“That seems toimplyyou foresee buying me a drink in the future. Meaning you might like to see me after tonight.”
“Can Iinferyou would be open to that?”
“Let’s have another round while I consider my answer.”
Without looking, I one hand texted Raul to meet me by the rental car I’d parked around the corner from the bar.
Slipping the powdered drug into his drink was depressingly easy, the bartender could not have cared less what was happening with any of the customers. He was too busy watching a black and white horror movie with closed captioning.
The only person who noticed, or maybe just cared, what I was doing was the pink-haired woman Davies had shot down earlier, who saluted me with her bright blue highball, mouthing, “You go, girl,” at me, probably assuming I was going to rob him in the alley.
The powder disappeared in the brown liquor, which I hoped would disappear almost as quickly into Davies once I was back at the table. In the time I had been gone to the bar, he had turned morose and thoughtful, which luckily for me made him thirsty.
“Everything ok?” I pressed the drink into his hand rather than setting it on the table.
A thought fluttered behind his eyes, as if he were about to tell me something serious and then retreated, leaving a sleazy smile behind.
“I was just thinking about a friend of mine and how much shit he would give me for being in a place like this and still managing to find a quality woman to have a drink with.”
At that moment I was happier I was about to fuck him up than I had been since coming up with the plan.
“To quality women,” I said, clinking the rimof my glass to his.
“To you,” he added, and then drained his drink like it was filled with salvation rather than rotten booze. “Arg,” his mouth twisted, “how can this shit get worse tasting?”
I leaned down and whispered, close enough that my lips warmed his ear, “If I have to hear ‘West End Girls’ one more time I will run screaming. And I don’t like wasting my screams, they can be pretty loud.”
I could practically hear his toes curl.
After that getting him outside was easy, fortunately. There was a line of time between a roofied person being suggestable and having to be helped to move. Though I am pretty strong there was no way I was going to be able to shift him to the door if he went limp.
Outside it was quiet, and though there was plenty of light pollution blocking the stars the moon silvered the squalid street and added a bit of grace that the sun couldn’t. A few steps over out of the door and Davies mumbled, “I don’t feel so good.”
“Who would, after that place,” I laughed, slinging an arm around his waist, nuzzling his neck and slurring, too, hoping that no one on the street would see anything other than a couple of drunks.
No one even looked at us. No one cared.
By the time we reached the corner I was near to supporting more of his weight than I could handle, and I had to hiss at Raul to give me a hand whilst I remote unlocked the car doors.
Davies must have been a yoga enthusiast, and ready for a nap, because he folded right in the back seat, like he was sliding into his bespoke silk and Egyptian cotton sheets.
I took Davies’ wallet, the gun that I was surprised but not shocked to find holstered at the small of his back, the tactical knife Iwasshocked to find in his boot, and the vintage chronometer he had fiddled with a few times while we talked.
I pocketed a thick sheaf of Euros, gave Raul the credit cards and told him to hand them around to all of the protesters from earlier that he could find. They were to go around town starting tabs with them in as many random places that they could.“Have them buy drinks and kebabs for everyone. Oh, and take this,” I smashed Davies’ mobile under my boot heel. “Toss it in the sewer at some point.”
“Is he going to be ok?” Raul asked, because he was a decent person who was capable of thinking of others.
“He’s a big, strong lad. He’ll be fine. He just needs to be careful about who he accepts a drink from.”
Chapter Five
In which Fee introduces Alec to her family.
Fee…
I pulled up next to my Granddad’s farmhouse just after sunrise when the light was still weak, though in Ireland that was most days, still. Mostly spared by global warming due to underpopulation, it was one of the only countries left in the world that still had the weather it was supposed to.
The animals he kept were barely stirring, it was that early. A ruffle of some chicken feathers, a shake of a cow’s back, the general complaint of a goose, and a bit of wind smelling of green earth was all that could be heard.
