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I turn toward her. It’s the best time, because I feel numb now. “Should I keep going?” I ask. She looks perfectly impassive.
“Of course.” Her voice is reedy, but she squares her shoulders. “I don’t ask questions I don’t want people to answer.”
I shrug, trying to focus on something that’s not her face. Like the bed’s headboard. There’s a nick in the wood, this one little pale spot.
“Shitheads always move in packs. The next two were in a car. They robbed someone…I cared for deeply. Beat him till he fucking died.” I try to swallow, but it’s hard to think of this shit, even now. That was Luigi. I tracked those fuckers down and used a knife. It was my first and last close-range encounter. Still have dreams about how warm the blood was. “I can never regret that.”
I look at her again, sitting cross-legged at the foot of the bed. She’s wrapped a blanket around herself, so I can’t see her body.
“Another dude broke into my house—while I was in there. Looking for drugs. Startled me awake, which was a bad move. All the other ones were pimps and smugglers, liars, people fucking over other people. People who hurt people I knew. In almost every case, I didn’t have to kill them. But some people are like spiders. You don’t kill them, you just take them to the yard instead, and they keep coming back in. Every time you open the door, fuckers will just walk in, right over the threshold like they own the place.”
“How do you know that?” she asks quietly. “About spiders?”
“Doesn’t matter.”
“Do you…capture them, and take them outside? In bowls or cups? You know if you put a bowl or cup over them, then you slip a few pieces of paper under it and put your hand on top…”
“That’s not a good idea.” I lift a brow. “Some spiders bite.”
“Do you do it, though? Do you take them outside…if you catch them?”
I blow a breath out, run a hand back into my hair. “So what if I don’t like to kill a spider? It’s pragmatic. Frogs and lizards eat them.”
“So you do it for the frogs?” Her face is calm now. I’ve got no clue what’s in her head.
“If I did it, I would do it because I don’t want to see their guts squished on my wall. Because I don’t like the guts. And I don’t like to see their broken spider legs or wonder if the other spiders miss them. That doesn’t mean shit. What would you tell little Elise? Stick with this one?” I laugh—this weird, strangled, faux chuckle.
“Well we’ll never know that, will we? You stole that choice.”
“Yes, that’s right. I didn’t give you one.”
“Why not?” she whispers.
“I was farther down than you were in the tunnel. I could see the light at the end, and I knew it was a fucking train. And you know what? I don’t regret it.” I’m pacing around because I can’t stay still for this shit, can’t look at her face as I tell her the truth. “You know why I really came to your party? To your D.A. victory party? I came because I wanted to see the payoff—for what I did. I wanted to see it, hear it, get a good look at it. I got caught and taken under, on the tracks, but you got out. That’s how it was always gonna to be. You were from the family. My dad was a fucking narc. Management’s kids don’t get fucked. You were going to Columbia. I wasn’t about to wreck that! The second that I thought about it—really thought—I knew I never could.”
“How would you have wrecked it?” I can’t read her face as she grips the sheet she’s got pulled over her chest.
“You ever heard what happened to your granddad’s wife?”
Her eyes go so wide, I feel a kick of regret mentioning it. But I decide to press where it hurts. Touching her again here in this cabin would be a mistake I don’t know how I’d come back from. All that about “better to have loved and lost”—those bastards don’t know shit.
“Yeah, you thought about that yet?” I ask. “Lamberto is your blood, cara. You know what happened to his wife? The one he claimed in public?”
Her brows notch just slightly. I step over to the bed, standing before her, still unclothed from what we just did. “Your dad’s mother was the mistress. Lamberto’s wife, she got gunned down. It was a retribution killing. She was at a beauty parlor.”
I can’t be sure, but I think her cheeks lose some of their color.
“The way I did it was the right way. I didn’t get to follow my dreams, but you got to be D.A. Now I get to see you in my dreams and in my nightmares.” I’m going for funny. Just some sort of fucked-up humor moment, something true but softer. But I don’t make my mark. A single tear drips down her cheek.
