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“I don’t want to live,” she said.
“Say that again.”
“You’ll be doing me a favor if you take my life. But you’re not up to it. You’re what they say you are.”
“What do they say?”
“You were in a foster home. There was a room where someone was kept locked up. Or where the children were forced to go when they were bad. What happened in that room? Were you sodomized? Did you have to kneel all night on grains of rice? Were you told you were unclean and unacceptable in the eyes of God? My mother was declared insane. Maybe I can understand what happened to you as a child.”
“Somebody put that on the Internet. It’s a lie. Those things never happened,” he said.
“Then why are you so afraid of me? Did you plan to kill me from afar?”
“Who says I was planning any such thing?”
“I think my husband paid you to kill my daughter. That means I was next.”
“Your husband does what I tell him. Don’t provoke me.” His voice sharpened. “Believe me, you do not want to provoke me, you little bitch.”
“I saw the pictures of the people you suffocated.”
“You want that for yourself? I can arrange it. I would love to do that for you.”
“I think you’re all talk. I think you’re scum. Call me back when you can speak in an intelligent manner.”
He was starting to shout when she closed the phone.
A moment later, she saw someone enter the SUV through the passenger side and drive away, scouring divots of grass out of the lawn, the exhaust trailing off like pieces of dirty string.
AN HOUR LATER, at the Younger compound on the promontory above the Clark Fork, the cell phone Felicity had taken from Gretchen’s purse vibrated on top of her dresser. She picked it up and placed it to her ear. The French doors on the balcony were open, and she could see the pink and blue blooms on the hydrangeas by the carriage house. She thought of New Orleans and the Garden District and the way the tenderest of flowers opened in the shade, as though defying the coming of the night or the passing of the season. “Did you mean what you said?” the voice asked.
“Yes,” she replied.
“Wait on my instructions. Tell no one about our conversation. If you do, I’ll put Rhonda’s tit in a wringer and let you listen. You’ll never get those sounds out of your head. You still there?”
“Yes,” she said.
“We’ll see if you’re up to this. Have a nice day.”
After he hung up, Felicity sat down slowly in a chair, as though afraid that something inside her would break. Then she began to weep. When she looked up, her husband was standing in the doorway, blocking out the sunlight, his face veiled with shadow. He was eating a bowl of ice cream mixed with pineapple syrup and appeared to be savoring the cold before he swallowed each spoonful. “PMS time again?” he said. “That stands for ‘piss, moan, and snivel.’ ”
“You did it, didn’t you?”
“Did what?”
“Paid Surrette to kill Angel.”
“Your mother was crazy. So are you.”
“Why did you do it, Caspian?”
“I didn’t pay anybody to do anything. I’ve been trafficking in cocaine. Large amounts of it.”
“What?”
“I quit going to G.A. and put my toe back in the water. I dropped a half mil in Vegas alone. The vig was two points a week. I hooked up with some guys in Mexico City. They stiffed me on the deal.”
“So you had Angel murdered?”
