by Meg Jackson
“I did some pretty dumb shit along the way. I fought a lot of guys I didn’t want to fight, just to keep myself in the ring, to keep my connections strong. I fought for money, which I never really wanted or needed. And then, I started pushing thirty, and I felt like I was going to lose my edge, lose my chance. So I started taking steroids. That was the dumbest thing of all.”
Tricia breathed deeply, steadily, taking that in. Damon seemed like he was too smart for drugs, but it just went to show what a man will do to heal the hurt inside him. She wanted, in that moment, to curl her fingers around his; to ask him if she could heal that hurt, instead of him looking for answers where there were none. But she didn’t.
“I stopped, pretty quick,” he said. “But the damage was done. My brothers didn’t trust me. And I – I did a lot of shit while I was doping that I’m not proud of. I was jacked up when…”
He didn’t need to say it. He looked at Tricia and saw the understanding in her eyes. The silence slipped up between them again, choking and hard.
“What’s his name?” she asked, instead of speaking her mind. He slipped her a look, taking in her careful diversion.
“Curly,” he said, and a smirk on his lips made Tricia’s heart fall even further. “Isn’t that a stupid fucking name?”
“It is,” she said, offering him a wan smile in response. “It’s a really stupid name.”
And you’re doing a very stupid thing, she thought, looking out the window again. And I’m the very stupid woman who’s going along with it.
25
“Hi, Detective Warren? I’m a reporter for the Providence Sentinel, and we’re starting a series on unsolved crimes, I was hoping to ask you a few questions.”
Ricky had gotten the detective’s name from the public records available on the case, then tracked down his phone number – he was old enough to still have a landline listed in the phone book. Her skills as a reporter definitely worked in her advantage – including the ability to fib the truth just enough to get what she wanted.
“Oh,” said the voice on the other end of the phone. “Well, it’s been awhile since anyone called me Detective Warren. Mr. Warren usually does just fine now that I’m retired. Ah, I suppose…well, what exactly are you looking to ask me about?”
“There was a case about twenty years ago – a woman was assaulted and raped in a parking lot?”
“Oh,” the man said, sounding considerably less congenial. “Yes, I remember that case. Doesn’t seem worth reporting on now, though…you said you’re with the Sentinel?”
“Yes, sir,” Ricky said, tapping the point of her pen against the blank sheet of paper in front of her, all ready for scribbling. “The series is mostly about what happens when a case goes cold. The public loves things like that. And you know, there have actually been situations where people have called in with new information on very old cases…”
“Yeah, and it’s usually a bunch of hogwash,” the detective snapped. Ricky grit her teeth, hoping she hadn’t blown it already. Then he sighed, and she knew from the sound of it that he would play ball. “But I’ve got nothing else to do today. Go ahead and ask away.”
“Well, to start off, if you can remember, what sort of evidence, exactly, were you able to get from the crime scene? You know, most people think of blood stains, DNA, fingerprints…”
“Lifting fingerprints isn’t half as easy as they make it look on the TV,” he said, sounding tired. “We found the piece of wood that he used to hit her. She had splinters in her head, there was some blood on the weapon. But it was an old, dirty, splintery wet plank of wood. Blood dries, you can scrape it off. Fingerprints, they don’t work that way.”
“And there was nothing on the car, or on her?”
“I wish there was,” the detective said. “But fabric’s tough, too, and the kid was smart enough to wipe down whatever else he might have touched, like the door handle. We got some DNA, though. A few pubic hairs that didn’t match the victim. Some semen – little fuck didn’t get off, but he left a little juice in there all the same.”
Ricky cringed. Juice. Not the most scientific way of describing something like that. Or the most tactful, in her opinion.
“Didn’t get anything from under her fingernails, figure she was too knocked out by then to do much in the way of fighting back.”
“But none of the evidence ever led you to an arrest,” Ricky said, scribbling into her notebook.
“No,” he said. “This was the eighties, mind you. We didn’t have fancy computers to run tests. Hell, we barely had the funding to run the tests on the rape kit. And, you know, even now, you don’t just look at DNA evidence and get a photograph of the perp on your screen. You just get little clues and shit. Unless the guy is already in the, you know, database or whatever, you’re still flying pretty blind when it comes to finding someone to arrest.”
“Right, right,” Ricky said.
“I wouldn’t be surprised if the little punk tried it again and got himself caught, but I guess I’ll never know.”
“You keep saying ‘kid’ and ‘little punk’. What made you think it was a kid?” Ricky remembered the reports, how the police had been looking for a teenager.
“Well, that school for fuck-ups was right near there,” the old man said. “They were always causing trouble. And we did have someone come forward as a witness.”
“You did?” Ricky said, surprised now. That certainly hadn’t come up in her research.
“Yeah, but it wasn’t worth shit in the end,” he said, his voice belying an old but persistent frustration. “She was a real estate agent, had an office on that block. Working late. Providence isn’t Vegas, you know, and where it happened was in a real quiet neighborhood. Most businesses down there closed up early.
