“I don’t want your place to get wrecked too,” she said, looking around at her demolished living room.
“Take one of the safe houses,” Gretchen suggested. “They’re all basically beige boxes with cheap furniture. If anything gets busted in one of them, it’s not going to break anyone’s heart. We just stocked number thirteen this afternoon to get it ready for that guy tomorrow—but we can make an emergency grocery run and stick him somewhere else. Take that one.”
“That sounds good to me,” Aria said. She looked at Colby. “As long as you’re not superstitious.”
“You’re all the good luck I need,” he said.
11
Aria handled everything.
“I can get that,” Colby protested, reaching for her bag.
She blocked him, her face full of determination and disapproval.
“I can get that. You’re hurt, I’m not. You might be a in a million-dollar suit, Colby, but you still look like you’re about to collapse. Just give me the directions to the safe house, sit back, and close your eyes.”
He’d been in the Army. There were certain orders he knew not to argue with.
And... if he had to admit it, it did feel good to lie back in the passenger seat and let her take the wheel for a while. If they got involved in some kind of high-speed car chase with Eli Hebbert, he would know right away. Short of that, there wasn’t a lot that could happen in a competition between wolf and moving car.
And as long as they were on the move, they were safe. The exhaust fumes, hot asphalt, and general smells of the road would slow down any attempt Eli made to track them by their scent, too.
They had a window of safety, at least for now.
He could afford to spend a few minutes just listening to Aria radio-surf until she hit on something she liked.
“Classical?” Colby said.
“My mom’s influence. My second-favorite kind of music, next to old school blues—and classical is easier to find on the dial.”
“You’ll have to teach me the classical, but I do know the blues. Who are your favorites?”
“It’s so hard to pick. Robert Johnson, B.B. King, Bessie Smith—Billie Holiday, which kind of takes me over to jazz a little, but she was so great I’d follow her anywhere.”
“Billie Holiday singing ‘God Bless the Child,’” Colby said. “She’s one of my favorites too.”
That rich, aching, somehow playful voice had felt, from the first time he’d heard it, that it had cracked open a path straight to his heart.
“If you got the symphonies from your mom, does that mean your dad is a blues guy?”
“No, believe it or not, he likes the fluffiest pop music you can imagine. He and Mattie have about the same taste.”
She fell silent for a moment, and all Colby could hear was her starting up the windshield wipers to ward off the first few drops of rain.
Then she said, “Mike, Mattie’s dad, was the one who introduced me to the blues.”
Colby waited for his inner wolf to bristle at the mention of any man who brought out that kind of wistfulness in their mate, but the mutt stayed unusually calm. Sometimes it picked up on things he couldn’t.
“What happened with you two?”
She sighed. “There
are two answers to that, kind of. The first one was the hardest to deal with but the easiest to explain: he died. In Iraq, before Mattie was even born.”
He opened up his hand and wasn’t surprised when she let one of her own fall into it, her fingers curling tight around his.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I served too, and I knew people who died in the line of duty. It’s always hard to lose someone like that.”