Fuck, he hoped she’d gotten the message and really handled her shit. He did not want to lean on her more.
Okay, that was his in—why he was here. Checking in, seeing how she was doing on the handling of her shit. He’d figure out a way to wedge in an apology without shifting the power balance. She didn’t need to accept it. He only needed to say it.
He got out and went to the door.
There was a security system, with a buzzer and a camera. He pushed the button and looked up at the camera, taking off his sunglasses and tucking them inside his suit jacket.
A tinny version of her voice came through the speaker after a few moments. “What do you want?”
“I’m checking in. Come on and let me in.”
“I handled it. I fired her. No more selling on the property.”
He was surprised. The way she’d fought for the waitress, putting herself in harm’s way for her, he’d thought they were close. He had not expected her to cut the chick loose. “Let’s talk.”
A silence followed, long enough that Tony began to feel like a fool and consider his options for changing that, when her voice came through again. “I’m coming down.”
A minute or so later, the locks shifted, and she opened the door.
Several hours before the club opened, she wore cutoff shorts and a loose white t-shirt. The cotton was thin, and he could see a striped bikini top under it. Looked like she was on her way to or from the beach. Her hair, much blonder without the gel she used to slick it back, was tousled, and she wasn’t wearing any makeup. She looked entirely different this way, but still damn hot.
There was a significant bruise on her forehead, new enough to still be reddish, with a freshly scabbed cut slicing through it.
“What happened to you?” Without thinking, he reached out, but she yanked her head back.
“It’s nothing.” She stepped back, clearing the way for him to enter. They were in a little hallway—more of a nook, really. She walked ahead a few feet, until they were in the club kitchen, and she flipped on a series of switches, flooding the big room with light.
It was a clean, bright industrial kitchen. He’d been in plenty around the Cove. This one stood out a bit as particularly clean and uncluttered, probably because it was new. Under the cooking aromas that lingered, the white walls still held the scent of fresh paint.
Billy went all the way around the big steel work island and faced him. “And I told you, I handled the problem.”
She’d obviously meant to put the island between them, and Tony let her have that. “No, you fired the problem. That doesn’t mean she’s not going to sell in the Cove. Maybe you made her need to do it more.”
Her eyes flared wide; she hadn’t thought of that. “You can’t possibly think to hold me responsible for what she does anywhere in town. I fired her and banned her from the premises. What more do you suggest I do?”
“You can tell me who she deals to.”
Billy laughed, an irritated bark. “I didn’t know she was dealing, so why would you think I’d know who to?”
“You could have asked her. Or make it easy for me to ask her.”
“We already established that I’m not interested in making it easy for you to get to her.”
“But you fired her, and banned her. How is that protecting her?” It wasn’t a serious question, really. He didn’t want Billy between him and the waitress, and now she wasn’t. But he found he couldn’t help himself; something about her made him want to challenge her. He liked the way her eyes lit up. Goddamn, but this chick was sexy.
Now he walked around the island, toward her. She watched him, her eyes tight with wariness, but didn’t move. He had no intent to get in her space again, not uninvited, but he wanted to change the tone of this encounter. So he had to stop being an asshole.
When he got to her side and stood less than two feet away, she said, “She knows you’re onto her now. She won’t deal in the Cove. Please, just leave her alone.”
“If you’re right, then nobody has to worry about that. Right? It’s good, that you fired her. You did good.”
“Good. Then you can go.”
Again, that bruise on her forehead drew his attention. It wasn’t a normal place to take a punch. But if she’d been hit with something, a weapon—like a bat ... “What happened to your head, Billy? Who did it?”
He reached out, and this time his fingers touched her before she backed away. Tony thought he caught a flutter of something in that featherweight touch, though. Like she’d almost leaned in instead.
She snapped out another harsh laugh and cut off his thought before he could pursue it. “That’s rich. You’ve been threatening me for days, and you give a fuck if somebody else hurt me?” Her tone was steeped in contempt. Maybe too much, like she was force-feeding herself with it.
