by Ace Gray
“Look Merce, Diego feels something for you. Sometimes his delivery blows, but he cares so, damn, much. If I were you, I’d get over the garbage Dantè fed you and see what’s in front of you. Grow up, Mercy. We all had to when he fucked us. You should too.”
Her tears streamed down her face in unending but silent waterfalls. She tried to raise her chin and look me in the face but the weight of my words kept her down. Diego leaned in and wiped them away with the heel of his hand. She flinched but her eyes stayed forward, locked on my chest. And thank fucking God because Diego lifted his hand to lick them off. I shot him a look that I prayed said, I hope you choke, you fucking creep. He froze with the tip of his tongue against his palm.
“Go to dinner with Diego, Mercy,” I urged and Diego’s hand dropped, his eyes lighting up with my words. “And let him rot. Forget he’s anything but rancid human flesh.” I stepped back and shot her a sad smile I hoped she bought.
“I’ll make you forget him, I swear,” Diego added as he shepherded Mercy from the spot she’d been rooted and toward the living room. Toward the front door.
She was numb, each of her lackluster movements spoke to just how frigid my words had been on her heart. I should have felt guilt—or remorse—but I didn’t. Not if Dantè might really go free. Not if she had something to do with it.
I honestly didn’t even feel bad that I’d knowingly thrown her to the wolves.
“How was dinner?” I asked as I tipped my beer back.
“Danger?” Diego asked. “Why the fuck are you sitting in the dark by yourself?” He flipped on the light then shot me a look. He looked more together than he had in a long time.
“How was dinner?” I just repeated myself.
“She was quiet.” He looked away, probably back at the last few hours. “But she went, so I’m going to take that as a win.”
A win? What a fuck-head. The only person she hated more than him right now was me, because of what I’d said to her. Or maybe herself because she believed it. Or because she went on the damn date in the first place.
“Did she talk about Dantè?”
“Fuck him,” Diego spat as he grabbed a beer then sat next to me.
“Sure.” I shrugged. “But that’s not what I asked. Did she talk about Dantè?”
“No.” He stomped his foot as he answered.
“What are you guys fucking on about?” Rousse stumbled out of his room, shirtless as he scratched the back of his head.
“Grab your flip flops, we’re going out.” I jerked my chin as I stood and started toward the back door.
“This better be good. So fucking good, it shames the perfect swell.” Diego looked down the hall toward Mercy’s room. She’d gone in and shut the door almost the second they got back.
My eyes narrowed and the muscles in my jaw clenched and unclenched as I took step after step into the forest behind the house.
“Wait up, guys,” Rousse hissed from behind us. “What’s going on?”
I hurdled the last downed tree trunk into the small clearing where we’d framed Dantè years ago.
“Dantè’s case has been reopened.” My quietly furious voice, a mix of fire and ice, ghosted on the faint sea breeze.
“What the fuck did you just say?” Diego spat his words out as we crunched the pine needles to the edge of the cliff where we knew Mercy wouldn’t come looking. “It wasn’t what I thought it was, right?”
“So this advocacy lawyer calls. She’s looking for Mercy, wants to tell her that she’s taking on Dantè’s case.”
“What? What does that even mean?” Rousse asked.
“It means that they’re going to try and prove he’s innocent. They’re going to try and catch the real killers.” I shot a glance at both of them. “And I’m willing to bet they’re going to do it because Mercy begged them to.” I jerked my thumb toward the house.
“You’re a liar. She would never!” Diego’s emotions bubbled up and over with enough ferocity that I stood and shoved him against a tree trunk. If there was a sliver of moonlight, he would see the threat inherent in my look. I pinned him with my forearm against his throat to make the light unnecessary.
“Are you really that far gone?” I asked through gritted teeth.
“She will love me,” he spat as his face turned a dark red from the way I choked him.
“You’re fucking delusional.”