But she was working late, this lady, hadn’t closed up yet. She said she saw two kids that day. One was a boy, young enough to probably still sing soprano in the choir. Black hair. Running like hell down the street. We never found him. But we also didn’t try that hard. He was too young to be the perp, and maybe he saw something, or maybe he was just a ten-year-old boy running home to avoid a whooping, you know?”
“Uh-huh,” Ricky said, feeling her heart beat pick up slightly.
“The other one, though, we thought we knew who she was talking about. A junior at the school, someone we’d had to talk to before. A real fucking asshole. Always harassing girls on the street and in class, lurking around getting himself into shit. Meanest little punk I ever dealt with. Had a stupid name, too, Curly Gottlieb. Maybe that’s why he was such a fucked-up little shit.”
The detective’s language was getting more colorful by the sentence, and Ricky noted the intensity of his dislike for the suspect.
“Did you arrest him?” she asked, brow furrowed as she continued making notes, her pen scratching against the paper.
“On what charges? Walking down the street? No. We went and talked to him. Tried to scare him. He didn’t flinch. Said he didn’t have to answer any questions. And he didn’t. You can’t go arresting minors because they’re seen somewhere near a crime. Even if they do kind of match the very vague description given by a victim who’s suffering a concussion.
No, we would have been up to our ears in legal shit if we tried to bring him in. He came from a good family, believe it or not. And he didn’t have any priors, just a bad reputation. We kept an eye on him – I kept an eye on him – for years after that, hoping he’d get himself into some real trouble so we could get some DNA. But he kept his stupid pig-nose clean until his family moved out of town when he graduated.”
“And nothing else ever came of the case? No new suspects or…”
“Nope,” Detective Warren said. She could tell by the shortening clip of his tone that he wouldn’t be up for much more talking. It seemed to be taking a lot out of him. He confirmed this suspicion with a sigh.
“Listen, I’m sorry I can’t be more helpful. Truth is, I hated working that case. It was one of those that you wind
up carrying around the rest of your life. Always wishing things had been different. Always wishing you could have done more. You should have seen the look in that poor girl’s eyes…Jesus, that was a hard one. I’m retired now, though. I try to keep my past in my past. Got enough baggage to carry to the grave without adding anyone else’s.”
“I understand, Detective,” Ricky said. ‘Thank you so much for your time, and for, you know, dredging all this up for me. It’s been a great help.”
“Sure, sure,” he said. “Good luck on your article. Hey, give me a call when it comes out, huh? I always did like seeing my name in the ol’ black and white.”
“Will do, sir,” Ricky said before hanging up, feeling only the slightest twang of guilt over her deception. What she felt guiltier about was forcing the old man to remember something painful, for no reason.
She wasn’t sure what she truly expected to learn from the call, but she’d hoped something would come up. All she had now was the possibility – the barest possibility – that Damon had been near the scene of the crime when it happened. Which, at best, meant he might have seen it happen. That would be traumatic for anyone, let alone an eight-year-old boy. No wonder he saved the articles. If that was him running down the street. If he’d seen it.
That was a lot of if’s.
26
Tricia and Damon stopped in Jacksonville for their last night before hitting Miami. The remainder of the ride had been full of half-hearted efforts to return to the easygoing, joke-filled, happiness of their earlier days.
“What’s the difference between a hippo and a zippo?” Damon asked.
“I don’t know, what?” Tricia answered.
“One’s a little heavy, and the other’s a little lighter,” he said, adding in some air drums for effect.
Tricia’s laugh was so forced that it made her cringe after it escaped her throat. Two days ago, she might actually have found that funny.
Later, she tried her own hand at lifting the mood.
“I read that Clearwater, Florida, has the highest rate of lightning strikes per capita in the U.S. And Key West has more bars per capita than any place in the U.S.”
“That must have been why Hemingway liked it so much,” Damon said thoughtfully.
“Which? Clearwater or Key West?” she tried on a playful smile to go along with her joke, but Damon’s look withered her. “I was joking…”
“Oh,” Damon said. “Sorry.”
And so it went. All the efforts had failed. It was both of their faults, and neither of their faults. It was just the way things went.
Damon checked them in to a little, local-owned beachside hotel with a restaurant attached, where they had dinner, both picking at huge plates of corn and shrimp and potatoes. Tricia was mumbling her way through a story about a family vacation in Panama City that had gone sour when she managed to get a sunburn on her eyeball when Damon put his fork down and interrupted her, looking straight at her bowed head.
“Why is it that you think I’m doing the wrong thing?” Damon asked. She looked up quickly, wondering how long he’d meant to ask her that. “I just want to understand. Everything I’ve done, gone through…it’s all led me to this. And it feels right – a kind of wrong-right, but right nonetheless. But I can tell you don’t agree.”
Tricia blushed, chewing her food slowly to give herself time to think of a response. His green eyes demanded an answer. Her heart wanted to lie. The kind of lie you tell someone so they feel better. A white lie. But this was no white lie. Nothing about any of this was white. It was all the darkest black.
“I thought I would feel better,” she finally said, putting her fork down and giving him her attention. “I thought I would feel better, seeing my ex locked up. Seeing those assholes behind bars. The ones who hurt me, punished. I thought it would all be okay after that. But it wasn’t. The person who was hurting – the woman I was when it all happened – she didn’t go away. She was still inside me, and nothing that happened outside of me could change that.”
