Dial Em for Murder (2 page)

I wondered if Gracie was real. If it broke his daughter Gracie's heart every time the old man descended into twisted nightmares where killers lurked within well-lit coffee shops. If she was his daughter, frantically searching for him, trying to figure out where he could have wandered this time. Or if Gracie was nothing more than another one of his delusions.

I wished him luck because I wasn't sure which scenario was worse.

Big mistake.

He tackled me. Right there in Starbucks, in front of all the baristas and the caffeine addicts and the people who happened to glance through the windows as they strolled down Madison Avenue. The old guy leaped at me as if he were a defensive linebacker in the NFL and sent me sprawling across the tile flooring, knocking the air right out of me. The stupid mocha Frappuccino that started this whole mess exploded on impact, drenching me.

A painfully long silence rocked the room. Each second stretched into something longer, languid, ugly. Nobody spoke. Nobody moved. Nobody breathed.

Maybe if somebody had rushed to my aid, they would have heard him whisper, “Always a caveat. Guard this with your life or you'll be next. Tell . . . your dad sorry.”

Maybe they would have seen him slip something into my coat pocket.

But nobody did.

Pinning me to the floor and coated with coffee, the old man shuddered, convulsed, and died.

“He
died
on you? For real? Take-him-to-the-morgue-and-bury-him died?”

My two best friends, Audrey Weinstein and Ben Tucker, stared at me in disbelief. Correction: Audrey stared at me in disbelief; Ben flat out didn't believe me. He had also been snickering ever since I'd mentioned working on my latest romance novel. Even if I caved and started letting people read my manuscripts, I would
never
show them to him. He'd only start quoting the dialogue from
Kidnapped by Her Italian Billionaire Lover
whenever he was in the mood to mock me.

I didn't think that one was my worst attempt at a novel, either.

My reply stamped out all traces of his amusement. “Yeah, he dive-bombed on top of me right before he went to the great Starbucks in the sky.”

The euphemism didn't make me feel any better. I had hoped it would create a false sense of distance in my mind. If I could make an empty joke out of it, then maybe I wouldn't be haunted by the way his body had tenuously clung to life before he had stilled. I'd mentally replayed it throughout the night, unable to stand even the familiar weight of my comforter. Not when it reminded me of his prone form draped on top of me. I could still hear that last breath rattling out of him, right into my ear, as he apologized.

To me or to someone else—I had no idea.

The only thing worse than feeling his final gust of air tickle my neck was being trapped beneath the weight of his corpse.

Ben's smile disappeared and I could feel him giving me a slow once-over that had nothing to do with attraction and everything to do with his overly developed protective instinct that was on full display whenever he looked after his little brother, Cameron.

“Wow.” Audrey tucked a strand of her pitch-black hair behind her ear and then shot me a suspicious look. “Are you messing with us? If this is a new writing technique, I'm not okay with it.”

I pointed to the redness rimming my green eyes from my sleepless night, wishing that my skin had the golden undertone that Audrey had inherited from her Japanese-American mother. Whenever I was sleep-deprived or stressed people tended to ask if I was seriously ill. “Does this look like I'm kidding? I've been freaking out ever since it happened!”

“Em's not that good an actress, either,” Ben said in what I considered a failed attempt to lighten the mood. I shot him my best death-ray glare when he ruffled my hair.

“Why didn't you call us?” Audrey gestured behind us at all the students milling around the cafeteria, loading their trays with enough saturated fats to send someone into cardiac arrest. “New rule, Em: If someone
dies
, you don't wait until lunch to casually bring it up! That's not okay.”

“What was I supposed to do? Call you and say, ‘Hey an old dude just tackled me in Starbucks, but I'm fine. Mostly. I'm doing better than he is, which, y'know, isn't saying much since he's dead. He's very dead. And I've gotta hang up and give the police my statement now. Bye!'”

Actually, that's
exactly
what I should have done. Audrey and Ben would have bolted to the nearest subway station and kept right on talking to me until the reception in the tunnel disconnected us. They would have been there for me, without any hesitation. Except it was pretty damn obvious that Audrey wasn't entirely over the breakup with Nasir, her boyfriend of four weeks, and the last thing I wanted to do was dump any of my baggage in her lap. Andrey wasn't the type to verbally rehash a relationship. Once it was over all she wanted was plenty of personal space. Calling her mid-freak-out had seemed selfish.

And okay, that reasoning didn't exactly hold up with Ben, considering that his Thursday afternoons usually consisted of coaching his eight-year-old brother, Cameron, in the finer points of baseball and smiling at whichever girl happened to catch his eye. I didn't doubt for a second that if I had called in a panic, the two of them would've showed up, baseball bats at the ready. As far as Cam was concerned, I'd reached honorary big sister status years ago. Which was kind of disconcerting since I definitely didn't have any sisterly impulses when Ben grinned at me.

So, yes, I could've called him for moral support, but I didn't.

Instead, I'd done my best to answer routine questions for the cops without tripping over my own tongue. Tried and failed. Miserably. The transcript probably read something like this:

Somehow I segued from there back to my romance novel, describing every plot point, while Officer McHaffrey did his best to maneuver me back to our very own—very dead—John Doe.

