“No shit—let me in, dummkopf. I’m freezing my ass off out here.” She’s already pushing her way through the door. “I had another win.”
“What happened?” She’s leaving soggy footprints on the linoleum. “You’re dripping. Let me get you a towel.”
“I told you, it’s freezing. Going to rain any minute.” She accepts the towel he fetched from the bathroom, wipes her face and chafes her hands with it. “I’ve been standing outside in the cold for the last two hours. I feel like one of those slabs of beef at Gennaro’s.”
“You’re white.” He frowns, goes to the kitchen to put a flame under the ponche in the pot on the stove. “You need something warm to drink.”
“Sounds great. I’m gonna use your bathroom, okay?” When she returns, she finds a chair, shakes out her fingers to recover feeling. Squints at the glass of hot punch he’s set down. “What’s this?”
“Mulled wine.” Simon’s fixed on her eyebrow stitches, at the way they’re starting to pucker.
“Awesome.” She sips. “Mm, not bad. So I went to the Riverview, but—”
“Keep talking. I’m going to remove your stitches while you tell me.” May as well kill two birds with one stone. He walks away to fetch sharp nail scissors and tweezers and a washcloth.
“You don’t want to do that later?”
“If you leave them too long, the skin grows together wrong,” he calls from the bathroom, before walking back. “And I can listen and do this at the same time.”
“Multifunctional, right.” She continues sipping, her cheeks gradually pinking. It’s a good sign; when she’d arrived, her face had been almost translucent. “Okay, so I went to the Riverview, but Mischa was up at the Triangle, and when I got there, I saw Ray Dinkins.”
“One of Lamonte’s men.” He keeps his tone neutral, but he doesn’t feel neutral. He pats at her eyebrow with the dampened washcloth. “Tilt your head this way. Do you trust me to use scissors?”
“What? Sure. And yes, Dinkins is Lamonte’s guy. We saw him at Big Mouth.”
Simon sighs. “You followed Dinkins, didn’t you?”
“Hell yes.”
He snips a stitch, teases the thread out with the tweezers. “As your security specialist, I’d like to raise some objections.”
“You know, for a serial killer, you’ve got a real sense of civic responsibility going on there,” Nomi says.
She’s so nonchalant about it, they both pause for a second.
Simon breaks the moment by snorting. “All right, tell me what happened.”
“It was pretty straightforward—he jumped in a cab, I jumped in a cab. I tailed him out to Chelsea Piers and watched him go into some warehouse off West Nineteenth Street. Then I waited around in the freezing cold like a bum for two hours until he came out.” Nomi holds still as Simon cuts and slides out another stitch.
“A warehouse.”
“Yep. I don’t want to get too excited—I want to cross-reference with the property list and see if I can find a match. But even if it’s not listed, that warehouse could be the place they’re holding Brittany. We’ve got the Jeremy connection, we’ve got Galetti’s property list, and now this.”
“Okay, last one.” Simon snips the final stitch at her eyebrow, eases out the thread.
Nomi drains her glass. “Three wins in one night. Does that mean my streak’s over?”
“Well, your stitches are over at any rate.” He smooths the washcloth over her knitted skin. The line is distinct but neat.
“Good, they were getting itchy.” She gets up and goes into his bathroom to check her face, calls out from there. “Looks okay?”
“For a rough job, it’s okay,” he concedes, as he disposes of the trash.
She appears again in the bathroom doorway. “There’s another joke in there about getting medical treatment from a serial killer, but I don’t want to push it.”
He wants to say, “Why not?” But now he’s the one feeling unsure. Maybe she’s still scared of him—hard to say. He shrugs and settles for an awkward “It’s fine.”
“Thank you.” Nomi comes closer, her dark hair still beaded with late-night mist. “For the stitch removal, and for the wine. And ...” She glances away, back. “When I had another win, I wanted to tell you about it. I guess I’m not ready to kick you to the curb just yet.”
