“You don’t know what you’re saying.”
My voice thunders through the cafe. “I know what I’m saying. I want to fucking kill you right now.”
No one turns their head. Not a single trucker looks up from his drink. Maybe I’m not the first person to scream about murder in this truck stop cafe. Or maybe even they know that there’s a large part of me that’s screaming just as loudly about how I don’t have the guts to kill the son of a bitch who murdered my sister.
Ricky ‘Reaper’ DeMarco takes too long to answer. I spit at him and then stand up, gesturing for him to follow.
“Come on, you piece of shit. Let’s take a walk.”
He stands, eyes narrowed, his trademark grin nothing more than a grim set line.
“Are you sure about this?”
“Ever since Vanessa died, this is the only thing I’ve ever been sure of. I fucking hate you. I fucking hate your charming, crooked smile, your warm voice, that you are brave and saved my life. Fuck it all. I want to kill you.”
He grunts, nods, then reaches into the pocket of his skinny jeans, and pulls out a couple of twenties and throws them on the table. “Fine. Let me get the tab.”
I take the money and hand it back to him. “No. You’re not buying me a fucking drink before I kill you. That’s too close a date. Take it back.” I turn and yell to the server. “How much do I owe you for the whiskey?”
His reply comes nonchalantly. Almost tired. “Four bucks.”
“Four bucks for three whiskeys?”
“You heard me.”
I heard him. But that doesn’t mean I understand. I’d master calculus before I understand how three large glasses of whiskey can cost less than a cup of coffee.
“How the hell is it so cheap?”
Something between a mix of pity and regret crosses his face. His voice drops, low, mournful, like a soldier caught in memories of compatriots dead and gone, of the horrors of war necessary to win. “You don’t want to know.”
Time seems to freeze, and then my stomach rumbles like two fault lines experiencing a contentious divorce. I have to move. Grimacing, I put down a five and then head for the door. “Come on, Reaper. We’re taking a walk in the woods.”
He follows, walking as calmly as if I asked him to go to the corner store and get a gallon of milk. The parking lot gives way to forest, and a rough deer track takes us deeper into the woods. The trees around us — oaks, mostly — give the air a rich, earthy, vanilla scent. Leaves and twigs crackle underfoot as we tread deeper into the forest.
“This isn’t the choice I would make, but maybe it’s the right one,” Reaper says behind me, his voice sharp in the quiet forest. “It’s been a long time coming. Hell, it isn’t really my fucking choice, either, is it? It’s yours. It was your sister who died.”
“It was.” A bird caws — a raven, and I nearly stumble over an outstretched root. I catch myself, but don’t fail to notice Reaper take a quick half-step toward me, ready to catch me should I fall. “Don’t.”
“Whatever you say.”
I want to hit him for that. He’s infuriatingly nonchalant, and it burns my heart to think that, in a way, I’m giving him what he wants by doing this now. I’m rewarding him for killing my sister by doing the thing that he’s been too much of a coward to do. My revenge is going to have the cost of giving my sister’s killer his last wish.
But I can’t deny that I need to do this now.
Because the war against everything else I feel for Reaper besides the primal hate is a war that I’m afraid I can’t win. And if he did what I want to believe he did, how can I live knowing that I fell in love with my sister’s killer?
So I have to do this. I have to hurt him, to make him angry, to break through that facade of remorse and see the monster that I know lurks beneath his skin, the monster who sold drugs, ensnared my little sister, and took her life.
I want to see it, so maybe this will be easier for me.
So I won’t understand how Vanessa could so easily fall for this man. So maybe I won’t feel echoes of those same feelings in the hollow space between my ribs where once my heart beat until it was snuffed out by the son of a bitch walking beside me.
“Tell me about her.” It isn’t a question. In my time in law enforcement, I became an expert in using what I called my ‘command and control’ voice. Harsh, directed, forceful, a reminder that — if you fuck with me — I’ll hit you back harder than you’ve ever imagined, because as a woman throwing herself into the most dangerous assignments, dealing with Triads, with street gangs, with drug-pushers from the Dominican Republic, backwoods militias, and human traffickers from the Chicago suburbs, and dealing with coworkers that suckled machismo from their mother’s breasts, every day in the career that I loved was a fight not just for survival, or justice, but to be seen as a human being.
My voice hits Reaper, and he freezes in his tracks, blinks, and shakes his head like I’ve just slapped him. “What?”
“Vanessa. Tell me about her. Everything you remember. Everything about her last days.”
