire her between now and then.”

Ruiz grunted. “Understood.”

I swiped my phone off and started making a bee line out of the park.

I didn’t stop until I got to my apartment, and then I only paused to decide what clothes I wanted to die in. I wound up opting for jeans and flannel, sweatpants and T-shirts, packing a duffle with a week’s worth of clothes so I wouldn’t have to do any laundry. I hit a grocery store on my way up for easy-to-heat-up food, a bag of apples, a case of beer, two cases of Red Bull, and then the long and twisting drive up to my farm outside of town gave me too much time to think.

I’d seen enough men die to have strong ideas about how I personally wanted to go.

Something classy—no screaming, for sure. No whining, no crawling around, no hands clutched in the air, begging for my dead mother or a God I didn’t believe in to intervene.

No, in a perfect world, someone would just take me out from far a distance. Maybe I’d catch a flash of red in my eye then—pow—I’d be sniped, before I even had time to consciously worry about it. That seemed optimal.

I’d sleep with my curtains open tonight.

Because I knew I wasn’t Superman.

I was good, yes, and the alarm system at my erstwhile vacation home was top notch—along with a lot of other elements of the facilities—but I had no delusions about my ability to dodge Nero Ferreo’s trained killers the rest of my life.

He’d started off his career as a motherfucking arms dealer.

He was never going to run out of weapons—or access to the people that used them.

So fuck that.

Curtains wide, windows open, and no goddamn alarms on.

Whoever he sent could come and fucking get me.

I rounded the final bend in my understated Toyota Tacoma just as the sun was coming down—it was an older model, but it was small enough to have in the city, and had hauled more than one piece of mysteriously tarped and taped cargo before. And when I pulled into my long and curving driveway, I found Gracie waiting in the corner of her pasture for me. She’d recognized the sound of my engine and had come out to meet me, her golden ears perked forward, racing down the side of her pasture alongside my truck as fast as she could—which wasn’t as fast as the year before, or the year prior—to meet me, her tail canted up and her mane flowing in the wind. I realized if I passed away I’d have to make accommodations for her.

I’d write up a will tonight and stick it on my refrigerator.

I pulled my truck to a stop, with a remodeled two-story farmhouse on the left, painted barn red, and with Gracie’s pasture and her excited whickering on my right, behind a fence laced with wild white roses. “What, is Alonzo not giving you enough apples?” I said, pulling one out of the bag, and heading her way first. I got out my phone to text the friend I paid to take care of my place, to let him know he was off the hook for a week or so, but maybe he should come and catch a beer with me.

Wouldn’t want Gracie to starve just because I’d gone and gotten murdered.

Gracie’s sounds of encouragement only got louder the closer I came, until her light gold neck was craning over the top rail of the fence, her lips straining shamelessly. I couldn’t help but laugh, pocketing my phone as she reached the apple and crunched down. She was a beautiful Arab Palomino that could trace her lineage all the way back to Morafic, and once upon a time she’d been one of the best show horses in the state.