by JB Lynn
I gulped. “How do you know my name?”
He twirled his pinky ring. The rock was huge. “I know your name, where you live, where you work, and that you’re the legal guardian of that little girl. I also know how much your annual salary is, that you have no criminal record, and what’s in your bank account. Most importantly, I know how much this “premium care” costs. People say I’m a crook, but the medical establishment has got nothing on me. They just know how to bleed you dry legally. And that is why I think you might find yourself amenable to the offer I’m going to make you.”
“You’ve lost me.”
“Think of this as a lucrative job opportunity. A chance to make some extra cash to care for little Katie.”
Delveccio stepped closer.
I tilted the pole toward him, a clear signal that I wouldn’t go down without a fight.
The move seemed to please him. “I like you. You’re a feisty one. That’s why I’m offering you $100,000 to take out Alfonso.”
My mouth went dry as I stared at him. I asked, “You mean like take him out to the ballgame? Or take him out to dinner?”
He tilted his head and raised his eyebrows knowing damn well that I’d understood his offer and was just playing cute and/or stupid with those questions. The man had just offered me a boatload of bucks to kill his son-in-law.
He watched me intently, studying my reaction.
“I can’t.”
“Why not? You took a chair to the man’s head earlier.”
“But that was the heat of the moment. I’m not . . . I couldn’t . . .”
“Sure you can. It’s in your blood. You are Archie Lee’s kid.”
I flinched at the mention of my father. I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised. The mobster seemed to know everything there was to know about me, but I was still startled that he’d brought up my dad.
“I know I’ve given you a lot to consider. You don’t have to decide right now. Think about it. Sleep on it. I’ve got obligations the next couple of days. I’ll be back here on Friday. You can give me your answer then.”
“I don’t think—”
He held up his hand to silence me. The diamond sparkled like the freakin’ North Star.
“If you decide to accept my offer, I’ll set you with one of my guys. We’ll get you some on-the-job training so that you get the job done and get away clean. I’ll be in touch, Miss Lee.”
I didn’t respond in kind. I just stood there, staring at him slack-jawed.
He opened the door and strolled out with the same studied ease as when he’d come in.
I ran into the bathroom, leaned over the sink, and gagged. Nothing came up beside dry heaves. Splashing water on my face, I studied my reflection.
I didn’t look like a killer.
Chapter Six
THE PROBLEM WITH someone offering to pay you to kill someone is that you can’t talk to anyone about it. Not anyone. Usually when you’ve got some sort of monumental, life-changing decision to make, you run it past your family, your friends, your confidants, strangers on the street. But I couldn’t breathe a word of it to anybody. Not that there was a decision to make. I’d made up my mind I wasn’t going to become a hired killer. But I’ve got to admit that it was all I thought about. Not the actual act of killing, but what it meant that Tony (or was it Anthony?) Delveccio thought I was capable of such a thing. Could he see something in me that I’d never admitted to myself?
I went back to work the next day, because I figured that I didn’t need to lose my job on top of everything else. But my heart wasn’t in it. Not that it ever was. I hated my job taking insurance claims for automobile accidents. You can never fully grasp the true stupidity of your fellow man until you’ve worked at a service call center. Between calls I thought about Delveccio’s offer. A lot. By the time my lunch hour, or more accurately my lunch half hour, rolled around, my head was spinning.
My best friend at Insuring the Future hobbled toward me across the break room. Armani Vasquez consistently earned the lowest scores on our customer service call audits, but she’s never in danger of losing her job. “I’m a female, Latina, gimp,” she declares proudly. “I got the Americans with Disabilities Act covering my ass. Ain’t no one gonna fire someone missing three fingers with only one good leg.”
