by Jamie Mason
“And money, and stuff that people actually find worthwhile, and, I dunno, success in your work, and self-respect—it doesn’t mean anything. You’re just above it all.”
Jonathan put one hand back onto the table and leaned in, not a full-badass lean-in. Tentative. Out of his league, but fired up. Almost that good. This guy was pinging like crazy, lit, all over the place and clearly not yet done, even though he was perilously close to having gone too far already.
“But you’re not really above it all, are you? Not all of it. That’s your car outside, right? The silver one? If you really didn’t give a shit about anything, you wouldn’t put sweet rims and orange calipers on your bank statement and drive it around for everyone to see and yank me every which way for the sad chance to talk about a woman who died before she could disappoint you.”
Owen’s spit turned acid in his throat. “Obviously, you’ve lost your mind.”
“This is pointless.” Jonathan stepped fully clear of the table.
“Sit. Down.” Owen bit the words like meat.
He was relieved to find that he hadn’t lost complete control of the conversation. Jonathan’s knees buckled him back into the bench as if they were on a string that Owen had pulled.
He had to give Jonathan his moment of insight, even as Owen fought to keep from launching across the table and slamming the fancy teeth out of his mouth. Owen shifted his attention from the knots of his fists, clenched under the table, to the air flowing in and out of his nose. Controlled. Cooling.
Jonathan was an amateur, but not without talent. But instead of enjoying and using it to his advantage, the asshole let it get away from him. Instinct had struck a match and made him desperate to blow something up. Reckless. He would almost certainly burn himself down in the end.
Just look at him. Jonathan was still sputtering sparks when he’d gone and poured gasoline all over himself.
Jonathan dripped sarcasm, also flammable, into his words. “Oh, I thought there was a point to you waving around hundred-dollar bills and working up poor Candi over there just about to the point of tears. I thought I was safe. Or was that just conversation, Owen, something to keep me here to give you someone to talk to?”
“Courtney.”
“What?”
“Her name is Courtney.”
“Okay. Candi, Courtney. Whatever. So fucking what?”
Just as surely as Owen had given himself away moments before, the hole in Jonathan’s soul was right there. They were both unused to being seen for their baselines. They’d traded turns getting knocked onto their back foot.
Both Owen and Jonathan had little use for people. But unlike Owen, Jonathan had to work at it. He fought influence—not by his nature, but by his insistence. He was a self-made man on his own island, but not abandoned there. Not stranded. No. He’d hacked it free of the mainland himself. But sometimes he felt bad about it. Clearly, it made Jonathan resentful to feel anything.
Owen’s voice went mild. “So fucking what? The little people, Jonathan, they count. Take yours, for instance. Donna. Carly. I know their names. I wouldn’t call them Dana and Carrie. I’ve met them. Talked with them. I’ve seen them in their own environment. It would be unwise of me not to have paid attention. It would also be dismissive. They don’t deserve that. According to YouTube, they’ve been through a lot lately. And they don’t even know what’s at stake, do they?”
“Are you threatening my family?”
“Would that make it easier for you?”
“Would that make what easier for me?” The warning bell clanging in Jonathan’s head showed, rising into the expression on his face.
“Hmmm.” A sincere hmmm was always a tricky pitch for the batter. “I wasn’t threatening them. I don’t pick on little girls or their”—Owen raised his water glass in a mock toast—“or their superhot mothers. Are you worried that I was threatening them? Or were you hoping for it? You know, looking at you, I’m not sure you weren’t doing just exactly that.”
“Fuck you.”
“That’s fair.”
Jonathan scratched his hands through his hair. “This is getting out of hand. I have the painting that your employers might want, even though you think it’s stupid. I know the price needs to be renegotiated because of what happened. I get that. But the—I’ll admit—impulsive down payment I took was with my head ringing from goddamned gunfire, I’d like to remind everyone. But all this”—Jonathan raked the air back and forth over the table between them—“this isn’t necessary. There’s no reason for it.”
