“Don’t worry, sweetheart.” Mark came over to the desk, smiling as always, and dropped a kiss on top of her head. “The cavalry’s here.”
Ray’s glance was more amused than sympathetic. “Don’t act like you couldn’t handle it.”
She made a face; he was right.
“Ooh.” Mark turned, hands in his back pockets, and nodded toward the flowers. “Yours?”
The bouquet seemed to be relaxing, the tightly packed stems bowing out to the sides so the blossoms fanned in an impressive display of color. They were gorgeous, and seemed to be enjoying the AC and fresh water she’d put in the vase. Still, every time Lisa looked at them, she frowned. “Yeah,” she said. “But I have no idea who sent them.”
She watched Ray pluck the card from its tongs and saw his brows knit together as he read the single, stupid line. She wasn’t prepared for the way his head whipped in her direction, his expression suddenly hard and guarded. “What’d the delivery guy say?” His tone was clipped, the words snapping off his tongue in a way that left her sitting up in her chair, feeling like a child in trouble.
A quick glance to her left revealed that Mark’s posture had changed; he was picking up on his brother’s mood change. “He said the guy paid in cash. No name.”
“It was a guy?” Ray demanded. “He said that? He knew it was a man?”
Her heart kicked up behind her breastbone; he was making her nervous. “He said ‘guy,’ but I didn’t ask if he knew for sure. Dad, what – ”
“Hey, Ray.” Sly poked his head in from the garage, incoming sunlight highlighting the gold in his hair and the white in his blue eyes. “I think our friend followed me back from breakfast.”
Now doubly confused, and wondering if this “friend” was related to the flowers, Lisa swept her eyes out through the window and saw a dark blue, late model Impala cruising to a stop beside her dad’s truck in the parking lot. The Lynx.
“What the hell is going on?” she asked, but no one answered; the guys were already halfway out the door. With a sigh, she deflated against the back of her chair. “No one tells me anything.”
11
It wasn’t too late to change his mind. Sure, he’d gone to the apartment and thrown all his meager belongings into two duffel bags. And yes, he’d left Josh a voice mail to inform him that he was moving out. But as he watched Ray and Mark Russell coming across the parking lot toward him, a last, desperate dread tugged at him. Moving away from one bad situation and into another, possibly worse, one wasn’t a positive life change. And there weren’t words to describe how infuriated Ricky was going to be. And Josh. And the other guys. He wasn’t just making friends here, he was making enemies too.
But Drew stood rooted, and then the Russell brothers were upon him and it was too late to do anything but accept that he was about to make a very big, maybe bad, decision.
“You came,” Ray said. He sounded neither surprised, nor expectant; he was just stating a fact.
His brother Mark was smiling, barely, but his eyes sparkled with a humor Ray’s lacked. “Glad you came,” he amended. “You’re doing the right thing.”
Drew couldn’t help it: he forced a humorless chuckle. Right? He’d passed right years ago, and this certainly wasn’t it. “I don’t think Ricky’s gonna feel that way.”
“Ricky is a small-time idiot who isn’t gonna do shit,” Ray said in a voice that could have been a snarl. “There’s bigger, meaner assholes out there than him.”
The remark sounded personal, at least that was Drew’s interpretation, but he made no comment. With a defeated sigh, he shoved his hands in his jeans pockets. “How do we do this, then?”
“Where’d you get that car?” Ray asked.
Another sigh. “Ricky.”
“First, we ditch it. Then we start the paperwork.”
***
“Smoke?”
Lisa waved away the pack of Marlboros that Sly tilted in offering. “I quit two years ago and I’m not getting started again.”
“I quit every day,” he said, shaking one out for himself and sticking it in the corner of his mouth while he searched for his lighter in his jeans pocket. “But then I forget I can’t, so…” The Zippo clicked on with a soft sound and he touched the flame to the cigarette with that air of resigned familiarity that Lisa found somehow comforting. All the men in her life had their own little quirks and flaws – they were refurbished rather than new and shiny – and she had learned long ago that a man with visible faults was more trustworthy than one who kept them hidden and secret. He’d probably die of lung cancer, but Sly always looked at-home and likeably grungy with a smoldering cigarette between his fingers.
