King looked up at her from the toilet. The lid held him but groaned. He was sure the plastic snaps keeping the lid in place would pop, and he would slide off into the floor with about as much grace as the pterodactyl that had destroyed his bedsheets.
She opened the door beneath the sink, and he expected to see the half bottle of cleaning solution and a wet sponge. But they were gone. The torn-up Cardinals T-shirt was gone too.
Mel pulled a bottle of peroxide from beneath the sink and took the white cap off the brown bottle.
“Cotton balls are in the cabinet,” he offered.
She found them beside an oversized bottle of Tums.
“You’ve got yourself in some deep shit, Mr. King. And if you ever want to get off this toilet again, you’re going to tell me what’s going on.”
King looked up into her dark eyes. Even in her already dark complexion, the dark circles were noticeable, a slight pink color to the purplish flesh, gave their own impression of a bad bruise.
He wanted to lie. His instinct was to deny everything. Lou was purging the apartment of evidence, perhaps this instant. After all, hadn’t he seen a shadow move behind Mel twice already? Something dark darting across his blackened bedroom.
But when he opened his mouth to speak, Mel arched an eyebrow and cocked her head. It was a challenge to whatever he intended to say next as if she was prepared to dismiss his first story on principle.
And there was the matter of her safety. It had been her shop. Her apartment was in this same building. The man had come for King, but Mel had been close. Too close. And what would have happened if Mel had used her key to let herself in? Would the gunman have turned and put a bullet between her eyes, no questions asked? Would he have taken her hostage or used her against him?
He dropped his gaze. “I should move out.”
Mel’s arched eyebrow fell, knitting together with the other. “Excuse me?”
“The case I’m working—some men came looking for me,” he said. “You could’ve come in here. You could’ve gotten shot. I can’t have that on me.”
She stopped cleaning up his face and her scowl deepened. “And how do you think I’ll fare when they come looking for you and don’t find you? Do you think a couple of pissed off thugs might not go across the hall and take it out on the first defenseless, old woman they find?”
“If you’re old, then I’ve got one foot in the grave,” King said.
“Two feet, I dare say,” she replied and dampened a fresh cotton ball with peroxide. “And it’s that girl’s fault.”
“Lou’s got nothing to do with this,” King said, feeling his anger uncoil inside him. Like a snake, it lifted its flared head.
“This trouble didn’t show up until her auntie came asking for your help.”
“Actually,” he said. “The problems started when I accepted a case from Chaz Brasso.”
Mel dabbed at the cut on his face. King would have bet good money that she was hurting him on purpose.
King hissed. “Easy there!”
“Are you a sixty-year-old man or a little boy,” she wailed. “Sit still.”
King gritted his teeth and looked up at her.
“What was in that folder you brought home the other night?” she asked.
King bat his eyes at her.
She exhaled. “I read the cards about this one. She’s the angel of death, Mr. King.”
“Don’t start with the cards,” King said. “It’s hard to talk about something as ridiculous as cards after I got pistol whipped by—”
Mel slapped him upside his head. It wasn’t vicious. But with his abused face, it hurt plenty. “Stupid cards. My Lord, show some respect, Mr. King. Don’t get me started on your stupid. I’ve seen plenty stupid out of you for you to be insulting an old woman’s beliefs. My views are as good as anybody’s. Not one person on this rock knows what’s going on. I trust the cards. I believe in them. They never lie to me. I might be too dumb or blind to see the message, but they don’t lie, which is more than I can say for some ungrateful tenants around here.”
King touched his tender scalp gingerly with his fingers. “Maybe. But you’re wrong about Lou. She’s been through a lot, and she’s got issues. But she’s not evil.”
Mel placed a hand on her hip. “The angel of death isn’t evil, Mr. King. But she also isn’t someone we want to be inviting to dinner.”
She tossed the pink cotton balls into a wastebasket wedged between the toilet and wash basin.
