Page 28 of Antihero

“Because you were hired to get here for sex?” Evan asked.

“Uh, yeah.” She sucked at the nail bed of her thumb, breath hitching. “But I didn’t want to. Because— It was so terrible— Was feeling guilty. ’Cuz the girl on the subway.”

“Why didn’t you just leave here?”

“Dunno.” She chewed a puffy lip that was slightly cracked. “I didn’t want to miss out.”

“On what?”

She looked around. Sprawl of marble floor. French wallpaper on an accent wall. Vaulted ceiling painted heavenly white. “This, I guess.”

Across the room behind him, he could hear Joey exhale. She was sitting in the love seat by the hearth, just her and the trapped mannequin before the demonic blaze. Sweat glistened across the bridge of her nose. Along the facing wall, the several mute assistants manning phones and computers at their stations pretended not to exist.

Evan turned back to Monica. “Tell me again about the young woman. You said she was around twenty?”

“They just carried her off. Like a drunk girl at a club. Her leg was like…” Monica extended a slender leg from beneath the sheet, let the foot dangle in the air. “It’s all I could see of her. They were mobbed all around her, like the whaddayacallits around, like, the president?”

“Bodyguards. How many men?”

“Four. There were four.”

“How old?”

“Dunno. Boy-men. Like college, you know? But not— They didn’t seem the type.”

“Would you recognize them if you saw them again?”

“No. No.” She shook her head rapidly, childish. “They had caps on low, like baseball caps? With the flat brims? And it was so fast and I was outside the train and I … and I…” Her face contorted violently, an ugly-cry twist, and she breathed shallowly, fighting off the memory or a panic attack or both. “I didn’t know. I thought they were gonna help her but by the time I saw-saw them … And I didn’t want to yell for help in case…”

“In case what?”

She gasped in a breath, steadied herself. “In case they came after me, too. And besides, what if it was nothing? What if it turns out to be…?”

“What time what this?”

“Midnightish. I was running late. I couldn’t miss it.”

“Couldn’t miss what?”

“The helicopter. The one he sent to pick me up.”

“What stop was it? Where they carried her off?”

“A Hundred and Twenty-Fifth Street. I had to switch lines, so—Yeah, yeah, definitely One Twenty-Fifth.”

Evan shot a look over his shoulder at Joey. She already knew: Pull surveillance footage. Her laptop was out on the ledge of her thighs, resting across the light gray wool of her trousers. She sliced her joined fingers back and forth horizontally, mouthed at him: No signal.

Monica slumped back, spine curved, head lolling dreamily. “You asked if he hurt me. The guy who lives here. Luke? If he had, what would you’ve done?”

“Proved that he did,” Evan said. “Then killed him.”

Her face snapped forward, wearing a grin.

But he wasn’t smiling.

Her expression dropped.

Evan said to the interchangeable assistants, “Get Ms.…?”