Give It All

by Cara McKenna

  What the frigging frack?

  She stared at him. “You OCD or something?”

  He swallowed. “Yes. I am. Are you really so surprised?”

  She considered it. Maybe twenty-four hours ago, before she’d seen him shaking in the bar, yes, she’d have been surprised. But after last night?

  “I dunno,” she said. “You seem so in control. Isn’t OCD all about being powerless?”

  His expression was impossible to interpret. “Power is nothing if not mercurial.”

  “You don’t seem like a germophobe.” Fussy sometimes, but he’d watched her make his sandwich and eaten it without any obvious distress. Then again, he’d been medicated.

  “I’m not offended by germs so much as I am imperfection.”

  “How often do you need to do that kind of stuff?” she asked.

  He considered it. “With some things I have to arrange them every day, before I can leave the room. Make the bed just so, set the toiletries in their correct places, organize the items on my desk. Quite a thorough going-over with a lint brush,” he added, glancing at his cat.

  His cat—the reason Kim had seen him crack his door open, the party he’d spoken to before entering? Not awaiting a roommate’s permission to enter, but making sure his pet didn’t escape.

  “What about scouring your bathroom?” she asked.

  “As often as my brain demands it. When I’m busy, perhaps two or three times a week.”

  “And now that you’re idle?”

  He frowned. “Twice a day, lately.”

  “Jesus. That sounds exhausting.”

  A dry smile. “Exhausting, degrading, tiresome. Anyone you see who looks the picture of control . . . It’s all a costume. Underneath you’ll always find a naked, trembling fraud. Trust me.”

  She stared at him, long and hard. His hair was messier than usual, feet surely dirty from the parking lot, manicured hands likely still stinking of rubber . . . but his clothes were immaculate, despite the casual getup. He was a wreck, dressing daily to pass for a successful, commanding professional. And just now, he was failing.

  “Do you even realize how strong the fumes are, in there? It’s a wonder you haven’t passed out and cracked your skull on the bathtub.”

  “There’s no wonder in any of it, merely dysfunction.”

  She studied Duncan’s unearthly face, like the perfect façade of a fancy house . . . but behind the drawn curtains, junk stacked up to the ceiling. “This what you take the pills for?”

  “This, and the panic and anxiety attacks. Though they do little to help now.”

  “You are one steaming hot mess, aren’t you?”

  “If only my therapist offered such candid assessments. Incidentally, I’d be grateful if you kept this to yourself.”

  I’ll bet you would.

  “Man, I had you pegged way wrong.” Mr. Perfect, a cold, calculating corporate sniper. In reality, a slave to a set of compulsions Raina knew about from books and television and movies but couldn’t begin to truly understand. He needed saving, in more ways than she’d ever guessed. And she had to admit, as a woman who resented feeling dependent upon anyone, a busted-up man held a certain appeal. She’d far prefer to be needed than beholden herself. Spelled doomed for any kind of serious relationship, but it was a drill she knew well, thanks to her dad, a role she could fill in her sleep.

  “Pack your shit, Duncan. You’re coming home with me.”

  That sad smile sharpened and he leaned against the doorframe. Even a touch slumped, the man was tall. Luxurious. He was too many things that shouldn’t fit together, yet here he was, standing before her, smirking.

  “Because you suspect I’m in danger?” he asked. “Or because of what you’ve just seen?”

  “Both. Though I came because I think you’re vulnerable, here on your own, and that little valentine written on your car confirms it. Who knows who’s behind those charges? But add those to an angry mob, and you’ll realize it’s true. You need help.”

  “And so you’re graciously volunteering to associate yourself with public enemy number one?”

  “I’m not afraid of anybody. Plus, nobody fucks with the owner of the town’s only bar. So get packed and let’s go.”

  “I don’t care to be told what my decisions are, Ms. Harper. In fact, there are few sensations I resent more.”

  “You’re preaching to the choir. But consider the benefits, at least. You get access to a kitchen, a washer and dryer, all the vodka you can drink—provided you don’t pair it with pills. Your cat can shed all it wants, in whatever room it likes. It can claw my boots to shit and I won’t even complain. Make yourselves at home. In fact, feel free to clean my bathroom.”

  His eyes narrowed at the joke.

  She huffed, frustrated. This must be what it felt like, arguing with herself. Poor Miah.

  “Come on. You have to admit, it’s safer than staying here.”

  “If I wanted a bodyguard, I’d have the feds put me in protective custody. But I don’t. I’m not going anywhere.”

  “Look, I get it. All I want is some assurance I won’t switch on the news some morning and see that you’ve been lynched by a load of drunk locals. Or that you’ve pled guilty, and know it’s because somebody threatened you or your loved ones. Because I know you’re innocent.”

  “I don’t have any loved ones,” he said stiffly.

  “Your cat, then—whatever. Or, who knows? To hear you’ve been shot or something. Or trapped in your burning motel room. I wouldn’t put anything past the people who offed Tremblay in his cell. Or my own neighbors, come to that.”

  “If they were smart,” Duncan said, crossing his arms over his chest, “they’d fake an overdose.”

