Down to the Liar

by Mary Elizabeth Summer

  And then her lower lip wobbles, ever so slightly, and she immediately firms up her features. The show of resolve is what breaks me. What can I say? I’m a fixer.

  “One-week trial,” I say, shaking my head at myself. I can’t believe I’m doing this. “If it turns out you’re a spy, I will sic my enforcer on you. And yes, she bites. Give me your phone.”

  Lily hands me her phone, and I type my number into her contacts app.

  “When should I start?”

  “Right now,” I say, switching from her contacts to the Web browser and pulling up the page for New World Initiative. I hand back her phone. “You’d better be right about that caramel macchiato.”

  She turns to go, glancing at me once before walking out. I settle back into my angst. I wish she hadn’t brought up the Ukrainians. I wish I hadn’t been thinking about all of it before she even showed up. I have too hard a time stuffing it all away after it comes popping out. The weight of it all presses down harder on me here. I lost so much more than I saved that day. Tyler. Sam. My dad. Not to mention Ralph, who I still haven’t managed to track down despite all my and Murphy’s searching.

  I just want to go back to what it was like before all this started happening.

  Amen to that. I light a candle on my way out.

  • • •

  After school, Dani takes me to the firing range in Des Plaines. Dani and I have been going regularly since January, so it’s a familiar route. I spend this particular trip lost in thought.

  I usually talk Dani’s ear off during the drive, getting her criminal-underworld insight on cases, keeping her updated on the Ukrainian girls, and, in general, telling her about my day. She’s a great listener. Not so much a sharer, unless she’s giving me the smackdown for being stupid. Like last March when I was struggling with my anger over Tyler’s death and daring the world to try to take me down. She said I didn’t have to suffer to earn forgiveness. But maybe I just suffer either way….

  “You did your job. You saved me from Petrov. Your promise to my dad is done, but you’re still here. And you still think it’s your job to protect me. Just so we’re clear, I never asked you to.”

  “You are right. You did not ask. But I was not doing it for you.”

  “Dani—”

  “Enough. It is your life to risk as you want. Just as it is my life to risk in your place.”

  “What are you thinking?” she asks, breaking into my memories.

  “Work,” I say, more lie than truth. No need to rehash the many ways in which I’ve been an idiot. So I fill her in on the particulars of the NWI job instead. Well, most of the particulars.

  “And your new associate has found information on the New World Initiative?”

  “As much as can be found without joining up,” I say, thinking back to the two-page report, typed and double-spaced, that Lily had emailed me that afternoon.

  “You are considering joining a cult?” Dani doesn’t sound thrilled.

  “It’s not really a cult. Or at least, not openly. It’s a leadership organization. Businesspeople pay to attend a series of leadership workshops that supposedly help them turn their mediocre lives into satisfied, happy ones. They advance to higher levels, bringing in new members to earn rewards and greater status.”

  “It sounds like a cult.”

  “It’s more like a pyramid scheme. It promises a big reward it never intends to deliver.”

  “Which is?” Dani backs into a parking spot next to the firing range just as the horizon turns a dusky rose. I open my door and step out, stroking the hood of Dani’s Chevelle as I walk to the sidewalk. This car and I go way back.

  “That’s what worries me,” I say. “What kind of ‘reward’ would convince someone with no priors to commit something as severe as grand larceny? Antolini had to know he’d get caught.”

  Dani holds the door to the range open for me. Steve the gun-desk guy smiles at us. He’s seen us enough times now to recognize our faces.

  I fork over my fake ID and Firearm Owner’s ID without his asking. Dani, he never ID’s. Possibly her black coat and perpetual glare are ID enough for Steve. They’d be enough for me to make her as a mob enforcer. And no one who wants continual use of his fingers cards a mob enforcer.

  We pay our rental fees, grab safety gear, and head to the firing range. It’s busy, but not so busy that we have to wait for a booth. I lay the Beretta I always rent on the table so I can adjust my safety glasses before loading the gun. The glasses are too big and constantly slide down my nose. Dani never seems to have that problem. Somehow she looks just as lethal wearing plastic glasses and headphones as she does without.

  She waits as I inspect the gun and load it. She’s a stickler for proper procedure. Always point the gun downrange. Always assume the gun is loaded. No coffee on the shooting line. Blah. Too many rules. But both she and Mike insisted I learn how to shoot in case another Petrov tries to use me as a body shield—which is hardly likely given that I turn down the dangerous cases these days, but as it’s probably the only thing they agree on, I took a note.

