“What the hell is going on here?” Is the first thing out of his mouth, plenty of attitude, like he’s king of whatever hill he happens to be sitting on, and not a short guy with bad hair and a worse suit. Then he sees Ronnie and the twinklings on her belt and everything changes. The guy stands himself up straight and drops his eyes to the floor. Instant and total submission.
Ex-con, I realize. And not all that ex.
I glance down at Sofia and her eyes are wide like she’s witnessed the second coming of Elvis and she’s taking those rapid little breaths that are music to any man’s ears.
Then I get it.
Christ no. This runt can’t be him. I believe in coincidence but this would be way beyond coincidence. This would be a goddamn miracle.
Detective Deacon takes the lead. “What are you doing here, sir? There’s an arrest in progress.”
The runt keeps his eyes down. “I live here, officer. This is my apartment.”
Ronelle laughs. “You gotta be kidding me, right? You’re Carmine Delano?”
“That’s me, officer,” he says, and with those three words Sofia is lost. All the work of the past year sloughs away as she steps out of my arms.
“Carmine,” she says, holding out her hands to this guy who abused her for years. “Carmine, baby.”
The guy flicks his eyes upward toward her and shakes his head.
Not yet, the motion says. Wait until the cop leaves.
The guy has been in prison all these years. Not dead, banged up.
Ronnie is having a hard time accepting such a mind-boggling a coincidence.
“You’re Carmine Delano?” she says again. “Showing up here at this precise moment. Unbelieveable.”
“All’s I did was come home, officer,” says the man who purports to be Sofia’s lost husband, come home at the very time his wife is about to be whisked downtown for his murder.
Ronnie knows prison discipline when she sees it. “Show me your arm, convict,” she orders and Carmine does not hesitate, dropping his duffel bag and rolling up one sleeve, revealing a forearm covered in ink.
“Prison tats,” says Ronnie. “Aryan Brotherhood. My favorite. When did you get out?”
“Two weeks,” says Carmine sullenly. “I did a twenty jolt without parole.”
“Where?”
“Eastham, Houston.”
Ronnie whistles. “The pig farm? They do not fuck around down there. You got any ID?”
Carmine pulls an envelope from his jacket pocket and hands it over.
“Just my release papers.”
“Tell me what landed you in the farm, Mr. Carmine Delano,” says Ronnie, studying the papers.
“Armed robbery, Officer. I was heading for Mexico and ran out of funds.”
“You kill someone, Carmine?”
Carmine shuffles like a guilty schoolboy outside the principal’s office. “A guy died in the bank. An old guy. Heart attack they tell me.”
Ronnie stuffs the papers into the envelope. “So, no parole. You were lucky not to end up with the needle and an audience.”
“Yes, ma’am,” says Carmine, but Ronnie is not impressed by his politeness.
“Ma’am? I don’t think the Brotherhood call people like me ma’am. Ain’t you noticed what color I am, son?”
“I was just trying to survive, Officer.”
Detective Deacon palms the papers into Carmine’s chest. Hard. “Yeah? Well, that supremacist bullshit don’t wash up here. I got your face in my lexicon now, Delano, so you better hope that nobody perpetrates any hate crimes, ’cause if they do, I’m coming directly to this address. Got it?”
“Absolutely, Officer. Those days are behind me. And I’m gonna get these tattoos lasered.”
“Good. Daniel here knows a cosmetic surgeon. He ain’t the most reliable but he’s cheap.” She turns to Sofia. “And you! Stop wasting police time with your boozy confessions. Next time I’ll find something to charge you with.”
Ronnie might as well be in another dimension for all the attention Sofia pays to her. I know the feeling.
Deacon pulls the flap of her coat across the gun, badge and cuffs. “Looks like you’re out in the cold.”
I turn to Sofia, to see if this is true. I shouldn’t have, because I’m invisible to her now. She will not even acknowledge me.
“Carmine, sweetheart,” she says, and I swear she is glowing. “I knew you’d come back. I knew you loved me.”
“I dreamed of you every night, Sofia,” he says, and they are like dogs on leashes straining to get at each other. “Even when I was being punked, I was thinking of you.”
Punked?
That should break the spell, but no.
“Poor baby,” she says. “Did they hurt you?”
Ronnie punches me in the shoulder. “You need a ride, soldier? Or you gonna get back to the club on that third wheel you got spinning?”
I swipe my Deadwood DVD box from the coffee table as if it’s the last remaining shred of my pride. The disk is still in the machine, but it’s gonna have to stay there.
“Can I sit up front?” I ask, hoping my bottom lip is not wobbling.
I walk toward the door with boots of lead, waiting with each footfall for a word from Sofia.
A farewell, a thank-you.
Anything.
But not a single utterance is offered. She is ill, I know and chained to this man by geasa, but that doesn’t make my heart any less broken.
Just like that I am out of the picture.
As the door closes behind us, I hear the thump of Sofia’s feet racing across the wooden floor and into Carmine’s embrace.
My phone tweets and I check it.
Cannibalism is not the only way to eat people alive. Love is just as effective.
I almost look around to see if Simon Moriarty is watching me.
Chapter 13
THERE’S STILL A LOT OF ACTIVITY AT THE CLUB AND I BET Jason could use a hand with the snag list, but my heart is heavy and my fingers are too thick for delicate work, so I sneak in the back way, like a teenager who has broken curfew to drink cider, and climb the boxy stairs to my apartment.
Dance music hammers the floorboards but after years of living in the same building as Sofia Delano, I can sleep through any commotion that is not potentially lethal. I strip down to my shorts and lie on the bed, which can accommodate my entire body if I lie diagonally and don’t move around too much.
In the end, it is not the decorating clamor itself that keeps me awake but the associated shenanigans. Jason and his boys are whooping it up while they work and I can hear the xylophone tinkle of shot glasses being raised every couple of minutes. The humanity gets to me, and the sheer, boisterous happiness of those guys. I know that I would be more than welcome to trot downstairs and join the celebration but I’d rather just lie here and be jealous. Anyway, grim moods are infectious and I would probably kill that party stone dead in twenty minutes. It would be like Jason’s dad walking in wearing his Gays Are the Spawn of Satan T-shirt. A T-shirt that Jason’s dad actually owns. Jason came out by telling his father that if gays were the spawn of Satan, then that would make him the devil. Took the father a couple of days to figure it out.
So I lie here on the bed and indulge myself in a mopey funk, replaying the week’s events over and over, but always coming back to the glassy adoration in Sofia’s eyes when Carmine darkened her door. Shit, she would chug the Kool-Aid right out of the bottle for that guy.
I was fooling myself. I never meant anything to Sofia.
Nothing. Not a thing. She couldn’t even remember my name.
For long hours my thoughts go around and around in ever-decreasing self-esteem circles until eventually I cry fuck it and trudge into the bathroom, where I find a bottle of triazolam that is almost in date and dry-swallow three pills.