What Washes Up

by Dawn Lee McKenna

  Kyle was quiet until they were out of town, heading up Bluff Road. “I would never do that to a girl,” he said finally, staring out the windshield.

  Maggie looked over at him, and he looked back at her, looking so much like David that she felt like she was looking at a memory. It occurred to her then that Kyle was now the same age David had been when they’d first met.

  “I know,” she said. “He was sick, Kyle.”

  “I don’t really care,” he said.

  “Me, neither.”

  He looked back out at the road.

  “I’m glad he’s dead,” he said quietly.

  “Me, too.”

  When they got home, they calmed Stoopid, who had a great deal of information to share, and soothed Coco, who had missed her kids profoundly.

  Uncharacteristically, Sky opted to hang out in the kitchen with Maggie while she cooked dinner. They worked in silence for some time, Maggie cutting vegetables for roasting while Sky, unasked, put the dishes away. Then she leaned up against the counter and watched her mother.

  “Were you really scared?” she asked finally.

  Maggie looked up from the cutting board. “Yeah,” she said casually. “Sure. But it was a long time ago.”

  Sky was quiet again for a moment as she watched Maggie spread the vegetables on a baking sheet and toss them with some oil.

  “Mom?” Sky ran her finger around in a drop of oil that had splattered onto the tile counter. “I’m really sorry about all the times I called you a paranoid freak.”

  Maggie laughed. “It’s okay. I just worry about you. I would have anyway.”

  “Sure, dude,” Sky said, trying to smile. “I’d have known how to handle a Mossberg by the age of twelve anyway.”

  “Yeah, you probably would have, dude,” Maggie said. “There are guns here. You guys need to know how and when to handle them. Period.”

  Sky smiled at her, and Maggie put some salt and pepper on the vegetables before putting them in the oven. When she straightened up, Sky was watching her.

  “What?” she asked her.

  Sky shrugged a little. “I’m proud of you.”

  Maggie felt a warmth in her stomach. “For what?”

  “Just, for being okay, I guess,” she said.

  Maggie smiled at her. “I am.”

  “I don’t feel right about leaving you alone tonight.”

  Sky had a group date planned, and Kyle was invited to a birthday sleepover.

  “Baby, I’ve been alone here plenty of times, remember?”

  “Yeah, but it just doesn’t seem right. You know, tonight.”

  Maggie shook her head. “It’s fine. Caroline and Brian are leaving for college soon. You should spend time with them.”

  “I can come back early,” Sky said.

  “Said Sky never,” said Maggie, laughing. “It’s fine, Sky. I promise.”

  Maggie took the cutting board to the sink and started washing it. Her heart almost stopped when Sky’s arms slid around her and she felt Sky’s head on her back. Hugs had been few and far between the last few years.

  “I love you, homes,” Sky said quietly.

  Maggie blinked back tears and smiled. “I love you, too, dawg.”

  Maggie turned onto Seventh Street and looked over at Kyle. “Did you remember your phone charger?” she asked him.

  “Yeah, I got it,” he said.

  “I’m off tomorrow, so call me when everybody’s getting ready to leave so I can come get you,” she said.

  “I will. But it’s probably not gonna be til like four or five, Josh said.”

  “That’s fine.” Maggie rubbed at her right eye. She hadn’t changed her contacts in days and her eyes felt like they had sand in them. She just wanted to go home and go to bed.

  “Unless his little brothers go all bat—get nuts again, then we’re all gonna scatter,” he said.

  Maggie looked at him, one eyebrow raised. “You need to hang out with your sister less.”

  “You told us we needed to hang out more,” he said, deadpan.

  Maggie was coming up with a reply when her cell rang. Kyle picked it up from the console. “It’s Wyatt,” he said.

  “Oh, give it to me,” she said, as she stopped at a stop sign.

  She thumbed the answer button. “Hey,” she said.

  “Hey. What are you doing?” he asked.

  “Dropping Kyle off for a sleepover.”

  “Oh. Well, I wondered if maybe you wanted to come by here.”