He wasn’t going to placate her with hollow reassurances. He hated the automated way some men did that to women. He could recall a night his mother had woken to the sound of broken glass. An intruder had busted out the back window, intending to sneak into the kitchen and steal everything that would fit into his pillowcase. His father had chased him away with a baseball bat and his big booming voice. It’s okay. Now, now. Don’t be so worked up. They’re gone. And they aren’t coming back, he’d told his inconsolable wife, patting her like a worried puppy.
Only they had come back when his father was out of town, and they’d cleaned out the whole house the second time. The room they didn’t get to was the bedroom because she’d locked it. And when she heard them in the house, she’d pulled Robbie into the bedroom’s bathroom with her and locked that door too before she called the police.
He remembered thinking his mother had been right to be scared. Afraid kept a person cautious. Afraid kept you alive. And so, he wouldn’t give Mel any sugar-coated bullshit.
“I’m sorry,” he said, holding onto her forearm. “I didn’t mean to bring this on you. When I told Brasso I’d take the case I—”
“You knew it was trouble,” she said, her lips pursed. “Don’t say otherwise, Mr. King.”
“I wasn’t looking to get anyone hurt.”
“But that’s the thing, isn’t it? When you go looking for trouble, it’s not yourself that gets hurt. It’s the people who love you.”
“I’ll move out tomorrow,” he said. And he meant it. He had no idea where he would go. But he would take his bullshit with him.
“You’ll do no such thing,” Mel said, closing the cap on the peroxide bottle. “You’ll stay right here and be ready to clean up the mess you made!”
King frowned at her.
“The next time they come knocking, you better be here to blow their heads off.”
“You can’t possibly be okay with living next door to a guy who’s got a big target on his back.”
“Better to live next to you than with you.” Mel gave him a small smile then. It wasn’t a pleasant, loving smile. It was flattened out by her pity and remorse. “Don’t make me beg, Mr. King. You know I can’t afford for you to move out. And maybe I like having your ass around.”
It was a damn sweet thing for her to say, in not so many words, that they were friends. And that she’d no sooner throw him to the dogs as she would throw herself.
He smiled. “This is the French Quarter. You’d have another tenant in no time. You can even raise the rent. They won’t know any better.”
“But then I’d have to trust someone new,” Mel said. “I just don’t have the energy for that, Mr. King.”
I trust you.
A lightning bolt of recognition shot through King’s mind, a searing hot stab of betrayal electrifying him. He swore and stamped his foot. “Ah, you fat fucker.”
“Excuse me,” Mel said, one hand on her chest. “Did a devil take hold of your tongue, Mr. King?”
“Motherfucker,” he said again. He sucked in his belly and squeezed past her into the dark bedroom.
“Who?” Mel cried, coming up behind him. But both King and Mel stiffened in the living room. Mel bumped into his back when King made a sudden stop.
Chaz stood in the kitchen, front door open behind him.
“Hey Robbie,” Chaz said over the black-eyed barrel. He centered the gun on King’s chest. “Where’s Chuck?”
25
Water ran over Lou’s hands, staining the sink i
n her bathroom with pink droplets. She looked into the mirror and saw a spray of blood had begun to dry across her cheek.
Looking deep into her own eyes, she replayed the parts of King’s conversation with his landlady. She thought the woman had seen her. In one moment between snatching the rug out from under King’s bed and mopping the last of the brains off the wall, her eyes had fixed on her, where she crouched down in the dark beside King’s bed.
But the woman’s gaze had slid right over her. And the way she’d spoken to King in the bathroom while she fixed him up had been part-fury, part-care. It made her think of Aunt Lucy.
It made her think of her first kill.
“Blood?” Aunt Lucy had said when she saw her. She stood up from the kitchen table in their Chicago apartment. The tea cup had jumped, knocking a few drops onto the black lacquer tabletop.
Louie was shaking from head to toe. Her body was soaking wet. Red droplets chilled her skin.
She’d just stood in the kitchen, dripping as her aunt ran her fingers all over Louie’s body. She was searching for a wound, for some evidence of the attack. When she found none, she turned Lou around and started on the angular plane of her back.