  A chill washed through her. “That’s not funny.”

  “It wasn’t meant to be.”

  “Just . . . just stay with me.”

  “You’re trying very hard to avoid saying please, aren’t you?”

  She sighed, exasperated. “Fine. Please.”

  “Please what?”

  Christ Almighty, he knew how to tease. “Please come stay with me. Just pretend it’s a really shitty-ass bed-and-breakfast. Even that has to beat this dump.”

  He shook his head.

  She huffed. “You made me plead, and the answer’s still no?”

  He smiled and she wanted to slap him. Handily, she had an even lower blow to deal.

  “I’ll tell people about your OCD.”

  The smile faded.

  “That you’re crazy, and that you’ve come into Benji’s on multiple occasions to drink on top of your medication. Think that’ll help your case, Duncan? Think I’d make a good character witness?”

  His eyes narrowed. “You were trying to help me a moment ago.”

  “I want you safe. But I’d prefer you professionally ruined and alive to stubborn and dead.”

  “I think you’re being sensationalist.”

  “And I think you’re being naive. Come stay with me or I tell everyone you’re a fucking nutcase.”

  After a pause, “Like a bed-and-breakfast, you say?”

  She held her breath, nodding.

  He was clearly pissed but forcing self-control. It was pretty hot.

  “I’d have to pay you by the night, then,” he said tightly.

  She shrugged. “Like I’d try to stop you.”

  Duncan took a deep breath, glancing around as though taking an inventory.

  “Deal?”

  “This isn’t a deal. This is me, submitting in the face of your threats. Thanks very much for not scrawling them across my car.”

  “So, deal?”

  “Deal,” he finally muttered, but didn’t offer his hand. And with that, he strode to the closet and returned with a suitcase.

  She made a face. “Wow. That
was slightly easier than I’d expected.”

  A mirthless little huff. “Easy? You extorted me.”

  “I twisted your arm.”

  “Semantics, Ms. Harper.” He unlatched the case and propped it open on the bed. “You ought to consider a career in law.”

  “Just a bit of persistence. That’s how I got Vince and Miah and those guys to let me hang out with them when we were kids.”

  Leaving Duncan to pack his perfect designer clothes into his perfect designer suitcase, she headed to the bathroom to gather his fancy toiletries, putting them in the leather shaving bag she found on the counter. She was probably organizing them all wrong. Maybe he’d have to take everything out and do it over. No matter. Just like Duncan, she only wanted to be doing, just now.

  She stole a sniff of his cologne, wishing she could dab it between her breasts and smell him there all day. Silly impulse. Anyway, she’d have the real thing sleeping in the next room, soon enough. And if there was one tried-and-true antidote to attraction, it was cohabitation. She’d get this man back in perspective in no time. She had zero doubt that he’d make an infuriating houseguest.

  “Why did you want to hang out with them so badly?” Duncan asked when she left the bathroom. “The Desert Dogs or whatever you called yourselves.”

  She shrugged. “They were always covered in dirt, and shouting. And laughing. Always getting in trouble and going on adventures. It looked like way more fun than Barbies to me. You’d have hated it. We broke a lot of laws and got our clothes all ripped and filthy.”

  He smiled, she thought, though it was hard to tell with his face cast down, attention on the task of arranging his bag.

  “Here’s your toiletries,” she said. “I probably packed them all wrong. I won’t be offended if you redo it.”

  He tossed the shaving bag into his suitcase without inspection.

  “Give me something to do,” she said.

  “Astrid’s bowls are in the corner.”

  “Astrid? Who calls their cat Astrid?”

  “I do. She’s named for Astrid Varnay.”

  “I have no idea who that is.”

  “I didn’t expect you would. She was a singer.”

  Raina gathered the cat’s brushed steel water and food bowls. “Wish my dishes were half this posh. She probably gets Fancy Feast, huh?”

  Duncan’s nostrils flared with a little laugh. He nodded to the dresser. “Bottom drawer.”

  Raina stooped and pulled it open, finding cat food cans. “‘One hundred percent certified organic minced chicken liver,’” she read. “‘Immune support. Grain-free. Cage-free. Gluten-free’? Oh my God, you’re obnoxious.”

  He chuckled at that, stacking folded shirts on the bed. It was perhaps the first true laugh she’d heard from him. She wanted to make him do that again. And again, and again.

  “How much do you pay for this crap, per can?”

  “I’d rather not say.”

  “I wouldn’t mind being your cat, Duncan,” she said as she carried the bowls to the bathroom. “Sounds like a good gig. Unless you bleach the poor thing, that is.”

  “Perish the thought.”

  He probably protected the animal from all the fumes, probably had a special feline respirator for it. Meanwhile he was poisoning himself with that stuff, to say nothing of the pills and liquor he downed in the name of mental health.

  “You’re a weird, weird man,” she said under her breath, rinsing the dishes.

  Half an hour later, they pulled up behind Benji’s. Raina took Duncan’s many suit bags and the bucket and cleaning supplies, while he hefted his luggage and the cat in its carrier. The Merc’s trunk shut neatly with a tap of his foot beneath the bumper.

