by Neliza Drew
I pictured the connections between Billy and Eric, between Lane and Billy. I thought about boat fairies and how Vince had worked at the port when we were in college. How he and Eric spent a lot of time together, but had seemingly nothing in common. How Lane might have met Vince as easily as she’d met Billy in such a small town.
Chapter seventeen
Charley’s oversized, dilapidated house and the old Hathaway place sat slightly opposite each other at the end of a long dead-end dirt road in the middle of nowhere. Mrs. Hathaway had died six years before in her living room, and even then the house had been old and not exactly structurally sound so her family could never sell it and the yard eventually took over.
In other words, there was no reason for a brand new Mustang to be sitting on the overgrown, dried-up lawn in front of a dilapidated house in the last remnants of dusk.
I parked next to the Mustang, walked up to the door of the house and knocked. It fell off the hinges.
From the Hathaway porch, I could see most of Charley’s house, the rest obscured by trees. My phone buzzed in my pocket. Tom.
“I think someone’s at Charley’s. We’ll talk later.”
“No way. You call the cops.”
“Sheriff’s department. Charley’s outside town limits.” I tried the doors on the Mustang, hoping to get lucky. None were open, but I couldn’t find any trace of an alarm either. I went back to my car and popped the trunk.
“Davis?”
“Huh?” I wrapped my scarred hand around the tire iron.
“Why does it sound like you’re about to do something stupid?”
“What do you even hear me doing?”
“I can’t hear you doing much of anything. That’s what worries me.”
“Quit being a cop.” I hit the mute button and smashed the passenger window of the Mustang. I reached in, opened the glove box, and pulled out the registration card. “Shit.”
When I didn’t get a response, I remembered to unmute.
“Davis?”
I stuck the paper in my pocket and went back to my car. “I might be in trouble here.” I got back into my car and stared at the steering wheel.
“Because you just broke the window out of a car?”
“I muted the phone, Tom.”
“I know you.”
“Oh.”
“And?”
“It belongs to one of the scariest people I’ve ever met.” Vince Zellner. What he’d done, what I’d let him get away with through my own cowardice, was unconscionable. The pain left in my shoulder couldn’t rival the pain in my heart, but at least the shoulder could be iced.
Outside Charley’s house would’ve been bad enough. Across the street made him seem like he was trying to hide. Trying to hide implied he was trying to sneak up on one of us. If he knew Lane was in jail that left Charley and me.
“I really have had too many people try to kill me.”
“What?”
“Nothing. I wasn’t his intended target last time.”
I groped in my purse and pulled out a Swiss Army knife. Not quite as good as the tire iron but easier to conceal, what with my gun being at home, where it belonged, and Phil’s being in a cardboard box, where they didn’t belong.
“Davis.”
“I’ll call you back.” I stuck the phone in my pocket with the knife.
I’d never been good with following rules — Nik’s, especially — so I’d spent a fair amount of school sneaking out my bedroom window. Charley was as good a homeowner as she was mother, so the lock was still broken. I slipped in, left my shoes and purse on the bed, and tiptoed down the hall.
I found a tattooed teenage girl in Nik’s old room, pulling apart a plastic trophy for no apparent reason other than spite. A discarded trail of broken knick-knacks littered the floor from dresser to desk to shelf.
I leaned on the doorway. “What’cha looking for?”
She jumped, composed herself, and growled.
“So the dog collar’s not just a fashion statement?”
“Who the fuck are you?”
“Davis. And you?”
“Davis is dead. Who the fuck are you for real?”
“This is getting old.”
“Whatever, bitch.” She went back to her petty destruction, dismembering a Barbie that might have been Lane’s.
“So, how ’bout if I guess you’re one of Lane’s friends. You have a name or do I just call you Fido?”
She turned and rolled her eyes at me the way only a well-trained teenager could. “Who the fuck is Fido?”
“Really?”
Nothing.
“That your Mustang outside?”
“So what if it is?” She asked.
“Because I was wondering if I should call and report it stolen.”
“Fuck you, bitch. He lets me drive it.” She tilted her head. “What’s it to you?”
I stared back at her. “He’s what? Ten years older than you?”
She shrugged. “Didn’t stop Lane.”
“She dating him or just getting drugs off him?”
She looked me up and down. “Fuck you.”
“Right.” I fought the urge to punch her. “How’d she meet him?”
“Says you introduced them.”
I squinted at her.
She smirked. “What’cho gonna do if I pull a knife?”
I let out a sigh. “Well, shooting you would make a helluva mess, but I already got cut dealing with a glass-wielding nutjob today so I might be feeling lazy.”
She chewed her lip. “You can’t be serious.”
“Quite. Try me.”
“Lane said you was dead, bitch.”
“Yeah, I heard that one already.”
“She wants you to be bad enough, she can make it happen. Vinny will do anything for her.”
I tilted my head. “Really?” If I had to guess, I’d have said that power flowed the other way. “That what happened to Guthrie?”
She ignored me. “Lane wants you gone?” She snapped her fingers. “Poof. No one ever finds you again.”
I felt a chill but ignored it.