I didn't say another word, not because I
actually
believed the dead man was right and that I couldn't trust anyone ever again, but because if I mentioned the dead man's cryptic warning about my father, Officer McHaffrey would've been obligated to ask some pointed questions about my home life, and I didn't want to get personal. The last thing I wanted to discuss right after having a stranger's lifeless body rolled off me was my complete lack of a reliable father figure. It wasn't as if being raised by a single parent increased the likelihood of being attacked by a strange man in a coffee shop. Explaining that I'd never met my father, not even for something as insignificant as a pumpkin spice latte,
did
make it far more likely that I'd graduate from uncontrollable shaking with adrenaline to full-on ugly crying on the sidewalk outside the Starbucks.

I focused on delivering one-word answers and nodding my way through the rest of the interview. It was the only way to postpone the tears I could feel welling up inside me, threatening to spill out at any second. Officer McHaffrey had barely finished thanking me for my cooperation when I bolted.

My sneakers slapped the pavement in a steady beat that offered no real comfort, especially when my breathing became shallow and choked. I couldn't drown out the morbid whispers of onlookers, and their words continued ringing in my ears.

The tight knot of revulsion in my stomach only began to ease when I swiped my keycard into my apartment building, instantly smelling the familiar mix of mildew and detergent that lingered from the laundry room. Something about it steadied my pounding heart rate, helped clear my head. I needed to walk up the three flights of stairs to the cramped apartment I shared with my mom, change into my favorite pair of hole-ridden jeans and my baggiest sweater, before attempting to wash the coffee stains out of my clothes. Then I needed to pretend that nothing out of the ordinary had happened. That nobody had whispered a cryptic warning to me during their last moments on earth. That the storm had passed, the worst was over—insert reassuring cliché here—and that my life would now return to its regularly scheduled programming.

I might have even convinced myself, if I hadn't double-checked all my pockets to make sure they were empty before shoving the clothes into the washer. There was something weighing down my jacket. Something that most definitely hadn't been there before my run-in with a geriatric coffee thief. Fingers still trembling from shock and adrenaline and a dozen other emotions I didn't particularly want to name, I delved deeper inside. I should have felt the papery folds of a secondhand book about the Vietnam War or a pamphlet full of conspiracy theories, some weird manifesto I could toss in the dumpster without a second thought. Instead the pad of my thumb slid across a smooth glass screen that I nearly fumbled and dropped to the ground because, oh holy crap, this did not belong with me. An old man slipping a handful of butterscotch toffees into my coat? Okay, that would be strange but sort of understandable in that who-knows-why-old-people-do-what-they-do kind of way. But randomly giving me one of the most expensive tablets on the market? That went well beyond weird.

Slate Industries had produced the Ferrari of electronics and my sticky Frappuccino fingers had no business holding one of their masterpieces. Roughly the size of a large smartphone but thinner than three quarters stacked on top of each other, it had been lauded as the tablet/phone love child hybrid that nobody realized they needed until they felt it resting in the palm of their hands. Then it became the next generation of tech they couldn't live without. The Slate's superior memory, speed, privacy settings, battery life, durability, and general awesomeness came with a hefty price tag attached.

And yet now one of them belonged to
me
.

For some reason all I could think as my fingers skimmed across the smooth chrome exterior was that anyone who could afford a Slate should be buying their own damn Frappuccinos. My Starbucks Stranger didn't need to resort to theft to get his caffeine fix. But for some reason he'd claimed
my
drink, grabbed
my
wrist with his ridiculously strong fingers, and slid this outrageously beautiful machine into
my
pocket. So maybe keeping it was the right thing to do.
Even to my own ears that
rationalization sounded awfully thin. “Finders keepers, losers weepers” probably didn't apply to cases where the loser turned up
dead
. Then again, turning over the Slate to the cops wouldn't magically bring the old man back to life. Most likely, it would go mysteriously missing, and if an officer in the department happened to start using an identical Slate, well, none of the other cops would ask too many questions about where he got it. As far as I was concerned there was enough moral ambiguity to keep me on the safe side of karma. If I handed it over to the authorities, I would be denying a dying man's parting gift. That would be rude. Disrespectful. Downright dishonorable.

I was merely respecting his final wishes.

“
Earth to Emmy!
” Audrey waved her arms dramatically in front of my face. “Are you even listening to me? You should have called us!”

I nodded and then did a quick sweep of the cafeteria. Nobody seemed to be paying us any undue attention, but I couldn't shake the feeling that I was being watched. Probably leftover paranoia from the old man's creepy warnings. “I know, okay? I should have called. Can we move on already?”

Audrey and Ben traded looks. The problem with best friends is that sometimes they know you a little too well. They can tell when you are holding out on them. And they have absolutely no qualms about poking and prodding until you've spilled all your secrets.

“Em's just mad he interrupted her alone time with her fictional Prince Charming.”

I glared at Ben as my cheeks heated with annoyance. Ever since he caught me with a big dopey smile plastered across my face as I finished the last paragraph of a romance novel, he'd started giving me crap about my personal life. Which was blatantly unfair, because did I criticize him for hooking up with random girls after baseball practice or outside the batting cages or on the subway or wherever the hell else he happened to meet them?