This man was browsing the t-shirts in a lazy, languid way. The manner in which he held his body caused a knot to form in Mel’s gut. Her heart dropped like a stone in a well.
It’s my imagination, she begged.
But she watched the man, lean and wiry, move across the shop, watched the girls with their cache of incense step aside so he could cross to an adjacent shelf.
Mel absorbed everything about him. The light denim button-up shirt, the acid-washed jeans. The tan belt and matching scuffed shoes. His curling dark hair hanging under his leather cowboy hat. A crow feather protruding from that hat. The fishhook earring in one ear and the bone choker with turquoise accents encircling his throat.
All of it was familiar, but it was the way he stood, the way he held himself that she knew best.
Her heart kicked against her ribs painfully, fear rising high in her throat.
Run! her mind screamed. Run up to your apartment, lock the door, call the police. And then what?
Then what?
“Terrence.” She meant it to be a cold acknowledgment, but her voice came out in a desperate rasp. “What are you doing here?”
His fingers froze on the Papa Legba statue, the smile already pulling into place before he turned to face her.
“Melandra,” he said, and tapped the brim of his hat. His eyes raked down her body lasciviously. “Nice place you got here.”
She drew her shawl tight around her. “Get out.”
It was hard to put the full force of her anger—and her fear—into her voice while trying to keep it low. She glanced nervously at the customers around her. Piper held a hanger in one hand while one of the men tried on a hoodie. They were turned at such an angle that Piper wouldn’t be able to see Melandra in her periphery.
“Is that any way to talk to your husband?” Terry drawled softly. His voice rasped like sandpaper. “Not that you’ve treated me like a husband for some time now.”
Fresh horror chilled her bones. The last sliver of her hope, of her wishful thinking that somehow this was all a horrible, terrible dream, slipped through her hands like sand.
“I haven’t gotten a visit in, what? Twelve, fourteen years? And you stopped sending money two years ago. Thought I’d just up and die without it, I reckon.”
She’d clung to the wish that he wouldn’t seek her out at all. After all, maybe prison really could change a man. He certainly looked changed. He was leaner now. A wolf-thin shape of his former self, but far more muscular. He’d been a scrawny terror of a boy when they’d met and had grown into a wiry man. Now it looked like the lanky man—all elbows and knees—had put on about fifty pounds of muscle.
“Did you forget about me in there? Did you forget about your own husband?” Terry licked his lips and hooked his thumbs into the waistband of his jeans. “Or did you think we were all paid up?”
“I don’t owe you shit!” she hissed. Her bangles jiggled as she jabbed her finger at him.
She caught the stare of a young woman coming around the candle display. Damn, she thought. I’m being too loud.
Or not loud enough, her thoughts countered.
“Come on,” Terry said. His smile hadn’t faltered. “We had an agreement. You write the checks. I keep my mouth shut.”
“In hell,” Melandra groaned, forcing a smile at the woman lifting a candle from the shelf.
The register dinged behind her. Mel glanced over her shoulder and saw that the men were committing to the hoodies after all, along with a fistful of lighters.
A cool hand wrapped around hers.
Reflexively, she jerked back, yanking away.
The hand only clamped down harder. Closing on the wrist until pain shot up Melandra’s arm. “Easy now.”
“Don’t touch me.” She tried again to free her wrist but he held fast.
“Now, now,” he said, pulling her close. “Don’t want to cause a scene, now do we? That’s bad for business.”
She could smell his aftershave, splashed generously along his neck and collarbone. The heady scent made her stomach turn.
Don’t panic, she told herself. You’re in control here.
“From what I can tell by this lovely establishment you’ve got here, you haven’t been paying me nearly enough for the burden of keeping your secret. But that’s all right. We’re going to make up for lost time, aren’t we?”
Mel couldn’t quite get enough air into her lungs. The room was darkening at the edges. It felt like he was leeching all her strength from her body with his grip alone.
