SIX

Bo held out a chair as he stealthily scanned the dim speakeasy, looking for the telltale flounce of blond hair. Gris-Gris wasn’t as busy as it should be this time of night, but there were still enough people to make it difficult to spot someone across the tangle of candlelit tables and dancing bodies.

“You owe me for this, Yeung Bo-Sing,” Sylvia said in Cantonese as she sat down in the chair he offered, using the formal Chinese surname-first pattern to emphasize that she meant business.

Then again, Sylvia Fong always meant business. The twenty-year-old switchboard operator lived with her twin sister in an apartment two floors above the one Bo grew up in—one he still kept but rarely used—just off Grant on the northern edge of Chinatown. She occasionally helped him when he needed to listen in on telephone conversations, and he made sure the building superintendent knew that he couldn’t screw her over on rent or bamboozle his way out of repairs.

“You said you weren’t busy tonight,” he told her. The house band was loud, so they had to practically shout at each other to be heard. “Besides, I’m buying you a drink. Your boyfriend surely won’t mind two friends catching up.”

“No, he won’t.” Her ruler-straight short bob swayed as she slowly shook her head. “But no club in the city would make you pay for drinks, and you wouldn’t beg me to race over here with you in this nasty weather if you didn’t want something.”

True.

Thanks to the widow Cushing moving the Plumed Serpent, Bo had been able to oversee the loading of tonight’s runs from Pier 26 instead of staging everything across the Bay. This saved him a couple of extra hours of work, but it was already past ten. He hoped Astrid hadn’t already moved on to another speakeasy—or decided against coming here altogether.

“Only one thing would make you look that nervous,” Sylvia said. “She’s home from college, isn’t she?”

Bo sat where he could see the bar and the door. “Who do you mean?”

“Pssh. Don’t play dumb. The blond Swiss girl.”

“Swedish.”

Sylvia widened her eyes and pretended to pant, mimicking small dog paws with her hands. “This is you, wagging your tail and begging for her to scratch your ears.”

“A bit lower down than my ears,” he said with a smile.

She laughed. “Lucky her.”

“You’re a boon to my ego, Miss Fong.” Bo had known Sylvia several years, and even though things started off lustily between them, it had been quick burning and short. But she was funny and easygoing, and they had not only remained friends but become closer. A rare joy, she was. “Why aren’t we together again?”

A stupid question, because they both knew why. She’d been uninterested in being hampered by a serious relationship, and he’d been harboring, well, whatever this was for Astrid.

Then, of course, there was the other thing. That night. The night he didn’t want to think about right now.

But she only said, “Because my mother would just as soon me marry a convicted murderer.”

“Mm. That’s something I hear a lot,” he murmured, half serious as he flagged down a waiter and ordered them two drinks: black-label champagne for her, water for him. When the waiter left with their order, Bo mused, “Maybe I should change my line of work. Do something respectable.”

“And give up your fancy new car?” Sylvia said as she took off her gloves and pocketed them.

He smiled. “Good point.”

“What did you name it, by the way?”

“I never could decide,” he lied. He didn’t want to give her the wrong idea—or even the right one, which was that he’d decided to christen it “Sylvia” as a quiet act of petty and irrational retaliation after he’d received one of Astrid’s college letters that mentioned that damned professor of hers.

“You should give it a nice Chinese name,” Sylvia said. “What about your mother’s name?”

“A car is too sexy to be named after a mother.”

She huffed and crossed her legs, adjusting the fall of her dress over one knee. “As if mothers can’t be sexy.”

“Not your own mother.”

Sylvia squinted over his shoulder. “Don’t look now, but I think I’ve spotted the person holding your doggy leash.”

Bo slowly, slowly turned his head in the direction Sylvia was looking, and damned if she wasn’t right. In the middle of the dance floor, Astrid twisted her curvy hips in a beaded aqua blue dress. Her mouth was open, laughing, while she stomped it up with one of Gris-Gris’s regular patrons, Leroy Garvey.

Jealousy, hot and liquid, shot through Bo’s chest.

He forced himself to watch her. Penance for dreaming an impossible dream. A voice inside argued: You could be the one out there, swinging her over the dance floor. Dancing with her. Whispering in her ear. Anticipating getting her alone in some dark corner of the club, where people would look the other way.

Could he be satisfied with that? Stolen moments in dark corners, seeing her when he could, between her long trips to Los Angeles and his short trips up the coast to Canada, running booze . . . until she found someone permanent, forcing Bo to step back and accept it? To let her go and watch her spend her life in another man’s arms?

He watched her trade partners. Another handsome man, happy to hold on to her, and he, sitting here moping beneath a cloud of nebulous anger and hurt.