“It’s not my blood,” Lou managed to spit out between chattering teeth. “I-I’m okay.”
Her aunt went still beside her. Her warm fingers withdrew. “What happened?”
“I had to.”
“Had to what?” Aunt Lucy had taken a step back. “Oh my god.”
“He deserved it,” Louie said, shivering harder. Her teeth chattered.
“I don’t want to hear it.”
“He—”
“Shut up!” It was the first time Aunt Lucy had screamed. It had shocked Louie into silence. Tears threatened to spill over her cheeks as she replayed Johnson gasping and choking on his own blood.
Aunt Lucy looked at the red on her hands. Her face flushing, she turned and darted into the kitchen behind them. She scrubbed her hands beneath the hot tap. Louie watched her, her heart pounding.
“He’s the one who betrayed Dad. Johnson was the reason—”
“Don’t tell me! I’m serious,” Lucy hissed. “No names. No, no details. Not another word!”
Louie chewed her lower lip, swallowing everything she wanted to say about Gus Johnson. How she’d lied about going to a graduation party. How instead, she’d spent hours in the basement of the public library searching microfilms for news of her parents. How the moment she’d seen Gus’s face in the interview, she’d known he was guilty. He was the one who had sold them out to the drug lords so he could save his skin.
Gus himself had admitted this in not so many words.
The way the traitor’s mouth opened, the eyes rolling up and to the left in preparation for his lie.
Louie hadn’t let him get far. She’d pounced. He knocked her off easily, outweighing her by more than two hundred pounds. He’d raised his gun to shoot her.
All the rationalizations. All the excuses. All her justifications.
She wasn’t sorry she’d buried her father’s pocket knife into the crook of his neck. She wasn’t sorry he bled to death on the shore of Blood Lake in La Loon. She didn’t give a damn that Jabbers took care of the rest.
But the way her aunt had finally looked at her, her fingers bone white from clutching her sink so hard, she did care about that.
Aunt Lucy had the appearance of serenity, if not for those fingers holding onto the sink as if any moment a tornado was going to rip the ceiling off and carry her away.
“I want you to take a bath,” Aunt Lucy had said. Her voice was even and low, almost too low for Louie to hear. Now she was the one shaking.
“But—”
“Get in with your clothes on,” Lucy said, ignoring the interjection. She didn’t turn away from the kitchen window as if the very sight of Lou was unacceptable. “Take them off and leave them somewhere. But not on this side. Go to that place. Leave everything there.”
“Aunt Lucy—”
“Everything,” she said, refusing to be interrupted. “Your shoes, your underwear. Everything. If you used—something—leave it. Do you understand?”
She hadn’t wanted to give up her father’s pocketknife, the small blade she’d buried in the hilt of Gus Johnson’s throat, but she also understood the danger in keeping it. A weapon, however sentimental, was evidence.
“Go on.” Lucy had waved her toward the bathroom at the end of the hall. “Do it now.”
Before Louie could protest, her aunt walked into the empty linen closet in their old Oak Park apartment and disappeared.
She didn’t need to see it, to know her aunt had slipped.
The apartment had hummed with her absence.
Lou did as she was told.
She’d run a warm bath and then she’d climbed inside it, shoes and all.
It was three in the morning by the time her aunt returned. She wasn’t sure where Lucy had gone. Her aunt had favorite places she liked to haunt just as Louie did. But Louie couldn’t describe her immense relief when Lucy came back. That she’d come back at all—that had been something.
“Louie?” Lucy sat down on the edge the couch where Louie lay, pretending to sleep. The cushions creaked under her aunt’s weight. She placed a hand on Louie’s knee. Then as if she’d sensed the girl’s reluctance to start a conversation, she squeezed the knee and said, “Talk to me.”
Louie turned over. It was hard to look her in the eye, but Louie tried to hold her gaze. The grim lines around Aunt Lucy’s mouth had smoothed over in the last few hours. And her brow was no longer pinched in anger. Now she looked sad. And perhaps a little scared.
