“Why?”
“Because I want this to be nice. I’m trying to end it nice. I’m trying to protect us both. You go to her with a story about us sleeping together, she’ll think you’re just a disgruntled clerk who got busted.”
“I didn’t steal your boat, douchebag. You think she’d believe that shit if she talked to me?”
“I think she’d believe you walked out of here with a pair of eight-hundred-dollar diamond earrings, since you used your pass card to log them out of the store in December and they never came back.”
“The fuck are you talking about? I never stole any eight-hundred-dollar earrings.”
“Christmas,” he said. “The hotel.”
“The hotel?” she asked. She didn’t get it—and then she did, remembered the night he gave her the ivory-handled pistol, the night she draped herself in almost half a million dollars of gems for him.
“When I took all that jewelry for us to play with, I used your security card, not mine. I guess we missed the earrings when we cleaned up the room. Honest accident. We were both pretty trashed. The point is, they went missing after you checked them out.”
That thought—and everything that came with it—took a moment to settle upon her.
“You knew you were going to break up with me all the way back in December,” she said in a soft, disbelieving voice. Speaking to herself more than to him. “Half a year ago. You already knew you were going to blow me off, so you planned some bullshit to make me look like a thief. You were plotting this blackmail shit half a year ago.” She didn’t believe for one second those earrings had been carelessly left behind at the hotel. They weren’t an accident; they were insurance.
He shook his head. “No, Bean. It’s terrible you’d even think that.”
“What’d you do with them? The earrings?”
“I dunno what happened to them. I honestly don’t. All I know is they never came back. Come on. I hate that I even have to say any of this. My marriage is older than you are, and I’m not going to let some hysterical, vindictive kid tear up my life just because she wants something she can’t have.”
She felt cold, shivery, so cold she almost expected to see her own breath. “You can’t do this to someone. It isn’t right.”
He cocked himself back in his chair, turning slightly, sticking out his legs and crossing his ankles. For the first time, she noticed he had a little beer belly, a soft roll of fat hanging over his belt.
“I want you to go home, kid. You’re upset. You need some time to be alone, feel what you got to feel. Believe it or not, I’m in mourning, too. You’re not the only one who lost out here.”
“What did you lose out on? You haven’t lost out. You have everything you ever had.”
“I don’t have you. I’m mourning that.” He looked at her through lowered eyelashes. “Go on. Be good. Don’t try to contact me, and for God’s sake, don’t try to contact my wife. Let’s not be stupid. I just want what’s best for both of us.”
“You’re in mourning? You’re in fucking mourning?”
“Believe it or not, I am. It makes me sick we can’t end things on a . . . a more positive note.”
She quivered. She felt fevered one moment and frozen the next. She really thought she was going to be sick.
“I’m not mourning you,” she said. “And no one else is going to either.”
He looked a question at her, furrowing his brow, but she didn’t say any more. She didn’t know she was backing up until her hip struck the edge of the open door. The impact turned her partly away from him, and she let it, swung around, and went out into the shop. She did not run. She walked very stiffly, without bending her legs, in no hurry.
She was gone for only about thirty minutes.
10:03 A.M.
Becki didn’t cry.
For a long time, she sat clutching the steering wheel, holding it so tightly her knuckles were white, even though she wasn’t going anywhere. She was just sitting there in the parking lot, looking at a bank of black Plexiglas doors leading into the mall. There were moments when rage seemed to push down on her whole body, as if she were an astronaut experiencing the gravity of some larger, denser, more terrible world. She was squeezed, felt the air being crushed out of her.
When he left work, Rog usually came out on this side of the mall. If she saw him now, if he stepped through those shiny black doors, squinting into the morning sunlight, she’d start the car and stamp on the gas and launch her little VW right into him. The thought of hitting him with the car—the thud, the yelp, the crunch of the tires going over him—thrilled her and made it easier to stand up against that cruel alien gravity.
He had fucked her for months while he was figuring out how to get rid of her. He came in her face, in her hair, and she acted like she enjoyed it, batting her eyelashes at him and purring, and it struck her now that he thought she was pathetic and childish, and he was right. It made her want to scream until her throat hurt. Gravity doubled. Tripled. She could feel it squashing her organs.
It maddened her, how easy it had been for him to stomp on her, to squash her under his heel. He had boxed her in with such tidy efficiency. He was probably on the phone with the wife now, telling her some story about how he’d confronted her, how hard it had been to fire her while she begged and wept and made excuses. The wife was probably comforting him, as if he were the one who’d been through something awful this morning. It wasn’t right.
“It. Isn’t. Right,” she said through her teeth, unconsciously pumping her foot on the gas pedal to punctuate each word. The car wasn’t running, but she mashed the pedal anyway. “It. Isn’t. Right.”
She needed something to steady her and yanked open the glove compartment, fumbled around, and found a bottle of Rog’s Putu mayo cocaine, razor-blade-sharp stuff he’d picked up himself on an emerald-buying trip to Colombia. The coke went off like a bullet in the brain.
Becki spotted her black lace panties crumpled in the open glove compartment. The sight of them was vaguely humiliating, and she grabbed for them to put them back on. They’d gotten tangled around the butt of her Christmas gun, and it came tumbling out with them. The .357 was shoved into the thigh holster with the straps and buckles, which was the way she kept it, although she’d never worn it anywhere.
The sight of it was like drawing a deep breath. She took it in her hands and held it and was very still.