by Cara McKenna
“Enjoy your life,” he said, not looking back. “I was an idiot to hope I’d ever have a place in it.”
She didn’t reply. And as he shut the door quietly behind him, all he could think was So much for that.
Duncan loaded Astrid into the passenger seat foot well and aimed the car at the mountains. To the south was the motel, where he’d be stuck until the feds gave him the green light to go. But in a few days, he hoped, he’d be free to turn north, toward the highway that would get him back to San Diego. He’d text Vince later, tell him, Keep the bike. It had only ever been a loan, anyhow. With that settled, his business with the lot of them would be done, officially.
But he hadn’t gotten two blocks, not even to Railroad Avenue, when the Merc gave a sudden jerk as the dash lit up, telling Duncan the front right tire’s pressure was low.
“Really? Fucking really?”
Astrid hissed in time with the deflating tire, the right side of the car dipping morosely.
Duncan exited, slamming the door. Apropos of his entire time here, he found a broken beer bottle had ripped up his tire—no doubt jettisoned by someone stumbling home from Benji’s.
It could have only been more poetic if he’d come to rest on the tracks, been made to watch as a freight train did his car in for good, dragged it screaming into the badlands until it burst into flames, all his worldly possessions vaporized.
He called a garage, arranged a tow, and waited twenty minutes until a stocky man disappeared down the road, hauling the erstwhile physical manifestation of Duncan’s ego off to get fixed. He’d gathered his luggage and Astrid’s carrier but left his suit bags in the car, along with his shoes. His old costume. He imagined them getting stolen in the middle of the night—of the entire car getting stolen—and he felt nothing.
As he walked back to the Gold Nugget, he realized his feet didn’t hurt anymore. He’d broken the boots in . . . or perhaps the other way around. And he couldn’t for the life of him decide what to make of that.
Chapter 28
Raina sat on the guest room bed, for an hour or more, turning a key over and over in her fingers. It was Duncan’s apartment key, left behind on the covers.
“Don’t bother billing me for your therapy,” she muttered, then shut her eyes and flopped over backward. Last thing she says to him, and it’s a potshot. “Good one, Harper, you fucking asshole.”
She tried to guess what her dad would’ve said, if he’d seen that exchange.
If that’s how you react when a man gives you diamonds, I’d hate to see what happens to the one who insults you.
She rolled her eyes.
Outside, the protracted crunching of tires on gravel told her Abilene had arrived to help open the bar. Raina peeled her pathetic ass off the bed and found her boots. She didn’t let herself look at the bottle and flutes still sitting on the kitchen table, though avoiding the scene only drew her eyes to the now empty spot where Astrid’s bowls ought to be.
“Goddamn it.”
For better or worse, it was another hectic day downstairs. The natives were getting restless, waiting for news updates that simply refused to arrive. Whatever the feds had gleaned, they’d managed to keep it to themselves for the time being. Nobody craved an update more than Raina today. Without one, she had no distraction strong enough to keep replays of the morning’s drama from cycling through her brain.
She’d fucked that up. Maybe not outrageously, but at least moderately. She had no doubt in her mind that Duncan had meant well. But you just didn’t descend on a woman with diamonds and I-love-yous and huge sums of money after one week of sex, no matter how insane said sex had been. He’d come at her too hard, and she’d pushed him back, probably too hard as well. Too hard to expect him to show at the bar tonight, too, which left her with only one question: go after him tonight, or give them both a day to calm down?
He tried to make my dreams come true, she thought. He’d gotten her dreams wrong, but it wasn’t as if he’d done something psycho. Considering that she’d kicked off their courtship by extorting him, those weren’t such terrible crimes.
And worse even than the regret, she missed him. After a few short hours, she missed that man. He ought to be sitting across from her now, V and T in his manicured hand . . . His previously manicured hand. Harder and rougher now, thanks to Fortuity.