“Hey now.” Rousse shoved between us. “Knock this shit off. If what you said is true, we can’t fucking fight with each other.” He rolled his ankle and stumbled back to the log behind him, but I let him dissipate the argument anyway.
“Fine.” I gave Diego a shove before I walked away and sat down across the fire pit from Rousse.
“He just needs to realize—” Diego started.
“No,” Rousse interrupted. “Leave that shit at the house. Out here, we have to have each other’s backs.”
“Just because they’re taking on the case, doesn’t mean we have to worry,” Diego mumbled as he sat down, making the third point of our unholy triangle.
“I made a few calls and found out they took the case three weeks ago, dumbass,” I grumbled.
“And…” Rousse asked with his voice as much as his eyebrows.
“And I think the bitch might be onto something.”
Two Months Later…
“I did it,” Max shrieked as she threw her arms around me. “I really think I did it, Dantè.”
I eyed the guard watching us over her shoulder. Simple contact was allowed, and Max had been coming twice a week for almost two months, so this wasn’t suspicious, but the way she pressed her body to me wasn’t quite as…simple.
She smelled like apple pie and was wearing a Batman t-shirt that hinted at her curves. And those glasses… Those glasses that inspired all sorts of naughty librarian visions when I was in the prison library.
I mean, I couldn’t fantasize about her anymore.
“Mercy may have saved your life,” Max said as she stepped back and eyed me over those glasses, wearing her mischievous smirk. My heart splintered and the jagged edges jabbed at my chest. I usually got swept up by Max and these moments colored with hope, but the mention of Mercy had me stepping back and trying to catch my breath. Trying to ease the pain. Max recoiled at my hurt, and her eyes went wide and sad. She knew what she’d done, just remembered too late. That name…That wicked, sharp, and scarring name.
“Sorry, I know I shouldn’t have said her…Sorry.” She held her hands up in surrender. She knew how hard talking about her was, how the words became lead in my mouth and I couldn’t get them out.
“It’s okay.” I tried to swallow that acidic burn that lodged in my throat all the same.
“But I mean it.” She reached for my hand and squeezed it. “Going out for ibuprofen probably saved your life.”
“Really?”
She settled into her usual seat at the table, and I took a moment to catch myself from reeling. When I slumped into the chair opposite her at our usual table, Max pulled out her trusty legal pad and file.
“It took me a little while to figure out which convenience store and then to get them to let me review their security tapes. It was almost another month before I could track down the guy who was working that night and convince him to talk to me, but…” she faked a drumroll with her tongue, “You’re not guilty.”
Not. Guilty.
I couldn’t process those two words. They echoed in my head like foreign words in an empty cave, and I kept grasping at the sound only to remember I couldn’t hold it. I sat staring at Max, dumbfounded.
“Dantè?” She waved her hand in front of my face. “Did you hear me?”
“What do you mean?” I managed even though the words felt gummy in my mouth.
“I have proof that you didn’t kill him. You were at that convenience store at the time of death.”
“But…” The details of that night lived inside me whether I chose to keep them or not. The murder of Leo Villeres felt at my hand
s whether it was or not. I’d imagined myself doing what they said. Over and over. I had become wicked and vengeful to survive, and I’d be lying if I said it didn’t strike a chord deep inside who I’d become. I felt like Max was stealing from me when she said I was innocent. Stealing the only thing that had strummed inside me for months now.
“But how?” The words were hollow. Like me.
“What do you mean?” She reached out and grabbed my hand. “We always knew you didn’t do it. We just had to prove it.”
“You knew I didn’t do it.” I sighed and slid my hand out from under hers to rub my face. “But I’d started to believe I had.”
“I wouldn’t have been here, not even for a day, if that was the case.”
“I know.” I swallowed. “But it was so much easier to believe you were just here until it all got fucked.” A hard edge lingered in my voice. “And that I’d let you down too.”
“Hey,” she said softly. “You don’t have to live under this shadow anymore.”