“There we go,” he said softly into her hair. “There’s the girl I know.”
“Mel?” a voice called out. It was strong enough to pull her back from the edge of hysteria.
The hand around her wrist released her immediately. Mel stumbled back as if pushed.
Piper placed a hand on Mel’s shoulder, turning her. “Hey, are you okay?”
“I’m fine.”
Piper regarded Terry. “Can I help you with something?”
“He was leaving,” Mel said, meeting his gaze.
“Was I?”
Piper was already squaring off as if preparing to fight this man. Melandra was certain her bravery and scrappy attitude were due to the fact that she had no idea how dangerous Terrence Lamott was.
The chandelier moaned overhead, and the enormity of Robert King crossed the threshold. A second later, a cool snout was pressing itself into Melandra’s palm.
“Security is here.” To Terrence, Piper said, “See yourself out, buddy. Or he’ll help you out.”
Terrence drew himself up and took King’s measure.
A low grumble echoed through the shop. Melandra had a moment of wondering if the heat had kicked on before realizing Lady was growling.
This stopped King in his tracks, and he glanced down at the dog. “What is it?”
“Some jackoff here is being—Hey.” Piper cut off mid-speech. “Where did he go?”
Melandra scanned the aisles. She pulled back the curtain on her reading room and found it empty. Out on the street, she thought she glimpsed an oil-black crow feather sticking out of a leather cowboy hat. But she blinked and it was gone.
The cold snout pressed into her palm again. “Ma grande.”
The Belgian Malinois leaned her weight into Mel’s legs.
“What did I miss?” King asked, his face pinched with confusion.
“Some asshole was messing with her,” Piper said. “He ducked around those shelves when you came in.”
“Language,” Melandra said. She was trying not to tremble all over. “We have customers.”
She pointed at the counter, where the women were waiting to buy their incense and candles. Piper slinked away.
“You okay?” King asked. His gaze was heavy and assessing.
“I’m fine.”
“You don’t look fine,” King said, frowning at her. “Who was the guy?”
“No one.”
King arched a brow.
“Someone I used to know,” she said. “Please drop it.”
“Okay.”
“I’m just stressed.” She wasn’t sure why she felt like she had to defend herself.
King looked around the shop. “Let me take care of things down here. Take a break. Go lie down or something. Take Lady with you. She loves a good nap.”
Mel looked to the window once more, expecting to see Terrence framed in the glass, watching her like a tiger through its bars.
But the sidewalk was full of tourists, walking, laughing, gearing up for the oncoming night.
And a headache was forming behind her eyes again. “Just for a couple hours.”
To the dog she said, “Allez.”
She mounted the stairs to her apartment with only one wish in her heart—that this was the end of it. That Terrence had had his say and would leave her be now.
She knew better.
8
Lou stood in front of the ramshackle bar on the outskirts of Colcord, Oklahoma. There was only a bl
inking yellow light at the four-way stop regulating the town’s non-existent traffic. A lone building, the bar itself, was surrounded by a gravel lot on all sides. Apart from the dark and sloping landscape behind it, there was nothing else on which to fix the eye for as far as Lou could see. Only two cars sat in the lot, a black Ford pickup and an old white station wagon that had a ring of rust outlining the wheel well.
Lou unfolded the piece of worn paper from her back pocket and read it once more in the moonlight.
Ricky Walker.
Lou smiled at the period punctuating the name, as if King had made it a point to seal the man’s fate with that small mark.
Is this what you are now? a small voice asked as she folded up the paper and slipped it into her pocket. A hitman?
It wasn’t Aunt Lucy’s voice or her father’s. It was that new cold voice, an unforgiving version of her own.
She suppressed a bitter laugh. She wasn’t hunting and killing these men for King. She wasn’t fulfilling some old grudge for him. Likely King had never even met these men. He’d heard of their stories secondhand, done his research, and earmarked them for death because his beloved justice system had failed to do so. And she knew King well enough to know his conscience weighed on him far more than hers ever could. He would not have signed anyone’s name to a letter of execution unless he was certain of their crimes.
