Page 5 of Angel’s Doll

I’ve spent years reading dangerous men across glass tables, and this one reads wrong in every direction I test. Leather vest over wide shoulders, patches I can’t decode, a split lip still bleeding.

He hasn’t grabbed me. He’s had ten seconds to grab me and he’s holding the lid open instead, giving me room. Durey didn’t give me room. He stood too close in an elevator built for twelve. This one is built like the elevator and keeps his distance in a dead-end alley.

I lower the pallet wood. I take the hand. It closes around mine, careful, like he knows exactly how much of his own strength to leave out of it. He lifts me over the lip of the dumpster as if I weigh nothing, cardboard and coffee grounds raining off my coat.

“Let’s move, Miss Hale. Your friend’s driver is going to wake up with a headache and opinions.”

Miss Hale.

I never told him my name.

I step away from him. One step away and nowhere to go. I’m literally in a dead end.

“You know my name.”

“I know your uncle.” He doesn’t move toward me. He doesn’t move at all. “Different problem. Same address.”

“Who are you?”

He glances toward the mouth of the alley as if expecting trouble. Then he talks, it’s fast and flat, a man laying cards face up because there isn’t time to play them.

“Truth, so you can decide quick. My club and Victor Hale have history. Bad history. His project died today, and some of what killed it was us. I’m not neutral and I’m not a stranger who happened by. I was watching his building when I saw them walk you out.” A beat. “You can go. Right now, any direction, and I won’t follow you. Or you come with me, get on my bike and you’re behind a gate no man in a suit like his walks through. Ten seconds. Your choice.”

Your choice.

I stand in the rain in a ruined coat and try to remember the last time anybody handed me a choice. My job was decided for me, my address, my car, my phone.

A few minutes ago, I was traded across a conference table without one word spoken in my direction, and this stranger asks me what I want to do.

I’ve got no phone, no money ... He says he knocked out Durey’s driver but the man is about to wake up angry.

“Bike,” I say.

He’s already moving. “Good choice, Doll.”

The bike waits one street over, black and heavy, nothing like the machines in Halcyon’s lifestyle renderings. He pulls a helmet off the bar and puts it on my head, his hands quick and impersonal, cinching the strap under my chin like he’s done it a hundred times. Then he knocks twice on the top of it, and the absurdity of the gesture almost undoes me. He gave me the only helmet.

“Hold on to me, not the seat bar. Lean when I lean. Don’t fight the turns.”

I have never been on a motorcycle in my life. Every vehicle I’ve entered since my parents died has been chosen, owned, insured, and tracked by Victor Hale.

I put my arms around a stranger, and we drop into traffic like a stone into water.

The engine climbs through my sternum. Rain needles my knuckles, the city smears into wet ribbons of light, and his body cuts the wind so completely I ride in the calm behind it, pressed against the first person I’ve touched in years who wasn’t shaking my hand.

I’ve been driven around this city for years in vehicles I couldn’t feel. Climate-controlled. Sound-proofed. Upholstered like coffins.

This morning the Sound was a flat gray backdrop behind conference glass, something Halcyon would have rendered in. From the back of his bike, it’s enormous and silver and moving, all of it at once, and I understand that I’ve spent ten years looking at postcards of my own city.

I can feel everything now. The road, the shift of his muscle before every lane change, my own heartbeat where my chest presses against his spine.

At a red light on Denny, his gloved hand leaves the bar and lands over both of mine where they’re clasped against his stomach. One squeeze. A question with no words in it. Still with me?

I squeeze the answer into his ribs before my brain approves the message.

The light changes.

He pulls over once, at the edge of a gas station lot where the floodlights don’t quite reach, and puts his boots down and turns his head. I brace for the interrogation. Who was the suit? What did you hear? What do you know? What are you worth?