So she’d go tonight after last call, find him at the motel. She’d own her part in the ugliness and apologize. A week or so ago, she hadn’t been the sort of woman who issued apologies . . . but Duncan deserved one. And she was woman enough to tender it. If he accepted, and they seemed good again, maybe some make-up sex—the second-hottest kind there was, trumped only by angry sex—and that would shift what was undeniably right about them back to center stage. Future-talk could wait.
“You all right?” Abilene asked, returning with empty pitchers.
“Yeah, I’m fine. Thanks.” Just fine, just fucking shit up left and right. “It’s been a long week.”
“No kidding. Least the tips have been great.”
Raina smiled. “At least there’s that.” And she settled in for the longest night of her life.
* * *
Duncan had been lying in his dark motel room for he couldn’t guess how long. He’d been too beat, too defeated to even succumb to any of his typical urges. Fuck the state of the bathroom. Fuck unpacking. Fuck order. Fuck bothering or caring or trying. All he wanted was to fall asleep and stay unconscious for a week, wake up in San Diego to discover the past couple of months had been some sick dream brought on by bleach-fume poisoning.
No such luck. He lay atop the covers still dressed, flat on his back with Astrid warming his middle, until insomnia was a foregone conclusion.
Time passed, divorced from any frame of reference. Ten minutes? An hour, six hours? With the drapes drawn, it could have been morning, and Duncan wouldn’t have known . . . Except no, it was quiet, still. The kind of quiet that never came over a city. An endangered quiet that Fortuity might not know two years from now, if and when the casino finally arrived.
Whatever. It won’t be my fault if it does. And for now, quiet.
Quiet—save for the faint scuff of approaching footsteps.
Duncan froze where he lay, heart beating fast; hope rousing, if not rising.
Closer, came the steps. Slower. Hesitant.
She’s come for me. To apologize, or to salt the wound further? He couldn’t care. Kind or callous, he wanted her words, her voice. Wanted her hands, should they draw him close or brand his face with another slap. He wanted her, no matter the nature of this visit. Wanted precisely what was happening—those footsteps growing sharper, louder, nearer, bringing her to him, the reason inconsequential.
He held his breath, heart beating loud enough to rival the footfalls.
And he realized too late, no engine had preceded those steps.
The crash of breaking glass snapped him upright; he tossed Astrid to the floor between the bed and wall. The heavy curtain kept the shards from flying, but something blunt was smashing in the window, shoving the folds aside. The butt end of a baseball bat. It was gone before Duncan could edge near enough to grasp it or get a look at its owner, silhouetted by the parking lot lights.
He lunged for his phone, but something blunt and brutal struck his calf—blunt, and blazing. Fire licked at his foot and the bedspread, a rag-wrapped brick painting the room yellow and stinking of gasoline. He rushed for the nearest water—Astrid’s bowl—and dampened the blaze. With a dash to the bathroom to refill, he doused the fire for good, snuffed a couple of flames guttering on the rug with his bare foot. He grabbed his phone and bolted for the door, jerked it open so hard he was struck in the chin by the chain bolt’s catch as it ripped free of the jamb. He barely felt it. What he did feel, however, was the push of Astrid brushing past his calf and running off into the night.
“Fuck.”
Chase the cat or the criminal? Had to be the latter. He took off, barefoot, in the direction past where the baseball bat had been dropped. He felt no pebbles, no glass he might have trod in, not the burn he’d just incurred; nothing but rage and hate and violence screaming to be let out. If his fellow motel guests were awake and emerging, he didn’t register it. He reached the end of the long building, and voices drew his attention to the side. Two bodies, tangled as one on the asphalt beside a parked camper. A man in a ski mask and gloves, on his hands and knees, and on top of him—
“Raina.”
She had her knee jammed into the small of the man’s back, and a gleaming black object pinned to his neck—the barrel of a gun.
“Don’t move. Don’t you give me a fucking reason to shoot you.”
The man did move, but not voluntarily. He was shaking—trembling. Weeping, chanting something again and again, quavering words Duncan couldn’t pick out.
