Two Can Play (Entangled Ignite) (22 page)

“Looks like grease smears.”

He pushed back his grief and focused on Rena, on getting her to believe. “She lost her life over this. It means something. I know it does.”

Rena’s eyes flicked to him and away. She was thinking. It was a start.

“What her arm says is
check #
, which must mean the numbers on these pages. Then something like
Think & G
. The
and
sign could be an
S
or a dollar sign. It could mean the money or maybe the banished accounts. Or maybe the money they stole from her. I don’t know. That’s what I have to find out.”

“So, what you know—your proof—is some scribbles on a dead girl’s arm, pages of numbers from the clinic, and weird things Cassie said while drunk? This makes you think Nigel and Naomi are murderers?” She snorted. “You’re a smart guy. Couldn’t you cook up a less crazy story?”

“Truth is more complicated than lies, Rena.” He knew his investigation hung on Rena’s response. If she told the Blackstones about his suspicions, they’d cover their tracks before he could even get to the police.

A thought leaped into his head. “Maybe Nigel and Naomi don’t know what’s going on. The crook could be their money guy, Rockingham.” The Blackstones knew all, Gage was certain, but he could tell he’d hit the mark with Rena. She tilted her head, her mind racing behind her sky-blue eyes.

“They’ve got money troubles and that’s his area,” he continued. “I found a newspaper article about them selling the Seattle Lounge to drug dealers—D&G Enterprises.”

“D&G doesn’t meet our profile. They told us in the meeting.” Her sneer masked relief. He was getting through. She had enough doubts to give him room to move.

“The fact they even considered that means there are serious financial problems. Rockingham could be stealing from NiGo.” He let that sink in. “Now that you’re a manager, you can ask questions I can’t. You can pin him down, find out what’s what.”

“Your ten minutes are up.” But he could see his words had hit home. She must have her doubts about Rockingham already. She flipped open her phone, but slowly, without fury.

“If you tell anyone, Rena, Rockingham will cover his tracks.”

She hesitated.

“And they’ll kill me, just like they killed my sister.”

“That’s crap. You’ll be fired and banished. No one’s going to hurt you. Get out of my room or I’ll have you arrested for assault.”

“Give me time, Rena.” He crouched close, at eye level with her. “If you won’t help me, at least don’t report me. You have Cassie on your conscience. Do you want me there, too?” It was a low blow and he saw it was a mistake.

Her eyes turned to blue steel. “Cassie’s in rehab and you’re a lying sack of shit.”

“I was too late for Beth,” he said, swallowing hard, his voice shaking despite his efforts to stay strong. “Now she’s dead. I don’t want to be too late for you. Or the others—Zeke, Bull, Baker, Ji Jin. Do you want them hurt?”

Her eyes flashed worry for just a second.

“Maybe I’m wrong. Or maybe the bad stuff can be fixed. Help me root it out. Help me save Lounge Life.” Had he gone too far? He clicked to the picture of Beth’s face and held it out to her. “My sister did not deserve to die.”

“I don’t even know that’s your sister.” But her words were faint.

“You would have liked her. She was smart and funny and fearless like you. She could whistle like you, too, loud enough to bust an eardrum. She used to bite into her ice cream cone, instead of licking it. She only had to hear a song once to memorize it. If you told her no, she’d fight like hell for yes.”

She was listening.

“I watched out for her when we were kids, protected her from Mom when she had her rages. I made sure she took her vitamins, gave her boyfriends the third degree. Saved up money for college and a business for her and then I let her slip away. I let her be killed.” Emotion rose in him and his throat shut down. “I’m telling you the truth, Rena. You know I am.”

“All the truth? This time?”

“All of it.” He held his breath while she pondered. She was torn, he could tell. She could cling to the Life and turn him in, or give him a chance to find the truth. She took his wallet from the table, flipped it open and took out the photo of him and Beth. “This is you and her?”

“Yeah. That’s us at Big Surf. After we moved to Tempe from Denver.”

“She did the paintings in your trailer?”

“She did. She was very talented. I set aside the money so she could open a graphic design business when she graduated. NiGo took that money. Leland Thomas showed me on a database.”

She fingered her phone, bit her lip. “Why would Leland show you our database?”