  “I bet Vince could help you with the paint,” she said. “Not a perfect job, but better than nothing.”

  “I’ll look into that.”

  Duncan had changed and smoothed his hair, looking a bit more like his public self, in jeans that fit too well to cost less than two hundred bucks. He looked like . . . well, like weekend Duncan. Not broken Duncan. She imagined telling the other Desert Dogs everything she now knew about him, and felt an immediate wave of revulsion. Guilt. Maybe that threat had been a bluff, all along. She wanted everyone to keep believing in the costume, as he’d called it—keep believing that he was two-dimensional, cold, and unhurtable. Perfect. Not human, not cracked and threatening to break wide-open.

  Raina held the apartment door for Duncan as he passed by. “You can put your stuff wherever for now—in here, or the living room. I need to strip my dad’s bed and make space in the dresser and closet.” She grabbed a fistful of trash bags from under the sink.

  And after three years’ procrastination, it was the only way this particular chore ever could have happened—in a rush of necessity. No time to sip whiskey and listen to the man’s records and pore over every worn handkerchief and nostalgic smell. She’d grab his clothes from those drawers, shove all but the most sentimental items into bags, and drop them off at Goodwill before she had a chance to question any of it.

  “I’ll pay you in advance,” Duncan said, following her into her dad’s old room. He was fishing through his wallet. He handed her six fifties.

  “This for the week?”

  “We’ll call it a hundred a night.”

  “Jeez. Well, like I said—I won’t stop you.” She folded the bills and slid them into her back pocket. A thought crossed her mind, slipped through her lips. “Can I say something tacky?”

  “I’d expect nothing less.”

  “If you and I wind up fucking, you don’t get to pay me rent anymore.”

  His eyebrows rose. “Because you’d feel like a whore?”

  She smiled sweetly. “No. Because I’d feel greedy, taking your money on top of your innocence.”

  His lips twitched, eyes narrowed in a way that made Raina’s belly all warm and tight. “You’re not coy, Ms. Harper.”

  “You’re not wrong.”

  “I rarely am.”

  She turned back to the room. “This could take a while. Would you grab me a beer out of the fridge?”

  “Sure.”

  He delivered it and then looked around. “I could help, if you told me how.”

  She considered it. “I dunno. I’ve been putting this off for ages—going through my dad’s things. And not to demean our little bonding session last night, but there’s no fucking way I’m gonna cry in front of you.”

  “I’ll attend to some work, then.” Building his defense case, he had to mean.

  “You going to represent yourself in court? If it goes that far, that is.”

  He nodded.

  Probably a good idea. Surely he was dying for a purpose. The strategizing might hold him over until he could reclaim his job.

  “I think you’ll do just fine, Duncan.”

  “You say that as though you hadn’t just threatened to destroy me yourself. And as if you know me.”

  “Don’t I, though? As well as anyone, aside from your cat and your therapist? What about your parents?”

  The light left his eyes, clear gray going flat as concrete, same as last night. “I’ll leave you to it.”

  And he left her there, alone and surrounded by a mountain of her dad’s things. Her throat stung, aching to call out terrifying words. True ones. Come back. I was wrong. I do need help. But she’d seen what losing one’s identity had done to Duncan, and she wasn’t brave enough to bring the same on herself. She didn’t need help. Help always had price tags dangling off it, ones labeled Self-respect or Independence, or ones that meant that you owed somebody something. Like love, only worse, since you didn’t get sex out of the bargain.

  “Fuck that.” She strode to her dad’s dresser and yanked the top drawer open, and invited the ghosts to do their worst.

  Chapter 9

 
“This all of it?” Flores asked Jaskowski as he sifted through the papers. They were standing on either side of a dinner table in the late ex-Sheriff Charles Tremblay’s kitchen, yellow legal-pad pages fanned out between them.

  “That’s all of it.”

  “Where’d you guys find this?” Flores asked. The team had been busy through the night.

  “Manila envelope, tucked under the silverware tray.”

  Sure as shit wasn’t the bones Flores had been hoping the team would find, but that would’ve been too easy, wouldn’t it? And there was plenty they could still uncover here—clues to suggest further conspirators, hopefully. Clues to suggest the identity of those elusive bones. Clues to who had actually committed Alex Dunn’s murder—Tremblay or Levins or someone else entirely. The house had been gone over from top to bottom before, and more than once, but Flores was growing more desperate each day they went without a real break. And though these pages might not be the bones, they weren’t nothing.

  “We sent scans to a handwriting guy,” Jask said. “These papers, plus the pad Tremblay kept beside the phone. It’s a strong match.”

  “No names mentioned, I take it.” But these couple of dozen pages of quasi-legible notes sure did seem to corroborate what Levins had spilled—that Tremblay had owed somebody, and big. The figures noted here took leaps from month to month, occasional payments doing nothing to stanch the money hemorrhage.

  He whistled, reaching the final page. “Hundred and sixty grand. Fuck of an interest rate.”

  Jaskowski nodded. “Kind of debt folks wind up paying back with broken fingers.”