“You could always ask Morelli,” Memphis suggested.
“Morelli’s dead,” Haynes replied unemotionally.
This time it was Memphis’s turn to appear nonplussed.
“Heard it was a car accident up in New Jersey,” Haynes continued.
“Interesting,” Memphis muttered.
“I think we’re done here, Mr. Redmond. I don’t expect to see you again. Carl can escort you to the door.”
Haynes’s bodyguard took a step in Memphis’s direction.
“Just in case you think we’re a bunch of dumb hicks down here, Mr. Redmond, I think you ought to know that we’re right on the edge of the Dismal Swamp. People get lost in there all the time, you know what I mean.”
Memphis nodded silently as Carl guided him away. He knew exactly what Haynes meant, and he knew a lot more than that.
Lena was standing by the door as he exited. She rolled her eyes at him and turned away. She was a woman who wore a certain amount of pain on her face, and he suspected that she rarely took chances. Some spark between them had caused her to drop her guard, and her perceived disappointment had only served to reinforce her curiosity.
“Sometimes you get the bear. Sometimes the bear gets you,” he whispered. “Sometimes you play it safe, and nobody gets anything.” His enigmatic words turned her around. Carl shoved Memphis past her, and her eyes followed him.
“I need a ride back to town, Carl,” she announced abruptly. “I’ll ride with Mr. Red.”
Carl turned and looked past her at Angus Haynes, who fidgeted nervously.
“His name is Redmond, and he has business with Carl,” Haynes explained.
“I have something important I have to do, besides I want to talk to him about something personal. What could you all have to do that’s so important that it can’t wait? Come on, Mr. Redmond. It’s not nice to make a girl beg for a ride.”
She grabbed her purse and Memphis’s arm and pulled him toward his car. Carl stood there perplexed without clear direction from his boss.
Memphis moved quickly to his car. Whatever Haynes’s plans for him had been, he had been reluctant to pursue them in front of his daughter. It was an advantage that might not present itself again and one that he was not about to allow to slip past him.
“You crazy as hell!” Rufus regarded Memphis with open-mouthed astonishment after listening to his plan. “You gon’ carry your ass back to New York after this is over, but I got to stay here and deal with these bastards after you gone.”
“You’ll be able to deal a lot better if everything works out, or you can choose to leave. You’ll have options, Rufus.”
“Options my ass!” Rufus complained. “You’ve had your monkey-ass up there so long, you forgot what it’s like down here. You the one with options. Got that white woman hanging all over you like you got a gold-plated dick. I ain’t got the options that you got.”
“The best option you’ve got is that we’re friends.”
“I told you I ain’t got no...”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” Memphis interrupted. “I’ve heard it all before.”
“What you gon’ do with that Haynes gal anyway? You gon’ take her back to Never-Never Land and live happily ever after?”
“Maybe. What’s it to you?”
“It ain’t nothin’ to me, but it ought to be something to you. That kind of fairy tale ain’t for folks like us. You trust that woman?” Rufus asked in a more subdued voice.
“I don’t have to trust her. I know her. I’ve seen a hundred women like that. Once you understand their pain, you don’t have to trust them. They’re predictable, and that’s a card in your pocket.”
“I don’t know, man. I don’t know.” Rufus’s reluctance still didn’t allow him to commit to Memphis.
“If you do this, Rufus, I’ll look out for you. You can count on me. Angus Haynes is a badass, but he ain’t as big a dog as he thinks he is. The crap he told me was all lies. Morelli was just another flunky. Haynes pulled all the strings. Haynes ordered him to kill all of us. It was Morelli who shot me, and he had a reason for it.”
“Did Morelli really have an accident, or do you think Haynes had him killed to shut him up?”
“Neither one.” Memphis’s voice was no longer softly persuasive but deadly serious. “I killed him.”
Rufus’s eyes widened with surprise.
“I tracked him. I beat his ass, and I pushed his car off an embankment, and he was already dead when it hit the bottom.”
“You killed him?” Rufus seemed unable to digest the possibility that someone he knew as well as Memphis had actually killed somebody. “I remember when you didn’t have that kind of evil in you,” he observed sadly.
“Things change,” Memphis lamented. “Getting five bullets in your ass changes you. Waking up with half of all the blood in your body spreading across the pavement changes you. Having to lay in it for hours watching people pass because you’re too weak to call out changes you. Yeah, I killed his ass, and I’ll kill ten more just like him before I let somebody do that to me again.”
“What you want me to do?” Rufus asked.
“I want you to beg Angus Haynes for a job. I want you to clean his toilet, scrub his floors, wash his cars, even kiss his ass if you have to. Be a good nigger, then tell me everything you see him do.”
“Then what?”
“Then we live happily ever after,” Memphis laughed, “just like the book says.”
The motel room was shadowy but unintentionally so. Subdued lighting from inadequate bulbs hid the woman’s face. Lena stood with her back against the door. It was as if she was frozen in that spot and unable to approach any closer.
Memphis waited on her. He sensed that it wasn’t a moment to be aggressive.
She stared at him then looked away, biting her lower lip in uncharacteristic indecision.
“I don’t know why I’m here,” she confessed. “This isn’t like me.” She looked at every spot in the room except at Memphis.
“Why I’m throwing myself at a man who wouldn’t even tell me his name, I don’t know. I’m not ugly. I’m not desperate. What do you think it is?”
“Maybe we both need the same thing,” he answered with an air of soul-searching.
“What?”
“Redemption, peace... revenge.”
Her eyes finally returned to Memphis. It was as if something had finally struck a chord with her.
“Why do you stay here... with him?”
“He’s my father.”
“They say he killed your mother.”
“You’ve been listening to idle gossip. She wasn’t my mother. My mother died when I was a child. That was his second wife. You could say she was my stepmother, I suppose, but I was grown when he married her. She wasn’t anything to me.”
“Did he really kill her?”
She finally stepped away from the door and walked hesitantly across the room and stood close to Memphis. She closed her eyes, leaned against him, and let his arms allay her trembling.
“He killed my mother too,” she sobbed unexpectedly.
Memphis held her, not knowing exactly what to say.
“She... she overdosed with aspirin, but he drove her to it. It was the only way she could get away from him.”
“And that’s why you stay, isn’t it?”
“I stay because I hate him,” she whispered as if she couldn’t bear to hear herself say the words. “I stay because I want to remind him every day how much I despise him.”
Memphis held her tight. She would stay in this hole in the wall until it killed her in order to make her father suffer. Ray Mayweather was probably only one in a line of losers with whom she aligned herself in order to spite him. Nothing hurt a man worse that the thought of his daughter wallowing in a toilet with a maggot like Ray Mayweather. It was a slow death for her as well, and it was inevitable unless he offered her an alternative. He guided her toward the bed, and she didn’t resist. Afterwards, they would talk about alternatives because he had seen a light in her eyes that made him think that they might exist for him again as well.