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“Hello?” It was Delta’s mother.
“Hi, this is Chris McCrae. Is Delta there?”
“No.” Alarm in her tone. “She was meeting her lawyer, and she said she would be right back.”
“Is that Mommy?” he heard in the background.
“No, honey. It’s a friend of Mommy’s,” Mrs. Smith told him. “Is everything okay?”
“As far as I know.” He injected surety into his voice. “Did she say where she was meeting Amanda?”
“At her office? Maybe?”
“You hear from her, would you have her call me?”
“Okay.”
He hung up before he gave anything away. Amanda’s office was in downtown Portland. Would she really meet there this late? Maybe. Especially if the meeting started earlier and had already broken up.
Delta. Dee.
Dee.
He had a sudden memory from high school. Tanner and Woody.
Tanner: “Let’s go to a titty bar.”
Woody: “They closed the best one down.”
Tanner: “Years ago, but there are others. Good ones.”
Woody: “McCrae should meet Diabla.”
Tanner, suddenly angry: “Diabla’s not in the game.”
Woody: “Well, maybe not now . . .”
Tanner: “C’mon, McCrae. Don’t be a pussy. Let’s go find you a real woman.”
He’d declined, and Tanner had called him a pussy for weeks afterward. McCrae had wondered if he should tell Delta, who believed, at that point, that Tanner was being true to her. A misguided sense of brotherhood and the uncomfortable feeling he would be a rat kept him from speaking. But maybe he should’ve.
Diabla. Female devil.
The devil made me do it.
Crassley had said those words with amusement mere hours ago, a hidden joke. Woody had reminded Delta of Tanner going to adult men’s clubs, and Delta had remembered Tanner using “the devil made me do it” as an all-encompassing excuse.
Was Diabla a myth?
He called Woody for the second time that day.
“Hey, McCrae, my man,” Woody greeted him, recognizing the number. “Are we BFFs all of a sudden?”
“The devil made me do it.”
McCrae guffawed. “So, you know?”
“About Diabla? I’m learning.”