“Did they?”
“No. I was surfing and wiped out.”
She played golf, and she surfed—she was kind of a jock. He could believe it; she had an athlete’s body, not bulky but toned. He really saw it now, with the little shorts and t-shirt she was wearing. Not that it mattered. Her expressive face was the picture of disgust, and he couldn’t get a read on whether it was real or she was putting on a show. He picked up animosity from her in strong waves, but there was something else pulsing through it, too.
He decided to ask straight out. “You really hate me, don’t you?”
“Is there something else I should feel for you? You threaten me, assault me—”
“I’m sorry about that. I wouldn’t’ve—I don’t ...” Tony clenched his jaw shut. It was known that Paganos shielded innocents—except a seven-year-old boy—and protected women and children, but Tony’s little game had been an implicit threat. He’d known it at the time and done it anyway, and Billy had taken it that way. He couldn’t admit to an empty threat. He put a lot of hurt on a lot of people, but his reputation was the reason he didn’t have to hurt more. So he stuck with the apology and said it again, “I’m sorry.”
“Are you.” She said the words flat, like skepticism had ironed out the question mark.
“I am. I wish I didn’t have to do it.”
A sneering grin twisted up one cheek. “As apologies go, it’s about what I’d expect from you. And I don’t believe it one bit. I think you get off on making women scared. You were hard the other night.”
He hated her contempt, and her disbelief, and her truth. It made him feel defensive, and that made him feel weak—and he hated that above all. Why did this fucking matter? She was nothing. He’d apologized, and he’d meant it. If that was the box he’d needed to check off, it was checked. Absolution unlocked.
The shark in Tony took over, and he grabbed her and pushed her back against the island. She gasped and went rigid, but she didn’t fight him—except with those eyes, flashing blue fury at him.
“You felt me, did you? Well, baby, I felt you, too. You didn’t hate it so much.”
She blinked, and he knew it was true.
“You are a bastard,” she snarled in a whisper.
“I told you before, you gotta watch how you talk about my ma. I’ll let myself out.”
He let her go and went to the door.
He needed to stay away from this chick.
~ 8 ~
West Egg was closed on Mondays, so it was Billy’s only day off in the week. Eventually, when the club was operating in the black, she intended to hire an assistant manager, so she could have help running things, but for now, when the club was open, she was there.
By nature a night person, and deeply invested in making this endeavor work, she didn’t mind the hours. The club was buttoned up by three a.m., and then she either went up to bed or hung out with some paperwork or something and waited for dawn so she could surf, and then went to bed. It worked for her.
Even so, she needed her Mondays. Sometimes she spent the entire day in bed, bingeing Netflix. Sometimes she got up and out and ran errands. What she tried not to do on Monday was socialize. Mixing and ming
ling all night, every night, in a constant crush of people and noise, she protected her Mondays for, above all else, calm.
On the day after her most recent upsetting encounter with Tony, Billy slept until noon, made herself a brunchy meal and good coffee in the kitchen downstairs, and decided to head to Corti’s Market and stock up on food for herself. While she was out, she hit a couple of boutiques in town, bought some clothes and a new pair of boots, and stopped in the sweet shop for a bag of cherry sours.
She was having a pretty perfect day, and keeping her mind occupied, away from thoughts that burned. Like Tony WhatsHisName. That surprise invasion yesterday had her spun. He’d offered a non-apology—Seriously. I’m sorry I had to do it?—but why had he bothered with even that pathetic attempt? Why did he fucking care if she hated him? And then he’d grabbed her and gotten in her face again. So ... huh?
She couldn’t decide if he was a threat to her now or not. And that was the reason he kept creeping into every break in her thoughts. That had to be the reason.
Jesus. There he was again, creeping in and taking over her brain.
