Gone Cold by Douglas Corleone

notebook. “Then let’s start with family and friends who live in the area.”

 
    Chapter 12
    I woke on the sofa in the sitting room of an elegant suite on the top floor of the Radisson. Daylight was squeezing through the razor-thin opening where the curtains were supposed to meet. I glanced at my watch and sighed. It was nearly eleven o’clock in the morning. I was disappointed with myself, but not the least bit surprised. After viewing the surveillance footage from the Stalemate, Zoey and I had stayed up most of the night, attempting in our own strange way to catch up on the past thirty-six years of our lives.
    When I sat up on the couch, I noticed that Ashdown had retrieved my Swiss Army suitcase from his vehicle. I decided to shower and dress before knocking on the bedroom door and waking them.
    I walked into the bathroom. Shed the clothes I’d been wearing since I spoke to Kati back in the States nearly thirty-six hours ago and stepped into the shower. As the scalding water beat down on my chest, I thought about last night.
    Over the past couple of years I’d often daydreamed about what it would be like to meet my sister, Tuesday. (I still hadn’t fully adjusted to the name change and seriously doubted that I ever would.) In any event, my sister was nothing like the woman I’d fantasized meeting. I’d expected a demure woman, refined in the ways in which most Americans imagine the British to be. But this woman was crass, even crude at times. She wasn’t the modest, soft-spoken little girl I’d lost thirty-six years ago. She was blustery and garish; she drank like a sorority girl and cursed like a stockbroker witnessing a career-ending crash on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange.
    At one point during the conversation here in the suite, I’d asked her how she met Ashdown. She raised her lip in a snarl as her ex-husband looked on. “Damon was working at the Met at the time. I’d been a dancer. After work, me and some of the girls would hit the car park for a bit of dogging and a wee taste of Charlie.…”
    Ashdown casually averted his eyes.
    “The car park was in a secluded spot,” she continued, “and no one round there raised much of a fuss, so it was rare for the filth to make an appearance. But one night, he and his partner roll up like bloody Starsky and Hutch, and this one taps on our window and flashes his badge and tells us, ‘Out of the car.’ My girlfriends think we’re right fucked because of the drugs, but from the way this one was looking at me, I could tell straightaway he was as randy as a schoolboy, and that if I gave him half the chance he’d bend me over the hood for a quickie. So, I ask him, ‘Fancy a shag?’ and he turns all red in the cheeks and says as coolly as he can under the circumstances, ‘How about a date to start?’ So, I say, ‘Sure, whatever floats yours, ya know, long as you let us go,’ and the next night he picks me up from my flat and takes me to this club, only he doesn’t dance, so instead we grab a few bevvys and get pissed and end up snogging like a pair of teenagers right there in the middle of the lounge. This goes on for over an hour before he finally realizes, What the fuck? and takes me back to his place to have it off straight through the morning.” She shot Ashdown a look. “Now, of course, he regrets the whole bloody episode.”
    Ashdown turned to her. “I don’t regret a single minute of that night, love. It’s my cock-up the next morning I’ll never live down, isn’t it?”
    She looked at me and smirked. “The wanker falls for me straightaway, asks me to move in with him after breakfast. A bit dodgy, wouldn’t you say, little brother?”
    Little brother. Simply hearing those words returned me to the London of my childhood, where Tuesday and I alternately laughed and fought with each other, she a fan of flicking my large five-year-old ears, me a master at pulling her longish brown hair. Both of us lousy little tattletales to