“I don’t know his name,” Dorsey said.
Vigo shrugged and moved to swing the bat again.
“Wait!” Travis begged. “I’m serious! He didn’t give me his name. But he had some kind of accent.”
“What kind of accent?” I asked.
“I don’t know… Fuck!” Travis said, his eyes on the bat still in Vigo’s hand. “Like… I don’t know maybe Russian or something. I’m not a fucking linguist.
I was surprised Dorsey even knew the word “linguist.”
“How did he find you?” Hawk asked.
“I don’t fucking know.” Dorsey’s eyes darted between Vigo and me, Hawk’s hand still pinning him to the wall by the neck. “I was running small-time drugs back then, doing all kinds of shit for money. He told me someone gave him my name, said I could do a job for him.”
I shook my head, disgusted. “Some fucking job.”
Hawk, Vigo, and I did a lot of things — a lot of things society at large considered bad — but we didn’t hurt innocent people.
“Why?” Hawk asked. “Why’d the guy want them dead?”
“I don’t fucking know!” Dorsey said. “He just said he wanted to shut them up.”
Hawk glanced at Vigo and me. Cassie had been right: her parents’ death hadn’t been an accident.
He let go of Dorsey’s neck and he dropped to the floor with a cry of pain.
I looked down at him and had to resist the urge to keep fucking him up just for the fun of it.
Hawk was right: we needed information.
“Why didn’t you tell the police when you were arrested?” I asked Dorsey. “About the guy who hired you.”
“He paid me a fuck-ton of money,” Dorsey said. “Said if I got pinched for the job and squealed, if I told anybody ever, I’d be the next one to go off the mountain.”
“What did he look like?” Hawk asked.
“Never saw him.” Dorsey whimpered as he tried to move his injured leg. “Only talked to him on the phone. That’s all I know. Fuck! I think you broke my knee.”
“We done here?” Vigo asked.
“We’re done.” Hawk looked down at Dorsey. “Tell anyone we were here and being run off the mountain will be the least of your problems.”
Terror was written all over his face as he stared up at us, and I remembered we were wearing our masks, wondered how we must have looked looming over him, staring at him from behind the silver hawk masks we wore to hunt and to work.
Dorsey’s eyes were locked on the bat as Vigo brought it down into his palm a couple of times, like he was testing its weight again.
“I think I’ll keep this. It’s got a nice feel to it. You don’t mind, do you?” he asked Travis.
“Take it!” Dorsey begged. “Just… take it and go before my girlfriend gets home.”
We turned away and headed for the broken door, hanging on its hinges from Hawk’s kick.
“That was nice of him,” Vigo said. “It’s a really nice bat.”
31
CASSIE