Ricky Walker, for example, had raped and murdered four boys. DNA evidence submitted at his trial proved he’d committed the crime. There were even eyewitnesses to the abductions of the last two kids. Still he’d been let go.
No. Lou wasn’t doing this for King. He was handing over these names the way a zookeeper fed meat through the bars of the tiger’s cage. He was trying to placate her, domesticate her, and she knew it.
And how do you feel about that? the cold voice asked. Do you want to be domesticated, kitty kitty?
It’s not like that, she thought crossly. After all, wasn’t King only doing what Lucy had asked of him? Lucy, her benevolent Buddhist aunt, got her way even in death.
Lou’s ease with death, with killing, had never sat well with Lucy.
Lou understood that some creatures of this world were simply predators and she was one of them. She was part of an ecosystem, an elaborate dance of checks and balances. A tiger would never feel guilty for the meat it ate. Lou felt no guilt for the lives she took.
At the very end, Lucy understood that. If killing only very bad men helped King sleep at night, and feel as though he were upholding a promise to his dead wife, then fine.
Lou could play along—within reason—though she’d learned not so long ago that bad and good were relative. A system built for justice and equity could be polluted with cutthroats. An underground network built upon rule-breaking and exploitation could offer liberation.
And who taught you that? Konstantine?
Rolling her shoulders as if to relieve them of some unseen burden, she crossed the parking lot and stepped into the bar. Some whining country music played. At first, Lou thought the place was empty. But then she saw the bartender perched on a stool, looking up at a television mounted above the bar. It played a boxing match between two fighters Lou didn’t recognize.
The man watching the television sat hunched, his paunch of a stomach hanging over his belt. His t-shirt had ridden up on his belly, revealing a hairy patch below the navel.
“Ricky Walker?” Lou asked.
The bartender didn’t even look at her. He just pointed a thumb over his shoulder. “He’s back there. Three sheets to the wind.”
Walker sat in the last booth on the right. His head was down on his arm. He snored softly. A glass full of half-melted ice sweated in his grip. His short, gnarled nails had black grime beneath them. His stubble was mostly gray.
She slid into the booth and regarded the man. The smell wafting off of him was acrid, like a mixture of piss and sweat.
He’s sick, she thought. He’s sick as hell.
She wondered if she could smell it because of her time with Lucy. Her aunt’s illness had had a stench too. It was like Lou could smell the body souring, going bad like old meat.
“Ricky Walker?”
No answer.
She kicked his leg under the table.
He harrumphed and drew himself up, fixing his bleary eyes on her. He squinted in the low light before pinching the bridge of his nose. “Hi. How you doing?”
“Are you Ricky Walker?” she asked again.
“Yeah, that’s me.” He lifted the glass mechanically and then frowned when only ice hit his lips. “Do I know you?”
“No.”
He shook the glass, rattling the ice. “Chuck!”
Chuck slid off the bar stool with a grumble and brought a bottle with him. He took Ricky’s empty glass and filled it to the rim. “Another Walker for the Walker. A drink for your lady friend?”
“No,” Lou said.
It was no matter to Chuck. With a shrug, he slinked away, taking the bottle of Johnnie Walker with him. He had eyes only for the boxing match.
“How long?” Lou asked.
“Seven inches,” Rick said, and snorted. It echoed in the glass. “But it’s what you do with it that counts.”
Lou smiled. It was a promising answer. She liked it when they were mean. “Cirrhosis?”
He drew long and deep on his drink. He sat it on the table with a humph. “Alcoholic cardiomy—cardiomy…”
“Alcoholic cardiomyopathy?” Lou offered.
