Bad People (42 page)

Didn’t matter, he would get that out of her soon enough.

He put Barry’s thousand dollars in one pocket, and Connie’s gun in the other. He stepped over the body and around the blood.

The path remained open; the way forward straight and clear.

Chapter 46: Ardiss

As soon as the shovel had hit the side of S/D’s head, Ardiss yelped and dropped it in shock.

S/D fell, fell almost took quickly. She had never seen a person fall so hard.

Outside the glass door, the mountain lions—S/D had called them bobcats, but they looked like mountain lions to her—now raised their heads, came to their feet, and then moved into their crouches. Would that glass hold, if they charged again?

She quivered. S/D moaned once and fell silent. She had hit him as hard as she could. The shovel handle had vibrated in her hand. She felt like she had sprained her wrist.

There was no blood, and his chest was rising an falling, just like it had when they lain together in her bed after fucking late in afternoon, she thought, feeling a wrenching in her stomach.

She hoped he wasn’t hurt, but she couldn’t bear anything happening to Luke.

She stood over him, rubbing her cold arms and her wrist, which was already starting to swell. Not wanting to be there with him, not knowing what to do when he woke up, and afraid to leave him.

And the mountain lions too.

When she thought she had calmed down enough, she called Luke, but the sound of his voice when he picked up on the first ring, caused her to break down.

She spilled everything out to him. At first he was short with her, in that way he could be. But then he was kinder. He wanted to know how she knew what he had done to S/D’s dad. She hadn’t
known
before tonight, but she had guessed. She knew he had done something back in the spring, something that he had arranged to do with the creepy sad guy he’d met in the coffee shop last winter. Something that earned him some money.

They paid all the bills with cash for a long while. And Luke had written all these notes on a family.

Luke kept them hidden in the closet but she found them and read them—as much as she could through his strange spelling and syntax. She didn’t retain the names of those involved from her reading of the notes back then. But recalled that around the time the money came in, the notes disappeared.

For days Ardiss feared that Luke somehow guessed that she’d read them. But if he did, he never said anything to her.

Then this whole Connie bullshit had started. And the woman has a son, a teenager, Luke told her, but only after he needed her help again. And now here he was, unconscious. Well, she guessed she had helped.

She heard a buzz buzz buzz, inside S/D’s jacket pocket. His phone vibrating.

She worried somehow the phone would wake him up, and she reached in to grab it, pulling back like a timid doe for a second when she thought she felt him about to shift his position.

His only movement took place in her imagination though, and she pulled his device free of the pocket, saw that it indicated his Mom was calling.

Ardiss touched the screen to answer it, and placed the phone to her ear.

“Stephen-David?” came the voice on the other end. So that was the voice of Connie.

Ardiss listened, tried to hear what had drawn Luke away from herself and toward this woman.

Whatever she had, Ardiss didn’t hear it now.

Only the voice of a woman in the dark. A scared woman. A woman trying to reach her son.

Ardiss swiped the call away and dropped the device, it clattered to the floor, and Ardiss kicked it away.

She sat down on the floor, bunched her knees to her chest, holding them tightly there.

The floor was cold, and it did not warm underneath her. She looked at S/D lying before her. His head lolled to one side. An unconscious person, she now learned, did not look or act like a sleeping person.

He was breathing, she had checked that, and she confirmed again that his chest still rose and fell.

But he looked more dead than asleep.

In the same place where his dad had died. No, that was the garage. S/D had said.

Is this what his dad had looked like, when S/D found him?

No.

There was blood.

Ardiss turned her head toward the backyard and the pool area. Without her having noticed it, the lions had departed, and Ardiss felt a welling of relief.

She imagined that pool area in summertime: Dad barbecuing, S/D and all his buddies doing cannonballs into the aqua-blue to impress the high school girls. He had a nice way to grow up.

For a while.

She scooted closer to S/D, close enough to touch his hair, which she did, holding a lock of it between two fingers. He looked small lying there. He looked even younger than his young age. She put her hand on his cheek, feeling the heat of his skin. A fever brewing there. Had getting hit caused that?

She put her hand over her mouth, to stifle a sound she couldn’t prevent herself making.

She had cried on the phone with Luke, but she thought she had composed herself now, and this sob surprised her. She had realized that when Luke got here, S/D was going to die.

Chapter 47: Tommy

Friday night had always been taco night at the Brussels’.

Before the split, that is.

Then Friday’s became microwave night, catch-as-catch-can night. Like every other night.

Now taco night had returned for the first time in sober, lucid memory, and though Tommy had hesitated when his daughter Chrystal quietly and calmly suggested it—suggested it most particularly for this Friday, his sobriety chip anniversary, he had just as quietly nodded his assent.

Of course, one
big
factor in Chrystal’s thinking was that she knew Ethan used to love coming over for those taco nights too. Tommy’s kid had always had a crush on Tommy’s movie-star-looks partner, which was all right—Tommy guessed it
had
to be—at least as long as Ethan never cast an eye in the sixteen-year-old’s direction.

So far he hadn’t, and Tommy believed Ethan possessed the good sense to keep it that way.

Ethan didn’t have much family of his own. A sister Ellen, also a detective, but some strain existed there.

So now a family of three—of sorts. Tommy the Dad, Chrystal the kid, and Ethan the rootless uncle who’s never far away, especially with football season starting.

Tommy had the big screen.

Tommy was chopping the onions, and Chrystal was moving the scads of bowls of other fixings to the dining room table, while the ground beef browned, when Ethan showed up. Chrystal dropped what she was doing to let him in.

