“I am not a fucking dog. I’m as capable as you are of defending both of us. I saw a need and I reacted. Effectively! Now, if you’re finished snorting like a chauvinist pig, I’d like to search the dead guy for any ID before that old couple stumbles out of the elevator and calls the cops. You okay with that?”
He’d been staring at her with eyes hot with anger in an otherwise flat expression, but when she finished, the anger disappeared and a smile lifted his lips. “Well done, then. Can your maidenly hands handle searching a gutted man, or would you like me to take care of that?”
She rolled her eyes, hiding her own smile, which was as much relief as amusement. “I’ll do it. I may barf, but I’ll do it. You—” She gestured at his wings and naked chest. “—need to clean off as much as you can and put on a shirt, just in case someone really does stumble on this.”
“You’re sure?” She gave him a look that made him laugh, but when he would have gathered her in for a kiss, she pushed him away.
“Guts!” she protested. “You’ve got bad guy guts all over you.” She then went up on her toes and kissed him several times. “Love you,” she said without thinking, then turned her face away so he wouldn’t see the rush of embarrassment lighting her up in bright red. “I’ll see if he has any ID or anything on him,” she hurried to add, filling the empty space left by her impulsive words. “If there’s a cell phone, I can check his calls, see where they lead, whether they’re to Sotiris or someone else.”
“What if they don’t?” he asked, his voice muffled by his position bent into the rear cargo space of the SUV as he rummaged for a clean shirt.
She paused long enough to stare. He seemed unaffected by her declaration of love. Maybe he hadn’t heard. Or maybe he didn’t care. The thought hurt more than it should have. Sure, she hadn’t meant to say it, but now that she had. . . . Fuck. Life had been so much simpler before she’d had sex. “If he’s not here on Sotiris’s orders,” she said finally, getting back to her gruesome task. “Then we’re in deeper shit than we think. You have any other enemies I need to know about?”
“Not in this world. Not that I know of, anyway,” he said, still in that casual, nothing-to-see-here tone, like her world hadn’t just tilted on its axis.
Telling herself to move, to deal with the immediate situation first, she pulled out her knife, flicked it open, and used it to lift the guy’s bloody jacket open. Grimacing, she forced herself to dip two fingers into his pockets, fighting the urge to throw up, or scream. She wasn’t sure which. Odd how she’d had no qualms about shooting him, or seeing Dragan rip him open like an overripe fruit, but touching him was a completely different thing. She’d be washing her hands for days.
Mindful of her mini-lecture to Dragan, she sucked it up and did a thorough search. The guy had the usual assortment of ID—wallet, New York PI license—interesting since Sotiris had more than one residence there—and a business card with nothing but an address and phone number. Probably an office, though it might be useful. There was also a cell phone, naturally. One could hardly do business without it these days, especially not a guy who probably spent most of his time out of the office.
Holding the items in one hand, she walked over to the SUV just as Dragan was getting ready to close the back hatch. Reaching in, she emptied a plastic bag of road trip snacks and stuffed the dead man’s ID into it instead. Yuck.
“Let’s go,” she said, pouring one of the bottles of water over her hands and drying them on her pants. “We’ll examine this stuff later, but right now, we need to leave.”
Dragan nodded and, with a glance at her wet and still somewhat bloody hands, walked around and slid into the driver’s seat.
She sighed, but knew he had the right of it. Besides, he’d become a pretty good driver over the last couple days, giving credence to his insistence that the SUV was just one more weapon that he’d master as quickly as any other. Walking to the passenger side, she used her left, slightly cleaner, hand to open the back door, then reached under the seat for the oil rag she kept handy, even though she’d never checked her own oil. That was fortunate now, since it gave her a clean rag to wipe her hands on.
Once they were as clean as she could make them, under the circumstances, she dropped the rag onto floor, then closed the door and slid into the front passenger seat. “You know how to get out of this place?”
He was already pulling out of the parking space. “I simply find a down ramp and take it.”
“You might have to go up a level to avoid running over the dead guy.” Like a squirrel in the road, she thought gruesomely. Double yuck.
“Got it.”
She could have launched into a lecture about down ramps vs. up ramps, but found she really didn’t care. As it was, they made it safely out of the garage without passing another vehicle, though it occurred to her that once the police found the body, they’d be checking the garage security video, if it existed. But they couldn’t do anything about that.
“What about the body?” he asked, as if reading her thoughts.
“There’s nothing to connect him to us, and I didn’t see any obvious cameras or warning notices inside the garage, so we might be clear there. They probably have video at the exits, but other cars left when we did, so . . .” She shrugged. “Nothing else we can do.” A sudden urge to yawn surprised her. She swallowed it, but he caught it anyway.
“Post-battle rush,” he commented, his eyes on the road. “It happens to all of us.”
Adrenaline, she realized. He was talking about adrenaline letdown. She’d read about that, but had never experienced it.
“You good to drive?” she asked, thinking his own post-battle rush had to be greater than hers. Since he sprouted fucking wings.
“Sure. I’ve plenty of experience with it. The post-battle letdown, I mean.”
Unlike her, she thought, though he was too polite to say it. Although her lack of battle hardening could hardly be considered a deficit, since this was her first one. Right?
They drove without stopping until they were on the outskirts of Pompano Beach, where they pulled into a large shopping area that included a restaurant and gas station, along with the usual grocery and other retail stores. Despite their big dinner earlier, they were both hungry, which Maeve wrote off to more of that post-battle stuff. They’d both expended a lot of energy taking down the shooter, and that had been just over three hours ago. After deciding to go into the restaurant instead of grabbing take-out, she proceeded to order a giant hamburger and fries, plus a chocolate shake, and did it without a twinge of guilt. Dragan doubled her order. So maybe there were good things about adrenaline rush.