Give It All (8 page)

“I don’t have any loved ones,” he said stiffly.

“Your cat, then—whatever. Or, who knows? To hear you’ve been shot or something. Or trapped in your burning motel room. I wouldn’t put anything past the people who offed Tremblay in his cell. Or my own neighbors, come to that.”

“If they were smart,” Duncan said, crossing his arms over his chest, “they’d fake an overdose.”

A chill washed through her. “That’s not funny.”

“It wasn’t meant to be.”

“Just . . . just
stay
with me.”

“You’re trying very hard to avoid saying please, aren’t you?”

She sighed, exasperated. “Fine.
Please.
”

“Please what?”

Christ Almighty, he knew how to tease. “
Please
come stay with me. Just pretend it’s a really shitty-ass bed-and-breakfast. Even that has to beat this dump.”

He shook his head.

She huffed. “You made me plead, and the answer’s still no?”

He smiled and she wanted to slap him. Handily, she had an even lower blow to deal.

“I’ll tell people about your OCD.”

The smile faded.

“That you’re crazy, and that you’ve come into Benji’s on multiple occasions to drink on top of your medication. Think that’ll help your case, Duncan? Think I’d make a good character witness?”

His eyes narrowed. “You were trying to help me a moment ago.”

“I want you safe. But I’d prefer you professionally ruined and alive to stubborn and dead.”

“I think you’re being sensationalist.”

“And I think you’re being naive. Come stay with me or I tell everyone you’re a fucking nutcase.”

After a pause, “Like a bed-and-breakfast, you say?”

She held her breath, nodding.

He was clearly pissed but forcing self-control. It was pretty hot.

“I’d have to pay you by the night, then,” he said tightly.

She shrugged. “Like I’d try to stop you.”

Duncan took a deep breath, glancing around as though taking an inventory.

“Deal?”

“This isn’t a deal. This is me, submitting in the face of your threats. Thanks very much for not scrawling them across my car.”

“So, deal?”

“Deal,” he finally muttered, but didn’t offer his hand. And with that, he strode to the closet and returned with a suitcase.

She made a face. “Wow. That was slightly easier than I’d expected.”

A mirthless little huff. “Easy? You extorted me.”

“I twisted your arm.”

“Semantics, Ms. Harper.” He unlatched the case and propped it open on the bed. “You ought to consider a career in law.”

“Just a bit of persistence. That’s how I got Vince and Miah and those guys to let me hang out with them when we were kids.”

Leaving Duncan to pack his perfect designer clothes into his perfect designer suitcase, she headed to the bathroom to gather his fancy toiletries, putting them in the leather shaving bag she found on the counter. She was probably organizing them all wrong. Maybe he’d have to take everything out and do it over. No matter. Just like Duncan, she only wanted to be doing, just now.

She stole a sniff of his cologne, wishing she could dab it between her breasts and smell him there all day. Silly impulse. Anyway, she’d have the real thing sleeping in the next room, soon enough. And if there was one tried-and-true antidote to attraction, it was cohabitation. She’d get this man back in perspective in no time. She had zero doubt that he’d make an infuriating houseguest.

“Why did you
want
to hang out with them so badly?” Duncan asked when she left the bathroom. “The Desert Dogs or whatever you called yourselves.”

She shrugged. “They were always covered in dirt, and shouting. And laughing. Always getting in trouble and going on adventures. It looked like way more fun than Barbies to me. You’d have hated it. We broke a lot of laws and got our clothes all ripped and filthy.”

He smiled, she thought, though it was hard to tell with his face cast down, attention on the task of arranging his bag.

“Here’s your toiletries,” she said. “I probably packed them all wrong. I won’t be offended if you redo it.”

He tossed the shaving bag into his suitcase without inspection.

“Give me something to do,” she said.

“Astrid’s bowls are in the corner.”

“Astrid? Who calls their cat Astrid?”

“I do. She’s named for Astrid Varnay.”

“I have no idea who that is.”

“I didn’t expect you would. She was a singer.”

Raina gathered the cat’s brushed steel water and food
bowls. “Wish my dishes were half this posh. She probably gets Fancy Feast, huh?”

Duncan’s nostrils flared with a little laugh. He nodded to the dresser. “Bottom drawer.”

