Page 116 of Rough Hard Fierce (Chicago Underground 1-3)
“That night. He was running across a three-lane highway. Even at night he didn’t have a chance. I guess he was trying to get out of the area. He’d have been exposed after that.”
Cameron took his leave after that. I didn’t show him out, just sat dumbly at the table.
Explosions and gunshots and this guy ends up hit by a car. What were the odds?
Accidents happened.
But then, Colin had taken off after him. Had he caught him and fought with him? An image flashed through my mind of the man cornered, possibly injured, deliberately steered into a busy street he had no hope of crossing. Colin hadn’t struck the killing blow; that had been done by a ton of steel, but he might have played a part.
Did I even care if he had? I’d been so adamant that he shouldn’t be involved in anything criminal, anything violent, but I knew as well as anyone that being innocent couldn’t protect us. It just made us more vulnerable. And aside from Cameron, for whom I had a grudging respect, I had no love for cops.
That guy would have killed us. He’d certainly tried and almost succeeded. I couldn’t find anything inside me that minded that this guy was dead, or that Colin might have pursued him literally to death. Maybe that made me a monster, or maybe it just made me human.
I delayed packing by putting away the dishes and laundry. They had to be done, I reasoned, so I might as well do them first.
And then at noon, something happened.
The delivery arrived. Colin had the Oasis start delivering lunch for the three of us when I had first been injured. I shouldn’t have to cook, and he wanted to watch over me, so we ordered in. A definite benefit to owning a restaurant.
It wasn’t the delivery that surprised me. I had hardly expected Colin to run around town, letting everyone know we were through, publicly severing ties. He wouldn’t even have thought of something so small as a lunch delivery.
No, I accepted the large paper bag with thanks, not surprised in the least. Since Colin had always taken the deliveries, I introduced myself to the delivery boy.
Though he had to be at least sixteen, Kai seemed more a boy than a man. He was young and black and overly polite, as if making up for any rude, young black men I’d ever encountered. I drew the line at ma’am. He refused to call me Allie, so we settled on Ms. Winters.
The surprising part was that there were only two meals in the bag, one for me and a child-sized portion for Bailey, which meant he had changed the order. Perhaps he had even been at the restaurant and sent the food himself.
A little jolt raced through me.
It felt like a message of some sort, this deliberate delivery of food from a man who’d always tried to give me food or drink even that first night. What if it was a peace offering?
It could mean nothing, but it could also mean everything. I couldn’t ignore it. What if he was, at this moment, sitting in that tiny little office down the hallway of his restaurant, waiting for a response from me? I had to try.
And if he was at his restaurant, then I had the perfect excuse to go and see him. Unfortunately, since Colin had insisted on doing the grocery shopping after the injury, we had no ingredients.
Leaving the food from the restaurant to cool on the counters, I rushed to the grocery store with Bailey and threw just enough ingredients to make a double chocolate cake into a basket. The checkout lines weren’t all that long, but I still tapped my foot. Bailey puttered about in the section with little toys they always used to entice small, bored children. I decided it was their own fault if she knocked them all over.
I didn’t have much hope that this would solve my problems with Colin, but at least I could do something. Baking had always served that purpose for me. Put in the right ingredients and it turned out right, not like life. And when it was done, I’d get to see Colin.
“Got a party or something?” the man behind me asked.
I turned back to see a man with his own basket, his smile kind.
“Something like that,” I said. “Making a cake for a friend.”
“Oh, what kind?” He peered into my basket, with special emphasis on my left ringless hand holding it.
“Nothing too fancy,” I said. “A double chocolate cake.”
“Sounds great. I like a woman who can bake.”
I laughed at the blunt caveman statement. It was clearly a sort of pickup line, but it wasn’t accompanied with a lascivious sneer or anything. Bake wasn’t a euphemism. He just liked a woman who could bake.
“Do you want to go grab a cup of coffee sometime?” he asked.
He looked to be maybe in his midthirties, with the kind of body that had once been thick with muscle but was now thick with padding. His age didn’t bother me, even though he’d be substantially older. His chubby body didn’t bother me in the slightest. It was maybe what Colin would look like, several years down the road.
He just wasn’t Colin.
