Spin (20 page)

“You’re fired.”

~ Finn ~

I PULLED UP in front of my place. A rumble of unease
rolled through me. Jane’s car was parked at a strange angle, the
door swung wide, but no one was inside or anywhere around.

All senses alert, I got down from my truck
and eyed her car as I passed it to go inside.

My immediate concern, pretty unnecessary
here in Destiny Falls, was that there’d been a home invasion. My
fears were allayed when I stepped inside and saw Jane.

Well, not allayed. Redirected. Because
something was definitely wrong.

She was sitting in one of the kitchen
chairs, her legs spread, elbows on her knees. She wore a strappy
yellow sundress and her tanned arms and brown hair glowed in the
evening light. But she was shoeless, with her hair falling down
beside her face and…a beer in her hand. Another sat on the table
beside her. Tipped over. A puddle of beer dribbled out, like an
estuary toward the salt-and-pepper shakers.

“Janey?” I said quietly, standing in the
doorway.

She burped.

I dropped my bag and started toward her.
“Are you okay?”

She swung her bleary eyes up. “Did you know
eagles are scavengers?”

I stopped my forward progress. She looked
like a woman on the edge. I glanced at the beer in her hand. “How
many have you had?”

“I’ve been doing research.” It sounded
vaguely threatening. She waved her phone in the air. “Did you know
about the scavenger-ness?”

“Is that going to be a problem?”

“Eagles,” she pronounced darkly, “look
good.” She traced the air in front of her face. “But in here?” She
poked her chest and shook her head.

“Bad?”

She nodded. “They clean up real good, that’s
all.”

“Bald eagles clean up real good,” I
repeated.

She nodded, then hiccupped. “Do you still
like them?”

“Are we doing something here, Jane, or are
you just drunk?

“You don’t appear to be doing anything, and
I’m definitely drunk.” She leaned forward in her seat and pulled
the refrigerator open awkwardly. Her hand disappeared behind it,
then she came out with another beer. “Want one?” she asked in a
sing-song voice.

I shook my head slowly.

“I’ve never been drunk before,” she
announced.

“No.”

She shook her head back and forth. Her hair
spilled every which way, which I liked very much. She would not.
How did it get down, loose and tangled?

“Nope, never. Not even once.” She sat back
in the chair. “How’m I doing?”

“It depends what you’re going for.”

“That is a good question, Finn.” She sat
back in the chair. Her skirt pulled up over one tanned knee. It was
scraped.

“Did someone hurt you, Janey?” I asked
quietly. Inside, I felt a fist begin to form in my gut.

She popped the lid off and, squeezing the
cap between her thumb and middle finger, she bent her arm, elbow to
chin height, and gave her fingers a hard snap. The bottle cap shot
like a missile across the kitchen into the living room, where it
pinged off something hard.

We watched it go. “Good shot,” I said
carefully.

“Oh, I’m a great shot. Anything backwoods
and dumb fuck, I’m your girl.”

Uh-oh.

Warily, I circled her, heading into the
living room to protect my valuables. Mostly the guitar. I sat on
the couch, grabbed the Gibson, and strummed a few chords.

I felt her watching me from the other room.
“Why didn’t you tell me, Finn?”

My heartbeat slowed down a little, in a
getting-ready sort of way. We were going to fight. I knew it. I
knew all about fights. Family fights, fistfights, firefights,
didn’t matter—I did them all.

“Tell you what?” I said, strumming the
guitar.

“What you do for a living.”

“Ah.” I was quiet a minute. “How did you
find out?”

She looked at me for a long time. I didn’t
like it. “Find out?
Find out?
”

I rested my arm over the guitar. “Yeah, find
out.”

“Mrs. Lovey,” she said. She might be drunk,
but her eyes had no problem drilling into mine. “I’m trying to
think of why you wouldn’t have told me.”

“Think hard.”

She looked shocked. I don’t think she
expected this response. But what the fuck? Jane was a beautiful
superhero, but she was also a liar. To herself. “Think hard about
why I might not have mentioned it.”

She got up, a little unsteadily. “What the
fuck, Finn?”

“‘What the fuck?’” I repeated quietly. “What
the fuck does ‘what the fuck’ mean?”

“It means why didn’t you tell me? I asked
what you did for a living.”

I met her eyes and strummed a chord. “Yeah,
but you were more interested in talking about ginger, and you never
got back around to it, did you?”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

I locked my eyes on hers. “What do you think
it’s supposed to mean?”

There was a pause. “I think it’s supposed to
mean I only wanted you for sex.”

“And?”

She looked at me for a long minute, then
leaned sort of drunkenly across the table in my direction. “I think
you can take the girl out of the swamp, but not the swamp out of
the girl.”

The fist in the center of my gut hardened.
“Well, there you go.” I gave her a cold smile. “Don’t worry, Janey.
You’re going places, remember? It can be your little secret, what
you did here, trashing out with the pawnshop guy.”

She jerked as if struck. Then she lifted her
bottle and looked at it thoughtfully, “Oh, yeah, I’m going places.”
Sunlight made the bottle glow a deep, rich brown. “Did you know I
can’t speak French?”

I narrowed my eyes. I hadn’t seen this
detour coming.

