“Meaning?”
She blows out a breath and turns out of the room. I follow her to the kitchen, where she uncaps a beer and slides it to me across the bar. “Jockey stuck around for a while once you went away. He came around a few times, trying to apologize, you know. He was saying he was just meeting with those guys, they were friends of friends, I don’t know. But then he moved up there, and…”
I drink, trying to keep myself cool, not show how hard my hackles go up at this new information. Jockey, here? Talking to my fucking sister like he wasn’t the reason I was gone in the first place? He’s all talk, Jockey, and the kind of guy who needs reassurance like a dog needs pats on the head. But that kind of person—they’re dangerous. Even more so because they don’t seem like it from the get-go.
“He moved up there,” I echo, “and?”
“Look, you didn’t hear it from me, OK?” Margot has a furrow between her brows, and her eyes are just a little too wide. Something about this has her spooked, and she’s not the kind to spook easily.
“Yeah, OK, I didn’t hear it from you.”
She nods, gripping her bottle too tight. “Guys at the shop, they talk. This guy who works for me, Mark, he’s…I mean he’s not a crackhead, but, you know, he’s into some, I dunno, moreefficientshit. Speed, some narcotics, whatever. But around here…”
Around here there’s two kinds of drug: the kind you smoke at neighborhood barbecues over a beer with friends, and the kind that gets you living on the curb real quick. “Yeah.”
“So there’s, you know, a gap in the market.” She lifts her eyebrows pointedly.
“Yeah, what’s the bridge between weed and meth?”
“Don’t ask me, Liam, I don’t fucking know the details. What I know is that Jockey’s the bridge between those city assholes, and our special, small-town assholes. Get it?”
“Yeah.” I run a hand over my mouth. What we’ve got here you can hardly call a mafia, but once upon a time, we had a nice little branch set up, working satellite for the Boston big-shots. Over the years most of the harder guys have been put away or moved away. But the way to revive a city and its gangs isn’t by funneling in cheap drugs for a nice profit. “So, this guy Jockey works for, he’s real?”
“Real enough, he’s from Boston.” Margot polishes off her beer and quickly cracks another, looking harried. “Liam. You could just…not. You could just leave. Leaveit.”
I drum my fingers on the bar. “Yeah.”
“There’s nothing left for us here. You know, back in Dad’s day, the mafia…it was different. Right? Those guys, they were men, and what we have now are boys.” Margot shakes her head. “Look, I’m not exactly advocating for organized crime, but the cops here don’t give a fuck if Jockey’s injecting more drugs into the streets.”
“So you think I should get out of town or play sheriff?”
“I don’t know!” She puts down her beer, too hard, and there’s a sharpringof glass against granite. “I used to feel safe, when Dad and his friends were around. I don’t know what they were up to. I know Dad did some bad shit, and I know the gang broke while he was away. But you know what else I know?”
I stare at her, trying to hide my surprise. Margot isn’t quiet by any means, but she tends to be pretty cool and easygoing. She’s not exactly altruistic, either, and she’s happy to hold this shit-hole town in contempt for all its shortcomings. But this—I’ve never seen her talk like this. Like not only does she give a fuck about this place, she’s got some kind of deeply-buried, deeply-ingrained pride for it too.
“What do you know?” I ask finally.
“I know that I don’t feel safe here anymore. And it’s because of assholes like Jockey. You think he cares about this place? About loyalty? No. All he cares about is cash.” She sighs, shaking her head. “Jesus. Sorry.”
“I didn’t know you felt like this.”
“I didn’t know either.” The ghost of a smile plays on her lips. “I gave up on it, I think, when…you know. When Milo died.” She looks away from me, clearly trying to swallow a grief I thought would have left her long ago. It strikes me then that, weirdly, I might not know everything about Margot and Milo. “I just wanted to leave, but then Dad got sick, and you were away. I was just waiting until you were gone. But with the shop…I don’t know. I just think, now, that I want a piece of this town, or of what it used to be.”
I put my hand over hers on the counter. “OK.”
“OK?”
“OK. I’ll handle this, like I should have a long time ago.”
Her eyes widen. “Liam, wait, I’m not asking you to—”
“I know.”
She seals her lips, face suddenly a mask. She’s trying to be strong, that’s obvious. She wants to protect me, from my past, from myself, from going back to prison. But Margot has done enough.I’mthe one that should be protectingher. I’m the one that should man up and deal with all of this shit.
It hits me full-on right there, yanks me under like cold black seawater: I gotta do this, and I gotta do it my way. There’s been a question mark here where my destiny is. I didn’t know how to deal with Jockey, or with the guys who stood by me when I got locked up, or the guys who are the reason I did. In the back of my head, there was a universe where I got out of here, took Margot and the memory of Dad and never looked back.
Not this universe.