  “Are you at home?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Did you get my message?” she asked.

  “Yeah. You can tell me whatever that is when you get here, but that’s not why I’m asking.”

  “Oh. Okay, well, I’ll be there in a few minutes.”

  “Okay.”

  “Okay,” she echoed dumbly, then hung up.

  Kyle was looking at her. “What?” she asked.

  “It’s a stop sign, not a train,” he said, rolling his eyes.

  “Shut up, Kyle,” she said, smiling. She started driving again. “You really need to stop hanging out with Sky.”

  Kyle grinned at her. “So, you’re going over to Wyatt’s?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Tell him I’m almost done with his book.”

  “Which book?”

  “He’s getting me into James Lee Burke.”

  Maggie looked over at him as she pulled into Josh’s driveway. “Really. You’re kind of young for his books.”

  “I’m ten.”

  “Yeah.”

  Kyle grabbed his backpack out of the back seat. “Well, I can go back to Goosebumps if you want, but Dave Robicheaux is better for my vocabulary.”

  He plopped the backpack on his lap and looked at her. “Dad liked suspense stuff, too,” he said, more subdued.

  Maggie’s chest tickled just a bit. “Yeah. He did.”

  “Okay, well.” Kyle gave her half a smile. “Hopefully, this’ll be better than last year.”

  She smiled and ruffled his soft, black hair. “Have fun, buddy.”

  “I will.” He leaned over and got a hug, then opened the door. “See ya later.”

  Maggie watched him go to the door, waved at Josh’s mom Shelly, then backed out of the driveway.

  Patrick put his rocks glass of tequila down next to the gun on the glass and marble coffee table, and waited for the burning in his throat to subside. Then he picked up the little glass vial, unscrewed the cap with the little gold spoon built into it, got a tiny scoop, and stuck the spoon under his right nostril.

  He snorted the coke, sniffed a couple of times, then licked a finger and dabbed at the residue on the spoon, rubbed it on his upper gum. He closed the vial again and set it down and picked up his drink, dripping condensation onto the marled grip of the gun.

  The Smith & Wesson Model 67-1 Revolver 38 Special. The first gun Pop had ever given him, when he was fourteen. It had come complete with a spiel about how “special” it was, and Patrick had thought it was exceptionally cool-looking, with all that stainless steel, so shiny and new. Unfortunately, in order to keep the cool-looking gun, he actually had to spend several hours out in the blistering sun with Pop, learning how to use it.

  He thought it all very symbolic, kind of like with Fain, but this symbolism was for him alone. He wondered if Pop would appreciate it, then admitted to himself that he wasn’t going to give Pop time to appreciate anything. He might be a fool, but he wasn’t stupid.

  No, he wasn’t going to give the old man any speeches or ask him to appreciate any irony. It was going to be straight to business, because Pop was slick and Pop was fast, and the real irony would be if Patrick was the only one who didn’t live through the night. No fooling around with the old man.

  The cold, calculating, superior hard-ass.

  Patrick downed the rest of the tequila in one go, wincing as it burned first his throat and then his chest. It was the good stuff, the Copas Anejo in the limited edition bottle with the glas
s cork. Might as well.

  He stood up, and only then realized that he’d had a little more tequila than he’d thought. He snatched up his vial, snorted another two spoons, and waited there a moment until he felt some clarity and fire come back to him. Then he dropped the vial into his suit blazer pocket and headed for the door.

  He was halfway across the room before he stopped and turned back, a giggle escaping from his throat.

  He’d almost forgotten his gun, damn it, and that just would have sucked so much.

  Wyatt’s rented cottage was a block from Lafayette Park, where Maggie and Boudreaux had walked out onto the pier. If she drove on another five blocks and hung a left, she would be at Boudreaux’s house. She wondered, as she pulled into Wyatt’s driveway, if Boudreaux still respected her decision to tell Wyatt the truth. She also wondered if was actually respect he felt, or just confidence in his own proper planning.

  Wyatt’s front door was open and the lights were on. She could see into the house through the screen door, but she didn’t see Wyatt.