Raina stooped and pulled it open, finding cat food cans. “‘One hundred percent certified organic minced chicken liver,’” she read. “‘Immune support. Grain-free. Cage-free.
Gluten-
free’? Oh my God, you’re obnoxious.”

He chuckled at that, stacking folded shirts on the bed. It was perhaps the first true laugh she’d heard from him. She wanted to make him do that again. And again, and again.

“How much do you pay for this crap, per can?”

“I’d rather not say.”

“I wouldn’t mind being your cat, Duncan,” she said as she carried the bowls to the bathroom. “Sounds like a good gig. Unless you bleach the poor thing, that is.”

“Perish the thought.”

He probably protected the animal from all the fumes, probably had a special feline respirator for it. Meanwhile he was poisoning himself with that stuff, to say nothing of the pills and liquor he downed in the name of mental health.

“You’re a weird, weird man,” she said under her breath, rinsing the dishes.

Half an hour later, they pulled up behind Benji’s. Raina took Duncan’s many suit bags and the bucket and cleaning supplies, while he hefted his luggage and the cat in its carrier. The Merc’s trunk shut neatly with a tap of his foot beneath the bumper.

“I bet Vince could help you with the paint,” she said. “Not a perfect job, but better than nothing.”

“I’ll look into that.”

Duncan had changed and smoothed his hair, looking a bit more like his public self, in jeans that fit too well to cost less than two hundred bucks. He looked like . . . well, like weekend Duncan. Not broken Duncan. She imagined telling the other Desert Dogs everything she now knew about him, and felt an immediate wave of revulsion. Guilt. Maybe that threat had been a bluff, all along. She wanted everyone to keep believing in the costume, as he’d called it—keep believing that he was two-dimensional, cold, and unhurtable. Perfect. Not human, not cracked and threatening to break wide-open.

Raina held the apartment door for Duncan as he passed by.
“You can put your stuff wherever for now—in here, or the living room. I need to strip my dad’s bed and make space in the dresser and closet.” She grabbed a fistful of trash bags from under the sink.

And after three years’ procrastination, it was the only way this particular chore ever could have happened—in a rush of necessity. No time to sip whiskey and listen to the man’s records and pore over every worn handkerchief and nostalgic smell. She’d grab his clothes from those drawers, shove all but the most sentimental items into bags, and drop them off at Goodwill before she had a chance to question any of it.

“I’ll pay you in advance,” Duncan said, following her into her dad’s old room. He was fishing through his wallet. He handed her six fifties.

“This for the week?”

“We’ll call it a hundred a night.”

“Jeez. Well, like I said—I won’t stop you.” She folded the bills and slid them into her back pocket. A thought crossed her mind, slipped through her lips. “Can I say something tacky?”

“I’d expect nothing less.”

“If you and I wind up fucking, you don’t get to pay me rent anymore.”

His eyebrows rose. “Because you’d feel like a whore?”

She smiled sweetly. “No. Because I’d feel greedy, taking your money on top of your innocence.”

His lips twitched, eyes narrowed in a way that made Raina’s belly all warm and tight. “You’re not coy, Ms. Harper.”

“You’re not wrong.”

“I rarely am.”

She turned back to the room. “This could take a while. Would you grab me a beer out of the fridge?”

“Sure.”

He delivered it and then looked around. “I could help, if you told me how.”

She considered it. “I dunno. I’ve been putting this off for ages—going through my dad’s things. And not to demean our little bonding session last night, but there’s no fucking way I’m gonna cry in front of you.”

“I’ll attend to some work, then.” Building his defense case, he had to mean.

“You going to represent yourself in court? If it goes that far, that is.”

He nodded.

Probably a good idea. Surely he was dying for a purpose. The strategizing might hold him over until he could reclaim his job.

“I think you’ll do just fine, Duncan.”

“You say that as though you hadn’t just threatened to destroy me yourself. And as if you know me.”

“Don’t I, though? As well as anyone, aside from your cat and your therapist? What about your parents?”

The light left his eyes, clear gray going flat as concrete, same as last night. “I’ll leave you to it.”

And he left her there, alone and surrounded by a mountain of her dad’s things. Her throat stung, aching to call out terrifying words. True ones.
Come back. I was wrong. I do need help.
But she’d seen what losing one’s identity had done to Duncan, and she wasn’t brave enough to bring the same on herself. She didn’t need help. Help always had price tags dangling off it, ones labeled
Self-respect
or
Independence
, or ones that meant that you owed somebody something. Like love, only worse, since you didn’t get sex out of the bargain.

