She dropped her hands and stepped back as far as possible. “Eine Minute, bitte!” she called through the door. “Let’s go,” she whispered.
They avoided eye contact with the elderly man on the other side of the door who made a disgusted noise as they exited. It might have been funny if the situation weren’t so deadly.
Jason probably still stuck out in a crowd, but at least now he might pass for someone else. At a glance, anyway, and especially with a blonde on his arm.
They walked a few streets down to an antique store. He didn’t catch any familiar or interested faces reflected in the window, just a young Jack Nicholson on the cover of a tattered record album sleeve from the soundtrack ofEiner flog über’s Kuckucksnest.
Like every resale store he’d ever seen, this one was dimly lit and dusty. He followed Emma down the junk-crowded aisle, keeping his arms pinned to his sides so he wouldn’t knock over any of the precarious stacks of old magazines, or accidentally sweep a row of ceramics off a shelf with his shoulder. He bumped a tall vase but managed to catch it before it hit the scuffed wooden floor.
A pale, wrinkled woman with neon-green hair scowled at him from behind a glass display case laden with kitsch. He gently replaced the vase on its tall pedestal and joined Emma at the counter, his new chin-length brown hair tickling his cheek and dangling annoyingly in his peripheral vision.
“Grüezi,” Emma said to the older woman.
The common greeting for this part of Switzerland was the only part of the ensuing conversation that he understood. He didn’t even know how far he could trust Emma, and having to rely on her to translate made him itch like a healing wound.
She held out her hand, palm up, to Jason. “Can I have your phone and battery? She can recycle them.”
Jason gave it over. She added her own and set them on the counter, along with a pile of Swiss francs. “Danke schön.”
The clerk gave him another stern once-over before waving at them to follow her through a velvet curtain. At the top of a narrow set of stairs, she turned down a dark corridor, stopped at the second unmarked door on the right, and handed Emma a key. Then, without a word, she left.
“I thought she’d never shut up,” Jason said.
Emma let out a breathy laugh. “Right?” She unlocked the deadbolt and pushed open the door to a tiny studio apartment, its dinginess laid bare by the sunlight filtering in through a dirty window. The scent of cigarette smoke embedded in the walls reminded him of his Grandma and Grandpa Jackson’s old house.
“Even the golden hour can’t improve the look of this place,” Emma said, stepping aside to let him enter and locking the door behind them.
He took two steps to the right and checked that the bathroom was empty, then peered under the daybed. “All clear.”
“I knew it would be small, but I didn’t remember it being this bad.” She made a show of taking in the peeling wallpaper in the main room and the rust-stained kitchenette sink.
The once-white walls had yellowed with age, and dust clung to every surface, but at least the fluffy white comforter looked clean. “It’s less of a nightmare than downstairs.”
Emma’s soft, intimate laugh hit him right in the chest. “Jason Chin, Destroyer of Knick Knacks.”
“Not since I was eight. And it was my brother’s fault.”
“Sure, blame it on someone who’s not here to defend himself,” she said. They smiled at each other for a minute, before hers slowly faded away, as if she’d suddenly remembered their history and why they were together now.
“I’m going to use the bathroom,” she said, and disappeared behind the narrow door.
He sat in a rickety cane chair at the round table next to the kitchen “zone” of the room. The space was so small, he could have reached out with his leg and touched the bed.
At some point, he needed to alert someone at Steele Security—and his brother—that he was caught up in…whatever the hell this was, but it could wait until he had some answers.
When Emma stepped out of the bathroom, he said, “Do you feel safe here? I mean, somebody knew you’d be at the last place. Assuming we weren’t followed and we weren’t tracked, what makes this room any different?”
She frowned and sat on the edge of the daybed across from him. A beam of sunlight illuminated the dust motes in the air, a flickering column of golden speckles that landed at her feet as if in worship.
“Even if someone gave those guys the location of the condo,” she said, digging through her large tote, “this place is different. Even my team doesn’t know about this place. It wasn’t a designated fallback or anything. It used to be a hostel, but now it runs as an off-the-books boarding house. One of the people I interviewed for that old story wanted to meet here.”
Jason grimaced thinking of her coming here alone to meet some creepy informant. “It would be easy enough for the owner to launder income from renting rooms through the antiques business.”
“Exactly.”
“But that also means she’d probably sell you out in a hot second.”
Emma shrugged. “Maybe. If she knew who I was. Someone would have to know to ask her first.”
