I stare at him, mystified. What the hell is he doing?
“No,” I say through clenched teeth. “I amSwedish.” Goddammit. Acting has never been my forte. My main strategy here was to not speak very much, and Grant isn’t helping.
The driver turns back, frowning. “You know this guy?” I shakemy head quickly, all too aware that my lonesome-tourist act is in peril.
“Trust me,” Grant says pointedly.“You are going to want to hear this.”
I glare at him. He’s a fraction of an inch from blowing our cover, and for what? An eighty-eighth reason we shouldn’t be doing this? I pry his fingers off the side of the carriage.
“Drive, please,” I call to the Pulverizer, with one more warning look at Grant. “I mean, pedal.Danke.”
Shit. That’s German, isn’t it? This is a clusterfuck on wheels.
We take off, leaving a flustered Grant behind.
“Where you from, love?” The driver shouts over the traffic as we make our way down the road. I hope I’m imagining the note of skepticism in his voice.
“Sweden!” I say, perhaps too enthusiastically. “Stockholm.”
“Stockholm,” he repeats, sounding like someone trying to decide if a child is fibbing. This is not good. “And what do you do in Stockholm?”
I rifle through and dump out the junk drawers in my brain, cursing myself for choosing one of the few places I’ve never been. “Oh, you know,” I say breezily. “Go to IKEA. Listen to ABBA. Be … cold.”
Oh, shit, wait. He meant what doIdo in Stockholm.
“Sales,” I hurry. “I am in sales.”
But something’s off. By which I mean more off than the standard pedicab-serial-killer kind of off. A heavy silence has fallen, the kind that tells me he’s thinking hard. It’s like I can hear him adding up my story, my terrible accent, my obviously unnatural hair.
He darts a look over his shoulder, then does a double take toward the sidewalk that leaves him slack-jawed. And when I follow his gaze, I can see why.
Grant is tearing down the sidewalk,shockinglyclose behindus—arms pumping, jacket flying out behind him, dodging pedestrians by a hair. And while I’m aware this is a big red flag and I should probably be giving him a death stare, all I can seem to do is gape. The man isfast. We’re flying down the road on three wheels, and he’s almost keeping up.
When I look back at the Pulverizer, his eyes are not on the road, but fixed on me. And there’s fear in them.
“He sent you, didn’t he?”
It’s like the world goes silent. “Who? Mr. Page?”
Horror floods his features, and I go cold. If the name alone can strike fear into the heart of a serial killer, Mr. Page must be onehellof a Big Bad Guy.
Without warning, the Pulverizer leaps from the bicycle seat, lands in a squat, and runs.
“HEY!” I shout, full Bostonian road rage taking over. Without him at the handlebars, the pedicab careens wildly, earning honked horns and screeching brakes all around.
I throw myself toward the handlebars and end up getting Heimliched by the bike seat, my fingers stretching desperately for the brakes. I can only graze them. I’m zooming toward an intersection, running out of time. With a kick to the carriage behind me, I gain only a fraction of an inch, but it’s enough. I squeeze the brakes a nanosecond before whipping through a red light, where I would have been inevitably crushed by the ambulance that whirs by.
I jerk my head to the right just in time to see the Pedicab Pulverizer disappearing around a corner. Farther back, Grant has come to a winded stop and is staring at me in horror, seemingly more interested in witnessing my near-disaster than pursuing our target.Fuck, fuck, fuck.
Ignoring the still-red light, I jump onto the bike seat and pedal into action, once again stirring up a cacophony of car horns. Pedicabs, as it turns out, are not the swiftest of vehicles. They’recumbersome and unwieldy at the best of times. And this, with cars screaming at me on the wrong side of the road and a murderer slipping farther from my grasp by the second, isnotthe best of times.
I clunk down the street and around the corner, coming to a crash-stop halfway up a curb. I look desperately in both directions.
He’s nowhere.
The storm of profanity that escapes my mouth earns me a glare from a well-dressed elderly woman passing by. A man pushing a stroller stops to cover his child’s ears and frown at me. I slump over the handlebars, rubbing my temples as I try to catch my breath.
I’m tempted to think this couldn’t have gone worse. Sure, the worst-case scenario of dealing with a murderer is getting murdered. But letting him get away when you were explicitly asked not to is a close second.