Finding herself in need of another distraction, instead of heading straight to the market, Billy parked on the street and went into Cover to Cover Books. That would keep her mind occupied for a while.
~oOo~
The sun was low, and the boardwalk was in that peak of weekday busyness, when the beaches started to empty, but vacationers weren’t ready to pack their day up just yet. They lingered on the boardwalk, getting some version of dinner at the trucks and kiosks, loitering in the arcade, grabbing up the souvenirs they hadn’t wanted to lug around all day.
Billy liked that bustle, and she liked to be separate from it. The ‘Club Parking Only’ signs kept most beachgoers from parking illegally on the lot, and her contract with Cove Towing took care of those who did. So she could stand on her property on an evening like this and watch the boardwalk, feel involved and yet at peace.
Except for tonight. She pulled into the small back lot and stopped. On what should have been an empty expanse of glittering white gravel, a minivan was parked. An old green Windstar, one she knew intimately well. As she sat there, barely on the lot, and stared, the driver’s door opened, and a man in late middle age stepped out.
Cain Jones. Calvin, actually, on his birth certificate. But when he’d started playing guitar in high school, he’d decided ‘Cain’ was cooler and, as he put it, ‘cut the lame out of my name.’
Her father.
She hadn’t seen him in nearly five years.
Dressed all in black, as usual—the leather pants were kind of ridiculous in this ninety-degree sauna of a summer—his shirt unbuttoned halfway down his chest, his dyed-black hair in the product-laden bedhead tousle that took him an hour to get just so, he leaned against the side of his POS van, crossed his arms over his paunch, and grinned.
Her father, rock god of his own fantasies.
What in the amplified fuck was he doing here?
The only way to answer that question was to face the problem parked at her door. So she pulled the Vanagon up and parked beside her father’s Windstar.
He moseyed over to her side as she opened the door. “You still driving this old heap?” he asked in his smoke-strafed, whiskey-soaked baritone.
Cain had given her the VW when she graduated high school, after he’d ‘upgraded’ to the used Windstar. The VW had been his touring van back then. She’d had a lot of work done on it over the years.
She closed the driver’s door. “Hi, Cain.”
“How ya doin’, Wild Bill?” He lifted his arms, and Billy let herself be hugged, but only briefly, and then stepped back.
“What are you doing here? How’d you know where I was?” Not from her mother, certainly. Allie would step over Cain’s bleeding body to get to a penny on the street. There was no way she’d help him reconnect with Billy.
She wasn’t hiding from her father, she simply didn’t want to see him. He brought trouble with him wherever he went.
“How’d you know I was here?” she asked again, and this time got through.
“You’re my baby girl. I should know where you are.”
Billy didn’t respond to that.
Cain pulled his phone from his black vest and fiddled with it for a minute, swiping around until he found what he wanted. Then he handed it to her.
It was a YouTube video, and she didn’t need to start it to know why he was here. “Fuck.”
She was going to kill Carly. Choke her out, revive her, and choke her dead. Dump her body in the ocean for the fish to eat, then pull up her skeleton and incinerate it. Scatter the ashes in the elephant exhibit at the zoo and let Dumbo and his buddies shit all over them.
Cain reached over and tapped the screen, and her recent rendition of ‘Try’ began to play. “You look great, Bill. Good as ever. Glad to see you back at it.”
She swiped the video away and handed him his phone. “I’m not back at it. That was a one-off, and under duress. Why are you here?”
But she knew, didn’t she? Her father was a decent guitarist and not a bad singer. He’d started playing paying gigs in high school, when he and his buddies took their little garage band out for parties and open mics—and the occasional gig at the drummer’s uncle’s corner tavern. After high school, with a new band, he’d found a regional following as a cover band and had started to make almost enough to live on. They’d sold homemade CDs out of the back of the Vanagon, but their original stuff never caught on. Her father thought himself a songwriter, but he wasn’t a good one.
It was then he’d met and knocked up the wild-child heiress Alexandra Bradford, and Billy’s story began.
