I laughed. “I hear that grandparents get that way.”
“You’re lucky. You probably got a couple more years before everybody starts asking you when you’re going to pop one out.”
I made a face. “More than a couple of years, I would hope.”
“How old are you now? Twenty-one?”
“Nineteen,” I said.
“Oh, right. I always get you confused with Mallory.” Mallory was another of my cousins. “Not when I look at you, you know, ‘cause you guys don’t look alike. But just when I’m thinking about your ages.”
“It’s okay. I knew what you meant.”
“So, uh, not that I’m complaining, but what made you call me today?”
Finally. “I actually wanted to ask a favor. If I had a big brother or something, I’d ask him, but I don’t, so…”
“You know I got you, Molly. I’m all the big brother you need. What’s going on?”
“This guy,” I said. “Um, he totally used me.”
“What do you mean?” His tone was sharp.
“I mean that I didn’t know that he was only dating me because he was trying to get information about the family. Turns out he’s an O’Shaunessy.”
“That rat bastard.”
I nodded. “Exactly. Anyway, I just kind of want to get the chance to teach him a lesson. You know, I have things I want to say to him, but I can’t get him to listen to me. And I thought maybe you and a couple of the guys might be able to get him in a position where he couldn’t, say, run off before I’ve said my piece.”
Zach chuckled. “Oh, I think that could be arranged.”
“I don’t want you to hurt him or anything, you understand? Well. Maybe a little bit. But mostly I just want him… detained.”
He was still laughing. “You are devious.”
“I only want justice,” I said.
“And you should have it,” he said. “I think me and the guys would enjoy this quite a bit. An O’Shaunessy, you say?”
“Chase,” I said.
“Oh, that prick,” he said. “Don’t you worry about a thing, Molls. I’m on top of this.”
“Thank you, Zach. You are all the big brother I need.”
* * *
Chase O’Shaunessy was tied to a kitchen chair in a basement. There was a gag in his mouth, and a little wound above his eyebrow trickled blood over his face. His eyes were wide and frightened.
My cousin Zach and about six other guys stood behind him, all with their arms crossed over their chests.
“Who’s that?” Zach pointed at Levi.
“Oh, this is Levi,” I said. “He, um, has a beef with Chase, too.”
Zach raised his eyebrows. “He’s not your new boyfriend?”
I didn’t know what to say.
Levi stepped forward, stretching out his hand to Zach. “You got me. When I found out what Molly was doing, I couldn’t let her come by herself.”
Zach shook hands with Levi. “Nice to meet you.” Then he glared at me. “Can I talk to you for a second?”
“Sure,” I said.
He grabbed me by the arm and dragged me over into a corner. In a low, even voice, he said, “What the hell did you tell him?”
“What do you mean?” I said, keeping my voice low too.
“About, you know, our family.”
“Nothing,” I said. “I told him that I had a tough cousin who takes care of me, that’s all.”
“That’s all?”
I nodded. Taking Levi’s lead, I ad-libbed, “Well, he thought it was a bad idea. I mean, he doesn’t really like it when I talk about my exes at all, you know.”
Zach peered out around me to look at Levi, who was standing in front of Chase with his hands in his pockets. He looked a little nervous. Shit, I felt bad for leaving him alone.
“How long you been together?” Zach asked.
“I don’t know,” I said. “We’re not really… I mean, we didn’t really have that boyfriend-girlfriend conversation yet, if you know what I mean.”
Zach’s eyes narrowed. “He goes to your school? What year is he?”
“He’s, um, a junior or something. I don’t know.”
“You shouldn’t have brought him,” he said.
“I’m sorry. He insisted.” That was actually the truth. I’d tried to explain to Levi that it probably wasn’t a good idea for him to come along, but Levi had been adamant about coming with me.
Zach shook his head. “Whatever.”
He strode away from me. He snapped his fingers at the other guys, and they all moved away from Chase. They started up the steps. Zach brought up the rear.
“He’s all yours, Molls,” Zach called over his shoulder.
“Thanks,” I said.
Zach stopped and pointed at Levi. “You.”
“Yeah?” said Levi.
“You hurt my cousin, you see what happens, right?” He gestured at Chase.
Levi cleared his throat. “Yeah.”
“Good.” Zach went up the steps and shut the door.
Now Levi and I were alone with Chase. I walked over to him and pulled the gag out of his mouth.
“Hi Chase,” I said.
“What the fuck?” he said, his eyes darting back and forth between the two of us. “I said I was sorry. I gave you weed. I gave you a limo. I thought we were cool.”
I smiled. “Oh, this isn’t about that, Chase. My cousin doesn’t know about that. If he knew about that, you’d probably be dead. He thinks this is just a chance for me to clear the air with a guy who jerked me around. And as long as you answer all my questions, he’ll keep thinking that, and he’ll let you go. Got it?”
“Your family can’t grab me like that,” said Chase. “I thought we agreed. We retaliate against each other like this, it’s going to be the nineties all over again, and I don’t think anybody wants another full-on gang war.”
“There won’t be a war, Chase,” I said. “Because you’re not going to retaliate about this. Near as I can tell, we’re even. You captured me. Now I captured you back. Right?”