I’d been a boy of summer, obsessed with sun and surf and sand, but now I was afraid of being burned. The only thing more terrifying than tasting the salt-air and feeling the sea breeze again was letting myself believe I might, then not. Who would I be out there anymore anyway? I was rough cut. And mostly okay with that.
“But out there…” I didn’t know how to shape my sentence. “I mean, what do I do if I don’t do this.”
Prison hadn’t been easy to adjust to in the least. But I’d manned up, I’d molded myself in Priest’s image. I forgot the boy that I’d been and put the things that reminded me of the good and golden in this world behind me.
“You’re not Brooks.” Max broke through my embattled thoughts.
“What?”
“Brooks from Shawshank,” she said as if it was as obvious as sky color. “You’re not him.”
Max was a touchpoint to the good outside these walls, and she’d inserted herself in my life despite the grime. She was one of the reasons for me not to surrender to the monster… not fully anyhow. She brought a lightness with her. And whether it was the comparison to the old man in the movie or her earnestness when she spoke of him, I burst out laughing. Loud and brash and real.
“I’m a lot better looking than him,” I managed, picturing his furry eyebrows and deep wrinkles.
Max blushed.
A barely formed thought appeared in the darkest recesses of my mind. One that craved the sun to light it up but was just as scared and shriveled in the shadows as I was. All too quickly, I had to shove the thought down. I couldn’t think about seeing her again. I couldn’t think about the possibility of the future…
Stop!
My life could only be mine again when I was sure. Not a minute before. No Danger, Diego, or Rousse. Certainly not…
I went back to furry eyebrows, a weathered and wrinkled face. To Brooks and Shawshank and listening to Morgan Freeman’s voice. To Max’s adorable blush and the way her glasses slid down her nose beneath her shaggy bangs and above her porn star lips.
“I’m not worried about it being foreign. Or being scared.” I sucked in a deep breath. “I’m worried I’ve become something terrifying.”
She arched her eyebrow, and that little smirk of hers tugged at her cheek.
“Okay, okay.” I chuckled. “What if it’s not real?”
“Dantè.” She sighed and reached to gather my hands up in her tiny ones. “Get your hopes up, baby. This. Is. Real.”
“You’ve been pacing over here for an hour and I’ve let you get away with it.” Priest stepped in front of my frantic circles, arms across his chest with little else as a hello.
I stopped and squinted at him in the dying sunlight.
Once, twice, I tried to speak but the words caught in my throat. And not because it was dry, but because the shape of the words was too weird. Wrong. If I said them out loud, I was admitting all the maybes that were potential razors to my insides.
“Boy.” Priest was sharp.
“She said I’m not guilty,” I spat as I wheeled on him, frustration pouring off me in waves.
For the first time in my 839 days in prison, Priest was speechless. His hands dropped to his side, and his mouth went slack. He looked younger somehow, relieved too.
“I knew it.” He stepped up and clapped a big, thick, and brawny hug around my shoulders. “I can’t believe they found out who framed you.”
“No, no, no.” I pushed away from him. “She found an alibi. No one framed me.”
Priest stepped back and his stance widened. His arms found their perch on his chest. “Do me a favor and when you get out, don’t be so fucking naive.”
“Why are you so goddamned sure I was framed?” The challenge inside me heated.
“Because it’s what I would do.”
“What?”
“You look for the easiest mark,” he said as he turned to sit on the lone metal picnic bench, the one with the chain-link marred view of the desert beyond us. “The wide-eyed kid that trusts people will always trust you. Even if you’re the devil incarnate. I suppose it’s why I gravitated toward you.” The whole world vibrated and froze at the same time, like we were at the peak of a roller coaster about ready to plunge. The moment Priest sucked in a deep breath, we started the plummet; he had the air of a storyteller. “I mean, I picked a kid just like you.”