“I asked about donations. Where they went, how much she’d given.” He realized he had to be honest with her. “I told him I had a bet with her about how much.”

“So you lied to him, too?”

“I had to if I expected to get to the truth. I’m not lying now.”

“If something happened to your sister, it wasn’t because of the Life. It couldn’t be.”

“Maybe you’re right. Help me prove it. You want the truth. I know you do. You want to have faith in something good. This is how to find out.”

“I already know it’s good.” But she went still, thinking through her own doubts, the things that fit with what he’d told her. A few seconds later, her face went still, her expression determined. “One week,” she said. “Show me proof in a week or I report you.”

“Good. Okay. Great.” He blew out a breath, still fighting the effects of the whiskey. “Will you do some checking on your own?”

She shook her head. “I will not drag one Lifer through the scum of your accusations. You have one week. That’s it.”

“Starting when we get back? Tomorrow’s our last day here and I can’t do shit from the road.”

“Don’t push your luck.”

“Okay. Six days in Phoenix, how’s that?”

She gave an almost imperceptible nod.”

“And you’ll come with me to see Cassie?” That was his ace in the hole. Showing that Maya had lied would hit Rena hard. “As soon as we get back, we’ll go straight to the shelter.” In the meantime, the
Seattle Times
reporter might have learned of dead bodies with pale tattoos or Georgia at IFO would have proof of something. Once Rena believed, he’d be able to move faster, take action. He’d have a teammate.

She shrugged, not speaking.

Just as well. He was too exhausted to form another thought. “You want me to leave?” Where the hell was he going to sleep on a rainy night?

She didn’t speak, so he picked up his muddy jeans, slid his wallet and phone into damp pockets, feeling her eyes on him. He leaned down to pull the stiff, cold denim up.

“Sleep there, for God’s sake.” She tossed a pillow onto the short horror of a sofa. He’d be better off on the floor, but he said, “Thanks, Rena.”

She’d let him stay. It was a start.

…

Rena stared up at the ceiling, listening to Gage thrash around on that squeaky, cramped couch. Gage’s sister was dead. Rena believed that much. But murdered by NiGo? Impossible.

Rena wouldn’t be in this mess if she’d insisted Maya banish Gage in the first place. Now she was so tangled in his nest of lies and accusations she didn’t know what to think. Three things had arrowed to her heart: Cassie was no thief; Mason Rockingham was not trustworthy; and Rena
did
want the truth.

There were financial troubles, she knew from Nigel’s migraines. Nigel and Maya and Mason all wanted more money from Rena. If Mason was stealing from gamers and Cassie had discovered it, Rena wouldn’t put it past him to have her evicted. He was buddies with the badass Watchers, too, like Roland, who’d clearly done more than one eviction. If Mason was up to no good, then it was Rena’s duty to stop him.

Gage had lied to her, betrayed her, used her like any Dead World creep, but, dammit, she half believed him. His sadness was real. The naked agony in his eyes could not be faked. She could picture that Big Surf shot of him and Beth as kids. The boy in the photo had the same dark eyes, square jaw, straight-on look as Gage. The boy and the girl had looked so easy with each other, so happy, secure in each other’s love. What a great thing to grow up with. Now Beth was dead.

She had given him a week. Was that wrong? Did it show a lack of faith in the Life? If there was no crime, he’d find no evidence, right?

She dozed off, then awoke with a start to realize she was lying on Gage’s chest, his arm across her body. He’d climbed into her bed after she’d fallen asleep. She didn’t really blame him—that couch was a disaster.

She was tempted to enjoy the secret comfort of being in his arms, but she rolled away to embrace the chill of the room. She had to stay clear of him, of the cozy warmth he offered. She had to find the truth and she would not let him influence her, not even in her sleep.

…

Shoved out of bed at dawn by a glaring Rena, Gage could tell she wanted to turn him in, screw the week she’d promised him. His only hope was that her need for truth outweighed her desire to hide in the fantasy of Real Life Lounge. It was anyone’s guess which way she’d go.

Battling the fog of his hangover, a queasy gut, and sandpaper-scraped eyes, Gage downed burned coffee and dry toast in the pitiful lunchroom attached to Ruby’s Rooms, then mounted his bike to make it in for his Lounge shift. Kick-starting the bike sent a stake of pain through his body.

