by Sophia Gray
I take a deep, shuddering breath. I’m sorry, Michelle.
“I didn’t kill Michelle in the woods that day. I followed her there when I realized she took my gun. I was trying to keep her from killing herself.”
Chapter 32
Derrick doesn’t look impressed by the bombshell I just dropped. “What are you talking about? I expected something lame, but I never expected it to be this pathetic.”
I knew he’d feel this way. “It sounds like a convenient excuse. I understand.”
“Yeah. Convenient. Exactly.”
“But it’s true.” I stare at him, needing him to believe me.
“Michelle didn’t have it in her it to kill herself.”
“Derrick, when a person’s in as deep as she was…they’re capable of anything. Heroin changes a person. She wasn’t the person you knew, the kid sister. She wasn’t even the girl I met that first night. Remember? When you introduced us at the party?”
His eyes get hazy, a far-away expression. “Yeah. She was, what, fifteen?”
I nod. “I was only sixteen. I’d been dying to get into the club for years, no matter what it took. You found me hanging around outside that party.”
“I wish I hadn’t.”
“You know what? Sometimes I wish the same damn thing. But that’s what happened. If it hadn’t been you, it would have been somebody else. I remember the way she was that night. So beautiful. And a lot older than just fifteen. She was worldly, she knew things. She could tell me the names of everybody there, all the guys in the club and their girlfriends, all the girls who hung out to service the members or just party. She knew them all, knew their stories. Knew the entire world. I wanted to be part of that world, so I drank it up. It was fascinating. I remember how perfect she was.”
“She was perfect.”
“She wasn’t anymore by the time she died, man. This is what I’m trying to remind you. You remember her as that little girl. A lot of shit went down between that night and the day she died. She wasn’t even smoking pot when I met her—nothing. She was totally clean. All that stuff came after. I watched her decline. Every day, she got a little worse. I know you know it. I know you saw it. You told me at the time how worried you were about her. How you wanted her to go to rehab. Remember?”
After a long time, he nods.
I continue. “Believe me. I’m not trying to bring this up to hurt you, or ruin your memory of her. I have a lot of memories of Michelle that nothing can touch. I loved her so damn much. What happened to her, what she became? That was a different person, man. I would never have believed she was capable of half the shit she did. Suicide is the least of it.”
“Why would she do that? I mean, if I believed you—which I don’t—why would my sister try to kill herself? Or did she not get the chance to tell you?”
“She told me. She told me everything. She’d been keeping secrets from me for a long time.”
“And?”
This is the part I knew would hurt him the most. The main reason I never wanted to tell him in the first place. “Remember that big blow-up we had, around three months before she died? With the cartel? And the guns?”
“Who could forget that? It was a bloodbath.”
I nod. “Yeah. It was. We lost five men. Including Kenny.”
“It was Kenny’s baby, that deal. He’d been in with the cartel for years. That was our biggest moneymaker.”
“Yeah, it was. He was a good leader. He wanted what was best for the club.” I look at Derrick, stressing what’s coming next. “Until he got greedy.”
“Greedy? What’s that mean?”
“Why do you think they killed him that night at the warehouse? Seriously, man. Does it make any sense? He was good friends with the head of the cartel. They’d been working together for years, went way back. What went down? We never got the slightest word there was a problem. No complaints, no threats. Nothing. How does that work?”
Derrick shrugs. “Bad blood. It happens.”
“Right. And that’s what they wanted everyone to think, the cartel members. They’d had a falling out. Well, they did, only it wasn’t over the actual business deal. On paper, everybody should have been happy. It was over Kenny skimming off the top.”
“What? No. Kenny wouldn’t do that.”
“Get real, man. He did. He saw how much more money he could make if he sold the guns for more than he told the cartel he was getting. He’d been doing it for about a year before they caught on.”
“No! How could he get away with something like that without any of us knowing?”
I shrug. “Maybe because we all loved him so much, none of us wanted to see it. I mean, I’m sitting here telling you about it, and you still don’t want to.”
“Because it’s easy for you to say years after the man was killed!”
“I understand that. But what I’m telling you is true. When they walked into that sale at the warehouse, Kenny and the guys, the cartel was lying in wait. Took out all the other guys—they had no idea what was happening. They were just going along because Kenny was our president. Trusting him blindly, the way we all did. Then they killed Kenny. I imagine they saved him for last, but maybe they took him quick. Who knows?”
Derrick takes this in. “If this is true—and I still think you’re lying—but if it’s true, how the hell do you know?”
I sigh, folding my hands between my spread knees. “I know because Michelle told me. Out in the woods that day.”
“What? Michelle? How would she know about this?”
“Michelle knew a lot more than she let on. More than I knew, for sure.”
“She was your old lady! She wasn’t in on anything!”