I slid onto the metal bench beside him, my elbows on the table top as I settled in to listen. I looked up into his weathered face and saw the lines thicken, his eyes darken. This was the first hint of his story.
“I’m in for murder, too. Unlike you, I’m guilty as sin.” His smile crooked up. “Eight counts, matter of fact.”
I swallowed. This man—my friend—was a stone cold killer and I didn’t mind. I’d become comfortable with the amount of evil I was pushed up against. I didn’t even know if I thought it was evil anymore. I’d heard the stories so many times. He deserved it. She left me, and with nothing. He was her tennis instructor. We were poor. There was always a reason. And I found myself justifying it all in the end too; I probably would have done the same.
“We robbed banks. A whole crew of us.” He used his hands to tell the story more than I would have thought. “There was a kid. Smart. Talented. Just had a knack for getting in, and, even better, getting out.”
Priest wove a web of crime. Small bank jobs, bigger ones. Hiding cash. Hiding everything. It was a story straight out of the movies. Especially when he and the kid went solo, Nixon masks in place, and started in on armored cars. The longer it went on, the more I got the sense that The Town had been written about Priest.
“Where did it all go wrong?” I asked when Priest stopped to take a drag on the cigarette he’d been hiding behind his ear, tucked in with his shiny black hair.
“It didn’t. Not in the way you’re thinking anyway. I was king of my neighborhood. My secrets were my own, my life too. The kid was happy hovering beneath me. Life was good.”
“But?” I asked.
“But I blinked, and suddenly the kid wasn’t a kid anymore. He was in love. Tryna open a bar with some new buddies. He was getting out and staying out.” He shrugged as if none of it really mattered.
“And you couldn’t allow it,” I said matter-of-factly.
“No, I let him go his way. I even thought I was happy for him.”
“But?”
“Here’s the thing no one tells you. Good doesn’t last. After a while, good becomes the status quo. The expectation. Then it’s not really good anymore. It just is. And you’re bored with what is. That’s when greed reminds you who you are and what you can do.”
A knot curled inside me, pulling my insides into my chest, and fucking with them. Murder was coming, and the way Priest told the story, I didn’t mind. The reason would come soon enough, the justification. I found myself wondering when the slow incline would drop out from under me again.
“Hitting a bank took time. Planning. A crew. The payoff was always good but unpredict
able. But the kid? He was predictable.
“He bowled on Tuesday and watched the game on Sunday. His girl slept over every Friday and Saturday. Half his stash was under his mattress. I watched him for a month just to make sure. Recon habits die hard.”
The sun was still setting behind him, sending brilliant hues in ripples along the cloud banks. The longer we sat, climbing the roller coaster with a tick, tick, tick, the darker the fire in the sky became. The deep and bloody crimson was the universe’s radiant foreshadowing.
“He was supposed to be bowling in his league. When he wasn’t, I had to improvise.”
“You said eight counts?” My voice turned up. My stomach somehow knew I was still in for the drop.
“He was proposing. Didn’t even tell me.”
I was plummeting, the acid rising in my throat as I rode this story out.
“He came at me but when I leveled him with a single punch and started spilling secrets in front of his family to be, he offered me the cash under his mattress. I should have taken it but suddenly, seeing the family, seeing the girl, it wasn’t just about the money.
“They had it all. I’d given it to them. And look at how they’d repaid me…” The world flashed behind him then started its deep fade to black. “Greed wasn’t the only thing that rushed through my veins.”
“Inside. Now!” The guards started corralling us back inside. Priest went without protest, his story unfinished.
Sitting in the mess hall, I chewed on his words as I forked the slop in front of us. Later, as I read before bed, sidetracked here and there by the vision of a kid and his girl slaughtered on a shag carpet in some nameless burb. Of me and Mercy on the hardwood floor of our California house. The visions kept fluxing in and out, memory mixing with story.
It wasn’t until the lights went out and steel and concrete separated us, did Priest finish his story. The shiver down my spine told me why.