“You forgot to mention that Marcelline is dead in your little recap of history.” Owen watched him closely. Jonathan had spoken of her only in the past tense. But would he flinch, a truth reflex, when Owen did?
Jonathan sniffed, a flicker of a sneer as he looked down at the tabletop. “You’re right. I didn’t mention it. I forgot. But bringing that up seems to be your part-time job, not mine. It’s been four years. Maybe get another hobby.”
There it was, that hostile pout. Jonathan didn’t care that she was dead. But he hated that he was supposed to. According to his story, Marcelline got only what she’d deserved. And why would he think he was supposed to feel anything about that? Because he knew better. The double cross was his.
Marcelline had been telling the truth.
Owen was going to kill him.
The whole revelation, silent and white hot inside Owen, seemed lost on Jonathan. “I wonder why you don’t bring up the other people who got hurt that night? You know, those people you actually came with? Your coworkers. Remember them? The little people, who mean so much to you? But the names stick better if they’re pretty, yeah?”
“Touché. There’s a lot about that night—”
For the second time, a person over Jonathan’s shoulder stopped the conversation. Owen had just said her name no more than a minute before, but it didn’t feel as if it were anywhere within reach for him to remember it now. His mind was emptied of everything by the look on her face. The rest of her was trembling in the struggle to keep the tears to a thin glistening line on her lower lids. Jonathan’s stepdaughter. The girl in the video.
Jonathan followed Owen’s gaze and looked behind him.
“Carly? What the . . . ? Are you . . . ? Why are you . . . ? What are you doing?”
The girl was defiant, her mouth tightened down over a barely quivering chin. “I left my phone in your car.”
She said it plainly, a dare blazing up in her wet eyes for either of them to make it seem like not a good enough reason for her to be standing there in the self-consciously grown-up restaurant in her yellow high-tops and braids.
She was too old to be cute. But Owen was more or less immune to cute anyway. She was too young and furled for him to even wonder what she’d be later. She was in one of life’s middle grounds, adrift on frustration in the sea of not-quite-old-enough-to-know. She had nothing to gain or lose, except to insist that she wasn’t stupid.
“Is everything okay?” She spoke to Jonathan, but she looked sidelong at Owen, and he realized with a little sting what she had delivered expertly in that look was that she would cast her allegiance in the direction of whoever told her the truth. He’d bet his whole wallet on that.
“Honey, here.” John scooped his keys out of his pocket. “Go on out to the car. I’ll be right there.”
“Go home, Jonathan,” Owen said. “I’ll get back in touch with you.”
Jonathan searched Owen’s expression for clues as to what all that could mean.
Owen rolled his eyes. “What?”
Owen looked at Carly. Carly looked at Jonathan. Carly looked back to Owen.
He wondered what she wondered about, how much she’d heard or intuited, then he wondered that he gave any thought at all to what a kid might be thinking. Sometimes people surprised him, and sometimes cheesy restaurants had the best coffee. Strange.
“Keep an eye on him for me, Carly, will you?”
Owen got up and saw in the margins o
f his vision everyone track his rise toward the ceiling—Carly, Jonathan, the people at the massive table across the aisle, Courtney, still by the bar, and the bartender, too.
Owen snapped his arms straight to settle his cuffs, buttoned his jacket, and walked out.
Once he was in behind the steering wheel, having pointedly avoided admiring the sleek flares that ran the length of the car’s flank, or the sun splashing in the silver flecks in the paint, or the orange enamel winking at him from behind the spokes of the wheel rims, Owen sent Jonathan a text:
Didn’t get around to it four years ago. Didn’t get around to it today. There’s possibly more money in any offer that might come down if there’s useful information about how you came by the Flinck.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
* * *
John gathered a storm cloud of silence over his head the whole way to Ada’s house. If Carly materializing over his shoulder in the restaurant had been a shock, finding out that Ada was in the comic book shop on the corner waiting for them was right up to the edge of what he could believe for this day.
