Piper left the Champion house feeling as though she’d made a new friend, but since Annabelle Champion lived among the city’s movers and shakers, while Piper lived above a Dumpster, it was a questionable assumption.
She didn’t want to show up at Coop’s before he’d had his second cup of coffee, so she headed for Lincoln Square. Berni had called her late last night to check on Piper’s progress finding Howard, and hearing that Piper had run a computer check through the major search engines hadn’t satisfied her. Berni wanted more.
“I’ve been reading up, Piper. There are these whatchacall databases where you can register missing persons. I want you to do that.”
“Those databases are for people who aren’t legally dead,” she said as gently as she could.
“A technicality.”
Hardly a technicality when Piper had watched Howard’s urn being lowered into the ground at Westlawn Cemetery.
“I never saw the body,” Berni said. “You remember that.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Piper outmaneuvered a blue Mazda to snag one of the diagonal parking places on Lincoln Avenue. The morning was cloudy and chilly, hinting at rain, but a few hardy souls sat on the benches. A motorcycle shot past, and she took an unoccupied bench.
She tucked her hands in the pockets of her bomber jacket. On the bricks near her feet, someone had made an elaborate chalk drawing of a pelican. It felt good to sit still for a moment. Between working at Spiral at night, chauffeuring during the day, and planning Faiza’s escape, she’d barely had a chance to breathe.
Eventually, she got chilled and began walking back to her car, indulging in a little window-shopping along the way. Her phone pinged. A text from Eric Vargas.
See U tonight?
As she pondered her response, she saw an elderly man cross Lincoln Avenue toward Leland. Potbelly, pants pulled too high at the waist, bright white sneakers, and a wedge of yellow foam rubber on top of his head.
She began to run. A CTA bus cut in front of her. She dodged it, avoided a UPS truck and a bicyclist, but by the time she’d reached Leland, the man was gone. She searched the area, ducking into alleys and side streets, but the man with the Green Bay Packers cheesehead was nowhere in sight.
Piper reminded herself that she hadn’t gotten a good look at his face. But Howard had the identical potbelly and the same penchant for wearing white sneakers and hitching his pants too high. The height had also seemed right.
The theme from Buffy interrupted her thoughts. It was Jen. “Berni wants me to use my media contacts to get the public to look for Howard. And she’s guilted Amber into helping her put up missing person flyers. Everybody’s going to think she’s crazy.”
Piper gazed out at the brick buildings lining the square. “Maybe not quite as crazy as you think.”
She arranged to meet Jen and Amber at Big Shoulders Coffee on Friday. They’d all have preferred one of the neighborhood bars, but Amber had to sing later that night.
On her way to Lakeview, Piper planned her strategy for dealing with Coop. “Let me up,” she said, when he finally answered his intercom.
“You got food with you?”
“No food, but I make a great omelet.”
“You can cook?”
“Sure, I can cook.” No need to tell him she hated doing it, but Duke had expected her to cook and take care of the house right along with acting like his son instead of his daughter. Nobody knew more about growing up with mixed messages than she did.
“Okay, you can come up. But you can’t ask me any more questions that I can’t answer. Got it?”
“Absolutely. No questions.” He knew she was lying, so she didn’t feel bad about it.
When she stepped off the elevator into his condo, she found him sprawled on his couch holding an ice pack to his shoulder. He hadn’t shaved, and his burnt-toast hair was a delicious rumple. Despite the bruise on his jaw, he was just so… everything. All that battered, lived-in masculinity would wake up any woman. Even the dead ones. Rugged men like him were born to win ball games and sire warrior children.
Children? She had to get more sleep. As much as she liked kids, she didn’t want her own and wasn’t in the habit of thinking about them.
He came off the couch. He was shirtless, and he wore gray sweatpants like other men wore Hugo Boss. They slipped low on his hips, revealing a flat, muscled abdomen and a thin line of dark hair pointing straight toward…
Toward her stupid downfall.
She was furious with herself. This had to stop. She was calling Eric. She was going to get this… this urgency out of her system even if she had to seduce Hottie in the back of his squad car.
“I’d ask how you’re feeling,” she managed to say, “but some things are self-evident.”
“I’ve been through worse.”
“Shouldn’t you bandage up your chest?” Right this second. Wrap up all that muscle so I can’t see it.
“They don’t do that anymore,” he said. “Constricts your breathing.”
So what was her excuse? Because she could barely fill her lungs.
Just as she found herself praying he’d put on more clothes, he grabbed a zippered navy sweatshirt from the back of the couch and shoved his arms through the sleeves. But he didn’t zip it. “You mentioned something about an omelet?” he said. “Let me see what I’ve still got growing.”
Sweatshirt falling open to reveal one of Mother Nature’s masterpieces, he went out to his rooftop garden. Instead of using his absence to regain her equilibrium, she followed him.
He was pulling up something she at first thought was an onion but then realized was a leek. He looked so much more at home here than he did working the crowd at Spiral. Utterly relaxed. It struck her how much digging in the dirt with those big, competent hands suited him.
“It doesn’t feel right,” she said. “Somebody like you owning a nightclub.”
“I don’t know why you’d say that.”
“Because Farmer Coop was born to plow the fields.”
“That’s Rancher Coop to you. I’m from Oklahoma, remember? And I’ve never been so glad to get out of a place.”
Despite the chilly weather, he was barefoot and still hadn’t zipped his sweatshirt, but the cold didn’t seem to bother him. She glanced over at the cozy nook not far from the French doors: round, slate-topped table; a cushioned chaise wide enough for two.
“Your bio doesn’t say much about your childhood,” she observed. “Only that you grew up on a ranch and lost your mother when you were young.” The same as she had. “It’s as though you barely existed before you started playing for Oklahoma State.”
He’d composted most of the tomato plants, but a few remained, and he pulled off a couple of small tomatoes, popping one into his mouth. “We were tenant ranchers. Just my dad and me. Sixty acres, not all of it good. Some cattle and pigs. Feed corn. He was a Vietnam vet before anybody understood much about PTSD. Sometimes he was okay. Other times, he wasn’t.”
She sensed what was coming next-the alcoholism, the physical abuse. She wished she hadn’t brought up the subject.
But he surprised her. “Dad was a gentle guy-one reason the war was so hard on him. A lot of the time, he couldn’t function-could barely get out of bed-so I had to take over.” He pulled the cover off a pot of herbs he’d been guarding from frost. “I was around seven the first time I drove the truck. I remember sitting on a pile of feed sacks and riggin’ up some blocks so I could reach the pedals.” He laughed, but she didn’t find it all that funny. “There were a couple of winters where I swear I missed more school than I attended.”
“That’s not right.”
He shrugged and gathered up his harvest. “Animals have to be fed and watered, and Dad couldn’t always leave the house.”