The man was in hysterics, clutching the back of his head, wailing. Raina straddled his back and used her free hand to yank the mask from his head.
Duncan stared at the man. He’d almost expected to recognize him, but he’d never seen this face in his life. And he realized what the man was saying, then. “No me lástimes—por favor, no me lástimes.”
Don’t hurt me—please, don’t hurt me, over and over and over. Confusion descended. Duncan looked to Raina. “This is no angry local.”
The man was small, and looked fairly young—twenty-five, perhaps—but he was dressed like a laborer, not a street thug.
Raina looked thrown; she sat up straighter, the weapon dropping to her side.
Duncan got to his knees and in a slow, clear voice demanded, “Habla inglés?”
If the man did, he was too busy sobbing his fearful mantra to make it known.
“He can write in English,” Raina said, “if he’s the same brick-thrower who vandalized your car and my building . . . Though I wondered once if the notes had looked so stiff because someone wanted to disguise their writing. But maybe they were stiff because someone had been copying them in a language they didn’t know.”
Duncan nodded. He had never taken Spanish, but having lived in San Diego for over a decade, he could cobble together enough to be understood. “Who are you?” he demanded.
More sobs answered him.
“Who told you to do this?”
An answer came back, one Duncan translated to “Can’t say. Can’t say.”
“Did they pay you, or . . .” He didn’t know the word for “threatened,” but it didn’t matter—the man began chanting a lament, something about family.
“They hurt . . . ,” Duncan relayed to Raina. “They said they’d hurt my family.”
“Goddamn.”
“Who?” Duncan asked in Spanish. “Who was going to hurt your family?”
The reply was complex, but Duncan gleaned something to the effect of “They’ll send everyone home.” He told this to Raina.
“Send everyone home? Does he mean the construction workers?”
“Do you work for Virgin River?” Duncan demanded. Nothing intelligible came back. “We’d better call—”
Sirens cut Duncan off then, telling him another motel guest had beaten him to it. He stood as the first beige cruiser arrived. It skidded to a halt with a screech of brakes, and it was Deputy Ritchey, the female officer who’d helped Flores search Duncan’s motel room. She jogged over, Taser drawn.
“That man threw a flaming brick through my window,” Duncan told her, then pointed to Raina. “She caught him.”
“Stay where you are,” Ritchey warned the man as Raina slowly got to her feet and backed away.
“I think he’s been coerced,” Duncan told the deputy, but she was preoccupied with cuffing him and speaking far stronger Spanish than Duncan did.
“Call Flores,” Duncan said. He would himself, but his phone was trapped in his room-turned-crime scene, beyond a minefield of broken glass. “This man was sent to intimidate me.” Intimidate, or perhaps hurt, or even kill?
Ritchey told her radio, “I need Flores at the motel,” then got back to whatever protocol she was going through with Duncan’s terrified assailant.
Raina came to stand by Duncan’s side as more officers arrived, crowding them away as the man was led to a patrol car. He called behind him, “Perdóneme,” over and over, the message meant for Duncan. Forgive me, forgive me. It gave him chills. He nearly wanted to call out in kind, shamed to have ever been a part of the project that had brought so much violence and death to this once-sleepy town.
“I can’t decide whether this is better or worse than angry locals,” Raina said, watching the scene.
“It’s worse.” Both motivations—ignorant anger and cold calculation—were unsettling, but there was something sharply disturbing about the impersonal nature of the truth. Something cowardly to boot, to realize the person sent to scare him had been frightened as well. They were both victims, both disposable in the eyes of the people playing this game. That man had been their pawn, and Duncan their target, obstacles in the way of, what? Progress?
No, money. Always money, when you dug deep enough. The rotten root from which all progress sprang.
“I guess I can stop suspecting my customers, at least,” Raina said.
“Yes. That’s something.”
A silver SUV arrived, and a moment later Flores was marching over, eyes narrowed at the cuffed man now sitting in the back of the cruiser. The door was open and a flashlight-wielding officer was talking to him. As he drew closer, Flores looked startled. “The fuck?”