“Four years in school and a whole lot of
tutoring, and I still can’t say anything but
‘Parlez-vous
Anglais?’
”

It sounded like a threat. I stopped playing.
“Do we need to be speaking French right now?”

“I can’t speak Spanish either,” she told me
darkly. “I have no talent for languages.”

“Jane—”

“I can’t play an instrument either. I can’t
sew. I can’t dance.”

“Jane—”

“I can’t fish either. I can’t cast a reel to
save my life.” She looked over at me, as if awaiting judgment on
this.

“You don’t cast reels,” I told her quietly.
“You going to tell me what’s going on?”

She plunged onward, ignoring me. “Plants die
when I walk into the room. I can shoot a rifle, but except for a
turkey shoot or home invasion, how is that really helpful? And
school, well.” She gave a drunken snort. “We all know how that
turned out.”

She leaned her elbows on the table, beer in
hand, and expounded on her academic failures. “History, math,
science, the names of trees or stars or rocks or antibiotics or
chemicals or anything else you might need to
know
.” She
shook her. “I suck at knowledge.”

I stopped trying to interrupt, because she
was on a roll and I wasn’t an idiot.

“I have one talent, Finn.” She held up an
index finger, weaving slightly on the elbow she had propped on the
table. “One. Do you want to know the one thing I do well?”

“Confuse the shit out of me?” I
suggested.

Her smile was bleak. “I am a human motor of
getting shit done, to quote a friend.”

“Yeah. Remember, it’s going to get you on
all those maps,” I said slowly.

“Right. The maps.” She lifted her bottle
again, examining it. “I’ll pay you for this,” she said and threw it
across the room. It hit my kitchen wall and made a clunking noise,
then fell to the ground, spraying beer but not shattering.

I got to my feet, guitar in hand.

“I can’t even break a beer bottle,” I heard
her say.

“What the fuck is going on, Janey?”

Her head turned to me. She should look
flushed from exertion and emotion. Instead, she looked pale and
flat. “I’m not going anywhere, Finn. Not anymore.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I got fired.”

“Oh shit.”

“And I can’t even break a beer bottle.” Her
voice cracked at the end.

Our eyes met. “You want to break a beer
bottle?” I said, low.

She nodded, her hair mussed around her
scared white face.

“You’re going to have to throw it harder
than that,” I told her, and crossed the room to show her how,
because I knew all about breaking shit.

~ Jane ~

FINN STRODE OVER to me as my phone buzzed yet again.
Another text from Savannah.

2 more clients bailed. Foster Aug wedding
& Stone Intel Corp.

It was her third message this afternoon.
This one finally expressed the natural sentiment,
What the f is
going on up there, Mac???

I was not only taking down my career, but
possibly Savannah’s as well.

Finn was grabbing beer bottles out of the
fridge. Then he took my hand and dragged me outside, up onto the
deck, near the thirty-yard trash container half-filled with
construction debris.

He swung me around and shoved a bottle into
my hand. “If you want to break shit, Janey, you got to do it like
this,” he said and flung a bottle at the container hard. It
shattered into a hundred pieces, spraying broken glass and foaming
beer like sea foam all over the container.

He felt fierce, and fierce was just what I
wanted right now.

I was breathing hard and fast. I tightened
my grip on the bottle he’d put in my hand and turned and hurled it
at the container. It shattered in a beautiful, satisfying mess.
Glass shards crashed everywhere. He slapped another one in my
hand.

“Want to tell me what happened?”

I began slinging them, hard and fast, one
after the other, and Finn kept me supplied, I have no idea how.
They shattered in bright, wet, splintering arcs until the deck was
a war zone of shattering glass and foaming beer and one crazy woman
losing her mind.

“Peter J. g.d. Sandler fired
me”—
smash
—“which means DC is out”—
smash
—“and all the
clients they referred to me are out”—
smash
—“and soon
everyone will know.”
Smash.
I wiped hair off my face with
the back of the hand that gripped a fresh bottle. “I guess it
really is in the blood.”
Smash
. “You can pretty it up any
old which way, but blood”—
smash
—“will
always”—
smash
—“tell.”

Smash.

Silence descended. I was shaking but done.
Or at least there were no more bottles in close range. In front of
me was a sea of broken glass and foam and beer fumes.

My shoulders slumped and my head went down,
and then Finn was there, behind me, lifting me in his arms, taking
me away from the splintered glass carnage. He carried me inside and
sat me on his lap on the sofa.

I indulged in the drama of the moment and
rolled my face into his chest and just held on, let him carry me,
literally, and smooth down my hair and rub my back until I started
to calm down.

Inside I felt all empty and echoey, like a
cloud might feel. In a bad way. Finn just waited. This was one of
his greatest strengths, his ability to just sit still, to be the
cyclone center

When I was no longer hyperventilating, he
shifted us to a more comfortable position on the couch and said,
“Okay, so tell me why Pete the ass fired you?”

I sniffed. “Well, there was an incident with
blueberries.”

He lifted his brow. “That doesn’t sound like
something I want you doing with Pete Sandler.”

“I dumped a blender full of blueberry
daiquiri over his head.”

A longer pause. “Okay. I didn’t expect that.
Why?”

“He—” I paused, searching for a word that
wouldn’t send Finn out of the house with a weapon. “He startled
me.”

We looked at each other in silence. Then
Finn started to roll me off his lap. “I’ll be right back.”