“Did you take care of it?” Aunt Lucy whispered as if someone would overhear them.
Louie nodded.
“It was someone who—” Her voice broke. Her aunt looked up at the ceiling and sucked in a breath. Once she seemed composed, she tried again. “He was responsible for your parents’ death.”
Louie nodded. “The Martinellis got to him first, and so he sold out Dad to protect himself. He’s probably the one who told all those lies about Dad too.”
Her aunt nodded as if this confirmed her suspicions. “And are there others? People you plan to...” Her voice trailed off. “Don’t tell me details. If I’m ever captured and tortured I can’t say anything to incriminate you. I can’t tell what I don’t know,” Aunt Lucy had said in jest. She smiled, and made it seem like a joke. Lou knew better.
And she knew the answer to her aunt’s question. Even before she began her hunt, her search, she instinctually knew that the murder of her family was part of a large and intricate web. After the research into Gus Johnson and the Martinellis, the world changed. The world she was taught existed dissolved. A new, more menacing world reshaped around her. She saw the strings, the puppeteers, and all the figures working in the darkness, controlling what people did and didn’t see on the mainstage.
And who better to understand this truth than her? No one needed to make Louie believe there were in-between places. She’d traversed these herself. And she knew that in the darkness your senses deceived you. You couldn’t trust what you saw, what you felt, or heard—you could trust nothing but the compass inside you, the one you’re born with—a force that tugged and urged and spoke inaudibly —and her compass said the work wasn’t done.
Yes, there are others. Angelo Martinelli and his brothers. Maybe their father too. And anyone else who had a hand in it.
“Listen to me,” Aunt Lucy said, fighting for Louie’s attention. “This is very important.”
Louie lay flat on her back and gazed up at the woman.
“I know you must be so angry. I’m angry.” Lucy swallowed before going on. “When I think about your father, I’m filled with so many regrets. There are so many things I wish I’d said to him. And about a million things I would have done differently. I’ll never get that chance. We must learn how to live with this, Louie. You and me.”
Louie’s throat tightened and
her eyes burned. She thought of her father, her last vision of him from the bottom of their swimming pool. His figure blurred and distant as she swam futilely toward him. If she had reached him—if she had pulled him into the water—
“If you are anything like me,” Lucy went on. “You think you could have saved him.”
“I could—”
“No,” Aunt Lucy stopped her. “No, and that’s my point. You couldn’t have done anything differently.”
“But—”
“I know you don’t believe me now, but you’ll see I’m right if you stop and take a minute to think about it.” Lucy pressed her lips together, wet them, and then continued. “Your father would not have let you do anything differently.”
Louie came up on her elbows.
“He pushed you into the pool, knowing you would escape. That’s what he wanted. It was his choice. And he would sacrifice himself for you every time, no matter what you did differently. He made his choice, and we have to live with it.”
“He deserves justice,” Louie had said. I deserve it. “What else am I going to use my ability for? Why do I even have it?”
“Why?” Lucy repeated. Sadness pinched her brow. “Why do ET salamanders breathe through their skin? Why do tufted deer have fangs and eat meat? Creatures adapt to their environment. An evolutionary necessity here. A chromosome mutation there. Why you have it is to survive. And it’s what your father wanted when he sacrificed himself to save you. He wanted you to survive.”
He wanted you to survive.
Louie burst into tears. She wasn’t sure why her aunt’s words had affected her, but that small admonishment had cut deep. Her guilt soured.
“It’s not too late to honor his wish,” her aunt said, stroking Louie’s hair and rocking her softly in her arms. “It’s never too late to let it go. Promise me you’ll try to let go, Louie.”
But the image of Johnson’s bloody lips was already burned into her mind. Louie knew it was too late to let go. Even at seventeen, she understood that when you’re this deep, it’s best to keep swimming or you’ll drown. She’d survived her revenge. She’d taken out all the Martinellis who’d killed her parents one by one. And now there was only Konstantine left.
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