Lay It Down

by Cara McKenna

  And you mustn’t keep a woman waiting, as his mother liked to say.

  “Of course not,” he said. “It’s just been busy around here, development drama—”

  “Spare me the banalities of your work-a-day life, and tell me where my money is.”

  “It’s on its way—you know I’m good for it.”

  “Talk’s cheap, and your IOU is growing hefty. We’re not a charity, and your little gambling habit wasn’t bingo night with the girls from the retirement home.”

  “I know that—”

  “One hundred sixty-three grand.”

  Shit, that interest . . . The original loss had been seventy-six thousand, barely a year ago. “I’ll get it. I should be seeing some investment dividends—”

  “I want to see forty of it in the next month, or the terms of the interest change. I’m talking about blood, not bills. I have an employee who enjoys that kind of work. Personally, I much prefer the cash. So pay. Me.”

  “I will. One month.”

  “Good. Because when I run out of parts of you to break, we start looking to your loved ones.”

  He thought of his elderly mother, his brother, his teenage niece and nephew, guts clenching. “I understand.”

  “I hope you do.” And the line went dead.

  “Damn.” He tossed the pay-as-you-go phone on the hard earth beside him and rubbed his face as if aiming to strip the skin—and regretted it a moment later, registering where those hands had been.

  One hundred sixty-three grand. Fucking Vegas . . .

  Fucking ironic that now he depended on Fortuity’s future casino to pay off the mistakes he’d made at one down south.

  It was a shame, all this business with the remains, and what had needed to be done about the deputy . . . But at the end of the day, you had to think of yourself first. Yourself, and your loved ones.

  He’d brought a cold can of seltzer with him. Still kneeling, back aching, he opened it with his fingers wrapped in his shirttail. It didn’t do much to cool his fevered head.

  Goddamn, this was getting complicated, all the way up through Sunnyside. The corporate behemoth was obsessed with their bottom line, dangling juicy incentives in front of the Virgin River managers, rewarding speed above quality. In turn, Virgin River was obsessed with its early completion bonus . . . not to mention delivering on the outrageous promises they’d made to secure the job in the first place. Money money money money. All anybody cared about. Himself included. Exhausting way to exist, but that was how it went.

  He got uneasily to his feet, knees whining. Now there were pushy locals trying to get involved, and Sunnyside was clued in. Too many prying eyes and ears, trained too close to home.

  Still, none of those pressures mattered when you put them up against the ones from his creditors. He’d gotten himself into this shit—no way around that. He had to suck it up and accept that he was stuck dancing this jig until this latest threat to progress was dodged. His man at the top of the Virgin River food chain owed him a big slice in the next two or three weeks, once they hit some deadline Sunnyside had laid out for them—enough cash to appease the jackals in Vegas for the time being.

  He pressed the cold can to his forehead, feeling an ache growing between his brows.

  Nobody ever said progress was pretty.

  Though goddamn, he’d never imagined it’d get this ugly.

  Chapter 15

  As the distant mantel clock chimed seven the next morning, Casey was standing before the door of his childhood bedroom in his shorts, dragging his fingers through sleep-matted hair. His Super Bowl XXXIII poster was still taped to the wood, though the yellow ink had bleached away. He stared at Terrell Davis’s purple face, straining for sounds. Vince had just left, evidenced by the rumble of his bike, and Casey could just make out the murmur of his mother’s spacey voice, exchanging words with Nita’s firm one.

  My mother . . . If you say so.

  That crazy woman was nothing like the mom who’d raised him and Vince. That perennially—and rightfully—fed-up single mother of two aggravating, physical boys. Fed up, but loving and warm. She’d been really pretty then, too, with long, glamorous hair like that chick who played Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman, and Casey had been an awkward mix of proud and pissed about his friends’ evolving interest in her. Had the term MILF existed in those days, he’d have had cause to break some noses. Provided Vince didn’t beat him to it.

  Now the woman was a haunted husk at best. Depressing as hell, just as Casey had been expecting. Just as he’d been dreading, these past nine years. And yeah, that was way too long to have avoided this homecoming, but he was here now.