“My heart’s failing. It’s swollen, or shit like that. Hey, are you from the clinic? Come out here to tell me to stop drinking again? It won’t work. I told y’all it’s all I’ve got. That and the dreams. I ain’t getting my heart rate up or whatever you said. I’m chilled, all right? Chilled as ice.”
He shook the glass at her, the ice clinking against the sides as if to emphasize his point. Whiskey sloshed over the rim onto his thumb. He brought it to his mouth and sucked it.
Lou said nothing as he tipped the glass back and drank the remainder in one go. When there was only ice left, he groaned. “Chuck!”
Chuck didn’t come. He was cursing at the television.
“It’s all I’ve got,” Ricky said again. His slurred murmuring seemed for his ears only. “And the dreams. I got the dreams too.”
That’s more than some, Lou thought. “Do you want to dance, Ricky?”
The man lowered the glass and sucked his lips. He smirked at Lou, which could have been interpreted as unabashed lust if the gaze had not been so unfocused. Lou doubted he could see her at all.
“You’re not really my type,” he said with a low laugh. “But you’ll do.”
He slid from the booth as she did and followed her to the dance floor—if that’s what the space could be called. In reality, it was the simple open area between two sections of tables, with the jukebox resting against the wall.
The fluorescent lights from its frame warped and spread like a prism across the surface of Lou’s sunglasses, and Ricky squinted. The ice tinkled in his glass as he sauntered toward her, a leer on his lips.
“Yeah, you’re mighty pretty,” he said, sucking his teeth.
“For a female?” Lou returned as Ricky slid one arm around her waist.
He stiffened.
“Or for an adult?” She clamped onto him, pinning his arm against her leather jacket, letting it rest where the top of her pants and belt met.
She didn’t need to get him into a corner. The bar was already dark enough.
* * *
A strange pressure popped between the bartender’s ears the moment before the sound of glass breaking rang out. He turned away from the match on the suspended television. Ice and glass fragments spread across the middle of the floor. It sparkled in the jukebox’s shifting lights.
“Goddamn it, Ricky,” he said, climbing off the stool and grabbing a white towel. “You’re paying for that glass.”
Chuck stooped over the mess and began to gather up the shattered pieces.
He turned to the adjacent booth, expecting to see the couple there, but it was empty.
Maybe they went to the bathroom. Or maybe they snuck out the back for a blowjob.
Just as well. Chuck was tired of the guy’s shit anyway. So what about the booze and the glass? If Walker thought he could dine and dash, he was mistaken.
The joke’s on you, Chuck thought. Ricky had left his credit card behind with his tab.
* * *
The warm reprieve of the bar was sacrificed on the altar of total night. Lou’s boots shifted, adjusting to the hard-packed earth forming beneath her. A chorus of toad song sprang up around them. Something in the tree above spread its wings and took flight. Its considerable wingspan kicked up the air around them, blowing the hair back from her face.
Ricky seemed totally unaware that the bar was gone and that he stood in unadulterated darkness.
Lou could pull her gun now, put a bullet between Walker’s eyes and be done with it. He would never know what hit him.
That would be too easy, she thought. Merciful.
No. Let Ricky Walker see the horror of La Loon with his own eyes. Let him see what waited for men like him.
“Can you swim?” Lou asked.
“Yeah, I can fucking swim.” Ricky’s hands were trying to get under her leather jacket, searching for her tits. But he was having trouble with the unyielding material. His breath misted white in her vision, fogging the mirrored sunglasses she wore even at night.
“Good,” she said, stepping backward into cold water. It sloshed over the rim of her boots, wetting her socks. No matter. How many times had she done this? Walked fully clothed into this lake, a body—sometimes living, sometimes dead—in tow?
She continued into deeper water, and like a puppy Walker followed her, planting a sloppy kiss on her throat as he moved forward. With a wave of revulsion, she fisted his hair and yanked it back.
The water had reached halfway up her thighs, inching toward her pelvis, when his fingers finally managed to get under her leather jacket.
His eyes widened the moment he found the guns in their holsters.
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