by JB Lynn
The sadness in his voice had Doomsday licking the back of his ear.
Reaching back, he rubbed her head affectionately. “I’m happy for her, but Daria, our daughter, is freaking out. The moment she found out her mom is moving across the country she burst into tears and threatened to drop out of school. She called me a dozen times today.” He dragged his hand down his face, signaling his frustration. “There’s nothing I can do to make this better for her. All these years trying to protect her and it’s her mom who knocks her world off its axis. I’m at a loss.”
“Understandable,” I murmured. “Does her mother want her to go with her?”
He shook his head. “She understands that Daria’s life is here. She wants her to visit and to go to the wedding, but she doesn’t expect her to move there.”
We rode in silence for a few moments. We didn’t appear to be tailing anyone. I finished my sandwich.
Finally he said, “So, why did you have a bad day?”
“I met the husband of the woman who killed Theresa.”
Patrick let out a low whistle.
Doomsday thumped her stump of a tail against the door.
“How’d that happen?”
“He came to the hospital looking for me.”
“Why?”
“He wanted my forgiveness.”
“Fat chance of that,” Patrick muttered.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” I asked sharply.
Patrick glanced at me, an emotion I couldn’t identify flickering in the depths of his green gaze. “You do like to nurse your grudges.”
“So you think I can’t be empathetic toward a man who’s looking for forgiveness?”
Instead of answering me, Patrick eased over to the side of the road, parking beneath a streetlight. He twisted in his seat so that he faced me.
My stomach flipped nervously. I had the sudden urge to open my door and run from the truck.
As though he heard my thoughts, he caught my left wrist in his hand, gently trapping me.
Swallowing hard, I looked down at where our bodies met, wondering if he could feel how my pulse had sped up. I tried to tug away, but his fingers tightened, not painfully, just determinedly, on my skin.
“Do you believe in forgiveness?” he asked softly.
I looked up at him in surprise. The moment he’d touched me I’d forgotten what we’d been discussing.
He watched me with that quiet intensity of his that made me feel both special and frightened. My mouth went dry.
“Do you believe in forgiveness?” he prompted.
“Do you?”
He tilted his head to the side, considering the question. “It depends on whether it’s deserved.”
“Agreed.”
“Really?” His tone indicated he didn’t believe me.
Afraid of what he might see with his searching gaze, I turned away to look out the passenger window. Quite the trick considering he still held my wrist.
The only sound in the truck was Doomsday’s panting.
I heard Patrick expel a long breath. “I shouldn’t have pushed you.”
“You shouldn’t do a lot of things,” I snapped, tugging my wrist for emphasis.
He let go immediately. I tried not to think about how much I missed the contact.
“So you want to kill him?” Patrick asked, retreating to a safe topic of conversation. Murder was that between us. “The husband?”
“No.” I turned so that I was facing him again. “Garcia.”
“I thought you were on the fence about him. And after a little digging and seeing that he was married to your aunt, I understand why. Delveccio can find someone else for the job.”
“I don’t want anyone else,” I insisted. “I want to do it.”
The venom in my tone made Doomsday whine.
Patrick’s gaze narrowed. “Why the change of heart?”
“The husband.”
“I don’t follow.”
“Revenge.”
Patrick frowned. “I’m still lost.”
“The husband told me that Garcia got his wife hooked on drugs, so really it’s his fault that Theresa’s dead. Now he’s got to pay.”
I hadn’t realized I was yelling until Patrick winced.
“That’s a really bad idea,” he said quietly.
“Why?”
“Because . . .” He turned away, staring out the windshield, choosing his words with care. “Revenge never gets you what you want, and being this emotionally involved in a job multiplies the chances of you screwing up and getting caught.”
“I don’t care,” I assured him, emboldened by my righteous anger and my newfound hatred of Jose Garcia.
“Then who will take care of Katie?” Patrick asked.
Chapter Seven
“HE DOES HAVE a point,” God drawled superiorly from his glass terrarium, which I’d put in the middle of my kitchen table. “If you get caught, what will happen to Katie? And me?”
“Doomsday?” the dog barked.
“Yes,” the lizard griped. “And the slobbering beast. No one in their right mind would take her in.”
I didn’t like being reminded of people in the right minds when I was in the midst of a conversation with a lizard and a dog. It made me feel like I could end up sharing a room with my mother in the mental hospital at any moment. I frowned at God over the refrigerator door. “I’d been looking for some support, not for you to take Patrick’s side.”
“I’m not taking his side,” God said. “I’m advocating for Katie and myself.”
“Doomsday!” the dog yipped.
“And the beast,” the lizard added grudgingly.
I turned away from them and considered the contents of my fridge. The hitman was right. I did eat too many olives. I had seven different kinds on the shelves.
“So you’re not going to do it, right?” the lizard nagged.
I sighed. The burning hatred in my gut had been replaced by the cold fear that I wouldn’t be able to help Katie. Maybe Patrick was right. Maybe God was right. Maybe I should just go with my initial reaction and turn down this particular job.
“Well?” God asked.
I took out a container of garlic-stuffed olives. I opened it and popped one in my mouth. “I wouldn’t want the two of you to end up homeless.”