  And sticking around over his dead body.

  Vince had told him last night, he needed Casey here. For how long? he’d asked, and been fed a load of nonanswers. Until they got to the bottom of what Vince seemed to think was Alex Dunn’s murder, based on not a lot. The only thing that had given Casey some pause was Vince’s tone. His conviction about this shit, when Vince never let you know he cared about anything aside from bikes and pussy. He really did believe something shady was happening in Fortuity.

  But maybe he’s losing his mind, too.

  Casey shivered. His jeans were by the foot of the bed, and he eased them up his legs, bullet wound shrieking, then hopped a few paces to pull a fresh tee out of his duffel bag.

  Their mom had tipped officially off her rocker when Casey had been twenty-two. That meant she’d come unhinged in her midforties. Which meant that if Vince was losing it to a similar tune, he was a good decade ahead of schedule.

  Casey swallowed, eyes trained on the desert through the window above his too-small childhood bed. And when exactly did I start losing it?

  Twenty-seven.

  Vince had told him last night, their mother saw things.

  Visions. Hallucinations, he had to mean, like the ones Casey had been seeing on and off for the past five years. Not often, and they were brief.

  A shimmery haze would come over his eyesight, like the world was being run through some cheesy sci-fi filter, and his hearing would go mono. First couple times, he’d assumed he’d been slipped something psychotropic, because he flat-out saw shit, shit that wasn’t there. Conversations that weren’t actually happening, snatches of events that weren’t his memories. He’d lost a girlfriend over it, a couple years back. Gone into a spell in a hotel room with her, and she’d said his eyes had turned glassy and he’d told her she was fucking around on him. That was what he’d seen, anyhow. Her with some guy. Apparently he’d said stuff to her, while he’d been tuned out. He’d barely got the shimmery shit out of his periphery and she was leaving, muttering about drugs. Man, what a bitch. He could’ve been having a stroke or a seizure for all she knew, and she just took off, pissed at him?

  Whatever. Like anybody stuck around. Not anybody with an ounce of sense, that was.

  Things had gone quiet in the rest of the house, and Casey took a deep breath, then eased his door open. He could see Nita on the couch, leafing through a magazine, and heard the muffled drone of a TV from the direction of his mom’s room.

  Though she had her back to him, Nita said, “She’ll be checked out for the next few hours, Case.”

  Damn, that woman had eyes in the back of her head. It had been a rare feat to get away with anything when Nita had babysat him and Vince. She’d watched them a lot, too, after their dad had run off and their mom had taken a second job. Nita had been young then—early twenties, probably, and still married. She’d never had kids, and Casey sometimes wondered if he and Vince might’ve had something to do with that decision.

  He limped across the room and leaned in to give her a kiss on the cheek. They’d caught up some last night, and she hadn’t changed a bit. More gray hair, sure, and a few pounds heavier, but steady as ever. Same surrogate aunt she’d always been to him. She’d never been pretty like Dee Grossier, but way more fun. Probably because she hadn’t had to live with two young boys hell-bent on destroying her home and pos
sessions. The number of times she’d materialized to snatch a book of matches out of Casey’s hands . . .

  “You got sonic hearing, I swear to Christ.” Casey dropped onto the recliner with a wince. The chair felt smaller than he’d remembered. His dad’s old chair. Back when the guy had been around, nobody but him sat in it. That’s real leather. I catch your ass on it, I’ll skin you and make a matching footrest. After he’d split, Casey hadn’t dared sit on the thing for years, convinced its owner was coming back, that he’d sense the trespass. Or that sitting in it might break some spell, make it so he never came back. Probably hadn’t chanced it till he’d been fifteen. Even then he’d kept one eye on the door.

  “How’s that thigh?” Nita asked, not looking up.

  “Worse than last night, if that’s possible.”

  “The perils of sobriety,” she said dryly.

  Casey glanced toward the back hall. “How long’s she . . .”

  “She won’t be out of her room until the morning shows are over at eleven. Even then it’s just for the bathroom and a snack, before the game shows start up.”

