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“Love, I stopped beating around the bush, can you try to do the same?”
“Fine. I occasionally do this,” she said.
“And by ‘this,’ you mean kill people?” I clarified.
“Yes. I kill people. But like you, the ones who have it coming. The ones who have pockets so deep that they can make all their sins disappear. The ones who not only think they are, but prove they are, above the law.”
I guess it should have been a shocking revelation. Maybe if I hadn’t seen how cool and confidently she’d raised that gun and pulled the trigger, I would have been shocked. Everything about how she’d acted that night told me that it wasn’t her first time doing it. And that it wasn’t some sort of crime of passion. She’d been too cool and detached about it all. Professionals performed like that. People who took lives often acted that way.
“Give me more,” I demanded.
“It’s a long story.”
“Turns out I have a lot of free time,” I said, moving over toward the desk, pulling out the chair with one shaky leg in need of fixing, turned it, sat down, and waited.
“I grew up here,” she started, waving toward the city outside at large.
“Figured as much.”
“And growing up here, you have to get pretty tough, y’know?”
“Honestly, firsthand, I obviously don’t know, love, but I can imagine.”
“More so for a girl. And especially for a girl who had no one to look out for her.”
“Where were your parents?” I asked, wanting, needing something real from her.
“Well, dear old Dad probably didn’t even stay the night, to be honest,” she told me, shrugging. “My mom. Huh. There’s really no polite way to explain that your mom whored herself out for drug money, is there?” I asked.
“Love…”
“It’s fine. I mean, it wasn’t fine. But I’m fine. But my entire childhood, my mom was either detoxing, getting high, or looking for money for drugs. That’s why my aunt—who is my mom’s sister—cut her off years before I was even in the picture. They actually didn’t even know that I existed until I was just shy of sixteen.”
“What happened just before you turned sixteen?” I asked, sensing that was when her entire life got turned on its head.
“I got a nasty infection in a cut that should have been stitched when I got it,” Shawn said, grimacing a bit, which led me to believe it must have been gnarly to get that kind of reaction out of her. “I finally convinced my mom to take me to the hospital. I didn’t realize how fucked up she was at the time. Honestly, I felt so awful, even if I did notice, I wouldn’t have cared. We got in the car. And she plowed us into a police cruiser,” she told me. “I got pretty busted up. And then after a couple days in the hospital for my infection and injuries, the nice people at CPS who never gave a shit about me my whole childhood suddenly decided it was time to uproot me from my life.”
“You didn’t want to go?” I asked, surprised. I couldn’t imagine wanting to stay with a drug-addict mother in a bad area where you had to constantly be worried about your safety.
“I prayed to leave. My whole childhood. But I was practically grown at that point. I barely ever even saw my mom anymore. It was an asinine time to remove me. But that’s what they did. It was then that they got in touch with my aunt and uncle, who might have washed their hands of my mom ages before, but were happy to take me in and try to give me a better life.”
“But you were feral,” I said, getting a small smile out of her.
“That’s a good way of putting it, actually. Especially compared to their very pretty and clean and safe life. I was enrolled in a private school where I was forced to wear a uniform and got in constant trouble for not getting along with classmates or teachers.”
“If it makes you feel any better, love, I was raised in that life and I constantly got in trouble as well.”
“Because you were a spoiled brat,” she said, getting a laugh out of me.
“That’s not incorrect,” I said, shrugging.
“I was just an outsider. And they made it clear that they knew I was an outsider. It didn’t help that I was angry all the time and a lot rougher around the edges than they were. I got through it. I adjusted to this new life. But because I was never actually one of you,” she said, giving me a look, “I think I saw things a lot more clearly.”
“Such as?”
“Such as how fucking criminal so many of the upper class are. They just had the means to get their crimes covered up. Or pay the best lawyers to get them off when they were initially caught.