  She got out and walked to the front porch through an atypically light rain, and tapped on the aluminum frame of the screen door. A moment later, Wyatt appeared from the kitchen area. She watched him walk across the living room. He was barefoot, wearing loose cargo pants and a green denim shirt with the tails hanging.

  “Hey,” he said as he opened the screen door for her.

  “Hey.”

  Wyatt stepped back and let her in. “Sorry, it’s kinda warm in here. My AC’s crapped out.”

  He closed the screen door behind Maggie, and she got a whiff of soap and denim. She hugged her purse a little closer to her hip, unsure what to do at the point at which they ordinarily might have hugged hello.

  He looked down at her, and he didn’t really seem to know what to do, either. “You want a glass of wine?”

  “Sure.”

  She followed him into the kitchen, separated from the living room by a half wall that turned into a hallway to the bedrooms. Wyatt walked behind the tiled breakfast bar between the kitchen and the eating area, opened the fridge, and took out a bottle of white wine.

  Maggie looked toward the open French doors that made up the back wall of the dining area. They led out to the back patio where she and Wyatt had had their first date. The floor-length white sheer curtains ruffled a bit in the breeze, and she heard the rain gently tapping on the patio. She looked away from the doors and set her purse down on the floor and climbed up onto one of the stools as Wyatt set two glasses of wine on the breakfast bar.

  “So what’s up?” she asked after she took a sip.

  “You first. Let’s get the work stuff out of the way first.”

  “What?”

  “Your message,” he said.

  “Oh. Yeah. You said the floor…in the processing room, you said it was tile.”

  Wyatt took a swallow of his wine. “Yeah, why?”

  “It wasn’t tile when I was there. It was just concrete.”

  Wyatt looked at her. “Great,” he said, sighing. “Okay. I’ll go back to Richardson in the morning.”

  “Tomorrow’s Saturday.”

  “Okay, Monday. Whatever. Boudreaux’s not going to pull up the concrete.” They looked at each other a moment and Wyatt sighed. “Lily died because she had the lumpectomy.”

  Maggie blinked a few times. Wyatt looked down at his wine. “They did the chemo and the radiation, but by the time she decided to have the mastectomy after all, it had spread to her right lung and her bones. She was dead eight months later.”

  “I’m sorry, Wyatt.”

  “Me, too.” He took another drink of his wine. “But I may have let that color my reaction to you a little bit.”

  Maggie sighed and shook her head. “No. It was wrong and I knew it was wrong.” She looked up at him. “I wanted to talk to you about it. I just didn’t know how for some reason. And then it just…snowballed.”

  Wyatt nodded at her, and she looked out at the patio, tried to blink some moisture back into her tired, scratchy eyes.

  “I told them earlier,” she said.

  “Told who what?”

  Maggie chewed the corner of her lip and watched the curtains flutter. “I told my parents and the kids about what happened to me.”

  Wyatt was quiet for a moment. “Maggie.” She looked over at him. “I didn’t say anything about it.

  Maggie stopped breathing for a moment, and had a fleeting thought that she’d like to go back in time a few hours.

  Wyatt sighed. “I got the search warrant without it. Maybe not as good a search warrant, but I got one.”

  Maggie looked down at the breakfast bar, at the grout between the small ceramic tiles.

  “I’m sorry,” Wyatt said. “I should have told you that at Boudreaux’s, but I had a lot going on in my head. Geez.” He rubbed a palm over his face. “I’m sorry.”

  Maggie stared at the bar for a moment, then she thought about Sky putting her arms around her at the sink and telling her she was proud of her. She shook her head. “No. No, it worked out the way it should. It was time.”

  Patrick took a little extra time at the stop sign to check his nose and his teeth, then almost hit an old man and his little dog when he let off the brake before seeing they were crossing the street. He scowled back at the old man, even though he knew he wouldn’t see it through the tinted glass, then shook his head and drove on. Some people were too old even to cross the road properly.

