WELL,” SPIKE SAID while we waited for our Uber, “if it was your stated mission to get under his skin, pretty sure we just checked that box.”
“Before I’m through,” I said, “I might have every big pimp in town mad at me.”
I’d used my own address as the destination for our car. Spike asked if I wanted to go to Spike’s for a nightcap instead. I told him I’d pretty much maxed out my fun card for one night. When we pulled up to the house on River Street Place, Spike walked me to the door.
“You want my opinion about your current circumstances?” he said.
“Always.”
“You should drop this now,” Spike said. “That guy was right. In the middle of something between him and Tony is not a place you want to be, at least not by choice.”
“I said I’d find her,” I said. “I’m going to find her. Kind of a thing with me. You’d know better than anyone.”
“I used to have an expression when a bar fight would break out,” Spike said. “Let’s you and him fight. Let him and Tony fight, and you sit this one out. She’ll probably come back on her own. Or not. But if she wanted to be with Tony right now, she’d be with Tony.”
“We’ve gone over this plenty of times before,” I said. “If I let somebody like Gabriel Jabari run me off, I need another line of work.”
Spike said, “I have a bad feeling about this, Sonya.”
It was always serious when he used my real first name. Same with Richie. And my dad.
“Lisa Morneau has been run by men her whole adult life,” I said. “I want to find out what finally made her run.”
“She’s not your client.”
I smiled at him. “You sure?”
“Be careful,” he said, kissing me on top of my head.
I told him that I loved him then, and Spike said, yeah, yeah, yeah, tell him something he didn’t know.
I unlocked the door. There was no beep from the alarm, which meant that I must not have set it before Spike and I went to Suite.
But when I stepped inside, Rosie did not come running.
Rosie always came running.
She did this even if she’d been asleep before she heard the door, from any room in the house. The original Rosie the dog did that. This Rosie was the same.
They both had mutantlike hearing.
I gave a quick whistle and called out “Rosie girl” as I instinctively reached into my purse for my gun, before remembering I didn’t have one with me.
“Rosie girl,” I said again as I reached into the drawer in the foyer for the short-nosed .38 I kept there.
I kept whistling as I searched the ground floor. She wasn’t in any of the rooms, or underneath any of the furniture. I kept the gun out as I headed up the stairs to my bedroom.
The bedroom door was closed.
The only time I ever closed that door was when Richie and I were making love in Melanie Joan’s old bed, which Richie said wasn’t a bed at all, but more like a precinct. Other than that, I never closed it, even when I was alone. When I was out of the house it was a way of making sure that I didn’t lock Rosie in there. I wanted her to be able to wander the house. I wanted her to be able to get to the water bowl next to the refrigerator in the kitchen.
Caution, I knew, was never a frivolous choice in the life I had chosen. So I gently opened the door with my left hand and quickly stepped through it with my gun still out, taking in the expanse of the room all at once.
The light was on. Sometimes I left it on before leaving, sometimes not.
“Rosie girl,” I said, more softly than before.
I looked underneath the bed. She wasn’t there.
It was then that I heard a soft mewing sound from the closet. That door was closed, too. I opened it. She was there, sitting on top of the shoes, staring up at me, clearly frightened, even knowing it was me. This from the small dog who thought she was big and who scared about as easily as I did.
I put the safety back on the gun, stuck it into the back pocket of my jeans, and gathered Rosie up into my arms, telling her that everything was all right. We went back downstairs, and I put a handful of food into her bowl, knowing that food generally made her feel better about everything.
While she ate, I took the gun back out and went up to the other levels of the old, narrow house, not thinking I would find anybody, but wanting to make sure.
No one here except Rosie and me.
But somebody had been.
I went back to the foyer and picked up my purse where I’d dropped it when I’d first come in and grabbed my cell phone and called Richie.
I had long since come to grips with the fact that as tough as I knew I was, and as good with a gun as I knew I was, there were still moments when I wanted to feel protected. Often by him. Man in my life. Susan Silverman called it duality.
“Somebody got into the house tonight while I was out of it,” I said.
That was all I got to say before he told me he was on his way and ended the call. I then poured myself a glass of Irish whiskey, which always made me feel better about everything.