Doomsday licked my hand in appreciation. That or she was after the olive brine.
“A wise choice,” the little guy assured me.
I felt a little better having made the choice. I ate another olive to celebrate and closed up the refrigerator.
“Who’s suing you?” the lizard asked casually.
“What?”
He pointed at the pile of unopened mail beside his enclosure. “You got something from a lawyer.”
I rifled through the pile until I found the envelope he was referring to. He was right, it was from an attorney’s firm. Hands trembling, I ripped it open.
“Please don’t be bad news,” I begged. “Please no more bad news.”
I flopped down on the chair and read it. I only read the first paragraph before I jumped back up. “Son-of-a-bitch!”
Doomsday ran out of the room and even God seemed to cower against the rear wall of his terrarium.
“Son-of-a-bitch!” I shouted again, throwing the papers on the floor and jumping up and down on them like a demented four-year-old.
“What is it?” God asked cautiously.
“They want her.”
“Who wants who?”
“Katie’s aunt wants Katie. She’s suing me for custody.”
I didn’t know it was possible for an anole lizard to pale, but Godzilla did. “She can’t,” he whispered.
“She is.” I pointed at the offending papers.
“What are we going to do?”
“I’m not letting her have Katie. She’s never even met her.”
God nodded. “Maybe you can get the redhead to kill her.”
I considered that for a second. “Maybe.”
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“You need to hire a lawyer,” the lizard said, his color coming back.
“With what money?” I asked.
He shrugged.
I snapped my fingers. “I’ll tell Delveccio I need an advance for killing Garcia.”
The lizard didn’t try to talk me out of it.
AS EAGER AS I was to tell my favorite mobster that I needed an advance on my contract to kill Garcia, I still had to spend the next day at Insuring the Future. But before that, I had to take Doomsday, piteously whining, “Gotta! Gotta! Gotta!” for her morning constitutional.
God, complaining that he had a case of cabin fever, insisted on coming along too, perched precariously on my shoulder, his tail wrapped around my neck for balance.
We’d barely gotten out the door when the dog emptied her bladder on my neighbor’s golf green welcome mat.
“Doomsday,” I scolded. “I’ve told you to only go on the grass.”
“Grass!” She scratched at the plastic turf.
“That’s not grass, dingbat,” God told her with a smirk in his voice.
“Dingbat not!” the dog snarled.
“Yes, you are,” I assured her, bending down to gingerly pick up the ruined mat, taking care not to spill the puddle in the middle. “And destructive. First Aunt Susan’s umbrella and now this.”
“While we’re using D adjectives to describe the mutt, I want to add disgusting,” God said. “As in: It’s disgusting you’re picking that up.”
“Like cleaning your terrarium is any better,” I muttered. “My life was a lot easier before the two of you.”
“Sorry Doomsday.” The dog nudged my hand in apology, upsetting my delicate balancing act and splashing her pee all over me.
“Aaaah!” God screamed, clambering on top of my head as if to escape sulfuric acid.
“Aaaah!” I echoed, throwing the soiled mat at the dog and trying to knock the lizard off my head. “Idiots!”
“Imbecile!” God countered.
Doomsday took off. I hadn’t even realized I’d dropped her leash until she was twenty yards away.
“Doomsday!” I called.
She didn’t look back. Ears flattened, she ran faster than I’d thought her capable of.
“Come back!”
She ignored me.
“Get back here right now or so help me . . .” I trailed off, partly because she was already out of earshot, but also because I realized I sounded an awful lot like my father.
“Look what you did,” God said reproachfully.
“What I did? You were the one who called her a dingbat and disgusting.”
“But I,” he drawled haughtily, perched on my head, “didn’t assault her.”
“I didn’t assault her.”
“You threw the mat at her.”
“I didn’t throw it at her . . . I threw it and it happened to hit her.”
God harrumphed his disbelief.
“If you don’t get off my head this instant I’m going to throw you off.” I reached upward, ready to make good on my threat.
“I have sensitive skin,” he practically shrieked, clambering back onto my shoulder. “What are you going to do now?”
I frowned in the direction Doomsday had disappeared. “I’m going to work. I assume you are going to spend all day watching cooking shows.”
“But what about the beast?” A tinge of concern wove through the lizard’s voice.
I shrugged.
“You should go after her.”
“I wouldn’t even know where to start looking. She’ll find her way home.”
“Like Marlene has?” God goaded.
The mere mention of my missing sister’s name made my bad day even worse. Ignoring the lizard’s dig, I picked up the soiled mat, tossed into the Dumpster, and stalked back to my apartment.
“I can’t believe you’re going to leave Doomsday to cope on her own,” the lizard griped as he climbed back into his terrarium.
“She’ll be fine.”
“She can’t even compose a proper sentence and now she’s out there . . . lost and afraid.”
I felt a twinge of guilt, but wasn’t about to let him know that. “She took off. She’s probably having the time of her life.”
He flicked his tail, signaling his disagreement, and turned his back on me.
Even though I was running late, after changing into urine-free clothes, I took the long way to work, hoping to catch a glimpse of the AWOL dog. I didn’t spot her.
