After a second, Logan reluctantly didas he was told, hunched up and sullen as a kid at school as his ragged, knock-off sneakers dangled off the floor. Maggie turned and headed for the door. She paused briefly as she passed Cal.
“Don’t be too hard,” she murmured. “It ain’t an excuse, but his girlfriend is real sick. He’s strung tight, is all.”
She didn’t wait to see if Cal cared. She strutted over to the door and locked it.
“Ihave an appointment in fifteen minutes,” she told Cal. “You can talk to Logan until then. After that I’ll call the cops and get him thrown out.”
Cal turned one of the black chairs around, brushed clipped blonde hairs off the leather seat, and sat down. He leaned forward, elbows braced on his knees, and narrowed his eyes at Logan.
“Why did you attack Joe at the graveyard?” he asked.
Logan snorted,winced, and wiped bloody snot away on the back of his sleeve. “Joe,” he mimicked in a sing-song sneer. “Like you’re mates? I saw you at the graveyard—Mr. Bailey this and Mr. Bailey that. Him in the back like Little Lord Fauntletits and you going where you’re told. You ain’t mates, bro.”
“I ain’t asking for your opinion,” Cal shot back. “Why were you there?”
“People go to graveyards,” Logan muttered.He tossed the ruined towel over the arm of the chair and slouched back. “Maybe I wanted to get in early, get a good spot.”
Cal leaned over and hit the height adjustment lever on the chair. It dropped and Logan yelped in surprise as he went with it. His hands flew up in surprise, and he winced as the impact jarred from his tailbone up to his battered nose.
“Dickhead,” he snapped at Cal as hedropped his hands self-consciously.
“Answer the question,” Cal said bluntly. “I don’t want to dob you in to the cops, kid, but I will.”
Logan shifted in the chair and tugged absently at his earlobe. It had been pierced once but healed over, and he rolled the scarred channel between his fingers.
“You’re not going to be any good to Asha in a cell,” Maggie chipped in from where she’d stood tosort her scissors and pretend she hadn’t listened in. “Tell him what he wants to know.”
The pressure made Logan screw up his face and fiddle more at his ear.
“You think you owe this person? Whoever put you up to it?” Cal said. “They pulled your fat out of the fire once, maybe, or they were nice to you sometime. Now you want to pay them back, show that you deserved their attention, right?”
In his case, with a shrug and a “whenever,” Van had fronted him some cash when he needed it. Of course he had. The money didn’t mean anything to Van. He didn’t need it for his rent or his kid. He hadn’t even sweated for it unless you considered the ten minutes it took him to empty his dad’s wallet. But Cal remembered how desperately grateful he’d been and how relieved he’d been with Van later whenhe asked his opinion about something. A way to pay off the favor while he paid off the loan. Then Van had needed something from Cal, and even if Cal had wanted to say no—and he hadn’t, he’d bought in 100 percent—he couldn’t have done it.
Logan shrugged his opinion with a dismissive tilt of his shoulders.
“She’s not like that.”
“She.” Cal hadn’t missed that. Maybe Edward was right, then. Thatwould wake the harsh old man.
“What’s she like, then?”
Logan rubbed his hand over the side of his face. “Good,” he said. “Kind, like. Not to me, either, to Asha.”
“His girlfriend,” Maggie interrupted again. She looked around at Logan and pursed her lips sympathetically. “She has leukemia.”
“It’s the best sort to get,” Logan explained brusquely. The words spluttered out of him on autopilot,something he’d learned by hopeful rote. “If you’re gonna get cancer, you want this one, right? She’s really sick, but she’s gonna get better.”
He said it like he needed to believe it.
“That’s where you met this woman with a grudge against Joe?”
“She’s his ex,” Logan said. He scratched at his elbows as he shifted in the chair. He glanced up to give Cal a hard look. “He used to beat her up, thismate of yours. I’ve seen the scars. Then he came back, started threatening her all the time and sending people to watch her. He was a real perv. And she didn’t ask me to do anything. I said I’d do it. I wanted to help her like she helped Asha.
“Scars?”
Logan held his arms up to show his forearms. “All up her arms, like he burned her or something.”
Cal hesitated as he tried to pull the threadsof the story into something that made sense. The ex part implicated Kristen, but how would she meet a kid with leukemia in London? She didn’t have any scars that Cal had noticed either, and the description hardly fit someone desperate to turn up at her ex’s hotel and tell him they weren’t broken up.
But there was one person in the story who was involved with a cancer charity.
“Do you mean Abigail?”Cal asked reluctantly. He had liked her, with her massive glasses and careful sympathy, even if she wasn’t Joe’s mother. She’d seemed kind, but Cal had assumed that because she was at a cancer fund-raiser. “Abigail Beranger?”
“Naw,’ Logan said with a flash of annoyance at Cal for not getting it. “Not Missus B. It was her daughter. Daisy. The redhead.”