“You haven’t stopped hurting,” Damon said, stating the fact blandly.
“No, I haven’t,” Tricia said. “Not entirely. It’s happening slowly. And…”
Her voice trailed off as they stared at each other. Did he know what she was going to say, what she was trying to say? How could he not? Hadn’t they been speaking without speaking since the moment they met?
“You’re helping,” she finally said, reaching across the table to grab his hand, the movement feeling bold even though they’d shared so much more already – their whole bodies, their whole hearts. “You’re helping more than putting them in prison ever did. The scared girl inside me – she fades away, when I’m with you.”
He seemed to stiffen, and Tricia recoiled, wondering if she’d been wrong this whole time. Maybe they didn’t really operate on the same frequency after all. Maybe it had all been in her head. And that scared girl she’d been talking about suddenly seemed to be right beneath her skin, and fighting to break out. Take over. She willed her body not to shake. She dropped her eyes, unable to look at him and realize that everything she’d thought had been wrong.
“I know,” Damon finally said. “Tricia, look at me.”
She blinked down at her food before dragging her eyes back up to meet his. He reached across the table, grabbed her hand and turned it over, stroking her palm with his thumb. The slightest act, and yet it filled her with everything she had ever wanted to feel: comfort and warmth and an aching desire.
“I always want to be the one who makes you feel better,” he said. “I will always want to be that man. But I can’t be that man until I take care of this. Do you understand?”
She shuddered then, wilting under the intensity of his gaze. She wanted to say yes, to say what he wanted to hear. And she did understand. All too well.
But she couldn’t lie to him. Not about this.
“I understand,” she said, pulling her hand away, her heart wincing at the sudden loss of his touch. “But I don’t agree with you. You want to be the one who makes me feel better. Why can’t you try to let me do that for you? I can be enough, Damon. You can let me try to be enough.”
This time, he was the one to look away, his jaw set rigid. His hands fisted. Tricia saw, for a flashing second, the man underneath the man. The violent one, the unsettled one, the one whose soul would never be completely calm, no matter how well he hid the storm. She saw the boy.
“You won’t be,” he said, rising from the seat. She wanted to grab his hand, pull him back down, ask him to stay. They didn’t have to talk about it anymore, they could talk about something else. Anything else. Just as long as he didn’t leave like this, in anger. “I wish you could be, but you can’t. You’re everything I want, Tricia…”
His voice trailed off. He pulled a fifty from his wallet and threw it on the table. Only then did he look at her again.
“But I can’t give you everything I want to, I can’t be the man I want to be for you, until this is done.”
“It’ll never be done,” Tricia said, speaking quickly in hopes it would give him pause. “It’ll never be done until you let it be done. And going after him isn’t how you let it be done. It’s not how you let go.”
“Tell that to the woman he attacked,” Damon said, shaking his head. “Tell that to her. Tell her he doesn’t deserve to…”
His voice trailed off again, and Tricia felt cold in her stomach.
He’s not just planning to fight him, she realized. He’s planning to kill him.
“I’m going to take a walk,” he said. “I’ll see you back at the room.”
“Damon, don’t…”
But he was already gone.
For the first time, Tricia wondered how much he’d ever really been there to begin with. They'd sat next to each other, been with each other pretty much exclusively, for days now. They'd made love. But he'd never been fully there. Not while he was keeping this inside. Not while he was keeping it from her.
27
Jenner knew this was his chance. After he was ushered back to his room that night, he held the little phone in his trembling hand. Someone might hear him talking. The phone might be dead. A million things could get in the way of the one phone call he needed to make. The one that would save his skin.
He had waited too long already. He’d hoped to figure out whether or not he would be brought along on the ride to Miami, as Crow had suggested. But no one had felt it necessary to tell him one way or another, and he’d been unable to pick up any clues from overheard conversations. All he knew is that whoever was going, they were going soon. There was enough bustle and movement in the clubhouse that could only be explained by a mass migration.
He pressed the power button and the screen flashed on; he held it under the pillow to muffle any sound it might make when turning on. It buzzed a few times in his hand. He pulled it out. Being from a time before cell phones, he still had a phonebook in his memory, and now he called upon it, dialing Kennick’s number slowly, carefully.
It started ringing. He pressed the phone to his head so hard that his ear hurt.
Pick up, Kennick, he thought. Pick up, rom baro, pick up, pick up…
“Hello?” the voice came in strong and clear, and Jenner stifled his sigh of relief. He kept his voice low, whispering into the phone as he spoke.
“Don’t hang up,” Jenner said. “Don’t you dare hang up, Kennick.”
There was a long moment of silence on the other end of the line, a sharp intake a breath.
“Jenner,” Kennick said, his voice injected every curse and vile word in English or Romani into the two syllables.
“I know where Damon is,” Jenner said quickly, knowing that the sooner he gave a little bit, the sooner he’d get his in return. “And I know he’s in deep shit.”
“The fuck…” Kennick’s surprise was clear.
