I smirked. “Oh, I got revenge. That fucker is very VERY…let’s just say what he is rhymes with, shed.”
“How?” She shifted so she was sitting sideways. I leaned into her as well, until I was only inches from her face.
“That’s not important,” I said, not able to help my smile as I recalled a teenaged King taking that fucker out of this world, like the fucking trash he was.
“That’s actually kind of extraordinary,” Dre said after a long pause, her words taking me by surprise.
“Why do you say that?”
“Because, most people wouldn’t be able to recover from something that crippling.” And again, I didn’t know if she was talking about me or herself.
I scoffed. “Nah, I just don’t let what that cocksucker did dictate my life. If I do, then he wins. Besides, him and my mom made my life so fucking miserable that now I appreciate every damn good thing that comes my way, and even some of the bad. If it weren’t for them, I wouldn’t have recognized King as my brother that first day on the playground at school, or taken to Grace when she showed a kid wearing wrinkled pants a bit of kindness.”
“WRINKLED pants?” Dre asked, dramatically opening her mouth in mock surprise, and my mind immediately went to something else she could do with those lips that could make her gasp.
Or gag.
I cleared my throat and looked away. “Yeah, now THAT would probably go down as the biggest tragedy of my childhood. By far.”
Dre giggled, and the sound did something to suck the heaviness from the air like a vacuum.
I pulled in between two pine trees and killed the engine, leaving the radio on. I flipped off my headlights and the still waters of the Caloosahatchee appeared spread out in front of us. To the right was the causeway, its high back out of the water like the Loch Ness monster doing stretches. The shore, on the other side of the river, twinkled with lights from hotels and condos. Occasionally, a set of headlights would appear from the other side and travel over the causeway like a slow moving shooting star over the beasts back.
“It’s beautiful here,” Dre said, leaning over the dashboard and looking out over the water. “I forgot how much I love it here. My summers here with Mirna were the best of my life.”
“Me too,” I admitted.
She sighed and sat back against the seat. “So you need to get Max out of the system. How exactly can I help with that?”
I picked the file up from my center console and set it on her lap. I leaned over to her with my chin resting just above her shoulder. I wet my thumb on my tongue when a few of the pages wanted to be assholes and stick together. When I got them separated I plucked the paper I needed out of the file and held it up, only to find Dre staring at my mouth when I handed it to her. “What?”
She put her hands on the seat and shifted like she couldn’t get comfortable. “Nothing,” she said, pointing down to the file again. “What is all this?”
“I’m going to need your talents if I’m going to make any of this work.”
“Talents?” she asked, looking confused. “Did Mirna tell you I had some sort of talent? Because I think you might of caught her during one of her bad times. The only talent I have is sabotaging my own life.” She tapped her index finger a few times against the seam of her lips. “Oh!” she exclaimed with a snap of her fingers. Leaning closer, she placed a hand on the side of her lips as if she were warding off lip readers. “When I was in kindergarten I ALWAYS colored inside the lines. Although, I’m sad to say I never pursued it professionally.” She sighed deeply. “One of my many many regrets in life.”
I found myself smiling back at Dre, and it sure as shit wasn’t as a result of her joke, because it wasn’t nearly as funny as she seemed to think it was. But if smiles were infectious then Dre’s was the plague of smiles.
Extremely contagious.
“Listen, Doc, I have no doubt that you were a coloring badass at one time. A Crayola savant, if you will. Unfortunately, that skill isn’t really going to work in this particular situation,” I said, nodding to the papers on her lap. “I need to create a paper trail so I look like an exceptional citizen in every way.” I leaned back against the door. “Like Martha Stewart.”
Dre lifted her head and scrunched up her nose. “Martha Stewart did time for insider trading.”
I sat back up. “Then John Stewart, or Tony Stewart, or whichever Stewart looks like someone the state would want to give a kid to. Fuck, even Kristen Stewart would do,” I said. “Although, I hear she’s a lesbian now, which is awesome by the way, but if she lived here they might not give her a kid ’cause Florida’s southern and very conservative,” I said, repeating Grace’s words.
“Well, we are in Florida, it doesn’t get much southern then that,” Dre said.
“Yeah,” I agreed. “We’re so southern that we’re below the bible belt. We’re like…the cock of the south.” Dre laughed.
“Did you know that gay marriage isn’t a thing here yet?” I asked.
“I actually did know that,” Dre said, tilting her head to the side while she went over the papers. “Well, I knew that. I can’t exactly say I’m up to date on current events just yet.”
Normally, when I went off on a tangent, especially to someone who didn’t know me very well, most people liked to call me out when I’ve veered off track and would try to and rein me back in. I was beginning to notice that Dre didn’t do that. In fact, every time my brain steered me off course, she’d let me go with it until I found my way back around on my own.
It was…different.
“Long story short is that I need to be a model citizen, and the list in that file tells us what we are going to need to make that happen. Since I can’t exactly prove a lot of that shit the legit way, I need your skills to create them.” I got out of the car and she followed, file in hand. I leaned against the hood and lit a joint, inhaling the smoke along with the salty air. Dre’s head was still in the papers as I continued, her bottom lip between her teeth. “At first, before Mirna told me what a diabolical genius you were with the forgery, I was going to get you a job at the clerks office and see what you could do to move things along. You know emails, files, signature stamps. Whatever might help,” I explained. “But when she told me you created the check itself, watermark and all…I figured we could use that talent to make a big dent in that list a lot faster.”