“Maybe,” he said. “I didn’t tie you up, you know. I didn’t rough you up.”
I shrugged. “Sorry. I told Zach not to hurt you. He’s… unpredictable sometimes.”
Chase gulped.
“Let’s just get down to business,” I said. “You’re here because of one person. Cori Donovan.”
Levi stepped forward. “My friend.”
“Cori?” said Chase. “Man, you think I killed her, don’t you? I swear to god, I had nothing to do with that.”
“Cori had a black eye right before Halloween,” I said. “You know anything about that?”
“You think I hit her?” he said. “I never touched her. Not personally, I mean. But even then, no one did—not while we were together.”
“So, how’d she get the black eye?”
“She ran into the wardrobe door in her dorm room.”
“You expect me to believe that?”
“It’s the truth. Hell, you ever been in one of those dorms? They got these big wardrobe things. They’re like movable closets. They have these doors that open, and Cori was wandering around in the dark, trying not to wake up her roommate, and the door was open. She didn’t see it. She smacked right into it. It wasn’t really her eye anyway. It was kind of more her cheekbone.”
I turned to Levi questioningly. Was there any reason to think that Chase would admit to hitting Cori? He was definitely afraid, but that didn’t necessarily make him truthful.
“Look, I’m not lying to you,” said Chase. “I would never do that. I would never have hit her.”
Levi rubbed his chin. “She didn’t make you angry? She wasn’t particularly faithful, was she?”
Chase raised his eyebrows. “Why would you say something like that?”
“Everybody knew that,” said Levi. “She slept around a lot. Didn’t matter if she was in a relationship or not.”
“Says who?”
“Says everyo
ne,” I said. “Hell, her last boyfriend Parker found out and broke up with her.”
“Well, maybe she cheated on that guy,” said Chase. “You know, I don’t know, maybe that guy had a limp dick. Or maybe he was boring. But I didn’t have any reason to think that Cori ever stepped on on me.”
“So,” said Levi. “Why’d you break up with her, then?”
“She broke up with me,” said Chase. “She said things weren’t working out. I was devastated. I didn’t think anything was wrong. But then when she started swinging those little capsules all over town, I figured it out pretty fast. She used me. She didn’t want me. She just wanted my connections. She wanted my E.”
“So, Cori stole your connection with Professor X,” said Levi. “She got his product and cut you off.”
“The professor cut us off all right,” said Chase. “But I don’t know if it had anything to do with Cori. He didn’t cut us off until some time in November, you know, and she was already dealing at that point. We don’t know why Professor X stopped providing us with stuff. No freaking clue.”
I furrowed my brow. “So, Cori didn’t steal the contract from you.”
“Contract.” Chase smirked. “No contract, sweetheart. There was an agreement. He decided to stop selling to us. That’s it.”
“Don’t call her that,” said Levi. “She’s not your sweetheart.”
“Right,” said Chase. “Guess she’s yours, huh?”
Levi glared at him.
“That’s not really important, is it?” I said. “About Cori. If she didn’t get in the way of you and Professor X, then why were you angry with her?”
“Who says I was angry with her?” said Chase.
“You weren’t?” said Levi.
Chase shrugged. “Maybe a little bit. Just because she used me to get close to our distributor. And because she was working in our territory, selling her stuff at the same parties where we tried to sell.”
“You wanted her to stop selling?” I said.
“Hell yeah, I did,” said Chase. “She had no right to do that shit.”
“So you decided to stop her,” I said. “Stop her from doing anything at all.”
“No,” said Chase. “I keep telling you, I did not kill her. Look, sometime in December, I asked Pumbaa to have a talk with Cori, and he interpreted my request to me that he should, you know, use force to be a little persuasive.”
“That’s why she was bruised in December,” I said. “Because Pumbaa hurt her. And you had no idea.” I couldn’t help but be a little sarcastic.
“I didn’t know he was going to do that,” said Chase. “Seriously, I only wanted to scare her. But Pumbaa took it a little far. You’ve met him. He’s a little… intense. He’s a good guy, but sometimes he takes things a little far. Anyway, he kind of roughed her up a little bit, and he stole all her product. She had the capsules inside these rolls of Lifesavers. She’d stick them down in the hole in the middle, then she’d just give you the Lifesavers. You’d pop off a candy, and there’d be a capsule sticking up in the middle of the roll, you know? She was always doing shit like that. Hiding things inside other things. Anyway, Pumbaa took all of her candy and told her stop swinging X in our territory.”
Hmm. That was why Cori had owed money to Professor X, then, right? She’d lost her product, and she’d been unable to pay for more. That was why Professor X had fronted her some pills. That was why she owed him money.
“But she didn’t stop,” said Levi.
“No,” said Chase. “She didn’t.”
“Not right away, anyhow,” I said. “Not until someone killed her.”