Again, she pivoted, hand braced on the rough plaster of the wall beside her head as she peered through the window of the closed door that separated garage from office. Her father and uncle were at her desk, The Lynx standing across from them, looking twitchy. He kept scrubbing a hand back across his short, bristly dark hair and shifting his feet on the tile. Her eyes had raked over every inch of him, from the work boots to the mud-spattered jeans, the baggy black sweatshirt and shifting muscles beneath. And she scowled and chewed unhappily at her lower lip, frustrated at being kicked out of the office, confused by the boxer’s presence and the apparent need for him to sign paperwork.
“What’s he doing here?” she asked, turning back to Sly, arms folded over her chest.
He exhaled smoke through his nostrils and twitched his light brows. “You think if you ask that enough I’ll finally tell you?”
“Worth a shot.”
“No it’s not.”
She narrowed her eyes at him and thought he might have been fighting a smile. “I pity the poor woman who marries you.”
“Me too.”
The door swung open, startling her – all she ever seemed to do anymore was get startled – and Mark stepped, smiling, down into the garage, as disheveled and without worry as always. “That went well,” he announced, and though it shouldn’t have, the comment turned Lisa’s building confusion into anger. A slow anger that sizzled deep in the pit of her stomach, but anger nonetheless.
“What did?”
She could hear the bite in her words, but her uncle didn’t react. He gave her a soft, thoughtful look. “Why don’t you go in and talk to your dad.”
“Because I might as well slam my head against this wall instead.”
Mark chuckled. “Go talk to him.”
With a sigh, she pushed off the wall and headed through the door he held open. Lynx was leaving the same moment she entered, through the main door, and he cast a look back over his shoulder. Their eyes met a moment, but didn’t hold. Lisa knew she was scowling and didn’t blame him for moving on without so much as a nod.
Ray was still at the desk, his elbows propped on its surface, hands clasped together in two tight fists. He stared down at the documents on the blotter and his face was rigid with tension, stubble on his cheeks proving her suspicion that he’d been out all night and hadn’t been at home for a shave that morning. He’d looked tired just thirty minutes ago when he’d arrived, but now he looked stressed, harried. Old. His eyes flicked up to hers, green, like hers, and he motioned toward the chair across from him. “Sit.”
“Dad,” she said in a rush as she slid into the chair, “okay, some weird shit’s been going on and I – ” He cut her off with a wave. She tightened her hands on the arms of the chair until her knuckles went white.
“Later,” he said, and she wanted to think it sounded like a promise. “Tonight. I’ll make it make sense.” His eyes lifted up and over her shoulder; she knew he was looking at the flowers that had come for her, which still didn’t make any sense.
“Why was he here? Lynx?”
“Andrew Forester.” Lisa hadn’t known his real name, but somehow, that seemed to fit. “He’s gonna be working for me.”
“As a mechanic?”
“As muscle for the security business.”
Which made sense…only it
didn’t. Not really. Lynx – Andrew, she guessed – was a strong guy, definite bouncer material, but he was also a boxer and someone Ray didn’t know at all. Granted, Sly and Eddie had been strangers once upon a time too, but somehow the explanation left a sour taste in her mouth. “I didn’t know you were expanding the security business.”
“Lis.” He exhaled in a loud rush and pinched the bridge of his nose. “Just…don’t be difficult, alright?”
The words stung, more than they should have. But she nodded.
“Okay, thanks, Tony.” Ray hung up his cell with a snap and didn’t feel any better. It was six and the sun was a hot, belligerent ball hovering over the tree line. Heat mirages radiated up off the pavement giving the nearly empty parking lot of King Customs all the charm of the Atacama. On either side of the garage, the boutiques and cafes were pulling in their usual dinner business, SUVs and imported sedans swooping around one another like frightened birds. Pedestrians loaded down with shopping bags, clutching iced coffees, their eyes hidden by oversize sunglasses, laughed and talked and strolled up and down the brick sidewalks. It was a sizzling, picture perfect upper class suburban evening, but Ray felt like there was a shadow hanging over him, pulling at him, laughing at him.
