Tammy picked up her purse off a side table and took out some Kleenex, which she held to her dripping nose with a miserable look on her face. She was half a foot taller than me, but at that moment she looked like a little girl. “You shouldn’t have given that reporter the story about our dad. That was wrong.”
“Tammy, I didn’t give him anything. He targeted your dad as part of the larger exposé on his own. I tried to get him not to run it, but I couldn’t convince him. Now believe it or not, I’m real sorry that you and your mom had to find out this way, but that doesn’t mean Veronica can come up to me where I work and try to stab out my eye. You get that, right?”
Tammy sniffled again. “You’re not going to sue, are you?”
I wanted to say, Yes! Yes, I am going to sue your bitch of a sister, just to prove that I’m not the only crazy person in this story.
But then I remembered that Tammy’s name was still not crossed off on my atonement list. “Okay,” I said. “If I don’t sue your sister, can you and me call it even on the Mike Barker thing?”
Tammy was nodding before I even finished the question. “Yes, we’re even. Just please don’t make this any uglier than it already is.”
I tried not to calculate just how much money I was giving up by not suing Veronica Farrell and said, “Fine” through gritted teeth.
Tammy was suddenly all smiles again, back to her usual sunny cheerleader. “Also, could you drive me to the hospital? I’m all hopped up on cough medicine. We can take my car.”
She pressed her keys, which had a BMW fob on the ring, into my hand. I hadn’t even seen her take them out of her purse. Before I could say no, though, she was already headed toward the door.
Son of a . . .
. . .
I hadn’t been to a hospital in a while. The insurance that I had at Nicky’s came with such a high emergency room co-pay that I wouldn’t have ever gone to the ER for myself unless one of my limbs was already halfway off. And my friends must be pretty healthy and lucky, because a trip with flowers and trembling smiles hadn’t been required of me yet.
So I couldn’t be sure if hospitals had changed from the cold antiseptic affairs that I was used to seeing on shows like ER, or if the rich just get taken to a lot nicer digs. But if there hadn’t been several signs, assuring me that the tall and sprawling structure was a hospital, and not a resort, I might have passed it right up.
“Wow,” I said as we pulled into the parking structure. “This is like the nicest hospital I’ve ever seen.”
“Do you know what room number she’s in?” Tammy asked.
“No, but you can ask at the front desk, or do they call it a concierge in places like this?”
Tammy pulled out her Farrell Girl compact and started brushing light powder over her red nose. “No, it’s a front desk.”
I watched her trying to mask the red on her poor abused nose. “You’ve got a cold, and Veronica’s in the hospital. Do you really think she’s going to care if your skin doesn’t look flawless?”
Tammy answered with a thin, embarrassed smile and kept on buffing her nose down with powder. “You don’t know Veronica.”
. . .
Nicky and Veronica were sitting next to each other on the edge of the bed when we walked in, and I don’t think it unfair to say that she looked like shit.
Her eyes weren’t exactly black, but there was ugly purple bruising around one, and the other was swollen shut.
Her top lip was also swollen, and her nose was packed with gauze. She looked so bad, Tammy whispered, “Jesus,” beside me.
I had one terrible second of pride that I, Davie Jones, had managed to mess up the face of the most beautiful woman I had ever seen. Then I shoved it down into the darkest corner of my heart where it belonged and said, “I’m sorry.”
Her one unswollen eye glinted amid the purple bruise, but other than that she didn’t respond.
That’s when I noticed something that I should’ve spotted from the second I walked in. She was holding Nicky’s hand in her lap. No, not just holding it. Squeezing it.
TWENTY-NINE