Lem snorted acknowledgment of that. Before he could ask anything else, someone rapped on Cade’s closed door and waited.
“What?” Cade asked.
The door opened, and his assistant leaned in around the jamb. Her gaze flicked from Cade to Lem and then back again. “Sorry to interrupt,” she said. “Captain O’Hara from the SDPD is on the line. Are you here?”
“No.”
She looked slightly surprised at the answer. Cade didn’t often dodge the opportunity to remind the cops that he was an asshole with a smart mouth or the satisfaction of reminding them they couldn’t touch him until he went a lot further out of bounds than he did.
Not today. Cade doubted there would be anything satisfying about his next conversation with O’Hara, and it wasn’t one he wanted to have over the phone.
Lem cleared his throat. “Do you want me to go down and bail any of our guys they scooped up out of the Crate?” he offered.
A miracle, Cade thought dryly. Lem wasn’t lazy, but he didn’t look for work either. And, come to think of it, he was actually pretty lazy too. Lem was lucky he was blood, and more importantly, good at his job when he wasn’t slacking.
“No,” he said again. Lem opened his mouth to argue, but Cade cut him off roughly. The last thing he needed today was for Lem to find out what had happened from angry cops that didn’t have the whole story. “I already told you what to do, Lem. I’ll deal with O’Hara in my own time.”
Lem stood his ground for a minute—while Cade’s assistant discreetly made herself scarce—until Cade scowled at him and growled, “Do you need something else?”
“Do you?”
“Get out,” Cade told him.
“Now you just sound like our dad,” Lem cracked. He held up his hands in surrender when Cade started to get up. “I’m going. I’m going. Take a cab to the station if you’re going to try and drown anything else while I’m not here.”
Lem left, the door closed behind him, and Cade was alone with his thoughts. He slouched down in the chair until his knees nudged against the coffee table. Usually the shift left him energized, but not this time. His mind was full of things that might or might not have happened.
Cade rubbed his eyes. It wasn’t the first time he’d killed someone. That was part of the job, although it had been a while. He didn’t know if this bothered him more because he’d liked Marlow or because he didn’t remember it, as if it were something the wolf had stolen from him.
Or maybe, he thought bleakly,it’s because you ate him.
He opened his eyes and looked at the whiskey. The sun caught in the curves of the bottle and winked at him. The idea of another glass—just the one—sounded better by the second, and this time it might work.
Or maybe the glass after that one.
Cade grimaced and got up before he gave in to temptation. He didn’t want to let O’Hara pick at this particular scab, but it wouldn’t go any better if he was drunk. He stashed the whiskey in his desk drawer and grabbed his keys.
Might as well get it over with.
The vending machine had a list of drinks available. Cade would lay money that they all tasted like his cup of Bovril, thin and vaguely greasy. He tossed it in the trash and patted his pockets down for the mints he’d grabbed earlier.
He thumbed the last square capsule out of the wrapper and popped it into his mouth. By this point, he barely tasted the mint as he crunched the sweet, just registered the wintergreen sting of it in his sinuses.
“Deacon,” O’Hara said as he opened the door and held it. He gestured with his free hand for Cade to go with him. “We can talk outside. I need a smoke break, anyhow.”
It wasn’t, Cade supposed as he rubbed the crumbs of mint against the roof of his mouth, the sort of conversation you wanted to have overheard. O’Hara probably didn’t want his men to listen to how one of them had been torn apart, and Cade didn’t want to give whatever fuck had used him as a weapon the satisfaction.
The two of them headed down the hall to the elevators—O’Hara broke the stilted silence with a few awkward questions that Cade answered brusquely—and took it up to the ground floor. It was quiet. Most people still had today off to recuperate. A food truck pulled up to the curb passed out fried rice and broth so salty that Cade could feel his nose dry out from feet away.
One person was ahead of them in the queue, a slender man in jeans and a T-shirt. His dark hair curled around the collar, and Cade squashed the sentimental ache in his chest under a mental boot. He wasn’t going to spend the rest of his life, not even the rest of the month, flinching every time he saw a man in black with untidy hair.
O’Hara stepped in front of him.
“You didn’t order me coffee, did you?” O’Hara asked in a disgruntled voice as he picked up a cup and sniffed suspiciously at the lid.
“No. That’s mine,” Marlow said as he turned around. He plucked the cup out of O’Hara’s hand and replaced it with a different one. Then he turned to Cade and held out a cup toward him. There were bruises on the backs of his hands and scabs on his knuckles. He wasn’t wearing his glasses, and his eyes looked very pale squinted against the morning light. “Chicken broth?”
He was alive.