  He nodded, depressed as hell.

  “Scared of her, huh?”

  “Nah.”

  Nita’s smirk said she wasn’t buying it, and she flipped to the next page in what looked like a quilting catalog.

  “Not scared,” Casey insisted. “It’s just sad, you know? That ain’t my mom.”

  “You can still catch her, in moments here and there.”

  “She used to pay you to babysit us, and now we’re paying you to babysit her . . . That’s seriously warped.”

  “That’s life, kiddo.”

  Life. Was this what his daily life might look like in fifteen years? A piss at ten fifty-eight, just in time to catch The Price Is Right?

  Shoot me now. Oh, wait. He glanced at his thigh, bandages bulky beneath his jeans. Too late.

  “You want a refill?” he asked, getting to his feet and hiding the stab of pain.

  “Sure.”

  He topped off Nita’s mug from the coffeemaker and filled one for himself, shuffling back to the living room. As he settled in the recliner, he found the nuts to say, “Vince told me, last night . . . about her seeing stuff.”

  He held his breath, waiting for her to tell him it had all been some bad joke, but all she said was, “’Bout time.”

  “How long’s she been having . . .” What had Vince called them?

  “The visions?”

  “Yeah, whatever they are.” And what did they look like? Had she said? Did they look like his?

  Nita folded the catalog in her lap and looked to the ceiling. “When did you leave us? Ten years ago?”

  “Nine. And I didn’t leave you. That’s just what kids do—what they’re supposed to do. They strike out on their own.” Parents could desert; children merely fledged.

  “No need to get defensive.”

  Casey nearly argued with that, but he bit his tongue. No use. She was way smarter than him.

  Nita went on. “Vince said she had the first vision he knew of right before you took off—the one where she saw you leaving.”

  Casey froze with his mug halfway to his mouth. “Wait. What? What do you mean, saw me leaving?”

  “She saw you leaving. She told your brother you’d be leaving on a sky blue horse . . . Think that’s what he said. Next thing we all know, you show up in that robin’s egg Mustang. Then you’re gone.”

  All he could do was blink.

  “What?” Nita asked, then sipped her coffee. “Vince promised me he was going to tell you all this last night.”

  “He did. Kind of.” He’d said their mom had had visions, but nothing about them being . . . Jesus, what? Psychic or something? They’d been pretty drunk, though, passing a bottle of Old Crow back and forth across the arthritic picnic table at the back edge of the lawn.

  “He never said she, like, foresaw anything. I thought he meant she had hallucinations.” Like I do.

  “She saw you go. And she saw something else a couple years later, something to do with Raina Harper. Vince was with her for that one, too, and some drama went down that he won’t tell me about. But far as I know, whatever your mother saw, it came true. Or nearly did. And it would’ve been bad, if Vince hadn’t intervened.”

  Casey stared at her. “You understand how fucking insane that sounds?”

  She shot him a look. Back in the day, that glare would’ve been accompanied by a gesture of rubbing fingers, demanding he give her a dollar for the cuss.

  “Sorry. How frigging insane, okay?”

  “Yes, of course I do. Better than just about anybody. That’s why your brother and I have always kept it to ourselves.”

  “Has she ever had one in front of you?”

  Nita nodded. “Only the one, and nothing near as dramatic as the ones Vince seems to trigger. But yes, I was out in the yard with her one afternoon, taking down the decorations maybe five Christmasses ago. You remember that twisted old tree that used to stand in the corner? She pointed to that thing and she told me, clear as a summer sky, ‘That’ll be coming down tomorrow. Vince can chop it up for the stove.’ And I was like, sure, whatever you say, Dee. Like that tree was going anyplace after standing there for decades, all but petrified.”

  “And?”

  “And the next night it gets struck by lightning, snaps clean in half.”

  Casey felt cold, like Lights Out had swallowed the sun twelve hours ahead of schedule. “That’s really fucked-up, Nita.”

