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6
Theo
Connections
Two birds. One stone.
I saw the inside of the gym I’ve been watching, I spoke to the owners, and got a glimpse of the curly-haired Frankston daughter, I smiled when they took my money, and nodded when the woman spoke about her limited knowledge on what she thinks I do for a living. She mentioned the very Bishops I loathe, as though I might be interested because we share an interest in technology and security.
She has no clue Bishop blood runs in my veins.
The woman was kind, she was knowledgeable about her gym, she was friendly, and not once did I get the feeling she was shady the way her money implies.
Those fighters compete for tens of millions of dollars per bout.
Well, not anymore; in the fight world, forty is practically old and long past retirement. Now they train new contenders and take their fifteen percent cut on title winnings. They invest their money in a way that, at least on the surface, appears to be legitimate. They own property, they run their gym, they have a massive merchandising set-up, one of the brothers plays with the stock market in his spare time, but he’s not laying down sums that seem out of the ordinary considering his surname.
Interestingly, that guy who plays with the stock market is stepfather to the curly-haired blonde fighter, Evelyn Kincaid. I wonder if Evelyn knows she has Frankston blood pumping through her veins? I wonder if she knows of her biological father’s participation in my mother’s death?
I don’t blame the girl. I don’t know her, and considering she’s just a teen, and my mother died twenty-two years ago, the blonde has absolutely nothing to do with the actions of her father the decade before.
But it sure is interesting to me, all of these connections. Frankston blood. Bishop blood. Libby Tate. And a whole lot of money. All in the same town. All in the same gym.
There’s no reason for anyone to suspect Theo Griffin is Gunner Bishop, so I don’t hide my face. I don’t hide my credit cards or ID. I stared into Libby’s dirty green eyes today – dirty, like the rainforest during a heavy rain – and she didn’t know me. Maybe, somewhere deep in her subconscious, deep in her soul, she thought she recognized me, but our meeting was too long ago, she was too young, our time together too short.
She stared into my eyes just as long as I stared into hers, and then I walked out again and she had no clue.
I could walk into Checkmate Security, and they wouldn’t know me.
I suspect the fact that I never met them back when I was eleven was all part of an elitism that Colum enjoyed. He kept them separate, away fromthe help. For that, I’m thankful. I’ve never been bitter about their upbringing, I’ve never felt like they had it better than me because they had money and power. I’d rather Theodore, my old friend, and my pencils keep me company in a dirty alleyway, over having a murderous rat bastard for a father.
I preferred the freedom I had, even if it meant uncertainty about my next meal, rather than worrying about overdosing on drugs by accident, or witnessing an innocent’s murder.
The separation back then makes it so I can walk around this town unnoticed. I can walk straight through Checkmate’s front doors and speak to them.
Soon. I’ll do that soon.
But for tonight, for the second time, I let myself into Libby’s apartment to search. I pocket my pick set and glance back into the hall to make sure no one is watching. Olly sits on the outskirts of town, watching, waiting for her return after he followed her halfway to the city on my orders. I don’t know where she’s gone, and I don’t know why she drove an hour north to get there, but her absence gives me hours to search her home in the light, to not worry about being caught, to look under her mattress, if I wish, and to raid her fridge if my appetite demands it.
I’ll have twenty minutes once she passes his checkpoint on the way back and his call comes, to remove myself from the apartment building. Loads of time to get comfortable.
Gloves on, I head to her bedroom and start there. I’m not sure if I’m being objective about this woman; I’m not sure if I’m searching her room for proof of wrongdoing, or simply because I want to be around her stuff. I’m not sure why I went to her in the gym today. I mean, sure, she was struggling with that weight, but she was giggling, not screaming. She was fine, so why did I have to rush close enough to touch? Why did I speak to her, or stare into her eyes like an idiot?
I could have blown everything if she’d recognized me. She could have called me out with the name she met me as, and within seconds, no doubt SWAT would have bulldozed walls out to speak to me. As I dig through her drawers, I ask myself,Why the fuck can’t I walk away?
I’ve spent twenty of the last twenty-four hours searching Libby Tate’s digital life right down to knowing she went on a date in January. A fucking date that she bought heels for. She went to the hairdressers at three, bought shoes at four, caught a cab at six, paid for a meal at seven, and was home again by seven-thirty. The fact she paid for a meal was his first strike, but being home by seven-thirty means he struck out on home plate. A real man would never let her pay her way. He’d have noticed the hair and shoes, and he sure as fuck wouldn’t let her leave before dessert.
Strangely, it makes me happy that it didn’t work out. But it also does things to my stomach that she was willing, and that she dressed up for him.
Can a man still be protective of a girl he met more than two decades ago?
I push drawers closed and move to the next. I don’t find anything that could be construed in any way but legal; no baggies of dope, no teaspoons in weird places, no rolls of cash stuffed into a duffel bag beside stacks of phony passports. What Idofind are police uniforms. They hang in the closet, side by side like starched soldiers. Perfect pleats, stiff collars, shined shoes on the floor. Idofind newspaper clippings about herself, not pretentiously hung on the wall, but folded into a scrapbook. A medal of valor she was awarded eight years ago for placing herself in a dangerous situation to save others. The child she saved when he slipped beneath the ice of a pond one winter. She was wrapped in thermal blankets, sitting in the back of the boy’s ambulance while they treated him. She wasn’t posing for a photo, but they took one anyway, and when it was run in the paper, she cut it out and kept it for herself. Another page mentions a charity baseball game between the police department and fire department. She’s the only female on her team, but the article speaks of her winning grand-slam, and the photograph shows her being thrown into the air by her colleagues.
Her very male colleagues.
Another article speaks of her good work buying up all the Girl Scout cookies to help out a local troop. Going by her hard cheekbones and the muscle I saw in her body today, I doubt she ate a single one. But she purchased them, posed with the kids, and the article speaks of how she’s their biggest sponsor every year.
Much of this, I already knew. Every news article ever run these days is first entered into an electronic database. All it takes is a literal search function, her name, and voila, everything pops up until my eyes don’t know where to focus. But seeing an article on my computer isn’t nearly the same as reading it in a scrapbook… while I sit on her bed.
