Chapter 13

"Figured me out, did you?"

Photo by Lena Remmert on Unsplash

“So ‘ow’d he find you?” asked Colin, mopping up the aftermath of his eggs with a slice of toast.

“Daryl?” Heath asked, glancing up at the Englishman. “I found him.”

“Yeah, ‘s what I meant,” Colin said with his mouth full. “Myself, I ‘ad a bit of an ‘eroin problem. I was nodding off on the el train, sleeping rough. I ‘ad a dream one night, curled up in a bleedin’ doorway in Camden, New Jersey—”

Heath’s eyebrows went up. “About the House of Mirrors?”

Colin stared at Heath. “Do we all ‘ave it?” he asked quietly. All pretense and cunning had disappeared from his face, and he looked for a moment very like a boy.

“The Bloodhound did,” Heath said. “Told me about it once. I did, too.”

Colin leaned forward. He looked Heath in the eye, his expression full of pain. “Does Daryl send it to us?” he began urgently. “Like, does ‘e do it on purpose, or—” His eyes flickered, the habitual gentle smirk returned to his face, and he sat back and took a bite of toast as if he had not been speaking at all.

Heath looked past him to see the men’s room door open, then close behind Clorox. He leaned out of the booth. “Everything come out okay?” he asked.

“Yeah,” the dwarf said, climbing up into his seat. “If you need to take a piss, you should probably go against the wall behind the restaurant,” he said matter-of-factly, his voice tinged faintly with pride. “That bathroom is going to need to be fumigated.” He took a sip of coffee. “So what are we doing, Ridgeback?” he asked calmly, looking Heath in the eye.

Heath’s fork paused halfway to his mouth. He put it down and stared at the cleaner for a minute. “Figured me out, did you?” he said neutrally.

Clorox shrugged. “There’s only five of you. You ain’t mute, so you ain’t the Basenji—I’m grateful for that, by the way, because the stories I heard about him make me want to crawl into a hole, pull a camouflage blanket over the entrance, and be real quiet in the hopes he don’t notice me—and I happen to know the Bloodhound is black. You could be the Wolfhound, but ‘Heath’ sounds like the kind of name African colonizers give they kid. So my guess is you—” he jabbed his forefinger in Heath’s direction for emphasis “—are the Rhodesian Ridgeback.”

Heath put his last forkful of pancake into his mouth, took his time chewing, and swallowed. “The Wolfhound’s got red hair and a mustache like Doc Holliday in Tombstone,” he said. “And he’s enormous; he’s like, six six, two-forty. I’m big, but I’m not that big.”

Clorox relaxed. He smiled, satisfied. “Okay, then, Ridgeback. What are we doing?”

Heath looked at his watch. “We’re going to be dealing with people with better-than-average security before this is over. I made a call before you two showed up to someone who’s good at bypassing locked doors and the like. She should be here shortly.”

Colin glanced up at Heath. “Am I to understand Puddles will be joining us?” he said sharply.

Heath sipped his coffee. “Payback’s a bitch,” he said. A small smile played about the corners of his mouth for a minute before disappearing.

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