Page 152 of Antihero

Big Mikey leaned back and spread his arms across the padded back of the booth. “What are you gonna do? Here? There’re, like, witnesses everywhere.”

The starting gate rattled, holding Evan’s rage in check. He kept his voice calm. “Witnesses don’t concern me.”

“You related to her, or something?” Finn-Finn asked. “You related?”

“No.”

“And you’re not a cop. What then?”

“I don’t like what you did to her,” Evan said. “And I’m going to make sure you never do it again.”

“Look.” Finn-Finn laced his fingers together on the table to form a curved wall, his thumb pads tapping each other. He was going for a we’re-all-adults-here pose but instead looked as if he was preparing to have a thumb war with himself. “I get it. I get it. You’re some kinda white knight or whatever. And you think we’re the problem. But we’re not. We’re not. You just haveta look at it different and you’ll see the hypocrisy.”

“Yeah,” Big Mikey said. “The hypocrisy.”

“You all made porn legal. You all put it everywhere. And you know how many people get human-trafficked for sex? Like: a lot. A lot. I mean, it’s your world. We just grew up inside it. It’s a dog-eat-dog world, man. Dog-eat-dog. We’re animals, basically. It’s the only way to work the system you all built. The only way to survive. So you made us. You made us animals. You can’t expect us to give a shit about this or that.”

Evan said, “She was unconscious.”

Finn-Finn shrugged. “So we bang a girl who’s outta it now and then. Everyone parties, drugs, whatever. But we didn’t keep her, did we? We didn’t keep her.”

Evan said, “You held her for five hours.”

The words had already left his mouth when he realized what the kid actually meant: that they deserved praise for not keeping Anca for good.

A part of Evan broke off inside him like a snapped match head. A tumbling flare that died in the darkness. The threat here, now, from them wasn’t physical. It was worse.

“And?” Big Mikey said. “We didn’t snuff her. And it’s not like we couldn’t’uv.”

If you put Finn-Finn and Big Mikey together, you might make one human being. Equally wretched, but at least one miserable thing instead of two. But there they sat, defiantly distinct and half-formed.

“I’m gonna have to warn you,” Big Mikey said. “You don’t get who you’re dealing with.”

Evan said, “Like Pete?”

Mikey’s mouth gaped in something like a smile. A breath washed out of him. It did not smell pleasant. His tongue poked at the corner of his mouth. “Don’t know any Petes.”

“Even the one who shares your last name?”

“Dunno. Why? What’s he got to do with this? Where is he?”

“Prison medical bay.”

“Oh,” Finn-Finn said. And then, “Oh.”

“Bullshit,” Mikey said. “Bullshit this guy takes out Dirty Pete.”

The waitress came by, wielding a pot of coffee. “Get you something, hon?”

“No,” Evan said. “Thank you. We’re doing great.”

Her gaze lingered on the tense scene but she kept moving.

Evan said, “I want the names of the other two men who raped Anca Dumitrescu.”

Finn-Finn giggled, high and jittery. “Mr. Demands-Man making demands.”

Mikey gathered himself up at Evan’s side. He had Evan by four inches and at least sixty pounds. “You sure as shit can’t prove you beat Pete up ’cuz there’s no way. There is. No. Way.” He poked Evan’s shoulder with a wide digit. “You couldn’t even go a round with me.”