“Right. Just an old lady. Who was having an affair with Kenny.”
Derrick gasps. His eyes are wide, like saucers. I know my words have hit home.
“You okay?” I ask.
“I don’t believe it.” Something about the look on his face tells me he’s lying, though. He does believe it. He just doesn’t want to.
“She told me herself. Confessed it all. That day in the woods.”
“I mean…” Derrick looks off into the distance. “Here’s the thing, right? I knew Kenny was always screwing around.”
“We all did. His dick was never dry. Girls loved him,” I agree. Kenny was a leader for a reason. He had that special something that set him apart. Magnetism. Then, once he took his place at the head of the club, that power was even more reason for women to hang off him. Power’s a turn-on.
“I noticed he got real secretive about his women toward the end. I even wondered, more than once, if there was a piece on the side he wasn’t telling anybody about.” He looks at me, his eyes big and sad. “It was Michelle?”
I nod. “Yeah. For around a year.”
“What? A year? How didn’t I know?”
I laugh. “You? I didn’t even know! Not until she told me. Yeah, I suspected something was going on. But I blamed it on…”
“…the drugs,” Derrick finishes.
I nod. “You knew about that?”
“Christopher, I tried like hell to get her to stop that shit. I really did.”
“I know, man. So did I. It was stronger than us.”
“So they were together for a year, and none of us knew?” He still has trouble believing it. I don’t blame him. Aside from ratting, sleeping with the old lady of another member—wife or otherwise—is the ultimate treachery. You’re pretty much telling a guy he’s not man enough for his woman, and you’re gonna take her instead.
“So she told me.”
“I always thought you two were so happy together. I did.”
“Yeah?” I can’t help snapping. “That’s not what you told the police, is it?”
He winces. I can’t help feeling smug. I want him to feel like shit over the things he told them about me. “I meant you weren’t happy in the end. Don’t pretend you were. There was a lot of shit going on between you two.”
I nod.
“That’s fair. But it was all over the drugs. And Kenny. Once she started up with him, I looked…less appealing.” It stings, admitting that. No man wants to admit he wasn’t enough. Especially not me. Then I add, “Plus, he didn’t care about the drugs. Whether or not she used. That was one of our biggest problems, the way I gave her hell over the H. I couldn’t let her do it without saying something. I loved her. Kenny? He didn’t care. She was a piece of ass.”
Derrick stirs defensively.
I hold up a hand to stop him. “Come on, man. You know how he talked about women. They were bitches, whores, skanks. Pieces of ass. Think about it. If he loved her the way we did, would he have let her keep shooting up?”
That stops him. He shakes his head.
“We were fine until she started up with that shit again. Hell, for all I know, Kenny gave it to her.” My voice is bitter. “I never saw the hypocrisy until it was too late. All that ‘love your brother’ shit. He was a backstabbing son of a bitch. Always was.”
“I have such a hard time believing this.”
I nod my head. “I know, man. If she hadn’t told me herself, I wouldn’t believe it either.”
“I don’t get it. How did she know anything about the skimming?”
I hesitate. This part’s going to be the toughest of all for him to swallow, but I need him to believe it, because it’s what ties the other pieces together.
“Because she was helping him do it.”
Chapter 33
“What?” His voice is deathly quiet. All I can do is nod my head while he processes this. “How could she do that? Like, how would she even be capable of it?”
“She might have been a dropout, but she was a smart girl in her own way. She had street smarts. She was wise. She understood people.” Derrick nods, agreeing with me. “She knew nobody would suspect her.”
“What did she do?”
“She helped him cook the books, first of all. Remember when he had her in the back office? I never thought anything about it—if anything, I was glad she had something to occupy her time. I was naïve enough to think it was a good thing, her having a job. She wouldn’t be sitting around the house all day with the temptation to shoot up. I didn’t think to question why Kenny would take a high school dropout and put her in charge of something so important. He showed her just how to do it. She estimated he skimmed at least a half million before the cartel got wise.”
“Holy shit! What do you do with that kind of money?”
“Launder it. Put it into different club funds nobody ever touched. The rest would be stashed away. She’d hide money all over the place. Sometimes even in the house.”
“But you could have been caught! Everyone would have blamed you.”
“I know. Believe me, I’ve thought this all over a lot of times. More than I can say.” She cared more about Kenny, about the money he’d give her for her drugs, than me. Or our marriage. Just like all Kenny cared about was keeping the money hidden. I used to think he looked at me like a son, or a kid brother. He didn’t give a shit that I’d take the heat if the money were found in my house, as long as nobody found it in his. It took me a long time and a lot of drinking to come to terms with that.
“You didn’t know anything about this while it was going on?”
“Not until the day in the woods. I didn’t know a damn thing. After the ambush, when Kenny and the others were killed, you remember how she was.”