I’d barely parked my car at Insuring the Future when Harry came barreling toward me. One look at his red face and wild eyes had me considering locking my doors and getting the hell out of there.
Then I remembered I’ve killed a mobster and a professional hitman and I was going to kill a drug dealer, so an irate pencil pusher with a penchant for pepperoni was no one to be afraid of. I got out of my car, but kept a tight grip on my keys, my handiest weapon.
“Who did you talk to and what did you say?” Harry spluttered, rocking to a stop a few feet away.
I backed up so as not to be in range of his enraged spittle. “What?”
“What did you tell them?” he squeaked, obviously panicked.
I considered him for a second. I hadn’t said anything to anyone, but he obviously thought I had. Whatever it was freaked him out. I liked watching him squirm. I smiled.
My smile unnerved him further. He paled.
“Surely there must be a way to fix this,” he said in his most conciliatory tone.
“The ball’s in your court, Harry.” I smiled again for good measure.
He turned and practically ran away.
That should have amused me, but watching him distance himself from me just made me think of Doomsday. I wondered if she’d ever come back, or, if like so many others in my life, she’d abandoned me for good.
My eyes burned with tears. Dashing them away with the back of my hand, I squared my shoulders. I’d survived a lot worse than a doggie desertion.
“Why the long face, Chiquita?”
Whirling, I realized that Armani had snuck up behind me, quite the accomplishment for someone who drags her bad leg behind her.
“Was Harry giving you a hard time?” she asked.
“He seems to think I told someone something about him and now he’s scared to death of me.”
She ignored my revelation. “There was a cute guy looking for you earlier.”
“For me?”
“Blue eyes, cleft chin, needs a haircut.” She headed toward the building.
I fell into step beside her. “Zeke,” I muttered, wondering what the hell he wanted from me.
“Zeke?” Stopping, she flashed a pleased grin. “What’s it short for?”
I rolled my eyes, knowing that Armani judged people’s worth based on the Scrabble value of their name, and kept walking. “It’s worth seventeen points all on its own. Why does it need to be short for anything?”
She hurried to catch up. I slowed down so she could.
“It’s short for something, isn’t it?” she asked.
“Ezekiel.”
“What the hell kind of name is that?”
“Biblical.”
“Where’d you find him?”
“He crashed into me.”
“Oh my God, the spider web,” Armani’s breath was suddenly shallow.
“With a sled,” I told her hurriedly, not in the mood to hear any more about her psychic predictions. “We were ten.”
“Oh.” She sounded disappointed.
“Did he say what he wanted?”
“He asked what time you took lunch and said he’d be back then.”
My bad day was getting worse.
I spent the entire morning wondering what Zeke wanted from me and then the jerk never showed up. Armani was disappointed by his no-show status. I was relieved.
The rest of the workday passed uneventfully with Harry giving me a wide berth, which meant I was less stressed than usual when I got to the hospital. I’d e
ven almost forgotten about the MIA dog. Almost.
A quick glance at the waiting area showed no sign of Tony/Anthony Delveccio or his hired muscle, so I decided to visit with my niece before doing business.
Mercifully none of my aunts were in with Katie when I got to her room. “Hey, Baby Girl,” I cooed, settling into my usual seat and picking up her limp hand. I stroked two fingers down her cheek, blinking back tears.
Once again, I felt a burning hatred for Jose Garcia because of what he’d done to my family. Realizing I was holding my breath, I slowly exhaled, trying to expel some of the anger.
Returning my focus to Katie, I began manipulating her fingers and singing “The Itsy Bitsy Spider.”
My voice cracked when I could have sworn I felt her fingers twitch.
I stopped singing and stared at her hand wondering if I’d felt an inadvertent muscle contraction as the doctors called her movements, or if she’d actually responded to me.
I cleared my throat, which felt as though it was being squeezed closed by a vise and started singing again. “The itsy bitsy spider went up the—”
This time I definitely felt her squeeze my fingers. She was responding. My heartbeat doubled its pace.
I forced myself to keep singing around the lump of tears lodged in my throat. “Down came the rain—” I looked up at her face. Her eyelids were trembling.
“C’mon, Baby Girl. Open your eyes. Open your eyes for Aunt Maggie.” I stroked her cheek. “Please, Katie. Please.”
I could have buzzed for a nurse, I probably should have, but it never even occurred to me. The only thing I could think of in that moment was willing Katie to open her eyes.
“It’s okay, Katie. Aunt Maggie’s here.”
She opened her eyes.
My heart leapt and I thought my cheeks might crack, my smile was so wide.
My moment of elation was short-lived when I realized there was no recognition in her gaze. There was nothing.
Chapter Eight
THE DOCTORS AND nurses tried to convince me that Katie squeezing my hand and opening her eyes were encouraging signs, but as much as I wanted to, I couldn’t believe them. The blank stare of the little girl frightened me. It made me think that my niece was lost to me forever.
That loss weighed on me as I left the hospital and stumbled toward my car, having forgotten I’d planned on finding Delveccio. I dropped my keys as I got to my car. Instead of picking them up, I leaned my head tiredly against the window. The glass felt cool.