Maybe because there was.
“How’d I guess you’d be here?” Mark’s voice sounded behind him, and a moment later, his brother joined him on the bench in front of the KC office.
Though Cheryl and Lisa joked about it, they were not twins. Mark was the happy one, the carefree one, the one who didn’t worry about much and smiled all the time. Mark was lightness and he was darkness. But they were brothers, and no matter how much Mark smiled, he was more perceptive than anyone Ray had ever met. Ray didn’t have to tell him what was weighing on his mind, what was driving him nearly mad, Mark would just know, and after a long moment of comfortable silence, Ray heard the rustling sound of Mark pulling something out of his jeans pocket.
“’All the pretty colors for a pretty girl,’” Mark read off the card that had come with Lisa’s flower arrangement. His voice maintained its usual calmness – the man was calmness personified – but Ray heard the layer of tension in his brother’s words. “That’s what he said, isn’t it?”
“Yeah.” Ice water went shooting through his veins. A cold, hard knot swelled in his chest, pushing at his breastbone, constricting his breathing. His eyelids closed – he blinked – and in that half-second of darkness, he was in the mahogany and leather courtroom again, the fluorescent tubes overhead droning, someone in the gallery smothering a cough. He saw the board and easel up in front of the witness stand, the photos on it; could hear the papery voice of the medical examiner as he described the mortal injuries that had killed the blonde woman and the little girl in the crime scene shots.
Rene Shilling had been thirty-four, blonde, with a large nose that seemed to fit her face and wasn’t unattractive. In the first photo, she’d been posed with her daughter Anna, the little girl a miniature of her mother. The prosecution had shown family photos from a birthday party, Rene behind Anna, loving hands on her girl’s shoulders, to drum up sympathy for the victims; it was a tactic that worked well, even on Ray. In his mind, he’d superimposed Cheryl’s face over Rene’s, Lisa’s over Anna’s.
And then the crime scene photos had been paraded out for all to see amid gasps and swears. On a sticky, May afternoon, the Shillings’ neighbor Linda Peterson used her spare key to let herself into the Shillings’ home. The sprinkler had been left on and was flooding the garden, washing pine chips out into the street. And Rene hadn’t answered the house phone or her cell. Linda had just been going in to check, she’d said, tears clogging her throat, just to make sure the girls were alright.
She’d found Rene on the living room floor beside the coffee table, her chest on the rug, her face staring blankly up at the ceiling. Her neck had been broken. And all around her, flowers.
Anna was in her bed, her eyes closed, covered in blood and flowers. A note on her white nightstand beside her My Little Pony lamp had read: All the pretty colors for a pretty girl.
Ray saw all that in the time it took him to blink, and afterward, the balmy afternoon felt like December. In Montana.
His last case, the one in which he’d turned over damning evidence about his client to the DA, the one that had left him disbarred and shunned, had been the one in which he’d represented Rene Shilling’s killer, and husband, Carl. The evidence had been thrown out, though. Ray had lost his job. Carl had been put away on tax evasion charges because the DA had been bloodthirsty and refused to let him walk away.
“Did you call Tony?” Mark asked.
Tony Carillo had been Ray’s partner and still represented the family. “Yeah. He said he’d try and find out when Shilling was released. If he’s been released, he said.”
“That case got a lot of press.” Mark played devil’s advocate. “This could just be a coincidence. And hell, maybe someone really did just send Lis flowers. She’s got lots of guys watching her down at the bar. I thought Drew’s eyes were gonna bug outta his head.”
But Ray shook his head. “That bit about the note was never leaked to the press. What are the odds some secret admirer would write that exact thing on a card? No.” His lips pressed together into a firm, thin line. “I don’t believe in coincidences.”