  He’d considered using a Sharpie to write Open Here on his chest before heading over to the old homeplace, and he’d laughed as he’d thought about the old ME, Larry Davenport, cutting away his shirt sometime tomorrow. Maybe the old bird would finally drop dead of a heart attack. In the end, though, Patrick hadn’t been up to writing upside down and backwards, so he’d buttoned back up and said screw it.

  It occurred to him, as he accidentally cruised through the next stop sign, that after tomorrow, people were going to start looking at poor Craig a little differently, waiting for the last Boudreaux standing to blow his head off, too. He felt kind of bad about that for a second, then he remembered that he didn’t actually like his little brother all that much.

  He slowed down as he approached the next corner, and his heart pounded in a more noticeable fashion. He cut his eyes to the right as he approached the house two houses from the corner. When he saw the black car in the driveway, he could actually taste bile rising up in his throat. He paused appropriately at the stop sign, then pulled around the corner and stopped.

  Then he looked around him at the empty street and reached into his blazer pocket. His fingers rummaged beneath the 38 Special, and he pulled out his little glass vial for one more hit.

  “I’m ready for things to go back to normal,” Maggie said as she looked away from the patio and back at Wyatt. He frowned at her, and she suddenly felt self-conscious. “I mean, life in general.”

  “That would be a pleasant turn of events,” he said.

  Around the time Maggie became uncomfortable with his scrutiny, Wyatt seemed to want to change the subject and pretend things already were normal. He rapped his knuckles on the counter.

  “Are you hungry?” Wyatt asked Maggie.

  She shook her head. “No. Thanks. We ate.”

  He opened up the fridge. “Well, I’m feeling peckish. How about a snack?”

  “Go ahead and eat,” she said, watching him poke at a couple of the take-out containers stacked in his fridge.

  He smelled a Styrofoam box, winced, and put it back in the fridge. “I ate,” he said, closing the fridge. “The cool thing about having cereal for dinner is that you don’t have to bother with breakfast the next day.”

  He turned around and opened one of the cupboards.

  “You really need to eat more like a grown-up,” Maggie said.

  He threw her a look. “Says the woman whose lunch I usually have to finish,” he said. “Oh look, Cheetos.” He grabbed the half-full bag out of the cupboard and closed the
door.

  “That’s so sad, Wyatt,” Maggie said.

  He slapped the bag onto the breakfast bar. “Well, I can put them on a salad if it makes you feel better.”

  “You don’t have anything for a salad,” she said, rubbing at her right eye, in which her contact was threatening to fold up.

  “Well, then I can put some ranch dressing on them.”

  Maggie felt a smile forming. “You’re so cute when you’re idiotic.”

  “Is that why you’re winking at me?”

  “I don’t know how to wink,” she said. “It’s my contacts.”

  Wyatt finished chewing his Cheeto. “You wear contacts?”

  “Yeah,” she said, as though he were a moron. “How can you not know that?”

  “Huh. Are your eyes really green?”

  “Yes,” she said, shaking her head.

  She slid down from the stool and bent down to reach into her purse. She pulled out her saline and her contact case.

  “You want some more wine?”

  Maggie stood back up. “Yeah, sure. I’ll be right back,” she said.

  She walked around the corner and down the hall to the bathroom, set her contact case on the sink.

  “You wanna go out on the patio?” Wyatt called out to her.

  “Yeah,” she called back, and unscrewed the cap of her contact case, then leaned in to look in the mirror as she pulled up her eyelid.

  Wyatt ate another Cheeto, then he poured Maggie another glass of wine, topped off his own, and put the wine back in the fridge.

  He picked up the two glasses and walked into the dining area. Patrick was standing just inside the French doors, his arm stretched out toward Wyatt. Wyatt had just enough time to think about diving for the kitchen floor. He even managed to start to pivot to the right before Patrick fired, and pain and heat exploded in Wyatt’s lower abdomen.

  He heard the sound of the wine glasses shattering, saw the bottom of the refrigerator as his face hit the cold tile floor. Then there was just nothing.

  Maggie dropped the contact lens in the sink as the gunshot rang out.