“I still want to know,” I told her. “I’ll get something for us to eat, and then you can tell me, okay?”
Lia took a long breath and nodded her acquiescence.
Auburn Gresham wasn’t an area I’d spent much time exploring in the past, but when gang activity in the area began to push up into Rinaldo’s heroin trade, I’d been part of a group that came down and let them know exactly who was in control in the city. The message had been clear—go ahead and do what you want in the south, but don’t fuck with businesses in the north. We even picked a line—the 47th Parallel. It didn’t quite match Korea, but it still served as an easy reminder. It was based on 47th street, not any line of latitude, but it served its purpose.
During my tenure in the area, I’d found the best pizza place and made friends with the owners.
“Is that who I think it is?”
Jack Anderson leaned over the cash register and stuck out his hand, which I shook. He was a dark-skinned man in his mid-fifties with white hair and stubble around his chin. He’d been running the pizza place since his father passed away in the seventies.
“It’s been a while,” I said with a smile.
“You want the usual?” Jack asked.
“I haven’t been here in nearly a year,” I laughed. I couldn’t believe after all this time the dude still remembered what I wanted on my pizza. He didn’t do the traditional Chicago style, but the guy made the best thin crust and sauce around. “Can it still be referred to as a ‘usual’?”
“Well, I don’t know anyone else who ever orders it,” Jack said. “Face it, Evan, no one else thinks pineapple and mushroom go together.”
We laughed as he put in my order, caught up on some neighborhood shit, and then said our goodbyes as he handed me my pizza in a cardboard box with a stack of napkins on top. I hoofed it back to the motel and Lia. She gave me a strange look when I told her what was on the pizza but seemed to like it once she tried it.
“So, where were you born?” I asked.
“Dallas,” she said. “My father worked for AT&T when I was young. When my parents divorced, he and my mom split custody while I was growing up. When mom got an offer for a new job in Phoenix, Dad didn’t want to be that far from me, so he quit his job and moved to Arizona as well. He started working with the Navajo Nation to set up their computer networks.”
“What does your mom do?” I asked.
“She’s in the financial business.” Lia took another bite of pizza, chewed for a bit, and then put the slice back in the box. “I know she works in information security, but I honestly don’t quite understand it all. She keeps hackers out of their systems, basically.”
I snorted.
“Is that funny?”
I shook my head.
“I just don’t think it’s very successful,” I said. “There are a lot of people out there who are very good at getting past the security folks.”
“I’m sure that’s true, but she tries. It’s pretty good money, at least, so she could afford to set aside money to send me to school. I still haven’t managed to get a degree anywhere, of course, because that was about the time Dad died.”
“How did he die?”
“Cancer,” she said with a shrug. “It fucking sucked.”
I watched her closely, noticing her fingers twitch and her eyes blink rapidly a few times to hold back the moisture forming in them.
“You were with him,” I said.
“I had just finished high school when he was diagnosed. They said he had maybe a year, but he didn’t make it past eight months even with all the chemo and shit. I took care of him because there really wasn’t anyone else, and William did all the business stuff while he was sick so we could afford medical bills.”
“So your fiancé worked for your dad?”
“Yes, for about six years.”
“While you were in high school.”
“We started dating when I was fifteen.”
“How old was he?”
She blushed a little, and my suspicions about him being quite a bit older were confirmed before she answered.
“He was twenty four at the time.”
“Around here, we would’ve called you jail bait,” I said.
“Only if the parents pressed charges,” she said, and I knew she was right. If the parents were okay with it, well, at least one parent, then the law would turn a blind eye.
“What did your mom think?”
“She didn’t like it,” Lia said. “She didn’t like Will, anyway, and definitely didn’t like me being with him.”
“Just because of the age thing or something else?”
“I think just age initially, but I also think she realized, long before I did, that he wasn’t quite what he pretended to be.”
“You mean before he threw you out of a moving car and left you for dead?”
Lia glanced at me with dark eyes and then looked down at her hands.
“Something like that.”
“Have you seen him since then?”
“Yes.”
“When?”
She looked back up at and me and bit her lip for a moment.
“He was there at my mom’s house.”
“After I dropped you at the bus station?”
Lia nodded.
“What happened?”
“The usual,” she responded. She seemed to want to leave it at that, but I wouldn’t let her. Eventually she told me the rest. “He was drunk; Mom was yelling, and I was stuck between them. The major difference was that I had decided I wasn’t going to do it anymore.”
“Do what?”
“Put up with him and his crap!” she growled. “He could have really hurt me when he pushed me out of that car, and then he just left me there! I wasn’t going to listen to him go on about how he came right back and was so sorry and spent hours looking for me—it was bullshit, and I wasn’t going to listen to it!”
She took a deep breath before she went on.
“I told him I’d found someone else.” Lia glanced at me, seeming embarrassed for a moment. “I know we didn’t really…well, it’s not like we committed to each other or anything, but for the first time since high school, I realized there were other options out there besides Will and how he treated me.”
She looked up at me, and her eyes began to sparkle with tears.
“It’s all right,” I soothed. “Go on.”
“He didn’t like that answer,” she said with a shrug. “He started yelling, and Mom told him he needed to just leave. She came up near us, and he pushed her away. Then he grabbed my arm and squeezed really hard–”
Lia’s breath caught in her throat, and the tears that had been building up since I stopped her at the door finally cascaded down her cheeks. Dealing with crying chicks was definitely not something within my repertoire, so I went with the only thing I could think of—I grabbed the box of tissues from the bathroom and handed them to her.
Lia wiped her eyes and gripped her fingers around the crumpled tissue as she composed herself.
“I had bruises there for over a week afterwards. Mom started yelling—said she was going to call the police—and that made him let go. I told him we were through and that I never wanted to see him again.”
“What did he do?”
“He laughed. He said I was his, and nothing was going to change that.”
A tickle in the back of my head—one that was rarely wrong—told me that I was going to kill that motherfucker someday.
“He still wasn’t leaving, so Mom ran inside the house and came back out with the phone in her hand. When he realized that she really was calling the cops, he got in the car and left. That was the last I saw him.”
I tried to clear my head enough to listen to the rest of the story, but it wasn’t easy. I didn’t know what the asshole looked like, but I had enough of a vision in my head that I could see myself with the business end of my Beretta in his face. At some point, I was going to have to find a picture of the guy and make all that come true.