“Fuck that.” She strode to her dad’s dresser and yanked the top drawer open, and invited the ghosts to do their worst.

“This all of it?” Flores asked Jaskowski as he sifted through the papers. They were standing on either side of a dinner table in the late ex-Sheriff Charles Tremblay’s kitchen, yellow legal-pad pages fanned out between them.

“That’s all of it.”

“Where’d you guys find this?” Flores asked. The team had been busy through the night.

“Manila envelope, tucked under the silverware tray.”

Sure as shit wasn’t the bones Flores had been hoping the team would find, but that would’ve been too easy, wouldn’t it? And there was plenty they could still uncover here—clues to suggest further conspirators, hopefully. Clues to suggest the identity of those elusive bones. Clues to who had actually committed Alex Dunn’s murder—Tremblay or Levins or someone else entirely. The house had been gone over from top to bottom before, and more than once, but Flores was growing more desperate each day they went without a real break. And though these pages might not be the bones, they weren’t nothing.

“We sent scans to a handwriting guy,” Jask said. “These papers, plus the pad Tremblay kept beside the phone. It’s a strong match.”

“No names mentioned, I take it.” But these couple of dozen pages of quasi-legible notes sure did seem to corroborate what Levins had spilled—that Tremblay had owed somebody, and big. The figures noted here took leaps from month to month, occasional payments doing nothing to stanch the money hemorrhage.

He whistled, reaching the final page. “Hundred and sixty grand. Fuck of an interest rate.”

Jaskowski nodded. “Kind of debt folks wind up paying back with broken fingers.”

“This means Levins isn’t
completely
full of shit.”

“Not completely.”

Flores frowned. “This could spell bad news for Welch. I had my money on Levins’s claims being bull, but if the gambling debts are real, and that witness is legit . . .”

“You think he did it?”

“Fuck if I know anymore. I think he likes money, for sure. But I also think he makes plenty of the shit for himself, legitimately, and that he’s the kind of guy whose personality just begs people to resent him. Especially guys like David Levins. To them, Welch looks like some entitled asshole whose mommy and daddy rocked him in a gold-plated cradle.”

“And is he?”

Flores shook his head. “Orphan, best I can tell. Got no record of who his parents might’ve been. And he grew up in a part of London that sounds more like the projects than Buckingham Palace.”

“Huh.”

“He’s either self-made or a complete fucking scammer. Though all his pedigrees seem to check out.”

Jaskowski smiled. “You think he’s innocent.”

“I did . . . Only a clinical-grade narcissist would talk to me the way he did in questioning. Either he
was
entitled to feel like he got slapped in the face, or he
felt
entitled to it. So I’m not so sure. I think he’s guilty of being a cocky prick, and of keeping some shady company, which isn’t doing him any favors. But I didn’t think he took bribes, no. I thought somebody must have sore feelings toward him, for sticking his nose where it didn’t belong.”

“Somebody must have real sore feelings toward that Grossier thug, then. Tremblay and Levins wouldn’t have gotten busted if not for him.”

“Yeah, but who’s gonna fuck with Grossier?” Flores asked. “Welch is the easy target, if somebody’s feeling bitter—he’s the outsider. Punish him for getting involved, cause a distraction while the real bad guys cover some tracks . . . But now I might need to rethink Welch, in light of Levins’s claims not being a hundred percent fabricated.” Funny aspect of the job,
being forced to second-guess your best tool—your instincts. And he’d begun to feel as if something wasn’t quite right about Welch, ever since he searched his hotel room. There
was
something unwholesome about a guy that clean and organized. Something about him stank faintly . . . not unlike that bleach-reeking bathroom.

“So, can we agree I’m your hero,” Jaskowski asked, “for finding these papers?”

Flores rolled his eyes. “Find us some fucking bones and get me home by next weekend. Then we’ll talk.”

“What if I sweeten the deal?” Jaskowski reached into his jacket pocket and drew out a plastic bag with a chunky flip phone in it.

Flores blinked. “What’s that?”

“Found it wedged in a little space next to the underside of the kitchen sink. No account—it’s a disposable.”

Pay-as-you-go phone? Now they were talking. “You get call logs off it?”

Jaskowski nodded. “All unlisted, every single one, incoming and outgoing. No voice mails. He was careful. All except one time.”

