Sweet Sinful Nights

Before the anger consumed her, she lowered the gun. She handed it to Ryan. “I’m not hungry.”

Minutes later, they sat in his car in the parking lot. The engine was off. The radio was on. The National, Ryan’s favorite band, crooned about missing the one you love. Such a moody song. Fitting, too.

“What’s the story?” she asked, cutting to the chase. “Is Stefano facing more charges?”

Ryan shot her a quizzical look. “No. Or not that I know of.”

She rolled her hands, as if to jog his memory. “You told me your friend in the DA’s office said he visited Stefano in prison about other crimes or something.”

“Right, but even so, that won’t change his sentence.”

“I know that,” she said, but then she realized—Ryan hadn’t called her to discuss the latest news about the shooter. “So this,” she said gesturing from him to her, “isn’t about Stefano?”

“No,” he said, forming an O with his mouth. “Not at all. It’s about someone else. I talked to Mom.”

*

His sister’s jaw dropped. Ryan hadn’t intended to shock her, but the evidence was on her face.

“She called you?” she whispered, as if she couldn’t quite wrap her mind around the concept of the phone, and how people used it to stay in touch.

He nodded and scanned the parking lot through the window to make sure they were alone. No one was wandering around. He turned up the music a little more, just in case. Ryan had always believed it was best to have these kinds of conversations in person, with plenty of background noise. He’d learned to keep certain aspects of his life completely untraceable. “She called me collect the other night. She told me her lawyer came to see her.”

Her eyes widened. “The same one who represented her at trial?”

He shook his head. “Nope. That guy is long gone. He went into private practice. But, the guy who came to see her is also a public defender. She said she contacted him and he went to Hawthorne.”

She cleared her throat and swallowed, then spoke in a clipped, controlled voice. “What does she have to talk to a lawyer about? Is she trying again to get them to re-open the case? Is she rehashing the details over and over like the last time we saw her? The evidence against her? The phone records showing she repeatedly called Jerry Stefano for two months before the murder?” Shannon said, smacking the side of one hand against the other for emphasis. “The lies she told about those calls were ludicrous. The prosecution saw right through them. She couldn’t even come up with a decent reason for all the calls.”

He knew why his mom had lied about her calls with Stefano. The truth would have made her look guiltier. She’d gambled and lost. The lies she’d told to the prosecution didn’t do the trick, but honesty would have tethered her more closely to Stefano and his Royal Sinners.

Rock and a hard place.

He knew some of those truths. She’d shared them with him, begged for his help, and he’d kept them locked up in his head. He’d never uttered a word of them. He’d learned that the best way to protect a secret was to never tell it. Seal your mouth, zip it shut, and don’t breathe a word. That was the one guaranteed method, and Ryan Sloan kept secrets like a champion.

But he hadn’t asked his sister to meet him so they could revisit the chain of evidence that had landed their mother behind bars. He’d called Shannon because she was the only one of his siblings who hadn’t closed the door on their mom. He needed strength in numbers even if that number was two.

“Mom and I didn’t talk about the phone calls with Stefano,” Ryan said.

“So why did she see a lawyer?”

“She said she’ll tell us in person when we come see her.”

Shannon held out her hands in frustration. “See? She can’t even tell you why she’s talking to a lawyer. She’s manipulating us into seeing her.”

“She’s our goddamn mother!”

“I know,” Shannon hissed, and pointed two fingers back at her eyes. “I damn well know. I look in the mirror every day and see her eyes. I have her eyes. I have her goddamn cheekbones and chin, too.”

“And you have nice eyes, so just focus on that. And besides, maybe it’s the kind of thing she needs to tell us in person. Maybe it’s important,” he said softly, but in a firm voice that brooked no argument. “We need to find out what’s up. End of the month. Her hours were cut, but she gets her final two hours the last day of June. We need to plan for it. Take the day, because it’s an all-day thing to get to Hawthorne in the middle of god-knows-nowhere. No excuses.”

She shoved her hand through her hair, yanking it back into a ponytail. “Why are you so determined to believe she might be innocent?”

His lips parted, but he took his time. His mother wasn’t an innocent woman, not by any stretch of the law. She might not even be a good person. But he believed that there was a difference between the things she’d done, and the things the district attorney had said she’d done.