I sag in my seat, trying to absorb it all once again. It’s almost comical listening to him talk about the wrong people as if there were monsters bigger than him he needed to shield himself from. But my gut is still clenched as if I were waiting for more.
“Try to think back and see if you can remember anything new. Anything at all that might trigger a memory of that night. Did the person who, you say, drove you around have any jewelry on, or an accent, maybe painted fingernails or a tattoo?”
He shakes his head, that faraway look in his eyes lets me know he’s rewinding time.
Mace leans in. “How about the car? Was there an odor when you got in? Did they play music? Hell, I don’t know, did it have dirty windows?”
My brother is grappling for straws, and to see him so exasperated makes this effort feel like a big, giant waste.
Erwin tips his head back abruptly as if he were just slapped in the face. “Yes, there was something, something silly. A tiny sticker of an armadillo. I grew up in New Mexico, and I remember thinking now there’s something you don’t see in the city. I thought, here I have one thing to be grateful about. Armadillo-free living.” His expression sours because, as it turned out, there was nothing for him to be grateful about whatsoever.
I look to Mace, and then like a celestial hammer from the sky it hits us both at once.
“Shit,” I hiss.
Mace offers a covert nod my way as we wrap it up with Erwin. I go as far as shaking the old man’s hand and about knock him to the floor with shock over it.
Mace and I wait until we’re outside of the prison before pausing, our faces stone-cold with fury for not extricating that little seemingly unimportant detail from him earlier.
“I say we head over to Armadillo Rental and see how far back they keep their records.” He gives my arm a quick squeeze. “I hate to say it, little brother, but Simone may never have gotten the justice we thought we gave her.”
A thousand insane scenarios rotate through my mind, none of them too sorry for Simone’s lack of justice.
“If he’s right, someone drove him to the murder scene, smeared his DNA over just enough of the house to put him away, and trucked him back to his street corner with the murder weapon.”
“Shit,” Mason barks as he kicks a loose stone into the landscaping.
“You don’t get to get angry,” I seethe and I pull him in by the sleeve. “We don’t kick anything. More importantly, we don’t kick ourselves.” My heart strums wildly in my chest. “If we’ve been set up—if he’s been set up—then this thing, this spider’s web I found my way into all those years ago—it’s not over. That body at the fundraiser, Loretta.” My eyes search the barbed wired field to my right as if searching for answers. “It means—”
“It means the spider is finally ready for its meal. Maybe the others were simply appetizers.”
I look to Mace, my eyes hypnotically trained to his. Ever since our father took off, there has been a cloud of foreboding in our lives. It grew far more ominous, turned black as night when my children, my wife died. And it has never cleared. Instead, it crouches lower, looms right over my head, pregnant with fury, ready to unleash the final fury of hell as if this were what it was gathering strength for all along. I can practically hear the thunder roll, growling in the distance, drumming through time and space as it makes its way closer, prowling along the periphery of my life as it lets out a deafening roar that paralyzes me from breathing.
The sky of my misfortune is black as night.
And something tells me it is about to rain like hell.
There’s no running from the impending storm. Something tells me I’ll have to face it head-on. And unfortunately for my family, so will they.
