If Riggs needed a distraction, talking about what a scumbag Brantley was, would be the way to go.
“Ah, me and officer Brantley go way back,” I slurred, bringing the end of the paper to my lips to lick and seal it. “I don’t know who gave that piece of shit more of a hard-on me or Christine,” I added, passing him the joint as I met his curious eyes.
He paused for a minute, composing himself and lit the joint.
“Never heard you talk much about your wife,” he said, inhaling sharply.
Yeah, I kept that shit under lock and key. Only the people who were around for it truly knew the whole story.
“So, this rat, the cop, he’s been itching to put you away for a while? And Christine? He wanted to arrest her too?”
I laughed.
“Nah he didn’t want to arrest her,” I said before taking a toke. “Christine wasn’t some low-life junkie, Riggs,” I explained, angrily.
People often had the misconception that Christine was using but she never took a drug in her life. I often think that she didn’t mean to kill herself and like me she was simply trying to forget the mess our life together had become.
She didn’t know she was shooting enough heroin to put down a horse.
She didn’t know.
“I didn’t say she was,” he said solemnly, pouring us both a shot.
To hell with sobriety.
“It’s what you think because it’s all anyone in this fucking place ever talks about. You’ve got this image of Christine, a woman you never met, lying face down in a bathtub with a fucking needle in her arm but that’s not the woman I married. Everyone in this club assumes I drink because I feel guilty she overdosed with the shit we were selling, but they’re wrong, so fucking wrong.”
“So why do you do it?”
“Sure, it’s got something to do with it. If I wasn’t dealing heroin she wouldn’t have been able to get her hands on it. But, Christine would’ve found some other way to end the nightmare she was living,” I told him the truth and not the fairytale I liked to believe.
“I was a shitty husband,” I admitted. “I put this club before her. I put the drugs, the money, the goddamn patch before the sweet girl I fell in love with when I was fifteen years old. See, she knew me before the club, before the corruption and the mayhem and she had to watch me morph into a Knight. It was all good when I was just a prospect, still had time for my girl and the crazy shit we used to do.”
I smiled faintly, thinking back to all the things we used to do like the time we got caught skinny dipping in her parent’s pool.
“I don’t know Lauren all that well, ran into her a few times since you two started up, but she seems spunky. Christine used to be spunky. She used to love life, and more than life, she loved me. She loved me hard, felt that shit down in my bones.”
And when her parents caught us she defended me to them.
She chose me over them.
She chose us.
I cleared my throat and continued.
“After I patched in, Cain pushed me to the front lines. I was eager to earn, eager to prove I would do anything for the club,” I angled my head to the side and studied his profile.
“Sort of like you,” I pointed out. “In our time of need you stepped up and became a front runner. That isn’t lost to the club, Riggs, and you don’t have to keep proving your worthy of your patch,” I added.
“I’m not,” he argued. “I’m just doing my job.”
“I thought the same thing and kept doing my job. I ran drugs, guns, women…whatever made the most profit and never looked back. I forgot about the love I had at home and what it felt like to go home to a warm body. I pushed the thoughts of how fucking good it felt to crawl into bed and have the sweetest woman wrap her legs around me. She didn’t know what I did, and if she did, she didn’t care. I could’ve killed a man, sometimes did, and she still welcomed me home, into our bed, night after night.”
“So how did it all change?”
“I started pushing her away. Cain made a deal with the G-Man and we moved more drugs, became the biggest operation on the east coast.”
“The G-Man is the guy Jimmy Gold was working with to push Pastore out, right?”
“Yeah,” I confirmed, taking another shot. “Anyway, there is only so much bad shit you can do before it catches up to you and changes who you are. It didn’t bother me at first, I had shoeboxes full of money and in my head I was doing it for a good reason. I would buy Christine her dream house, make sure my woman had everything she wanted, the best of everything. I told myself I was doing it for her, making up for the douche bag I was on a daily basis. I didn’t have a conscience I only had a goal, but I didn’t plan on being the reason two seventeen-year-old kids died,” I confessed.
A house I was just starting to make a home.
Rest in peace Alex Rossi and Peter Corona.