“You’re out of your league, bitch.”
“So, who are you anyway?”
She stood taller, like it was a dare. “Sylvia. What’s it to you?”
“Great. Get out.”
“Lane told me to meet her here tonight.”
“Lane’s in jail,” I said.
“For reals? No shit?”
She sounded way too excited about the idea. I raised an eyebrow at her. “For reals.”
“Shit.”
“Yeah. So, how come you didn’t know that?”
“Look, don’t go getting into my business. Lane ain’t here, she ain’t here.” She pulled out a phone and typed a string of messages like I wasn’t there. When she was done, she looked up and grinned. “You better watch your back.”
Something dark welled up in me. I turned to look out the window at the dark sky. The aches in my muscles suddenly couldn’t compete with the ones in my soul, my subconscious, whatever part of me couldn’t just let the fuck go. “Why does Lane hate me?”
“You don’t know?” She snorted like it should be common knowledge.
I had a guess. I hoped I was wrong.
“She said you were a drama queen. Said you got what you deserved.”
I watched her walk past and didn’t bother stopping her.
“You don’t get to tell me what I deserve. Neither does Lane.” I caught sight of myself reflected in a picture frame. I looked like shit — not even warmed-over shit, but smeared off a shoe onto a cheap motel carpet shit.
“Fuck you!” It echoed down the hallway, followed moments later by a door slam.
I went down to my old bedroom, surveyed the mess and the memories. The revolver I’d shot as a kid sat on the dresser. I picked it up and thumbed rounds into the chamber before going back down the hall. I knew it was more talisman than anything else. I wasn’t sure I’d use it. I still
felt safer with it.
Lane’s room was messier than it had been earlier in the day, but it was hard to say what had been moved and what hadn’t. I found the purses easily enough since they’d been relocated to a pile on the bed. I picked one up and opened it. The lining felt cheap, confirmed by several tears where it attached to the seams. Outside, it was too clean to have been used much, the interwoven letters a little too irregular and the leather a little too plastic-smelling, like Payless shoes or gas station wallets.
I took out my phone and snapped pictures of a few of them with some close-ups of the lining and logos and texted them to Tom’s wife. Tom knew criminals. His wife — the only daughter of a successful Cuban immigrant who’d come over long before the Mariel boatlift and established himself as a real estate developer back when there was still land to develop — would know the real thing if she saw it, and she’d also know which season these were supposed to be mimicking.
Every purse but one had a torn lining and they were all full of receipts for gas and food, a few for motels, up and down the coast. The one that didn’t advertise its knockoff status was heavier than the others and smelled better. It had been not so much part of the pile, but tangled in the bed sheets, and I’d almost missed it.
I sat on her bed and stared at it. “What have you been doing, Lane?”
Chapter eighteen
I needed a shower and maybe some coffee. The aspirin I’d taken that morning had worn off hours before. My stab wounds throbbed, my head ached, and my emotions were stretched and frayed. The bathroom grout still had blood visible in it. I ignored it and dropped my pants.
The hot water stung my cuts but massaged my muscles. I let it beat my forehead until it ran cold.
I hadn’t closed the bathroom door and the cold air from the rest of the house broke through the steam to leave gooseflesh along my arms and shoulders as I toweled dry. I caught sight of old scars in the mirror patched with condensation.
The back stairs creaked.
I froze.
Light footsteps, like someone in heavy boots tiptoeing, left the stairs and moved down the hallway.
I’d left the gun on Charley’s bed with my purse.
I slipped through the open doorway to her room and grabbed the gun. An old pair of sweatpants and a tee shirt topped the pile of laundry on the bed. I squirmed into them one-handed and picked up my bag slowly so the contents wouldn’t jostle together.
A shadow on the wall of the hallway arrived before he did.
I stepped back toward the window, gun in hand, purse slung across my chest like a too-tight messenger bag where I could hold the contents steady with my free arm.
“Police. Got a call about a burglar.”
Something about the voice was off.
“Be a shame if I had to shoot you. Probably should just come out with your hands up.”
I turned, smacked the window lock with the butt of the gun and shoved the window up.
A man in jeans and a flannel shirt took a Weaver stance in the doorway.
I tumbled through the window as a bullet shattered a pane above my head. My foot hit a patch of pine needles and slid until I hit shingles again.
I crawled to the edge and lowered myself, gripping the rusty, clogged drain hard enough to open the scab on my hand. I tapped my toes against the house, found purchase on the window trim and shifted sideways until I was over the overgrown grass.
A bullet hit the gutter next to my hand and barely missed me when it exited. Swampy water polluted by rotten leaves drained out of the hole onto the sweatpants.
I dropped, landing for a second time in one day in a squat on the dead lawn.
Above me, the mystery man fired three more times, tearing holes in the overhang of the house, each one hitting the ground a foot to my left.
I took off for the woods at the edge of the property, zigzagging until I was surrounded by trees, pine cones puncturing my feet. When I felt entombed in the forest, I stopped. The sweat on my forehead chilled in the evening air and I wrapped my arms close.