“Eddie did this? Eddie?” Cheryl glanced up and locked eyes with her daughter.
Lisa wrinkled her nose up in disbelief. “No way could he have stayed that straight-faced all day,” she argued. Her flowers were sitting on the kitchen counter beside her mother’s identical arrangement and she was having extreme doubts about her dad’s explanation. “I’m not buying it.” A glance proved that Ray was still at the table, his fingers still drumming restlessly on top. “Did he tell you he sent them?”
He shrugged, but Lisa didn’t miss the dark look that flitted across his face. “More or less.”
Deciding that if he was too concerned about their mystery gifts, he’d tell them, she shared a glance with her mother that said oh well and went to the fridge, digging a Coke out amidst the clutter of beers on the top shelf. “So, Dad.” She popped the tab and turned around to face him, putting her back against the fridge. His face seemed so heavily lined with some unnamed stress that guilt nearly drove her to withdraw the inquiry, but she pushed on. “Earlier, you said we’d talk tonight.”
Cheryl was at the sink adding fresh water to the flower vases and suppressed a snort.
Lisa said a silent thank you to her mother for that one little sound, because she could tell his wife’s doubt was what pushed Ray over the edge in a favorable direction.
“Yeah, I guess I did,” he muttered, motioning toward the chair to his left that was Lisa’s usual seat at dinner. “And you’ll just bug the hell out of me ‘til I talk to you,” he correctly assumed as she sat and put her elbows up on the table in a mirror of his position.
Cheryl murmured an agreement.
Ray sighed. Wiped a hand down his face and looked even more exhausted than he had. Lisa got the impression he hated this worse than the where-do-babies-come-from talk. Then he looked at her with closed-off eyes and asked, “So what did you wanna talk to me about?”
There was a loud bang from the sink as Cheryl dropped the pot she’d been scrubbing. She picked it back up with a muttered word Lisa couldn’t make out.
“Dad.” Lisa sighed and decided that being subtle wasn’t going to work. “Can we please stop playing this game? What’s with all the whispering shit at the garage with you and the guys?”
He lifted a single brow that had her slumping down against the table. “Whispering shit” had been pushing it and she knew it, but she was just so frustrated. And more frustrating than the actual frustration was the notion that she was worrying over what was probably nothing at all. He was her dad, not her best friend; he wasn’t obliged to tell her every little thing about his life and his business.
She’d decided to bury all her I-shoulda-been-
a-boy feelings once more and go change for job number two, but his eyes moved away from hers, swinging down like heavy green pendulums to land on the tabletop, and a muscle in his jaw twitched: a sure sign he was about to speak. His words shocked her. “You’re a good girl, Lis.” He chuckled. “Not always ‘good,’ really, but no one could ever say that you weren’t loyal. Or that you weren’t a Russell.”
Lisa snuck a look toward her mother but was met by Cheryl’s back; she still scrubbed dishes as if she couldn’t hear them.
“The security business,” Ray continued, “is getting bigger. Word of mouth and all that.”
“So that’s why you’re hiring the Ly…er, I mean Andrew.”
He nodded. “That’s part of why, yeah. Also because…” She swore she could see the wheels and cogs in his head grinding against one another as he fought the urge to keep whatever he was about to tell her locked away. “He” – another sigh –“is helping us. Your uncle and Eddie and Sly and me: he’s helping all of us…help someone else.”
Growing up the daughter of an attorney had taught her to listen with more than her ears, to read between the lines more often than she took words at face value. Perfectly normal, perfectly legal “help” didn’t involve hushed conversations and underground boxing matches. She recognized all this, accepted it without a backward thought, and took a mental step forward. “That’s why we went to the Pit Masters that night, so you could meet him.” Her father gave nothing away via facial expression or voiced word. But his eyes said “yes.” She frowned. “What did you think I was gonna do, Dad? Run to the cops? Tell them you gamble and hire on boxers? I wouldn’t – ”
“I know you wouldn’t,” he said before she could get too insulted. “Trust me: anything I keep back from you, I keep back so you’ll be safe.”
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