I’d put double deadbolts on all the doors. At the time it had made me feel better, but—once again—it was only me then.
“I’m scared, Tommy. We’re too happy.”
He plays with my hair again, strokes my cheek with a knuckle, and then he takes my hand and heads toward the door, pulling me along with him. “Wine and pasta are great levelers,” he says. “‘Calm your stomach, calm yourself,’” he quotes.
“Who said that?”
“My father.”
I let him lead me down to the promised peace.
Dinner is a happy thing. Tommy was right. It doesn’t take away the fear, but I feel grounded again.
Bonnie is chatty and animated, talking about her choice for an extracurricular activity.
“Track,” she says. “I think I could run pretty fast, and they have meets and everything. I like running and being healthy, and it’s a good way to meet other girls.”
Track coordinates too well with her desire to become an FBI agent when she grows up, but she’s so obviously happy about her choice that I let it go easily, a butterfly on the breeze.
She doesn’t even mention the other part of the deal—our time at the gun range. I’m sure it’s on her mind, just as I’m certain she’s not bringing it up now on purpose. I accept this manipulation with a kind of relief; it’s very teenage, almost normal.
She helps Tommy clean up after the meal. He likes to hand-wash the dishes and refuses to let me do it.
“It relaxes me,” he says.
The man wants to do all the dishes, all the time. Who am I to argue?
They work quietly, not speaking. Bonnie is very comfortable with Tommy’s taciturnity.
I enjoy watching them when they don’t know they’re being watched. I give them a final, lingering glance and then go upstairs to our bedroom. I close the door and retrieve my cell from the bed where Tommy had tossed it. I dial Kirby. She picks up after two rings.
“Howdy, Smoky,” she chirps. Kirby is almost always chipper, except when she’s killing someone, and maybe sometimes even then.
“Good job on the wedding, Kirby,” I tell her, meaning it. “Sorry it got interrupted.”
“That’s okay. I don’t think I was feeling as bad as the bald chick.”
“I can confirm that.”
“I’m most pissed off about the cake. I mean, gosh, I really got a good deal on it.”
Probably by flashing your gun and that kilowatt smile, I muse. “What did Callie do with it?”
“She took two slices home. Two slices! That’s all. Does that make any sense to you?”
“What happened to the rest of it?”
She giggles. “Let’s say it was put to good use on a beach by a fire satisfying the munchies.”
“I guess a man was involved?”
“Of course! I mean, what girl with any self-esteem eats wedding cake on the beach alone? Talk about pathetic pictures, you know?”
“I suppose you’re right.”
“So, boss woman. What’s the job? Need someone fucked silly until they give up secrets in the throes of ecstasy? Or maybe you need someone to become extra-special quiet?”
Kirby’s only half joking. I imagine if I asked her to kill for me, she’d do it without much concern. She’d kill and then head back out to the beach with a gosh and a giggle for some more marijuana, wedding cake, and man. Kirby is a creature of the now, and she doesn’t question her own enjoyment of things. I envy it sometimes, but only sometimes. I’m happy with my current moral compass.
“I need you to guard Bonnie. It will be full time, which I guess means you’ll need to pull someone else in to help. I’ll let her know it’s happening. She’s too smart to do otherwise. She’d figure it out.”
A brief silence tells me she’s disturbed by this request. Kirby is the only person I know who’s more inscrutable than Callie, but I’ve seen enough and become attuned enough to the minutiae of her variations to be certain that she cares about Bonnie.
“Someone threatened her?” Her voice is cool, mild, dangerous.
“Me. Someone threatened me.” I fill her in.
“Hmmm …” she says. “Sure, I’ll do it. It’s going to cut into my sex life, but that’s the biz.”
“We’ll pay you, Kirby, of course. Tommy said for you to call him about that.”
“Puh-leeeeeeze! Your green stuff is no good with me, babe. You’ll have to foot the bill for whoever I get to help me, but I won’t accept a shiny thin one for anything else.”
