“Yeah. Oh. This early morning caller said she was a friend of yours. I saw you talking to her a couple of weeks back, talking to her outside the shop, and you told me she was just asking for directions. Remember?”
Of course I remember. I remember all too well. The very first time I met Lowell, she pulled up in her bland sedan with the tinted out windows, and she spent the next five minutes explaining in great detail how she was going to fuck with my shit if I didn’t help her. Mac had asked me about it the next day, suspicion deeply engrained in every line of his body, and I’d told him she was just some tourist, asking how to get to the Pacific Science Center. “No. No, I can’t say that I do,” I lie.
“Well, she seems to know you, Mason. She said she’d been trying to get hold of you for a couple of days now. Said she hadn’t had any joy. And this woman, she said something really interesting before she left, Mason. You wanna know what she said?”
I keep my tongue in my head. Nothing I can do or say is going to make this situation any better. The wisest course of action is to seal my mouth shut and wait it out, see what happens. Mac throws the brick. It launches through the air and impacts with the wall just behind my head, exploding into tiny chunks of debris and a cloud of red dust.
“She said you weren’t holding up your end of the bargain. That you hadn’t given her anything interesting in days.” Mac shrugs, his palms turned up to the early morning sky. It looks like it’s going to rain. Why the fuck I’m noticing something so arbitrary as the weather when Mac looks like he’s about to cut my fucking head off is beyond me, but I can’t help it. “Why the fuck would this woman show up here, talking about you giving her something interesting? Tell me, Mason, ‘cause I am all out of ideas over here.”
“I don’t know. I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about.” Probably shouldn’t have said something so patently untrue. Mac snarls under his breath, reaching down to pick up another brick. This time it hits home. Pain blossoms like a firework in my head as the chunk of stone smashes into my left shoulder.
“You lying little shit. You’ve been informing on us this whole fucking time!” Mac screams. “I kept asking myself over and over, why the fuck won’t this kid pick up any extra work? Why won’t he just give in and fucking take the easy route? And now this…this makes everything so much clearer. Can’t be blurring the lines between right and wrong, picking up extra work, if you’re already working for the cops now, can you?” Another brick flies through the air. Dave stands off to one side, watching on with grim satisfaction as Mac volleys missile after missile at my head. “She even left her fucking card for you in case you’d lost her number, you ungrateful little cunt!” Mac rips a rectangular flash of white card from the top pocket of his shirt and flicks it at me; it falls at my feet in the bare dirt, but I can see all too well the blocky black print on its surface:
Denise Lowell
Drug Enforcement Agency
Why the fuck would she do this? Coming here? To the shop? She must be furious with me if she thinks betraying me to Mac, letting him in on the fact that I’ve been feeding her information, is going to make me comply with her wishes. Her actions are more likely to get me fucking killed. Lowell knows Mac’s up to all sorts of shady shit here once the roller shutters are pulled closed each night. The stolen cars that get shunted through Mac’s are innumerable. She has to know he would assume I was informing on him if she did this; it must have been her plan all along.
Fuck that fucking bitch.
If I ever see her again…
But, no. I probably won’t see her again. The likelihood of me seeing anyone ever again is pretty fucking slim. Mac has this look in his eye—pure hatred, so intense and so raw that it looks like it’s gripped him whole. I won’t be walking out of here today. I’m going to be bundled into the trunk of one of Mac’s cars, and he’s going to have my body dumped on the stairs of the downtown police station. A message to those who think they can snitch on someone like Mac and get away with it.
“I haven’t told her anything about you, Mac. What the fuck could I have told her? I don’t know anything. Please, Mac. Just think this through.” It’s barely worth wasting my breath, but I have to try. I’m a proud guy. I hate to make myself look weak, hate begging, but a responsibility like mine will make a guy do all kinds of things. Millie is the only thing that matters. If I’m not there to take care of her, who the fuck will? She’ll be placed into the foster care system, and what family is going to want to take care of a six-year-old who suffers from grand mal seizures? No one, that’s who.