“No.”
KYLE KNEW IT wasn’t his father. It didn’t even look right, and after his morning watching the new day dawn he would have been ready to bet that the sight wouldn’t affect him like it had in the past. But then the emotion rose in him, pure and full of its lovely pain, and he was up, and out of his chair, and out of the bar. He couldn’t help himself. He would never be able to help himself. Despite everything he had learned, he’d never be totally free of him, because it was his father, and as someone told him long ago, that’s just the way of it with sons and their fathers.
He looked left, nothing. He looked right, nothing. He ran to the other side of the street, climbed onto the roof of a car, scanned as far as he was able, and from there he saw it, the head of gray hair bobbing atop a bent figure that had just turned the corner.
He jumped down, chased the man around the corner, saw him, gained on him, grabbed his shoulder as he called out, “Dad?”
The man spun around, old, decrepit, his pocked face marked with fear. The man raised his gnarled hands to ward off Kyle’s attack.
“I’m sorry,” said Kyle, backing away. “I didn’t mean. . . . I’m sorry.”
He felt deflated as he walked back to the bar, when he saw it, resting against the wall of Bubba’s, right by the door. An envelope. He stared at it for a moment before picking it up. No address, no postage, just his name scrawled across its surface. Kyle Byrne. With shaking hands he opened it, reached inside, pulled out a piece of paper wrapped around something flat and rectangular, bound with a rubber band.
A few moments later, he opened the door, leaned into the bar, and motioned for Ramirez to come out. She glanced around, puzzled, as if he were surely looking for someone else, but then grabbed her pocketbook.
“What happened?” said Ramirez, outside now. “Your jaw dropped as if you saw a ghost.”
Kyle laughed. “I have something I need to give you.”
“Flowers?”
“Better,” he said as he handed her the tape that he had found in the envelope.
Ramirez stared at it for a moment before glancing up at Kyle, who beamed at her, like a hunting dog who had just retrieved a dead quail. She gave him a questioning look, he nodded. She took a tissue from her bag, wrapped the cassette carefully.
“Where’d you get it?” she said.
“I found it right there on the street.”
“Just sitting there, outside, just like that.”
“Strangest thing,” said Kyle.
But he didn’t tell her who the tape was from, he didn’t tell her that there was no reason to dust the cassette for fingerprints because he had wiped them off on his T-shirt, he didn’t tell her anything. He just stood there for a moment, smiling and letting the emotions that blossomed from the envelope, all good and all surprising, rise through him.
“My father once told me,” he said finally, “that life was about seizing glory. I didn’t know what he meant then, but I think I know now.”
“And what’s that?” said Ramirez.
Without any preamble or his usual grab bag of feints or tricks, he leaned forward and kissed her.
HE LEANED FORWARD and kissed her, and she kissed back, closing her eyes and letting her body fall into his, and they each felt something happen that was both startling and new.
Ramirez felt the cold hardness at the core of her ambition, a hardness that lived like a tumor in her gut, soften and slowly begin to melt. And Kyle felt something stiffen—not just that which was always stiffening from a kiss or a look or a stray thought, but something else, some resolve that had for most of his life been airy as a fog. And her hurry, her worry, her innate brutal competitiveness, it all seemed to float from her. While he wanted to shout, to dance, to do something, anything, to grab hold of life in a way that was far beyond his usual meander to nowhere. She suddenly didn’t have anyplace more important to be, and he suddenly was in a rush to get there. She had no priority other than to feel his lips on hers, his large body pressed against hers, and he wanted to take her to the moon.
“I feel like I’m on a tropical island,” said Ramirez after they slowly pulled apart to catch their breaths.
“You make me want to put on a suit,” said Kyle.
“I liked you in a suit.”
“Except for the tie. Nobody likes the tie.”
“It is a little grim. What would you do in a suit?”
“I don’t know. Something bold.”
“I like the sound of that. You want to go back in with your friends?”
“No. Let’s go someplace.”
“Where?”
“Anyplace. Let’s just get in a car and drive.”
“Okay.” She laughed. “I guess that means my car.”
“I guess it does.”
“Can we kiss again first?”
They kissed again, and then she took his hand and led him down the street to where her car was parked. She led, and he let her lead him, and all the time he felt as if his heart were imprinted with the words of the note he found wrapped around the tape.
“I couldn’t be prouder, boyo. I could be richer, sure, and wouldn’t that be a pretty thing, but I couldn’t be prouder. Partners on the tape? I’ll be waiting.”
He would never fully understand their power, the first five words of the note, never understand why they mattered so, coming from a man who hadn’t said an honest word to him in decades, but they did, beyond measure, and as he held tight to her hand while she pulled him down the street, he felt his feet skip across the cement as if he were flying.
About the Author
New York Times bestselling author William Lashner is the author of seven suspense novels that have been published in more than a dozen languages throughout the world. A graduate of the University of Iowa’s Writers’ Workshop, he lives with his family outside of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
www.williamlashner.com
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ALSO BY WILLIAM LASHNER A Killer’s Kiss
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Credits
Designed by Rosa Chae
Jacket design by Ervin Serrano
Jacket photograph © by LOOK-foto/Wildcard Images U.K.
Copyright
This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
BLOOD AND BONE . Copyright © 2009 by William Lashner. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.