“Kirby,” I protest. “That’s a lot of time, and—”
She interrupts me. “You do know that I’m rich, right?”
“You are?” The thought had never occurred to me.
I can almost hear her rolling her eyes. “See, you think blonde means dummy, just like the rest of the world. Hella yeah, I’m rich! Solving all those problems with drug cartels in South America tended to leave cash lying around, if you know what I mean, plus I was playing them off against each other, selling information and my own special brand of silence to both sides.” If she was here, she’d be winking at me. “Then there’s years afterward working freelance. People pay a lot of money for what I do, Smoky. I’m what is known as highly diversified. Mutual funds, gold, Swiss bank accounts—you name ’em, I’ve got ’em. Then there’s all the blackmail I have stashed away in case I need a really big infusion of cash.”
What can I say? “I appreciate it, Kirby. I really do.”
“No problema. Now, gotta ask the question, hate to but have to. If something does happen, how do you want me to solve the problem?” It’s asked with the same level of unending cheer as all the rest of it.
“Lethally,” I answer, without hesitation.
The penalty for messing with my family is death. This is a morality I no longer have the slightest quandary about.
Kirby takes it in stride, never missing a beat. “You betcha. When do you want me to start?”
“Tomorrow morning, if you can.”
“Coolio. Then I’ll call Tommy, hammer out the details, and head for the beach. One more night licking wedding cake off my current hunk of man before heading into the salt mines.”
I hang up, feeling troubled and amused, which is par for the course when it comes to conversations with Kirby. She weaves stories of carefree sex with cheerful tales of assassination in a dance that leaves you wondering how much is true and if you should be worried about the state of your soul or hers or both.
An adage from my father pops into my head. Chase the wind and you’ll be running forever.
It applies to Kirby. Either cut her out of your life or accept her as she is, because you’ll never tame her. She’s the wind.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
“Killing another human being, man or woman, is like concrete and dirt,” his father said when the Boy was sixteen.
The Boy always listened closely to anything his father said, but his interest sparked stronger now, not because of the subject but because of the hint of poetry in its speaking. Dad was not a poetic man. He enjoyed his Dali and the thundering violins of classical music, but those were anomalies as a means to an end.
“The airy-fairy squad tells us about things like wind and the sky. Feelings of freedom, all that jazz. Maybe they exist, maybe they don’t. All I know is that you can’t touch the sky or see the wind. But everywhere you look, far as the eye can see, you’ll find concrete and dirt. It’s real. You feel it against your feet or your car tires.
“Killing another human being is something you do against concrete and dirt. It’s where the blood goes as they die and where the body goes after they die. It’s where you’ll end up too.”
Dad had been looking off as they sat in the backyard. They were having a barbeque, just the two of them. It was the Fourth of July, and the sun was setting in a panoply of runaway reds. Dad held a long steel spatula and used it to turn over the burgers as he exposited on the subject of killing.
“The sea,” the Boy said, without think
ing, and then shut up quick, his ears going red to the tips.
“What’s that?” Dad asked. “Speak up, Son. Once you say something, own it.”
The Boy cleared his throat and straightened his back. “Sorry, sir, it was just a stray thought. You said it was everywhere, concrete and dirt, as far as the eye could see. But … not on the ocean, sir. There it’s water.”
Dad turned a burger and nodded. “True enough. But think harder, Son. What’s all that water sit on?” He didn’t wait for an answer. “Dirt. Throw a body in the ocean, and it sinks to the bottom, which is sand and rock. Even if that body gets eaten on the way down, whatever eats it dies and ends up there anyway.” He peered at one of the burgers with a critical eye. Somewhere, a string of firecrackers went off. “You can escape the water, Son, but you’ll never escape the dirt.”
Dad was right again, as usual. It occasioned a surge of pride in the boy. He was lucky to have the father he had.
“Thank you, sir. I’ll remember.”