The man had been in shadows, but he hadn’t been who I’d expected. That was a voice I knew. And I worried his stance meant he really was with law enforcement. If someone had paid off a cop, Lane’s chances at a fair trial fell even further.
Chapter nineteen
I came out of the trees at the edge of a field surrounded by a grayed split-wood fence. In the middle sat a single-wide trailer older than Lane with fading green paint. Wind blew across the open space and through my thin shirt.
The gun I shoved in my purse, and noticed a hole in the baggy sweatpants, too circular to be a rip from a tree branch. Looking at it made old wounds ache harder and I rubbed the base of my skull to quiet the fear and hurt.
I pulled out my phone and dialed Tom as I ducked under the fence and started across the lawn toward the trailer.
“Hello?”
“A cop just broke into Charley’s and shot at me.” The sound of the words leaving my mouth suddenly hit me hard. My knees almost buckled under me and I stopped in my tracks.
“Davis?”
“I’m fine.”
“That’s good. I had kind of assumed since you called me instead of an ambulance.”
I didn’t say anything.
“Davis?”
“Stop saying my name like that.” I felt on edge, and stupid for feeling that way.
I looked up to see a shaggy-bearded man on the cinderblock steps of the trailer. He held an over-under shotgun pointed at my chest.
“Tom, I gotta go.” I hung up the phone and held up my hands.
“What are you doing on my property?”
“Lost? I was running in the woods. My mother lives next door.”
“Girl, you ain’t got no damn shoes on and the crazy woman lives a half mile away ain’t got but one kid. Runs wilder’n the deer.”
I mashed my lips together.
“Don’t go making no shit up. Talk, girl.”
“Davis,” I said. “My name’s Davis.”
“The one the crazy bat said was dead?”
I threw my hands up further and let them drop. “Really? Is there anyone she hasn’t mailed my obituary to?”
“Musta done something pretty terrible for your own momma to disown you.”
He didn’t know the half of it. I sighed because I couldn’t think of anything else to do and couldn’t work up the effort necessary to explain any further, even if he was still pointing a shotgun at me.
“Get on up here and tell me what’s what.”
I took a few steps closer, my brain scrambling for some version of a story that was truth-y enough and left out almost everything.
“Who you running from?”
“No one. Ex–boyfriend.”
“He the one shooting at you?”
I stopped.
He lowered the shotgun slightly. “I been living out here for forty years. I know the sound of a rifle and I know the sound of a handgun. Someone out that way was shooting a pistol, and you don’t hunt with no damn pistol. ’Sides, ain’t season.”
“He’s—”
“Why isn’t he dead? You had that revolver.” He gestured at my purse.
“You were watching me?” I glanced over my shoulder and saw the fence line illuminated.
“I do that. Old man. Heard shots.”
“Dad was a Marine. He died in Beirut. The gun’s his. He never got a chance to teach me to use it.” As usual, lies were easier than the truth.
“Don’t go running around with guns you can’t shoot. Good way to shoot yourself or get someone else to do it for you.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Why are you here if your momma thinks you’re dead?”
“She had an accident. Looking after the place for a few days.”
“And the younger one?”
I hung my head like I was embarrassed. “Jail.”
“Come on in, princess. I was just fixin’ to have some tea.”
He turned and
went inside. I looked for more surprises. When nothing else materialized, I walked up and waited on the top step.
“Rug ain’t clean no way.”
The interior of his modest trailer was dark and decorated with musty doilies and doodads I envisioned having been carefully placed by a long-dead wife.
I expected iced tea sweetened with so much sugar it would sting my teeth. Instead, he poured water from a cast-iron kettle into china I suspected had also been chosen by the doily owner. He spiked the tea with Jim Beam. “You sure you okay?”
I nodded and sipped.
He disappeared down the hall. I picked at my feet, trying to dig one or two of the pinecone thorns out of my calluses.
When he returned, he handed me a washcloth and a bottle of alcohol so old the label was discolored and peeling. “You want to tell Bob what happened to you?”
I cocked my head and tried to figure out if he meant himself or the large mutt that had suddenly begun licking my left foot.
“Where you from?” He chewed his lip behind the bushy gray beard.
I gave him sheepish. “Florida.”
“Used to have a cousin went off up there. Never did have a lick of sense, that one. Got arrested in no time trying to sell dope to the cops.”
Up? “I don’t sell dope.”
“Don’t you go lettin’ no guy mess you up. My momma’s aunt Shirley had one a’them. Beat her before church.”
I said nothing.
He sipped some more rocket fuel tea. “That how you got all those other scars?”
I started to get up. “This has been real nice of you and all—”
“Sit down. Old Bob don’t get much comp’ny. You don’t want to talk about it, we won’t talk about it.”
I sat.
“Gets mighty lonely out here since my wife died. Been thinkin’ about going to church again, but I don’t know. I might be too old to get religion.”
I dumped some alcohol on the washcloth and held it in my bloody palm.
“You got religion?”
I wasn’t sure what the right answer was, but I was confident the truth wasn’t it.
“You can say no. It’s okay. Just wonderin’s all.”