Even drunk, he’d realized a new truth: Rena mattered to him. When he’d stumbled into her room, he’d wanted the comfort of her arms, as stupid as that had turned out to be. They’d connected that night in the woods and he’d counted on her feeling the same. In the gray dawn, the bitterness in her eyes told him that ship had sailed.

He’d barely slept, tormented by a nightmare: a terrified Beth kept scrawling a single question on every inch of her pale skin.
Where were you, Gage?
Over and over on her arms and legs and hands and feet and face and belly, the letters tiny and desperate and black with accusation.

Why hadn’t she reached out to him before this, when he might have saved her? Had he made her too independent? Turned her into a loner, too? Or had he simply been too distant, too judgmental for her to trust him?

Now, he felt dead inside. Losing Beth had stopped a vital engine in him. The electric hum was absent, the silence terrible.

…

Three hours into his shift, Gage spotted Rena in a booth at the café. The woman eating with her was just leaving, so he headed over and took the woman’s place across from Rena. He had news to report.

“What do you want?” she snapped. “You’re on duty.”

“I’m taking a break. I have news.” He looked around to make sure no one could overhear, then leaned forward. “A Seattle reporter talked to the police. They said they’ve had five unusual drug deaths in the downtown area over the last eight months. No IDs on the bodies. No signs of longtime drug use.”

“Were there status tats?”

“The reporter’s going to try to find out. If I could get a Seattle Lifer to ID the bodies, it would be a lot easier.”

“Oh, you bet. The Seattle GM will trot right over there.”

“You could ask about Seattle Lost Lives, maybe borrow snapshots.”

“That’s it? Your news?”

“Not all of it. I got a call back from that number Beth had hidden. It turns out that IFO is a chemistry lab. Beth gave them tattoo ink to test.”

“The ink she stole from Day-Day?” Rena pretended disdain, but she flipped a straw end to end, nervously alert.

“The analyst put it through a gas chromatograph, which separates the chemicals in the sample. The equipment they have could only identify the pigments and the fluorescence. The rest showed up as”—he pulled out his notepad and read what Georgia had told him—“L-U-P, which stands for Large Unidentified Peak.”

“What the hell does that mean?”

“It means we need more advanced equipment to break out the components. Specifically, we need a”—he looked at his notes—“high field mass spectrometer/nuclear magnetic resonance device.”

“And where would you get that?”

“In Tempe, as it turns out. When I asked her where I should go, the analyst said universities have advanced equipment for their research. I remembered the new biotech institute at Arizona State got a lot of media attention.”

“So…”

“So I got the analyst to call down there and speak ‘chemist’ to the head of the relevant department. The guy’s interested. All I need is some ink to test. Luckily, I salvaged some from the trash when you got your tattoos.”

“You robbed Day-Day’s trash?” Angry pink flashed on her cheeks again.

“I could use more, if you had a reason to drop in on Day-Day.”

“Not in a million years.”

He needed her assistance to hit the health center, too. “You gave me a week, Rena, but I’m crippled without help. I’ve got too many leads to handle on my own—dead Lifers, poisonous ink, Rockingham’s extortion, the health center numbers.”

“That’s your problem, isn’t it?” She looked up at the waitress approaching them.

“I wish I knew which numbers Beth meant for me to check.”

“As far as the ink and—E, please.” Rena’s last words were aimed at the waitress. “Over ice.”

Rena’s words riveted him.
…the ink and—E
. He flipped open his phone and clicked to the grainy shot of Beth’s smeared letters.

“Gage?” Rena said. “Your order?”

“Nothing, thanks.” He didn’t look up. He’d thought Beth had written
Think & G
. But if he tilted his head at the angle she’d have been writing at, the
G
looked more like an
E
.
E
for
Electrique
. The
h
was smeared and thick, so it might be two letters—
h
and
e
, which made it
the ink
, not
think
.

“You have to see this.” He shifted to Rena’s side of the booth and showed her the photo. “It could be
The ink & E
.”

“It’s a scribble. It could say anything.” She scooted away from him.

“No.
Ink & E
makes sense.” Excitement climbed in him. It was fitting together like puzzle pieces. “Electrique is addictive and you know it. Why did Day-Day tell you not to drink it after your tats? Think about it. There must be an interaction of some kind.”