“Good boy.” His father flipped another burger. “Someday, Son,” he said, changing the subject without warning, as was his way, “you’re going to be on your own, and you’re going to start examining everything I’ve taught you with a more critical eye.”
“I’ll never question your lessons, sir.”
“I believe you as you say it now. But things change, Son, people most of all. You’re under my thumb now. One day you won’t be. You’ll likely stop sometime—a full stop, probably—and the key question will come to mind.”
The Boy waited for his father to continue. When he didn’t, the Boy realized he was waiting for a prompt. “What’s the key question, sir?”
His father turned a burger. “The key question, Son, is: What makes him an authority on all this stuff?”
His father leaned back on his heels and gazed up at the sky. The Boy watched him and pondered. He didn’t really get where his father was going with this. Question his right as an authority? That was crazy talk. He was an authority because he was Father. What other explanation was needed?
“You listen to me now because I’m the biggest piece of meat between us,” Dad said. “Boys grow, Son. You might never be bigger than me, but one day you’ll be stronger. What will you use to explain my authority then?”
“Sir—”
“Don’t worry, Son. I’m not trying to make you agree to something that’ll I’ll punish you for later. Listen up and I’ll get where I’m going.”
“Yes, sir.”
Father moved the burgers off the grill and put some raw ones on. “When I was a boy, we were poor. I’m not talking about missing a radio or a new pair of blue jeans. We had handmade furniture and an outhouse and didn’t always know where the next meal was coming from. Mama helped make ends meet by whoring. Daddy was a no-good who drank every cent she couldn’t hide.
“Daddy wasn’t too particular about who he fucked when he got a drunk. I had a brother and a sister, and all three of us got the touch now and again.”
He flipped a burger and the Boy listened, rapt and fascinated. Father had never talked about his own past before. Never.
“Mama died when I was fourteen. I was the oldest, but not by much. Sissy was thirteen, and my younger brother—Luke—was twelve. Daddy had no intention of getting a job or quitting his drinking, so he put us to work fucking for money, all three of us.
“Sissy was the weakest of us three. Always had been. She lasted two years before she got Daddy’s shotgun and blew her head clean off.” Father paused, staring into a memory. “I came in just after I heard the blast. Blood was in the air like a thin red fog. It was like dust when it settled, but it was wet.” He stared for a moment longer, then seemed to come back to reality, reaching down to turn a burger as though he hadn’t just traveled in time.
“Daddy had us bury her in the woods. He beat us and told us we were going to have to do her share now too. And so we did.”
The Boy noted that his father’s voice had changed. A strong accent had crept in, along with a rhythm and mode of speaking that had only been hinted at before. He had no idea where his father came from. He only knew the here.
“Luke went next. Some freak strangled him to death while he was fuckin’ him. Daddy had me kill the freak too and bury them both in the woods. He went to beat me again, but I decided I’d had enough of all that.” Father examined a burger, voice calm as he relayed these horrors. “So I killed him and buried him in the woods too.” He paused, looking off. “That was the day I understood, Son: There ain’t no such thing as the soul. I tried pretending there was, because my mama had lied and said it was so, and do you know what that pretending made me?”
“No, sir.”
“Pathetic, boy! It drove me to try to love that man, in spite of all the things he done to me. It made me happy when he smiled at me, it even made me cry sometimes when he wouldn’t love me back. I was like a puppy dog, begging for scraps at his feet, just a touch or a smile or a kindly spoken word. All the time thinking I needed it because I believed in such a thing as the soul.” His father leaned forward and spat on the ground. “I learned the truth, and I never let it go, and I swore if I ever had a son of my own, I’d teach him right, so he wouldn’t make the same mistake in his own life.”
Firecrackers went off, but the Boy barely heard them.