“Oh?”

Jaskowski headed for the counter, fetching a stapled stack of papers. “Text message,” he said, flipping through the pages. “To the cell phone of David Levins.”

“Excellent. And?”

Jaskowski cleared his throat. “August fifteenth, eight seventeen a.m. ‘If a guy named Welch comes by, just give him whatever he asks for. Keep him sweet.’”

Flores felt the floor shift beneath him. “Well, shit.”

“Doesn’t look great for your little expat orphan buddy.”

“No, no, it doesn’t.” Fuck if he hadn’t called that one wrong.

“Not enough to arrest, but plenty for a subpoena to get his phone records and seize his computer,” Jaskowski offered.

“I’ll put in the request, then give him a couple days,” Flores said. “Call him in, waste his time, turn a couple screws. Get him frazzled, give him a chance to scramble and maybe dig himself into a deeper hole.” Goddamn, he’d really wanted that asshole to be innocent, too. Thank fuck they hadn’t started a pool.

“So now I’m your hero?” Jaskowski asked.

Flores rubbed his sweaty forehead, beat and energized and angry and giddy—everything this job made him feel. Every
kind of hungry. “Yeah, you’re my hero, Jask. Now quit jerking off and find out what happened to those goddamn bones.”

*   *   *

Duncan jumped in the easy chair—his music was suddenly gone, headphones lifted from his ears. He craned his neck to find Raina behind him, smiling. She’d been in and out between the guest room and the kitchen countless times in the past hour or two, but Duncan had taken little notice, caught up in research for his defense.

Raina put the phones to her ears, blinking. “Opera?”

He took them back. “Often.”

“Classical, I could see. Opera seems a bit . . . dramatic.”

“To each his own.” He hit
PAUSE
on his phone.

“Wait. Is your cat named for an
opera
singer?”

“I got her not long after Astrid Varnay died. I’m averse to sentimentality, but not immune.”

“Good God, you’re weird. But listen—I’m starving and short on groceries. You want to grab a late lunch across the street?”

Not a bad idea, his stomach suggested. He glanced around, finding Astrid on the windowsill behind the couch, looking lean and alert, but somewhat settled. “I would.”

As they headed down the stairs a few minutes later, he said, “I’m assuming Abilene is holding down the fort.”

“Yeah. I’ll join her around seven. Afternoons are easy. Boring. All the same old men, drinking the same old beers, listening to the same old fifty songs they’ve been playing since my dad opened the place.”

“Predictability has its merits.”

“It’s painful some days, but it’s also the reason I read five books a week. I bet you read a lot,” she added as they crossed Station Street.

“Not as much as I’d like to claim.”

“No?”

He shook his head. “Reading requires a quiet mind, which isn’t something I possess. It takes an exceedingly riveting story to keep my compulsions in the periphery. Though I enjoy audiobooks.”

“Of course you do,” she said with a smile. “You can read and clean at the same time.”

Duncan held the diner’s door open for her. As they slid into opposite sides of a booth, he said, “Don’t mistake a disorder
for a hobby, Ms. Harper. I don’t strictly enjoy cleaning. I merely enjoy it more than the sensation of panic that occurs if I
don’t
clean.”

The older waitress took Duncan’s request for a hot water and Raina’s coffee.

“What happens,” Raina asked, “if you
don’t
clean?”

“In reality? A panic attack. In my head . . . I don’t know. It seems as though there is no
if.
As though whatever will happen is too horrible to comprehend. Either way, it feels like a matter of life and death.”

“Jesus.”

The waitress dropped off their drinks and they placed their orders. Thankfully Duncan had made a regular of himself here, so the woman wasn’t too put out when he inquired after just about every ingredient that went into the chicken club, eschewing the mayonnaise and requesting spinach in place of iceberg lettuce. He tipped waitresses as generously as he did bartenders, so she accepted the revisions cheerfully enough, then left them be.

Raina watched as he slid a shiny gold envelope from his back pocket. “You bring your own tea bags?”

“Are you truly surprised?”

“Not really. But if you ever pull that shit in Benji’s—show up with your own organic lime wedges—I’ll bar you.”

He smiled, attention on the bobbing bag. “I’m certain you would. How’s your father’s room coming along?”

She rolled her eyes.

“My offer of help still stands.”

“So does my stubborn refusal.”