She had not a single mental image of her parents as a couple. By the time she was old enough to form long-term memories, she knew her parents despised each other. Her father rolled in and out of her life like a storm front, showing up a few times a year, inciting a screaming fight with Allie until somehow she agreed to turn Billy over to him for a weekend or sometimes a week, occasionally a few weeks.
Her keenest recollections of those sporadic weekends and weeks were bathed in neon light and shadow. She had vivid sense memories of sitting in countless bars while her father played, spinning around on countless barstools, under the care of nameless bartenders, being fed peanuts and Cokes served with cherries speared on pink plastic swords.
Then, in middle school, when her father found out she could sing, he’d started pulling her up on stage with him. She’d enjoyed that.
When she was in high school, he gave her her first bump of coke.
By the time she was in college, getting her nerdy French Studies degree at Smith, she was using regularly, singing with her father and whatever band he was with at the time—he went through a lot of them—whenever they were close enough to swing by and pick her up, and bailing him out of an array of calamities, including actual jail a few times.
Then he’d disappeared. Billy hadn’t seen him again for three years. In that time, she got straight, and she got smart. And she’d stopped fucking singing. She wanted no part of any part of that period of her life.
As Carly fucking well knew.
Had Billy been an addict? The evidence was not conclusive. She’d kept her grades solid, she hadn’t had much trouble going cold turkey—her withdrawal had amounted to a week or so of supremely shitty mood, and then she’d been fine—and she hadn’t felt strongly tempted to partake in the eight years since.
Almost five years ago, while she was home in Boston, living with her mom and waitressing at a chichi club, Cain had shown up again, calling the house landline collect from a jail cell in some Podunk town in upstate New York. He’d been out of his mind and picked a fight with his band while they were on stage. It turned into a brawl with the whole bar involved. Tore up their equipment, the stage, and the bar, and four people landed in the hospital.
She’d bailed him out and given him a choice: get into rehab and straighten his ass out, or never c
ontact her again.
And here he was, five years later. Her drug-fucked, ne’er-do-well, self-absorbed father, pulling trouble on wheels behind him, at the precise moment when his bullshit could get her deeply fucked with the Pagano Brothers.
All because Carly had pulled her little stunt meant to ‘help’ her.
God save her from friends and family.
Cain had the video playing. Billy reached over and tapped the screen to pause it. She had groceries in the van, including a pint of Ben & Jerry’s Chocolate Therapy, so ...
“Why. Are. You. Here?”
“I just wanna talk, Billy. I’m your old man, and I missed you.”
“It’s been five years. I doubt you missed me that much.”
“Can we go in? Show me around your new club?”
He was going to ask her for work. Best case, he wanted her to hire whatever band had been stupid enough to take him on. Worst case—what was worst case? How low could Cain Jones go? How much lower than he’d already dragged her? She was afraid to imagine.
But her groceries were in the hot van, and she wanted that fucking ice cream. Moreover, she didn’t want to do whatever was going to get done out here in the open.
“Fine. Help me get my groceries in.”
~oOo~
“Wow, baby.” Cain set the bags on the steel counter. “This is beautiful!”
All he’d seen was the kitchen. Billy ignored him and rescued her ice cream from a bag. Occupying herself putting groceries in the fridge, she tried to figure out what to say, how to handle this. Not for one second did she think he was here just to reconnect. He wanted something. He always wanted something, even if it was just her. And he couldn’t have her or anything else.
When she was out of groceries to put away, Billy closed the fridge and turned to face her father. He was at the far side of the room, reading the names on the staff lockers.
He looked over and saw her facing him. Returning to the island with a big grin—she saw that he’d never gotten dental work to repair the molar he’d lost in that brawl—he said, “You’re legit, Wild Bill. This is the real deal. Employees and everything. I guess Old Man Bradford left you a bundle, eh?”
Accidental Evils Page 9