Then the lifeless body shifted and released a pitiful wail.
Letty recognized the tattoo of the strangling hands as Arnold LeBreck painfully lifted his head and fixed his eyes upon Letty, and then something behind her.
Letty’s stomach fell.
She spun around.
Daphne stood five feet away wearing a black rubber apron streaked with paint or blood and a white surgical mask, her black hair pinned up except for a few loose strands that splayed across her shoulders.
She pointed a shotgun at Letty’s face, and something in that black hole suggested the flawed philosophical underpinnings that had landed Letty in this moment. No more hating herself, no avoiding the mirror, letting her father whisper her to sleep, no books on learning to love yourself or striving to become something her DNA could not support. She was facing down a shotgun, on the verge of an awful death, not because she was an evil person, but because she wasn’t evil enough.
Letty thought fast. “Oh, thank God. You’re not hurt.”
Daphne said through the mask, “What are you doing here?”
“Making sure you’re okay. I ran into Chase—”
“What’d he tell you? I warned him to let me have a week with Arnold, and then I’d be out of his life.”
“He didn’t tell me anything, Daphne. That’s why I came over. To check on you.”
Arnold moaned and twitched, managed to get himself swinging back and forth over the wide drain in the floor like a pendulum.
“That man was going to kill me,” Daphne said.
“I know, honey. I saved you. Remember?” The smell was staggering, Letty’s eyes beginning to water, her stomach to churn. “Well, I see you’re okay, so I’ll slip out, let you—”
“You shouldn’t have come back.”
“I didn’t see anything in the papers about your husband or Arnold. I thought something had happened to you after I left last Sunday.”
Daphne just stared at her. The facemask sucking in and out. At last she said, “You think what I’m doing is—”
“No, no, no. I’m not here to…that man was going to kill you. He deserves whatever happens to him. Think of all the other people he’s murdered for money.”
“You saw my painting?”
“Um, yeah.”
“What do you think?”
“What do I think?”
“Do you like it?”
“Oh, yes. It’s … thought-provoking and—”
“Some parts of Arnold’s portrait are actually painted with Arnold.”
Daphne’s arms sagged with the weight of the shotgun, the barrel now aligned with Letty’s throat.
“I saved your life,” Letty said.
“And I meant what I said. I won’t ever forget it. Now go on into the wine cellar. Just push Arnold back and stand over the drain.”
“Daphne—”
“You’d be a lovely subject.”
Letty’s right hand grazed the zipper of her all-time favorite score—a Chanel quilted leather handbag she’d stolen out of the Grand Hyatt in New York City. Thirty-five hundred in Saks Fifth Avenue.
“Get your hand away from there.”
“My BlackBerry’s vibrating.”
“Give it to me.”
Letty unzipped the bag, pulled out the BlackBerry with her left hand, let her right slip inside. Any number of ways to fumble in front of a gaping shotgun barrel.
She said, “Here,” tossed the BlackBerry to Daphne, and as the device arced through the air, Letty’s right hand grasped the Beretta and thumbed off the safety.
She squeezed the trigger as Daphne caught the phone.
The shotgun blasted into the ceiling, shards of blond brick raining down and Daphne stumbling back into the wall as blood ran in a thin black line out of a hole in her throat.
Letty pulled out the pistol—no sense in doing further damage to her handbag—and shot her three times in the chest.
The shotgun and the BlackBerry hit the limestone and Daphne slid down into a sitting position against the wall. Out from under her rubber apron, blood expanded through little impulse ripples whose wavelengths increased with the fading pump of her heart. Within ten seconds, she’d lost the strength or will to clutch her throat, her eyes already beginning to empty. Letty kicked the shotgun toward the washing machine and walked to the edge of the wine cellar, breathing through her mouth; she could taste the rotten air, now tinged with cordite.
She looked at Arnold. “I’m going to call an ambulance for you.”
He nodded frantically at the pistol in Letty’s hand.
“You want me to . . . ?”
He let out a long, low moan—sad and desperate and inhuman.
Arnie,” she said, raising the Beretta, “I’m not even sure you deserve this.”
10
Letty walked down the long driveway toward the 4Runner. The rain had stopped and the clouds were breaking up, a few meager stars shining in the southern sky, a night bird singing to a piece of the moon. For a fleeting moment, she felt the heart-tug of having witnessed a beautiful thing, but a crushing thought replaced the joy—there was so much beauty in the world, and in her thirty-six years, she’d brushed up against so little of it.
At the bottom of the driveway, she took her BlackBerry out of the ruined handbag, but five seconds into the search for Chase Rochefort’s number, powered off her phone. She’d done enough. So very much more than enough.
The alarm squeaked and the 4Runner’s headlights shot two brief cylinders of light through what mist still lingered in the cul-de-sac. Letty climbed in behind the wheel and fired up the engine. Sped away from that house, from lives that were no longer her problem. Felt a familiar swelling in her chest, that core of inner-strength she always seemed to locate the first night of a long bit when the loneliness in the cell was a living thing.
And she promised herself that she’d never try to be good again.
Only harder, stronger, truer, and at peace, once and forever at peace, with her beautiful, lawless self.
II - Sunset Key
1
Letty Dobesh came in from the cold to the smell of cooking eggs, bacon, and stale coffee. The Waffle House was in College Park, a bad neighborhood in south Atlanta near the airport. She wore a thrift-store trench coat that still smelled of mothballs. Her stomach rumbled. She scanned the restaurant, dizzy with hunger. Her head throbbed. She didn’t want to meet with Javier. The man scared her. He scared a lot of people. But she had $12.23 in her checking account and she hadn’t eaten in two days. The allure of a free meal was too much to pass up.
She had come twenty minutes early, but he was already there. He sat in a corner booth with a view of the street and the entrance. Watching her. She forced a smile and walked unsteadily down the aisle beside the counter. The points of her heels clicked on the nicotine-stained linoleum.
Sliding into the booth across from Javier, she nodded hello. He was Hispanic with short black hair and flawless brown skin. Every time they’d met, Letty thought of that saying, Eyes are windows to the soul. Because Javier’s weren’t. They didn’t reveal anything—so clear and blue they seemed fake. Like a pair of rhinestones, with nothing human behind them.
An ancient waitress sidled up to their table with a notepad and a bad perm.
“Get ya’ll something?”
Letty looked at Javier and raised an eyebrow.
He said, “On me.”
“The farmer’s breakfast. Extra side of sausages. Egg whites. Can you make a red eye? And a side of yogurt.”
The waitress turned to Javier.
“And for you, sweetie?”
“Sweetie?”
“What would you like to order, sir?”
“I’ll just eat her fumes. And a water.”
“Ice?” The way she said it sounded like ass.
“Surprise me.”
When the waitress had left, Javier studied Letty.
He said finally, “Your cheekbones look like they could cut glass. I thought you’d come into some money.”