She is, of course, right. No one dares to discipline her for fear of a discrimination lawsuit. As a result, she takes ridiculously long breaks and mouths off to managers on a consistent basis. She can be a royal pain in the ass, but I like her. Maybe it’s because she says what she thinks, or maybe it’s because more than once I’ve caught her taking the blame for mistakes other employees have made. Something she does with some regularity and with no expectation of reciprocation. She’s not nearly as self-centered as she pretends to be . . . but she is damn good at the pretending.
“I got a reading tonight.” Breathlessly she flopped into the chair opposite me.
She’s got one of those cool scooter things, but she refuses to use it most of the time, preferring instead to drag her bad leg behind her, lurching like a drunken sailor. She’s fiercely independent that way. It’s another reason to like her. “I got a reading,” she repeated.
“Good for you.”
Besides being the poster child for the Americans with Disabilities Act here at Future, Armani Vazquez was starting a side business . . . as a psychic. While I don’t believe in signs, premonitions, vibes, or luck, Armani does.
“Referral from a former customer.”
“Uh huh.” I considered asking her why she hadn’t foreseen the car accident that had just demolished my life or the runaway Zamboni that had ruined her leg and chewed up her missing fingers.
“I tried googling the girl, but I didn’t come up with much.”
“Not even Facebook?”
Armani shook her head, her face appearing and disappearing behind her thick curtain of dark hair like a magician’s trick. Her hair was part of her mystique and she played it for all it was worth. “Girl’s pretty cagey about revealing personal information online.”
I raised my eyebrows. “How inconvenient for you.”
Armani liked to scout out details about her clients before they met her. She claimed it helped her get a better idea of the big picture of their lives. She may have almost fooled herself into believing her own bullshit, but I wasn’t buying. Fortune-telling was just a con, designed to take money from some poor, desperate sap who was looking for a couple blanket reassurances—you’re not going to die alone; you’ll find love—that kind of crap.
“She’s a four,” Armani announced with disdain.
“Excuse me?”
“A four. Lisa. L-I-S-A. Four.”
“Which means . . . ?” Like all good con artists, Armani had put her own spin on things. Some so-called-psychics read palms, other cards, and still others tea leaves, but Armani Vasquez read Scrabble tiles.
Yes, Scrabble tiles. She’d ask a mark to pull a handful out of a cloth bag and lay them on the table. Then she’d spell out words or make up anagrams and “read” the future. She practiced here in the break room on unsuspecting co-workers all the time, perfecting her act, reading their tells.
She’d never offered to look into my future. Maybe she sensed that I’d seen enough in my past. Maybe she figured I wasn’t quite as dumb as the rest of these idiots we called our peers.
“You know how I feel about fours.” Armani judged everyone based on the numerical value (as determined by Scrabble letters) of their name. Armani equaled eight. Vasquez was like hitting the jackpot in her book. It equaled twenty-eight.
My last name Lee is only worth three, but I’m saved by the fact that my first name is a ten, if I go by Maggie, or twelve if I use Margaret. Otherwise I don’t think we’d be friends because she doesn’t trust anyone five or below.
I didn’t respond to her comment about fours. I had more important things on my mind. Like why Delveccio thought I was capable of murder.
“What’s wrong wit
h you? “ Armani asked sharply, jolting me out of my morose musings.
I couldn’t tell her the truth, that my future might hold a murder. “I dunno. My sister’s dead. My niece is in a coma. Excuse me if I’m not going to win Little Miss Sunshine today.”
“Today, my amiga, you are not even in the running.”
“So go sit somewhere else if you don’t like my company.”
She ignored that as she started rummaging in her purse. “What you need is to channel your inner Chiquita.”
“You want me to channel my inner banana?” I knew what she meant, but I liked teasing her. For as long as I’ve known Armani, she’s been trying to get me to set my “true self” free. I was too bottled up for her taste. I didn’t tell her that my reserve was something I’d carefully constructed over the years. The ability to control my emotions, to lock them up and refuse to express them, was a conscious choice. It was what separated me from my crazy mother. I wasn’t about to let loose any time soon . . . or ever, if I could help it.