Ethan came into the kitchen, bearing two kinds of soda: cola and root beer.

He put the large bottles into the fridge.

“You coulda brought yourself some beer,” said Tommy, as he’d made that clear before. Tommy appreciated the thought, he guessed, though he really didn’t expect it of Ethan, and didn’t think the younger guy should have to deprive himself of beer for Tommy’s sake.

Ethan shook his head. “Soda will do me fine. I’m driving anyway.”

“You’re gonna drink a beer in my presence one day or another, you know. I’m a big boy, I can handle it.”

“You think I can’t have a nice evening without beer?” said Ethan. “If that’s the case, I’ll go home now.” Ethan winked at Chrystal.

She looked good. She was plumping up in the face again: her cheeks were red and round, not sunken and gray. Now Tommy was going to have to worry about boys and dances and things, he feared.

It was a fear he could handle.

He had blamed his ex for all the sadness, all the unhappiness in his daughter’s soul, yet he’d nearly let her starve herself to death while he concentrated on drinking himself to death.

He bent into the onions so the fumes would make him cry and not the emotions he had been feeling all day since receiving his chip at the meeting that morning. Without Ethan he would be dead now—or soon at least, and without Chrystal he wouldn’t even
have
a reason to live.

That he had almost destroyed their lives was something he couldn’t think about now without deep humiliation. A sense of failure he had resolved to hold onto forever, because he must never allow himself to sink so low again.

“Hey Tommy,” said Ethan. “You think you got enough onions cut there? Or are you expecting the Russian army?”

Tommy looked down to see that he had diced the entire second onion, when he had only intended to do half of it. “I like a lot,” said Tommy, rinsing the knife. “Good for the sinuses. And don’t you know onions is good to fight the cancer too?”

“Everything’s good for something, they say,” said Ethan doubtfully. He was never one for onions, or garlic, or hot peppers or anything like that. Always self-conscious about his breath, that guy.

“Make yourself useful and pour us all some sody-pop, will you?” said Tommy.

Chrystal had disappeared, and Ethan asked where she’d gone.

“Probably to change her clothes. She’s into the outfits and that nowadays. She watches that show, with the gay fellahs and the German girl, where they makes the clothes?”

“
Project Runway
?”

“Yeah,
Project Runaway
. She DVD’s it and—”

“DV
R
’s it,” interrupted Ethan. “Go ahead.”

“And we watch it back together when I’m home. Pretty good show.”

“Tommy Brussels sober, and making his kid record
Project Runway
for him. What kind of monster have I created,” said Ethan. He pushed one of the glasses of root beer toward Tommy. “Here’s your ‘sody-pop,’ Calvin Klein.”

“All right, all right, boy, sit your ass down and Let’s eat.” Tommy called Chrystal.

They ate, making their own tacos and talking about disastrous Seahawks season-starts of the past in anticipation of the probably-disastrous ones to come. Tommy further defended
Project Runway
. At the end of the meal Tommy loosened his belt.

“Dad!” said Chrystal.

“You’ve pack on another twenty, easy,” Ethan told him.

Tommy waved his hand at both of them. “It’s the sobriety. Everything tastes so damn good now.” After awhile, Chrystal excused herself to do homework.

“On a Friday?” said Ethan, making an expression, mocking doubtful, come to his face.

“Leave her alone,” said Tommy. “It’s a special Saturday course at the community college.”

Ethan nodded. “I’m impressed, Chrystal.”

She smiled and said. “Besides that, if I start now I don’t have to help with the dishes.”

“Oh, I see how you work it,” said Ethan. “All right, go be a genius; the boys will clean up.”

“Thanks, boys,” she said.

When she had gone upstairs, Ethan said, “She’s doing okay, then.”

“She’s doing great,” said Tommy. “We both are.”

“Thirty days. That’s not that long of a time.”

“It sure damn feels like it. Course it
would
be closer to sixty except for…you know.”

“Yeah,” said Ethan. Tommy had had a couple back slides early on. “That’s probably to be expected though,” said Ethan.

Tommy looked up toward the stairs, where Chrystal had gone. “That’s what scares me,” he said.

“That’s probably good,” said Ethan.

“I suppose.” He paused. “So what’s new for you? Got a big date tonight?”

“Think I’ll stay in. You’re making me feel all domestic. You want me to wash or dry?”

“Jesus, but you’ve turned into a pussy. Go out and enjoy yourself, Ethie. I’ll do the fuckin’ dishes.”

“Nah. I’ll stick around. I don’t think you got the elbows needed to get through the layer of grease on the meat pan. Now, over in the twenty-first century we have this thing called a ‘dishwasher’….”

“I got me one too.” He still hadn’t replaced the one that had broken even before his wife had left him, and he had been putting it off for other reasons than the money. He liked finishing his evenings lingering over the ordinary little chore: diving his hands into the hot sudsy water, listening to the squeak the towel made on a sparkling white plate, hearing the clack of the plates and the clatter of the silverware put away clean, and seeing the cabinets and drawers shut up nice and safe for the night.

“Besides,” said Tommy, “I got a big stupid Scandinavian dishwasher. It’s a Starvold. They make a lot of noise, but damn they are cheap.”

“Nice,” said Ethan Starvold.

“Hey, I gave you your out and you should’ve taken it. You wash. I dry.”

Ethan nodded. He stood up slowly, with a groan, and then hobbled his first step or two toward the kitchen.