The Man Who Walked in Darkness (Miles Franco #2) (Miles Franco Urban Fantasy) Read Free Page A

on the table and returned to his seat.
    “I don’t remember,” I said, “because I was drunk.” I fixed Wade with a look. “Got it?”
    He made a disbelieving noise. “If you were drunk, how do you know she called?”
    “I was at home, waiting for the next day of the trial so I could go back in and hear them tear me apart again. I felt like having a bit of a break from it all. So I knocked back half a bottle of bourbon. Nice break, huh?”
    “Get on with it, Franco,” Wade said.
    “The phone started buzzing, so I stumbled over and picked it up. I was pretty plastered by that time. It was Claudia, of course. She wanted to meet, wanted my help with something, I think. Only then…” I screwed up my eyes.
    “Then what?” Vivian said.
    “It’s all a blank. Next thing I knew I was waking up on the couch. I’d passed out.” I slammed my hands down on the table and got to my feet. The chair spun, so I picked it up and hurled it against the wall. “I fucking passed out when she needed my help!”
    The chair clattered to the ground. My face burned, my eyes burned, every bit of me burned. Christ, I was a screw-up. I’d managed to go my whole goddamn life as one, but it’d never hurt anyone but myself. Now, I couldn’t seem to go two steps without destroying someone’s life, without leaving a trail of bodies behind me.
    Wade slammed into me, knocking the rage out of me. He wrenched my arm behind my back and pushed me up against the wall.
    “Enough!” Vivian yelled.
    The pressure on my arm didn’t ease, and to be honest, I didn’t want it to. I should’ve gone to prison. At least there I couldn’t do as much damage.
    “Are you going to be calm?” Wade said into my ear.
    “He’ll be calm,” Vivian said. She appeared beside me, close enough I could smell the hint of cinnamon in her perfume. “Right, Miles?”
    I took a few deep breaths and nodded. Wade lessened the pressure on my arm, giving me enough room to turn and shove the bastard away by his sports jacket. I half-hoped he’d sock me one, but he just picked up the chair I’d thrown and thumped it down in front of me. “Sit.”
    I sat. Vivian rested against the table while Wade folded his arms and leaned menacingly in the corner.
    “Tell us about her,” Vivian said.
    I nodded and tried to get my thoughts together. “Like I said, she sang with my band sometimes.” Calling it a band was a stretch, to be honest. A trumpet, a double bass, and a keyboard do not a band make. “She first showed up at one of our gigs about two years back, when we sucked even more than we do now.”
    I could still remember the white cocktail dress she’d worn, in a biker bar, no less. You couldn’t not notice her. Bubbles, our keyboardist, nearly fell over himself when he saw her sitting there, waiting for us to start playing. I can’t say I was much better. I’ve always been wary of women. But Claudia was something else.
    “She can’t have been off the plane for more than a couple of months,” I continued. “Still had an accent thick enough to spread on your toast. But she had a pair of lungs on her, that’s for sure. Salin, our double bassist, convinced her to come sing with us a few nights a month. She didn’t take much convincing, really.”
    “Were you two intimate?” Vivian asked.
    My face grew hot. Why couldn’t it have been Wade who asked me questions like that? “No, never. She lived alone, I don’t know where. I don’t think she even had a boyfriend. Never once heard her talk about stuff like that. The music was enough for her.”
    Vivian scribbled away in her notebook. “And you don’t have any idea what trouble she was in?”
    I suppressed the urge to punch things again and settled for shaking my head. “I wish I did. Christ, you have no idea.”
    Vivian nodded and gave Wade a look. I couldn’t tell what secret cop signals passed between them, but he just twisted his mouth up and shrugged.
    “Okay, that’s great, Miles,” Vivian said.