“Anyway, I buried Daddy, and then I lit out and joined the army. I ended up at the hard end of the Korean War. Managed to fake my age and get in where the fighting went rough.” Father paused, staring off into the then again. “I saw things you couldn’t imagine, boy. Men firing rifles with their guts hanging to their feet. Cannibalism in the snow. A dead woman getting fucked ‘cause the man raping her hadn’t realized she’d gone and died.” Father kept on staring, his eyes wider now, in some kind of wonder. “People think we were righteous then, and maybe most were, but there were savages in all that rock and bone too. Men-beasts who lived for war. I wasn’t quite one of them, but I understood the notion.”
His father turned to him then and looked down on him with a huge fierceness and intensity. It was a look from the void, and the Boy glimpsed, just for a moment, what a man-beast might be. Men who’d eat men and sell their children and have sex with the dead.
“So when that time comes, and you question what I’ve taught you and what makes me the man to say, remember what I told you today. It’s because I been, Son. Been and done and come to know. There ain’t no God in this world. I’ve seen that truth, right down to the dirt we walk on. There’s just the eaters and the eaten.”
The look continued until the Boy began to sweat because he felt an absence of his father in spite of his physical presence. He felt himself toppling into the chasm that had opened up in his father’s eyes.
Then his own voice spoke to him, like the voice of that God who didn’t exist, huge and booming, full of authority and fire.
I am my father’s son!
It was a sudden thought, random as a bolt of lightning, and as powerful. It flashed once, lighting up all the dark landscape inside him, and it brought a feeling of pride he understood and a sorrow he didn’t.
He blinked and it was done. Father had turned away from him, back to the grill, where one burger had burned to black. Firecrackers exploded somewhere.
“Burgers are done,” Father said, his voice normal again. “Let’s eat.”
It wasn’t the first time they talked about killing, or the last, but it was always the most memorable. For reasons he couldn’t define, ever since that day he equated the coldness of death with the rich burst of cooked flesh in his mouth. Not as a point of sensory enjoyment but more as a sense of déjá vu.
He frequently thought of firecrackers when he killed.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
“It’s time for an answer, Smoky.”
The director called me on my cell phone not long after my first cup of coffee and has arrived at this statement without much in the way of preamble.
“I’m still waking up, sir.
”
He chuckles. The condescending tone of it puts my teeth on edge. “Come on, Agent Barrett. You’ve already decided. I just need you to tell me what your decision is.”
His confidence irks me, though much of that is the early morning grumps. Bonnie, in a moment of loving clairvoyance, brings me another cup of coffee. I roll my eyes heavenward in thanks. She grins and goes back to helping Tommy with breakfast.
“Fine, sir. My answer is yes. My team and my family are on board too, but everyone essentially said the same thing—their view may change if and when a Quantico move occurs.”
“That’s normal in any relocation. You’ll lose some if that happens, there’s no way around it.”
“So what now, sir?”
“Now I do my job. I have a number of things to accomplish behind the scenes, including getting this whole idea approved and funded. We’re still a few months away. I’ll be in touch.”
He hangs up, no good-bye or thanks, Smoky, irking me further. I scowl into my coffee and take a gulp, when I usually take a sip. The taste and the caffeine, as always, mollify me a little.
A knock comes on the door, and I groan. “Why?” I complain. I plod over to answer it myself, defying anyone stupid enough to come knocking this early to have any problem with my hurricane hair and frayed bathrobe.
I open the door to find a woman in her early forties. Age and personal style have cast her looks somewhere between pretty and matronly. She already has herself fully together this early in the morning; her makeup is perfect, her hair is styled, and she’s wearing shirts and slacks with a thin sweater. The slacks are something I would wear, while the sweater reminds me of my grandmother. It’s slightly surreal. Her smile is cheerful and blinding.
All morning people should be killed. Except for Tommy and Bonnie, of course.
“Yes?” I ask, keeping my voice on the neutral side of pleasant.
“Good morning,” she says, saying it with that long o that I can’t stand: good moooorning. It seems to be favored by overly cheerful people who come selling magazine subscriptions or God. “My name is Darleen Hanson? I’m on the current homeowner’s association board?”
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