Still, Armani kept trying to get me to let go by calling it different things: “Let the world see the real you” and “Be your bitch self” were just two of the previous campaigns she’d waged. She’d dropped it right after the accident, but apparently she’d decided I’d been my mopier-than-usual self for long enough.
“Let that cute, smart, passionate girl that’s inside you out, Chiquita. You have a big heart stuck in that petite persona you show to the world.” She pulled a bottle out of her purse and spritzed my arm with some Glow by J Lo perfume. “You’ve gotta get your glow on.”
“You just put your Glow on me, which, by the way, is not cool. I don’t care if you are a cripple, you try that shit again, and I will lay your ass out.”
She beamed. “Yes, that’s it! Send some energy out into the universe, and let it come back at you ten-fold!”
“You have lost your fucking mind!” I jumped out of my chair before she could spray me again.
“And you have lost your way, Grasshopper. But I believe that you will find your path.”
Right then I was worried that the path she was referring to might lead me straight to the death penalty, but of course I couldn’t tell her that. Instead, I went back to work, knowing that as soon as my shift was over I was going home to talk to the other living . . . being I could talk to.
Chapter Seven
I SHOULD HAVE KNOWN that my plan to go home and spend a nice quiet evening talking with a lizard, who calls himself God, about whether or not I look like a stone cold killer, was doomed from the start.
Aunt Leslie waited for me in denim overalls and a Grateful Dead t-shirt, her white hair waving in the wind like a flag of surrender. She was hammering something above my front door, a difficult task for most women, but at six-four, she rarely needed a ladder.
“What are you doing?”
She swung around in my direction, almost causing me thousands of dollars worth of dental reconstruction. I jumped back, narrowly escaping a hammer to the mouth. Oblivious that she’d almost taken my head off with her hammer, she threw her arms around me, enveloping me in that disgusting scent she wore. She squeezed my ribcage like she was trying to get the last drop of toothpaste out of a used-up tube.
“We missed you at the wake.”
Extricating myself from her grip, I backed away a few feet to where the air was fresh and clean (or at least where I could breathe in the familiar smog that passes for fresh air in New Jersey). “What are you hanging?”
Aunt Leslie beamed, obviously proud of her find. “A horseshoe.”
“A what?”
“A horseshoe. It’s supposed to ward off bad luck.”
Kinda late for that, I thought. “You know I don’t believe in that kind of stuff, right?”
Her smile turned upside down into a pathetic, pouting, frown. Her lower lip trembled ominously.
“But hey, it can’t hurt!” I wanted to avoid one of Aunt Leslie’s emotional outbreaks like a lingerie model wants to avoid cellulite. “I’ll take all the help I can get. Thanks, Aunt Leslie!”
She smiled and I breathed a sigh of relief (albeit a shallow one, since I was still trying to avoid the noxious fumes emanating from her person). A mini-meltdown had been avoided.
“So was that all you wanted? To hang the horseshoe?”
“That, and to check on you. You’ve been so strong through all of this. I just wanted to see how you’re holding up.”
I briefly considered revealing how I’d snapped and attacked a man with a chair.
“And . . . ,” she said, a little too brightly. “I wanted to see if you’d like to visit your mother.”
“No.” I didn’t have to think about it. The answer was automatic.
“But . . .” Her voice cracked, a sure signal the tears would start any moment. “But I know she’d like to see you.”
“And you know I wouldn’t like to see her.”
“Susan said you’d refuse, but I thought if I could just talk to you . . .” The waterworks started on cue, just like those sprinklers that go off in the produce section of the supermarket just when you’re reaching for a head of lettuce.
I held my breath, waiting to exhale a sigh of exasperation. But there was no need to upset her more. She was just trying to be a good aunt and sister. I couldn’t fault her for that.