He set a grim face and hoped it held a perimeter against any conversation. His time for questions, for looking before leaping, was all but gone. He needed to think and go—forward or underground.
John had never once been eager to talk to Roy. Well, not exactly. Sometimes hearing Roy’s truck pull up, whining on its burned-out springs, or watching him walk over on his bowlegs with his shoulders all hunched and stiff, John would grow a not entirely unpleasant pressure in his jaw. Like the tight, rising tension in knuckles that need to pop. The anticipation wasn’t awful. It was a sure thing. An itch that would get scratched.
But those little exorcisms of irritation aside, Jonathan had never, in any way, been bursting to talk to Roy. He often daydreamed about getting news that would signal the end of having to deal with him at all. Of Roy breaking his neck while crashing down the stairs. That’d be great. Totally something to look forward to. Or him getting struck by lightning. Or finding out that he’d finally caved in and let that mopey-ass face have what it—deep down—really wanted: a hose run from the tailpipe of his rolling junkyard right in through the window. Carbon monoxide, an hour, and a classic-rock mixtape to sing him over to the other side.
So, of course, for the first time ever that he actually wanted to talk to Roy, he couldn’t. He’d blown off the meeting. Another quarter left on the curb at the Y had just come in at the wrong time, in the middle of everything. Something had to give and Jonathan had let it be Roy.
He wondered if the jackass was still showing up at the McDonald’s every evening and every morning for the last couple of days like a pathetic tide.
John looked at the clock, then over at Carly in the passenger seat and back to Ada in the rearview mirror. He’d never make the six o’clock meetup. He’d have to try to find Roy in the morning.
It had been easy not to talk about the painting with Roy. They’d never really discussed it except for Jonathan telling him it was gone. And Roy certainly didn’t want to talk about it after that night. Not ever. It was a boxed topic just trembling at the hinges to fly open and spill all over everything.
The memory of Roy’s face from that night would come to Jonathan out of nowhere, sometimes when he was trying to sleep or eat or watch a show, or like now when he needed to think. The horror. Shame. Regret. Panic. The wheels coming off everyone’s wagon.
It had been contagious, that awestruck, begging look. It infected Jonathan and made him briefly sure they’d never get away with it.
Now he had no choice but to risk the third rail of Roy’s raw conscience. John needed to know if anything worth the Anningers’ time and checkbook was in the box of stuff Roy had taken from his father’s mess. Anything at all worth their forgiveness.
He could almost imagine forgiving Roy, too, as the door hit him on the way out, if he had anything in that truck or in his lukewarm brain that John could offer the Anningers. Selling the painting to them was only as useful as it balanced the account to their satisfaction. And to Owen’s.
He hated dealing with Roy.
But Jonathan knew what to do with other people’s upset, to this or that end. Out of everything he could use, nothing was finer for getting to what you needed to know—and for getting people to do what you needed them to do—than winding them up.
Carly was next. Then Roy.
She’d been quiet on the ride sitting next to the inevitable argument. But she was soft in her posture, with her arm unselfconsciously near Jonathan’s elbow on the padded console. As unconcerned as Carly looked, there might as well have been the Macy’s parade beside them for how hard poor Ada had been staring out the window. She was practically pressed against the glass, as close to being outside as she could get at fifty miles per hour, straining to the limit of her seat belt in an obvious wish to be riding in a sidecar, in the trunk, anywhere that was not with her friend who was in big trouble.
He pulled into her driveway.
“Thanks, Mr. Cooper!” Ada leapt out with the door already slamming home before the car had rocked back from stopping. “Bye, Carly! Message me!”
She bounded over the tidy bed of pansies to shortcut the walkway to her front door.
Jonathan dropped the car into reverse and drifted backward toward the street.
“Wait,” Carly commanded.
