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“Sam Silvan.”
He relaxes slightly. “Ah, Sammie. How’s she doing?”
“She’s doing okay. You owe her six grand.”
He grins at me and climbs over the log. “Tell her to send me an invoice.”
“She hates you.” I jump down beside him. “Reallyhates you. Did you know that?”
We walk on. He doesn’t answer at first, only looks ahead at the path, eyes on the ground. I can’t read his body language, but his shoulders are slumped, and he’s avoiding my gaze. Finally, he says, “Did she tell you what she wanted me to do for her?”
“No,” I admit, feeling uneasy. “I didn’t feel comfortable asking.”
“Sammie Silvan looks like a good old girl, a nice Southern lady, but that’s only a facade. Sammie Silvan was holding a lot of debt to a lot of very unsavory people back in the day, the sort of people she wanted an intermediary to deal with. That’s why she hired me.”
“You were a middleman?”
“Let’s call it a go-between. She gave me cash and I used it to pay off her drug dealers.”
I suck in a breath. The girl sitting across from me at the coffee shop was put together and stone sober, there’s no way she was a drug addict. “I don’t believe you.”
“I won’t act like I didn’t skim some off the top, but she dug her own grave. Eventually, when I realized she was never actually going to pay these guys off completely, I walked, and she didn’t like it. She threatened me, said a lot of very nasty things, and eventually gave me six grand to keep my mouth shut.”
“I guess you owe her that six grand back now,” I say and he pauses to lean against a tree. “How much of that story is true?”
“Enough,” he says, staring at me. “You want me to say I haven’t done some bad things in my life? I can’t do that. I’ve bribed gangsters and paid off drug dealers. I’ve bought coke for bored housewives and helped an addict tie off one time. Sammie Silvan’s problems were just another day in the office for me, but to her it was the end of the world, and she didn’t like how I handled things. So we parted ways.”
I let his words sink in. It all fits with my image of him, but none of this is making me feel any better. “Why would my dad send you, of all people, to bring me home?” I blurt out because I can’t keep in in anymore.
He looks at me for a long moment before turning away and walking away. “You’d better ask him that.”
“I’m not going to, so I’m asking you instead. Why you, War? Why not a private detective? Or one of my cousins?”
“I suspect he’s got his reasons.”
“That’s a great copout but doesn’t help me at all.”
“I don’t know why you’re so interested in me suddenly. Did Sammie scare you?”
“No,” I say and hurry past him, taking the lead again and skirting around a large muddy puddle. I’m tempted to push him in. “I’m just trying to figure out what you’re doing here.”
“If you think getting to know me is going to give you some insight into what your father is thinking, you’re going to be disappointed.”
I look at the trees, frowning. Is that what I’m doing? Maybe he’s right—maybe this whole thing is about getting a glimpse into my father’s thought process. He’s always been the kind of man that does whatever he wants, that makes his decisions and his decisions are final, that doesn’t take criticism and isn’t interested in opinions. Maybe if I can see in War what my father sees then I can glean some precious insight into the man I hate and ran away from and still desperately miss.
Except that’s not what I’m doing. “This is about what you’re hiding from me.”
He slows and I put some distance between us. “What I’m hiding?” he asks.
“You’re a liar, War. Don’t tell me you’re not.”
His smile bristles with knives. “As the playground cliché goes, takes one to know one.”
“Right, and that doesn’t change anything. Why did my father send you? What does he want from me?”
“He wants to die with a clear conscience.”
War says it so simply, so directly, and it’s like a punch to my gut. I have to lean my hand against the rough bark of a nearby tree to catch my breath. My father is dying—he’s really dying—and here I am interrogating the messenger like any of this matters. Colton Leader is on his deathbed, and I can’t stop obsessing about War and what he means. When maybe there’s no meaning to him at all. Maybe War’s just a kid that takes jobs, and my dad really does want to bring me back home to say goodbye.