  She ignored the swearing. “It is. Guess your brother and I have gotten used to it, for better or worse . . . One thing that’s especially strange is that sometimes when she has one, it comes with some weird weather. Often. The lightning, and the day you left we had that crazy dust storm, remember?”

  He did. As he’d driven off, aimed due south, it had felt like a big, final fuck you from the desert itself, pebbles pinging off his windscreen and nicking his paint. “Yeah. I remember.”

  “And the time when Raina got in trouble, it was strange that night, too. A meteor shower or something? Yes—I remember, a bunch of the younger folks had gone out to Big Rock to get stoned and watch.”

  “This is some real Twilight Zone shit.”

  “Let’s hope this new vision doesn’t bring a tsunami to town.”

  “Wait—new vision?” Vince had mentioned something about that, but Casey’s recollection had gone spotty at that point in the brotherly bonding.

  “Yes. Yesterday morning, right after you got shot, in fact. Your brother’s been funny about the details, but something to do with that young woman he’s taken up with. And something to do with Alex.” She crossed herself.

  “Fucking hell . . .” Casey dropped his head back to stare at the ceiling. Fucking psychic visions, was it? That couldn’t be what he had, though. He imagined calling up that ex of his, asking, Remember when I had that spell and you ditched me? Any chance you fucked a big, shaven-headed dude with a cheesy-ass tribal tattoo on his shoulder, not long after? And the other stuff he’d seen . . . Just bits and pieces. Once, in that casino . . .

  Whoa.

  Yeah, the casino. He’d spaced out at the blackjack table, lost in tunnel-vision-ville. Lost in a crazy trip, something about a race. A track-and-field race, and a skinny black dude in a green skin suit busting through the tape with his arms raised in triumph. It’d been the Summer Olympics, the highlights impossible to escape on TV. He’d chalked it up to that, but what if . . . What if that race hadn’t been run, yet, when he’d seen that? What if that ropey African dude had been a dark horse, maybe? What if Casey could’ve put a bet on that event? You could bet on anything in Vegas. His wheels were turning, now.

  “Casey?” Nita’s voice drew him out of the clouds and back into the busted old BarcaLounger.

  “Sorry. Yeah?”

  “You all right?”

  He sighed, playing up his confusion. Let her think he found this all completely far-fetched. Not that it was hitting eer
ily—and intriguingly—close to home.

  “I dunno. I knew it’d be awkward, coming back. But this is all just straight-up fucked.”

  She sipped her coffee, nodding faintly. “Welcome to my world, Case.”

  He held up his mug in a toast, but his mind was racing with questions, worries, schemes . . .

  After all, if he was doomed to lose his marbles by forty, stuck shuffling around in his slippers like his mom . . . Hell, if that was his crappy-ass dead-end future, he owed it to himself to figure out this vision shit. Understand it, maybe harness it for a profit. Make the motherfucking most of it, before it drove him insane.

  He looked to Nita. “Maybe it’s about time I got more involved.”

  “You mean here? You thinking of sticking around?”

  “I might be.”

  “Good for you, Casey. Your brother could use the support, whether he’d ever admit it or not.”

  “No kidding. He’d rather order me to stay than ask nicely.” He’d goddamn tricked him, in fact, and with the lowest goddamn lie a man could tell. But come on—like anything less would’ve actually brought me back. Well played, big brother.

  “If staying here in the house is too much, to start off,” Nita said, “you’re welcome to my guest room, for a week or two. Provided you’ve gained some housekeeping skills since you were a teenager.”

  “I’d like to think I’ve matured some in the last frigging decade.”

  “Yes, Casey.” She drained her mug and stood with a sigh. “We’d all like to think that.”

  • • •

  Vince had risen early, his body clock still set to quarry time. He’d lain in bed for five minutes, nerves yanked in a dozen directions at once. He’d finally gotten with Kim, and goddamn, it’d been good. Fucking amazing. That should’ve left him spent and calm, but his convo with Casey jumbled it up. And all the unanswered questions about Alex, the mystery of Kim’s apparent involvement. And his little playdate with Duncan Welch, later in the morning.