“That wasn’t me,” said Chase. “And it wasn’t anybody that I know. I didn’t want her dead. I didn’t. After the thing with Pumbaa, I made sure everyone knew to steer clear of her. I never wanted her hurt.” He looked away. “You know, even though she screwed me over, I still kind of had it bad for her. She was… there was something about her. She was so free, you know? She did whatever she wanted. She didn’t care about rules. She was like a force of nature. Maybe I still wanted her back, I don’t know. When I found out she was dead…” Chase got choked up. He sucked in air through his nose. He still wouldn’t look at us. “I never wanted her to be dead,” he said, and there were tears in his voice.
* * *
“You think he was faking those tears?” I was sitting in the passenger seat of Levi’s car. We were driving back to campus.
“Looked real to me,” said Levi.
“You think he was right that she never cheated on him? You knew her. I didn’t. I thought she cheated on everybody.”
“I don’t know. She and I didn’t talk about that part of her life very much.”
“She never tried to sleep with you?”
He glanced across the car at me quickly, then turned back to the road. “Um…”
“She did, didn’t she?”
“She was high a lot,” he said. “You remember that time that I ran into you at that party, and you told me that I should kiss you and Jill?”
I cringed. “Oh. Yeah.” That was really embarrassing now. At the time, it had seemed totally normal, but now it sounded extremely screwed up.
“She was kind of like that all the time,” he said. “I thought she kind of flirted with everyone, and then decided whether or not she actually was interested based on the people who responded.”
Right. Then another thought occurred to me. “Wait. You didn’t sleep with her, did you?”
He laughed. “No. You’re the only person I’ve slept with in over a year.”
“Really?”
“Really.”
Well, that was kind of cool, then. I smiled a small little smile. One he couldn’t see. And then I remembered something else. “You told my cousin you were my boyfriend.”
“I did,” he said. “You think that means he’s going to come and beat me to a bloody pulp?”
“No,” I said. “It’s just you didn’t need to. It made him notice you more.”
“I figured it was best to stay as close to the truth as possible. Too many lies to too many people gets confusing, trust me.”
“Well, but…” I turned to him. “I mean, that’s not really the truth, is it?”
He looked at me again. “It isn’t?”
“You said that you didn’t have time to be in a relationship because of the fact you’re getting justice for your brother,” I said.
“Yeah, but we… I mean, stuff happened after I said that. And I sort of thought that meant that we were…”
“Together?”
“We aren’t?” he said.
“No, we are. I mean, I want to be. But if you really can’t, then…”
He tightened his grip on the steering wheel. “You know what, this is all stuff we should talk about. But I don’t want to do it while I’m driving. Why don’t we, like, have dinner together?”
“Like a date?”
“Exactly,” he said. “You can come to my house. I’ll cook.”
“You cook?”
“Yeah,” he said. “Sometimes, I cook.”
I grinned at him. “Okay.”
* * *
“Levi, I don’t see any food in here,” I called. I was peering into a closet off his kitchen. He’d asked me to run and get a bag of rice.
He was busy chopping vegetables for stir fry. “What? What closet are you looking in?”
“The one you told me to look in.”
“Well, there’s two, and one’s the pantry, and the other one… Well, don’t look in the other one.”
“Why not?” I cast my gaze up and down the shelves of the closet. It was mostly bare. There were some boxes and a stack of towels. And… a box of ammunition?
“It’s not important. The pantry’s next to it, okay?”
I reached up to pick up the box. It was bullets all right. And as I touched it, my hand brushed something else. Something cold and metal.
I let go of the ammunition box and explored it with my ha
nds.
A gun.
I picked it up and took it off the shelf. It was a handgun. Not an antique one, like the ones in my dad’s collection. But my father had guns like this too. Black, heavy, and modern.
I stared at it.
Then I checked the chamber to see if it was loaded. It wasn’t. I couldn’t hold a gun and not check. Not after what had happened to Heidi.
I went back into the kitchen. “Levi?” my voice came out with a funny pitch.
He turned away from the counter. “What?”
“Why do you have a gun?”
He let out a breath, and his whole body slumped. “Jesus, Molly, I told you not to look in that closet.”
“Because you didn’t want me to see this?”
“Because…” His mouth worked, like he was trying to figure out something to say and couldn’t. “It’s complicated, okay?”
“What are you going to do with this gun? Is this how you’re planning on getting justice for your brother?”
“No,” he said. “It’s not—it’s not about that.” He strode across the kitchen. “Give it to me.”
I backed away. “So, then why do you have it?”
“For… for protection. I interact with some dangerous people sometimes.”
“But you didn’t have it when Chase captured us. You don’t carry it?”
“Molly, give me the gun.”
I shook my head. “Wait. Have you ever used it? Have you shot anyone?”
He sighed. “I don’t use it. I just… I just have it. That’s all. And I don’t want to talk about it.”
“Why do you have it if you don’t use it?”
He ran a hand through his hair. “Jesus Christ, does this really bother you that much? Given your family? You said yourself that your father has guns in your house. Is this a big deal?”
“I didn’t think you had a gun,” I said. “I thought you were…” I shook my head. What did I think about Levi? Sure, he’d always been nice to me, and he’d helped me out, but he sold drugs, and he was on some kind of vengeance mission. Why did I even trust him?
Levi took the gun away from me. He checked to see if it was loaded. “I don’t want to talk about the gun.”
“Did you think I loaded the gun?” I said.
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