“He threw a brick through my window,” Duncan said.
“And it’s not the first time,” Raina added. “I have photos.”
“He doesn’t speak English,” Duncan said, “but he’s terrified. I think he’s been coerced. Same as my so-called witness.”
“That is your witness,” Flores muttered, brushing gruffly past him.
Duncan spun around. “What?”
“You two stay put,” Flores barked over his shoulder.
“Jesus,” Raina said.
Duncan nodded. “Well put. I suspect we’ve a long night ahead of us. And my room’s a crime scene, so I doubt I’ll be sleeping soon . . . Astrid ran off as well.”
“Shit.”
“There’s no way they’ll let me go after her now . . . I can only hope she’s holed up somewhere safe and stays put.”
An officer came by and took statements, photographed Duncan’s various injuries, then asked them to wait. Duncan could feel his feet now—cut up and dirty, tender where he’d stomped out those flames. He shifted from one foot to the other, and wished he had a sweater.
Raina’s hands were in her jacket pockets, and Duncan eyed her. “Why on earth did you come armed?” he asked. “You weren’t camped out here on security detail, were you?”
“Armed? Oh no.” She pulled a hand from her pocket, revealing not a pistol, but Duncan’s cologne, of all things. He’d mistaken its round black cap in the shadows.
“I was just bluffing.” She handed him the bottle. “And I wasn’t on watch duty—I came to see you. You left that in my bathroom.”
He cracked a weak smile, turning the bottle over in his hands.
“For five hundred bucks,” she said, “it better goddamn double for a weapon, huh?”
“True. Who needs Samuel Colt when you’ve got Tom Ford . . . ?” He set the bottle on the concrete walkway and took a seat beside it. “Why did you come, exactly? Had you failed to tell me off in all the ways you’d meant to?”
She winced. “You know, you weren’t much nicer during that fight.”
“No, perhaps not.”
She spoke to his hands. “But I came to apologize. To tell you that I was too harsh.” She met his gaze. “And I realized I missed you. I didn’t want you leaving
for good, without hearing me admit that.”
“Oh.”
“It just hurt, because before that bracelet move, I really thought you got me, you know? I know that wasn’t you trying to buy me or dress me up, not really. But in the moment I just . . . I dunno. And then what you said, about the bar . . . I’d just given myself permission to let it go. I couldn’t handle somebody telling me their plans to keep me chained to it. As generous as your idea was.”
He nodded. “I could see how that might be a touch overwhelming.”
She gathered her hair in both hands, twisting it into a knot. “I’ve been with too many guys who had plans about how they wanted to change me—whether that meant convincing me I was the marrying kind, or talking me into stripping on a fucking webcam. I’ve been told too many times that I swear too much, that I dress too cheap, hang out with the wrong people, that I’ve fucked too many guys to be taken seriously as ‘girlfriend material.’ Like I’d even asked, you know? Like I could even give a shit.”
“I made you feel that way? Like I wanted to change you?”
“I dunno . . . Maybe a little, when you gave me that gift. That’s why I flipped out on you. I’d really, really thought you liked me exactly the way I was.”
“And I did. I do.”
“Yeah, I know you do. You just wanted to give me a fucking bracelet.” She smiled at him, looking sheepish and weary. “Like I said, I’m sorry. I don’t usually let anybody get close enough to stand a chance at hurting my feelings. It stings way worse when you’re out of practice at it.”
“You hurt my feelings as well. The night of the photo shoot, when you snubbed me.”
She blinked. “Snubbed you?”
“I must have stood there like an idiot for five minutes or more, waiting for you to introduce me to people. Acknowledge me.”
“When did— Oh. Who was I talking to?”
“Tall woman, thin. Colorful.”
“That’s my friend Angie. Her husband just started radiation—lung cancer, same as my dad. It wasn’t the kind of conversation you just hit Pause on, I guess.”