He hit the brake hard, expecting Carly to point out a cat or a toddler in the way.
She didn’t look at him. “You’re supposed to wait until she gets inside.”
Of course. That should have been automatic. It was fundamental to his role of fatherly not-father to act as if he cared about things he didn’t. But he was curious that Carly somehow felt bold enough to deliver the stern poke of you know better. She needed to be in a more useful mood. All his obvious brooding hadn’t been enough to get her there.
He needed more time. “We need a few things from the store. And you and I need to have a talk before we get home.”
She nodded and took up a more Ada-like interest in the street rushing past them.
“Carly, what the hell were you doing showing up there?”
She whipped around in her seat. She’d been spring-loaded for him to say anything. “Me? What were you the hell doing there? It sure the hell wasn’t racquetball!”
Carly should have been easier to play. She was a kid. “Don’t say hell.”
Her pink cheeks went neon.
He and Carly had a side-door communication. He wasn’t her parent. He wasn’t her peer. Neither of those approaches would have been the way in. So from the beginning, he’d teased her. He delivered most everything he needed to say on a joke with only the faintest edge of authority, and they’d always understood each other. As much as he ever wanted to be understood by anyone, she’d been the best. “You’re not good at it. The hell thing just isn’t working for you. Your mother will—”
“John! Stop it!”
“Okay! Fine. But seriously, what were you doing following me? What were you thinking? It’s crazy. I mean, I’m not mad. We’ll get past it. But this is not okay.”
Carly turned toward him in her seat, burning her opinion into the side of his head.
He glanced back from the road to see where they were in this. He didn’t recognize her. Jaw set, eyes sparking. And the strangest thing yet—that she didn’t mind being seen like that. She didn’t wilt into the grumbling fourteen-year-old expected thing. Under challenge, she didn’t look down or flinch to a lower wattage.
An icy flutter, a little flurry of premonition, dove through him. For the first time, nice wasn’t going to work on Carly. It surprised him how much he didn’t want to go the other way. But it didn’t stop him.
John dug his tongue against a molar to flex his jaw. “You need to get control of your face, young lady. You have been gunning for me all day. And I don’t appreciate it. I’ve been easy on you. Maybe too easy. I don’t know what you think you’re doing. If you’ve got something to say, say i
t. But you’d better say it respectfully. Don’t you glare at me. And don’t you ever follow me around again and barge in on private conversations. Is that clear?”
When she didn’t respond, John didn’t look away from the road. “You’ve got nothing to say? Really? I said I wasn’t mad because I was trying to be nice. But, yeah, I’m getting pretty angry right now.”
“But you’re not, though.” Her voice was the flat confrontational match of the expression he’d seen on her face.
“What? You’re saying I’m not angry?”
“Yeah. Actually, I don’t think you are. You’ve got five thousand things on your mind right now, and you want me to think you’re angry so that I’ll feel bad and be quiet. Like maybe I’ll try to get on your good side by not asking questions. But I don’t actually think you’re mad at me. Not yet.”
“Wow. You are really something these days. It’s like I don’t even know the person sitting here.”
She said nothing. The icy flutter grew tendrils and he fished his mind for a new tactic.
She got there first, but with a new waver in her voice. “You told Mom that the cameras were for some guy who was stalking you. But you said he was weak. Like some homeless guy or something. That he wouldn’t hurt us.”
“That wasn’t him.” He snatched a quick look away from the road. “That’s not who I was talking about. That’s not who the cameras were for.”
So that was it. The worry of Owen had put Carly on her mission. She was just barely on the dry side of crying. This he could work with. “It’s not him, Carlzee. I promise.”
“Then who is he?”
“Just someone I did business with a while back.”
“Did business?” Tears forgotten in an instant, she was straight back on offense. “What does that even mean? Did you work with him?”
He didn’t have time for her hyperprimed attention to detail, but he couldn’t help being impressed. “Yes. As in did business. That’s what that means.”