With that, he was gone.
I closed my eyes and leaned back into the cushions, the throbbing at the side of my head fading away.
A toilet flushed.
Dunk came out of the bathroom with a bag of frozen peas pressed to his face. “When’d you get home? What the hell are you wearing? You look like a waiter.”
Thirty minutes later, and I told him everything. He told me about the man who punched him.
“Complete sucker punch,” Dunk said. “Another half second, and I would have laid him out.”
“And he left the money?”
Dunk nodded. “Five hundred in an envelope on your bed. I counted it.”
“I think he broke your nose. You need to have that looked at.”
“Complete sucker punch,” Dunk repeated. “I’ll get him next month, though. I’m gonna camp out in front of your door with a nice sawed-off, and maybe a few of my boys. We’ll sit him down right here on your comfortable yet stylish couch, and he’s gonna tell us what’s going on. I’ve had enough of this bullshit.”
“I don’t think that’s a good idea.”
“You don’t get a vote.”
“This is my apartment. He comes here for me.”
“He broke my nose. That officially made him my problem. People are going to ask me what happened. I can’t let something like this go. That would be weak. I don’t do weak.” Dunk lowered the frozen peas. “The bleeding stopped. How bad does it look?”
“If you don’t go to the hospital, it’ll heal crooked. Your right eye is going black, too.”
Dunk swore and replaced the peas.
Auntie Jo snorted in her sleep, and then her rhythm went steady again.
“You need to let this girl go.”
“I can’t.”
“You said she killed a man.”
“I didn’t say that. I don’t know what I saw.”
“You said she killed a man just by touching him—which is not possible, by the way.”
“Well, then she couldn’t have killed him. I’m completely full of shit, and all is well.”
Dunk lowered the peas again and tentatively touched the tip of his nose, grimaced, and felt around his eye. “What was his name again?”
“Raymond Visconti.”
Dunk said nothing.
I leaned forward. “You know his name, don’t you?”
“I’ve heard of him, yeah.”
“Is it true? What she said he did?”
Dunk sighed. “If this is the Visconti I’m thinking about, then yeah, it probably is. He’s a bad dude. Was a bad dude. Or is, depending on what your girlfriend did to him. Christ, this hurts.” He replaced the peas and leaned back in the chair.
