We rumbled along back roads, nothing visible except the trees in our headlights. We’d driven more than a few minutes, beyond the grounds of the resort altogether.
Finally, we eased to a halt beside another Bentley. A lanky figure was waiting for us. I checked my door handle. Locked.
My pulse grew faster, lighter. The knife was a bird in my hand, ready to fly.
The figure walked around the car, got in the back seat with me. He was hunched even in the Bentley, and wore a tweed suit and tie.
“Dr. Lyon,” I said.
“Jessica Anderson. Or maybe someone else.”
“You’ll know my name soon enough.”
“How mysterious. May I call you Jessica for now?”
“That works,” I said, seeing why Hiromi and Garrett found him so disturbing. He was a daunting presence, his deep voice confident, intimate. But all I saw were angles of attack—the open flank, the throat, the glittering eyes.
Lyon tapped the seat in front of him, and the car started moving again.
I spoke first. “Nice party. Thanks for having us.”
“Thank you for convincing her to come. Whatever else happens, I owe you that.”
“What do you think is going to happen?”
He turned away to stare out the window. “At first I thought law enforcement had taken an interest. The taps on my phone, the careful break-ins at my office.”
I didn’t answer.
“But then you appeared, insinuating yourself into Hiromi’s life. Not the sort of approach the IRS would take. Or the FBI.”
“We aren’t here to change what you do,” I said. “We’re here to do it better.”
He nodded, like a shrink taking notes. “Some sort of Mafia, I suppose.”
“You’ve heard of them. No one’s heard of us.”
“I’m concerned for you, Jessica. It won’t be long before Hiromi realizes the mismatch between you two. She’s a genius, and you are not.”
A laugh bubbled up in me, carried on adrenaline. He was going to psychoanalyze me. “I bring other things to the table.”
“An overdeveloped sense of your own power, perhaps.”
“Physician, heal thyself.”
He didn’t smile; he was a wall. There were three of them and one of me.
Start with the flash grenade, tossed into the driver’s lap. Cover my ears, press my face against the seat in front of me.
We kids had always been excited for Aunt Iris’s lessons in applied pyrotechnics, acting out explosions the whole day before. Gertie drawing hands with missing fingers.
Peter ecstatic.
“I’m sure you’re very tough, Jessica.”
Flash grenades on Wednesdays. First outdoors, then in the empty rooms of the guesthouse, and finally in the old jalopies in the barn—practice for this very situation.
“But the awful things that happen when we’re little only make usthinkwe’re strong,” he said. “They leave us with broken parts. Tell me, Jessica, what awful things were done to you?”