“Theme of the day. I asked Vince about a paint job, by the way.”

“Any luck?”

“He said to bring it by the garage tomorrow. I’m not expecting a miracle, but anything is better th—”

Duncan’s heart stopped as the diner’s door jingled, admitting two men. Flores. His companion was taller, with a big belly, also wearing a generic suit—surely a colleague. Christ, why did they make Duncan feel so
suspicious
? He wasn’t doing a thing wrong. Drinking tea. Chatting with a . . . with an acquaintance. Waiting for a sandwich. How had he gone from entitled to paranoid in the span of two days?

“What’s wrong?” Raina asked, and she turned in her seat to
see who’d entered. She looked back to Duncan. “Are they from Sunnyside?”

He shook his head. “The one with the glasses is the agent who brought me in.”

She frowned, eyes narrowing at the men. “Was he a jerk to you?”

“A touch snide. But nothing out of a film—no blinding lightbulbs or hands slamming down on tables.”

“He’s got to know you’re innocent. You taking bribes from Levins is ridiculous.”

“How about we drop it?” he asked as their food was delivered. “I’d like to spend a few minutes
not
thinking about my predicament, if that’s all right.”

“Fine.”

They ate quickly and split the bill. Duncan cursed his heart for beating hard as they made their way to the exit, the agents seated at the counter eating matching burgers. He focused his attention on Raina’s backside, but the distraction fell apart at the sound of her voice.

She stopped behind the two men. “You Flores?” she demanded.

The man swiveled on his stool and caught sight of Duncan, offered a little nod as he swallowed a bite of burger. He looked to Raina. “I am. Who’s asking?”

“I just want you to know,” she said quietly, “that if you think Duncan took bribes, you ought to get your badge revoked for having the mental capacity of a turd.”

The other fed snorted, and Duncan ground his teeth. “Christ.”

Flores’s eyebrows rose above his glasses. “I don’t discuss ongoing cases with the public. Though your opinion regarding my likeness to a turd has been noted.”

“If you ever come across the street,” Raina said smoothly, “I’ll see to it personally that your drink gets spit in.”

Flores smiled. “You asking for a visit from the health inspector, Miss . . . ?”

“Ms. Harper,” Duncan said, and steered Raina toward the door. “Excuse us.”

“I think you’re a prick,” Raina tossed over her shoulder at Flores. “Just so you know.”

Duncan cast Flores a mortified look. “She’s very passionate,” he said grimly.

“Bet she is,” said Flores’s partner, smirking.

“See you soon, Welch,” Flores called.

Out in the lot, Duncan glared at Raina. “Oh,
thanks
very much for that.”

“You’re welcome.”

They crossed the street. He worked hard to hang on to his annoyance, but it was like wet tissue paper trying to pass for a tarp—a flimsy attempt, not hiding what lay beneath. And beneath was undeniable pleasure. And wonder.

She stood up for me.
With vulgarity, doing him precisely zero favors, but no matter, because no one had
ever
stood up for Duncan before, not for any reason. It made him feel too many things. Patronized, yet delighted. He hoped she couldn’t tell.

Once back in the apartment, they resumed their respective projects, but by four, Duncan was at a standstill. Without knowing the nature of that so-called witness and his or her claims, there could be no strategizing about it.

He stood and stretched, and with his headphones off he heard music coming from the soon-to-be guest room. He walked to the threshold. The space was chaos—half-filled boxes and garbage bags all over, every drawer open, books and records and shoe boxes stacked into a dozen towers. The music was coming from a dated turntable perched on the dresser, the record an old blues album.

Raina was humming along.

He ought to be angrier with her, for the way she’d managed to bring him here, and for that gaffe in the diner. He ought to be furious, and anxious as well—she could threaten to play the OCD card anytime she wanted something more from him, tonight or tomorrow or next week. He resented being manipulated. Yet if anything, he rather admired the ploy. And perhaps he could play nice until he stumbled upon a secret of hers and landed them in a stalemate. A truce, two equally sharp knives held with perfect parity at each other’s throats.

Good luck. The shameless are exceedingly difficult to blackmail.

She had her back to him, and a heap of notebooks beside her on the bed. She was slumped, her rounded posture and the bundle of waves gathered at the top of her head making her seem like a teenager. She wasn’t crying, he didn’t think, just lost in the open book in her lap.