  “There is something you are not telling me,” Dani says over the dull roar of the other shooters. She’s leaning against the wall of the booth, her arms crossed, looking relaxed. She always seems most at ease when there’s a gun in the room.

  I fire a few rounds into the distant target. It’s hard to tell from the booth, but I may have managed a reliable group. It’s down by the lower left quadrant of the target, but it’s a group.

  “Move your right foot back,” Dani says, her expression shrewd and assessing. “Lean more over your left.”

  Dani didn’t exactly volunteer to teach me. She prefers to keep me completely separate from her day job as hired muscle for whatever criminal syndicate happens to be shorthanded. Training me in the fine art of killing people is too close to that part of her life for comfort, I guess. But I insisted. Mike gave me exactly one (totally unnecessary) driving lesson during which I nearly booted him from the car for stomping on an imaginary brake pedal on the passenger-side floor every time I rounded a corner. I figured that subjecting myself to his teaching style while I was in possession of a loaded weapon was not the best way to stay out of prison.

  Besides, I like being around Dani. She doesn’t push me to be something I’m not. She doesn’t judge me, as long as I’m not acting stupid. And she doesn’t need protecting. I can just be with her. No expectations, no apologies, no guilt. She is to me what a gun is to her—I’m most at ease when she’s in the room.

  She arches an eyebrow, still waiting for me to spill my secrets. I adjust my stance and my aim. “I’ll tell you later,” I say, because hell if I’m shouting about my mom issues at the top of my lungs.

  I take a few more shots, but they end up hitting the same place on the target. Dani leans forward and fixes my grip on the gun, her movements patient but firm, her fingers warm against mine.

  “Holding it like this feels clunky,” I say.

  “It applies rearward pressure to counteract the forward pressure of your shooting hand. Try again.”

  I do as told, and this time my shots end up in the lower right quadrant of the target.

  Dani sighs, which I see more than hear, and comes over to stand behind me. She wraps her arms around me, placing her hands over mine on the gun. She still has to shout despite her mouth being right next to my ear, but that’s not as weird as the chill that zips down my spine at the thought of her mouth being that close to my ear. Earth to Julep—you’re supposed to be paying attention.

  “You are working too hard to align the sights. You won’t have time to do that in a fight anyway. Focus on the front sight. Now take a breath and let it out halfway. Squeeze the trigger slowly so the movement does not change your aim….”

  Bull’s-eye.

  She hesitates, and then steps back. The sudden absence of her body heat makes the ambient air that swirls in feel colder than before.

  As much as I prefer Dani’s company, I don’t actuall
y get her. I’m a grifter. I can usually read people like a shopping list left abandoned in a grocery cart. But Dani’s more like The Brothers Karamazov, the nineteenth-century Russian novel Mrs. Springfield bludgeoned us with last semester—all intricate imagery that’s a bitch to decipher. I’m sure it’s because my knowledge of her life is patchy at best. She won’t tell me about her present, and I get only rare glimpses of her past. She keeps too much hidden, like why she goes out of her way to help me.

  I freeze my position and fire off another three rounds. All of them end up just to the right of center.

  “Better,” she says.

  I change the clip and hand her the gun. She pulls the slide back to check the chamber. In one smooth movement, she aims and shoots the target dead center. She waits a breath and shoots another. Then another. The hole in the center of the target widens to an oval.

  “Control is everything,” she says. Her ice-blue eyes are set at serious, but then they always are. I’ve seen her laugh maybe three or four times in the eight months I’ve known her. Whatever demons she’s carrying must weigh as much as the cathedrals she has etched into her skin. And I know a thing or two about carrying demons.

  I see the moment her thoughts shift from guns to something else. I don’t know what they shift to, but her expression turns bleak. She’s about to say something when Steve bursts through the door, minus headphones and safety glasses. His gaze falls on us like he’s a smoke alarm and we’re on fire.

  “You’d better get out here,” he says.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  is the author of Trust Me, I’m Lying and its sequel, Trust Me, I’m Trouble. She contributes to the delinquency of minors by writing books about unruly teenagers with criminal leanings, and has a BA in creative writing from Wells College. Her philosophy on life is “You can never go wrong with sriracha sauce.” She lives in Portland, Oregon, with her wife, their daughter, and their evil overlor—er, cat.