He nods, eyes wide again. “She was a mess. Crying all the time. Sometimes she’d call me in the middle of the night, just babbling. I couldn’t make heads or tails of it. I remember coming out to the house to see her. I couldn’t get her out of bed.” He shakes his head, going back to that time. “I remember thinking, she’s falling apart right in front of me. I thought it had to do with you. Sometimes I would even ask if you did something, and she wouldn’t give me an answer. I assumed I was right.”
“I get it. She couldn’t be honest with you.” I sigh, running a hand over my head. “That went on for weeks afterward. At first, I thought it was just the shock of losing so many friends. She grew up with all of them, just like you did. But after a little while, I started to get a little suspicious. I wondered if she weren’t maybe fooling around with one of those guys on the side. It made sense. We hadn’t been together, not like that, in a long time. She wanted nothing to do with me. I always made her feel guilty about the drugs, she’d say. She couldn’t stand being around me when I judged her.” I sigh, rubbing my temples. “Maybe I did. It’s always easy for a person who doesn’t understand the addiction to judge the people in it. I loved her, though. In the end, it was all a matter of wanting her to be healthy. I wanted my wife back, for God’s sake.” I feel a catch in my throat, like I’m about to cry. I push it away.
I continue. The words are just pouring out of me now. I locked them up for so long. “That day…that last day, before she went to the woods…she was desolate. She sat for a long time at the fire, just staring at it. I knew better than to get in her way when she was like that. I gave her room. I didn’t ask her questions, except to find out whether there was something I could do for her. I went out to get some firewood together, and when I got back, she wasn’t there. Her coat was still hanging by the door. I looked around and found the box for my gun on the bed. Empty.
“I ran out the door. I followed her footprints to the woods. She had the gun. She was going to kill herself. I begged her to stop, to think about it. She had her mind made up. Told me the whole story. All those deaths—Kenny and the others, especially the others—were her fault. She couldn’t live with herself.”
“Oh, my God.” His face is white as a sheet of paper. I know I’m getting through to him.
“She pointed the gun at me at first. To get me to stay back when she was confessing everything. Then she turned it to herself. She was going to shoot herself in the heart. I lunged at her, just desperate to get her to stop. I thought I could overtake her. She was so tiny. But I was too late. She pulled the trigger just as I got to her. She died right there.”
I’m crying. Remembering the look on her face when she told me everything, the way she’d sobbed. She hated herself. She hated who she’d become. She was tired of being an addict, tired of lying. She had killed her friends by lying to them. All because Kenny let her shoot up and do whatever she wanted when I wouldn’t. She would have done anything for him, she said, because he let her be who she was. But she didn’t want to be that person anymore. And she couldn’t live with the guilt.
Let me go, Christopher. Those were her last words to me, before turning the gun on herself.
“I took the gun and left her there. I knew if I called the police, they’d immediately think it was me. So I went to town, to one of the payphones. Called them anonymously, told them about a body in the woods. She was only there for a little while, man. I didn’t leave her out there. It was so cold outside; they had no idea how long it had been since she died because her body temperature went down so fast. She wasn’t even wearing a coat.”
Derrick is sobbing. “My sister…” His head is in his hands, the bottle forgotten on the floor. I move to the couch, beside him, and put my arm around his shoulders. He leans into me, crying. He doesn’t push me away. I know he believes me. “My baby sister.”
“I know. I know.”
“Wasn’t she pretty?” he asks, sobbing.
“She was. She was beautiful.”
“She always wanted everything to be nice, didn’t she?”
“Yeah. She decorated the house like something out of a magazine. She’d always have fresh flowers everywhere. She wanted it to be special. She was funny and sweet and kind. She rescued Scout, you remember? Found him on the side of the road after a truck hit him. Insisted we take him to the vet, nursed him back to health. She had a big heart.” I don’t want to think about the lying, thieving person she became. Like I told Derrick, that wasn’t her. That miserable, scheming person wasn’t my wife. She might have been my wife again by the time she pr
essed the muzzle of my Glock to her chest, clear-headed at last. But it had been a long time since she’d had clarity.
“Why didn’t you just tell me? Years ago?” He’s finally calm enough to speak clearly.
“I knew it would hurt. I mean, not only did she kill herself, but she was stealing from the club. Sleeping with Kenny. I didn’t know you knew about the H. I wanted to keep it from you.”
“You’ve been living with this all this time. I can’t believe it.”
“I blamed myself. I still do.”
“Christopher…it wasn’t your fault.”
“It was. If I could have kept her away from the drugs…or let her know I loved her anyway…maybe she wouldn’t have ended up with Kenny. If I’d been fast enough to stop her, she wouldn’t have shot herself. There were things I could have done.”