Closing the distance between us, I wrapped my arms around her waist. “I appreciate you coming to check on me, Aunt Leslie. And I appreciate the horseshoe. I even appreciate the invite to visit Mom, but I’m sorry, with everything else that’s happened, I can’t. I just can’t take any more. Can you understand that? Can you forgive me?”
Hugging me back, she pressed a kiss to the top of my head. “There’s nothing to forgive, Maggie. When you’re ready, I’ll be here to go with you. Until then you take care of yourself.”
She walked away, taking her cloud of stinky perfume with her. I watched her go, feeling guilty for upsetting her. I knew she meant well. I knew she loved me. I knew she didn’t mean to meddle.
“Oh,” she yelled as she reached her car. “I forgot to tell you that Susan says that when you decide that Katie is too much responsibility for you, just let her know.”
My good will toward her evaporated instantly. Meddling fools!
I was muttering as I unlocked the door and walked inside my apartment. “She makes it sound like this was all my idea. I mean it’s not like I ever had any desire to have a kid. I’m a realist. I know I’d suck at it.”
“Suck at what?” God asked in that self-important tone of his.
I was so upset about Aunt Leslie’s visit that I’d totally forgotten I’d left him and his terrarium in the middle of my kitchen table.
His voice was so unexpected that I jumped back, knocking a framed family portrait photograph off the wall. It crashed to the floor, the glass shattering.
“Dammit! Look what you made me do.”
“What do you suck at?”
“Raising a kid. I know I’d end up screwing up a kid just the way my . . . just the way I was screwed up. Why would I want to do that? Why would I want another living soul to inherit that kind of legacy? The world really doesn’t need one more fuck-up.”
Picking up the frame, taking care not to look at the photograph, I leaned it up against the wall.
“That’s why I balked when Theresa asked me to be godmother to her unborn child. Katie hadn’t been born yet, and Theresa was already asking me to make a commitment to be responsible for the kid if something should happen to her and Dirk. I turned Theresa down the first two times she asked me. I caved the third time, when she pulled out the big guilt guns, If you don’t agree to take her, she’ll end up with the coven.”
“That’s an excellent impression of her.” The lizard sounded impressed in a bored kind of way. “Spot on.”
“And of course nothing could get me to quit shirking my responsibilities quicker than the impending threat of the coven, also known as the three witches, also known as my
three aunts. Not that Susan, Leslie, and Loretta are bad witches, or women, or aunts. I actually think they mean well most of the time, but sometimes their meddling feels downright evil.”
“And what horribly, evil thing have they done to you, that you’ve labeled them witches?” God managed to make every single syllable drip with disparagement.
“I didn’t label them. My father called them the three bitches. My mother changed bitch to witch every time. As a kid Theresa thought that meant they were the three witches. The name stuck.”
“And you never outgrew the childish name-calling.”
Ignoring his chastisement I rummaged in the kitchen pantry for my dust pan and brush to clean up the broken glass in the foyer. “If I’m totally honest, I’ve gotta say that there have been plenty of times I’ve wondered whether the nuthouse locked up the right Ginty sister. I mean, sure my mother is delusional, but I don’t think she’s any crazier than her loony sisters.”
“You do realize you’re telling all this to a lizard, don’t you?”
I sighed. “I was trying not to dwell on that particular fact.”
“You’re not very sensitive.”
“About what?”
“Mental illness. You toss around nuthouse and loony like they’re beads at Mardi Gras.”
“Are you trying to tell me that you’ve been to Mardi Gras?”
“I’m trying to tell you that the stigma of mental illness runs rampant, and you shouldn’t be so callous as to perpetuate the stereotypes.”
“I’m being lectured by an amphibian.”
“Reptile.”
“Whatever.”
“And I’m not telling you anything you don’t already know. You should be ashamed of yourself.”
I glared at God. It’s really difficult to stare down a lizard. They don’t have eyelids, so you know they’re not going to blink first.
He just stared at me with that infuriating implacability of his. “You’re angry, Maggie?”
“It’s a double standard.”
“What is?”
