Page 10 of Reckless Woman
There’s a vicious beat as he drops his gaze to the empty in my hand. “I suggest you take that bottle of Macallan and fuck off for the rest of the day. You’ve drunk most of it anyway.”
“Don’t flash that limp dick dismissal crap at me, Dante,” I say coldly. “You told me a couple of months ago—to my goddamn face—that youdidn’t trust her. When you first found out who she was, you traveled to Colombia to put her down. Now you’re risking your family for a circus parade offaith?”
For a man who doesn’t talk much, I just managed to load enough incitement into a couple of sentences to red flag a bull.
“Did that bullet in South America travel to your brain?” Dante rises up from his desk, all six foot three inches of killer, and I wonder—idly—if I’ll be missing a hand by dinnertime. “Since when do you question me about anything?”
“You said—”
“She changed my mind,” he snarls, enunciating every word.
“When she dismembered some lowlife for you?” My mouth twists in scorn. “That isn’t a demonstration of trust. That’s a fucking pay-per-view. She’s Emilio’s daughter, and don’t you forget it. She’s just as bat-shit crazy as he was. Come on, Dante…You’re smarter than this.”
Thatreallypisses on his mood.
“What the hell are you still doing in my office?” he snarls. “Chancing a death wish?”
“I’m demonstrating what real trust is.” Eating up the distance to his desk, I lift up my shirt to show him the ugly, six-inch scar running jagged across my abdomen. “It’s you knowing, believing,trusting, that there will never be a retaliation forthis.”
Two years ago, he’d thrown Eve off this island and into the shark-infested waters of the Miami FBI department. When I’d called him out on it, he’d carved his displeasure into my skin.
Tossing my empty glass down on the desk, I drop my shirt and walk out before I do something really stupid like going back on my word and finally returning the favor.
* * *
I spendthe next few hours lost in the bottom of a bottle, chasing sundowners like I haven’t had a drink in days. In reality, I’ve sunk more liquor since Texas than I have in a month.
I do the worst of my drinking away from Anna, down on the shoreline below the main house. She’s a recovering addict and I’m not that much of an asshole to spill my vice in front of her. I’m the one who made her whole. I’ll be damned if I’ll be the one breaking her into pieces again.
I’ve taken up smoking in a bid to hide the taste. This evening I’m a real sin magnet, cooling my anger on a carpet of white sand that feels like cremation remains beneath my fingers.
“You saving any of that for me, little brother?” murmurs a voice that hasn’t aged a day since a barn and a shotgun, and the start of a nightmare.
“Nah, Cash, get your own.”
I slur it at the sunset, even though he’s sitting right next to me. I can smell the dirt and the Old Spice he used to steal from the hardware store in McKinney.
In my head, he’s wearing the same plaid shirt that Pa turned from blue to red. The left side of his face is missing and there’s a strange look in the one eye that still blinks, like he knows things but he isn’t telling me, just like he did back then…like the fact that our father was a paranoid schizophrenic who was always one juju jitsu away from triple homicide, or that our mother was cooking up meth in the basement as well as growing skunk in the attic to deal with the issue.
My brother.
My dead brother.
Cash first appeared to me in Texas once Anna and I were done making good in a place that holds nothing but bad. He opened the door and slid right into the Dodge’s back seat as I was starting up the engine. It was almost like he’d been expecting me.
I know he’s not real, but his figment won’t quit. It’s like he’s here for a reason and he isn’t leaving until he’s done.
“What are you drinking?” he asks.
“Frustration,” I say bitterly.
“Sounds like shit. Give me a Beamer any day of the week.”
He lights up one of my Marlboro Reds like he did on his last day on this earth. I smell the smoke. I hear the grinding metal of the lighter, and just like that I’m back on the family farm I’ve spent my whole life running from.
For the next couple of minutes, he keeps his dead mouth shut as we stare out at a false paradise together. It’s the worst conversation we never had. He’s making me think things I haven’t thought for years—like a hope that crashed, and a loss that burned. Stuff that as a kid I didn’t know how to process until Santiago put a gun in my hand and told me to shoot it all away.
I finish the rest of the bottle, and feel the payback kicking in already. I’m craving Anna’s body now to turn my vice into something sweeter.