“Does it matter?” Mike asked, shaking his head. Then he answered his own questions. “It doesn’t. None of it matters now. It’s done.”
There was a heavy silence, all of us just standing there.
“You and Beckham jumped me last night,” I said. “You took the key.”
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m sorry for how all of this intersected with your life. I wish it hadn’t. I’ve tried to make it up to you over the years.”
That explained why they didn’t kill me last night, why I wasn’t hurt worse. They beat me, just not too badly.
“Make it up to me?” I said. “I watched my parents die. I was fourteen years old.”
He lifted his palms.
“Because of Didion and Beckham,” said Mike. “They were rabid dogs.”
“They were dogs that you called,” I said.
He dipped his head in a single nod of concession. “And they’ve both been put down. You got what you wanted, Zoey. Now we can all move on.”
Seth used duct tape to bind the tarp around the bodies. He seemed to have some experience with this type of thing, given his calm and the deftness with which he completed the task.
I worked to push through my numbness. Underneath it all, some part of me was screaming in rage and sorrow, but I couldn’t get to her. She was buried deep, suffocating. Saving her was saving myself, I knew that. But I was probably too late. Once I drove that knife into Didion’s heart, I became one of them. Why hadn’t I realized that? I made a decision about what was right and wrong, who deserved to live and die, but the only judge and jury was my own selfish rage.
“He never told you about it?” asked Mike. “All these years. He never told you the truth? You didn’t know about the money?”
I shook my head. Paul wasn’t a big talker. We spent a lot of time together, but mostly we just talked about me, or ate, or went to the movies. He would never tell me about this dark side of himself, of my father. His only goal in life was to protect me. I knew that on a cellular level. Even if it meant lying to me about them, about his own dark deeds. He’d have figured it was the right thing, to keep all the ugly out of my life. Little did he know I’d been infected long ago.
Mike shouldered the bag and walked toward me.
“Think about the girls; think about what this money can do for them, for the school,” he said. “Think about how comfortable we can make Paul. You know he doesn’t have much time.”
I squared myself toward him, spread my legs, and gripped the gun in my hand.
“I can’t let you take that money, Mike,” I said. “It’s not right.”
He smiled, cocked his head. It was an expression he used, the patient teacher indulging his student’s youth and na?veté.
“Not right? Come on. This money belonged to a drug dealer, earned off the suffering of others. It sat in the dark for ten years. If it goes back to the police, it will sit in an evidence locker until some other dirty bastard gets his hands on it, one way or another. Let’s not get hung up on some paint-by-numbers morality. Your parents died for this money. Don’t you want it to do some good in this world?”
There was a kind of street logic to this. The school was a force for good in the community, a place where girls learned to be strong, to stand up, where kittens became dragons. But I couldn’t teach them unless I could lead by example. I knew that now.
“You don’t deserve this payday,” I said. “None of us do.”
“Who are we to judge who deserves what in this world?” asked Mike.
He looked old suddenly, tired. There were dark circles under his eyes. But his belly was full of chi, and I could see by the twinkle in his strange light eyes that he was ready for a fight.
“I am going to judge tonight,” I said.
“Your hands are dirty, too, little girl.”
I nodded. “I don’t deny it.”
“Walk out of here with me, leave the past behind,” he said. “Seth will get rid of these bodies. We’ll take this money and do good with it. Live to fight another day.”
“There are too many hanging threads,” I said. “Josh Beckham for one.”
“We’ll pay him off,” he said. “He’s weak, has an elderly mother to care for.”
Mike would kill Josh Beckham. I knew that; he wouldn’t leave it to chance.
“The Bishop woman,” I said.
“Threats will keep her quiet.”
No. I’d unleashed a chain of events when I killed Didion that led to the opening of a long, dark tunnel that had been locked too long. All our secrets climbed out, and we couldn’t stuff them back down there. I felt a creeping lightness, the lifting of a burden I’d carried. Maybe I had wanted answers after all, not just revenge. The truth, no matter how dark, shed a new light.
“Drop the bag,” I said.
His smile grew wide. It was loving, kind—but there was a shade of something else there—condescension maybe, amusement. We both turned at the hard scrape of plastic over concrete, Seth was dragging the bodies toward the door. How did he fit into this? I couldn’t believe, hapless as he had seemed back then, affected as he was, that he’d known that night what his role was. He couldn’t have. But then I’d been wrong about so many people, so many things.
“Let’s just move on from here, Zoey,” said Seth, breathless from pulling the bodies. “We’ve all made mistakes.”
“It’s too late for that.”
I backed up, blocking their exit from the warehouse.
“We’re calling the police. This ends here.”
“If you do that, Zoey,” said Mike, “you’re only hurting yourself. You’ll go to jail like the rest of us.”
“So be it.”
A flash in those eyes, a flicker of anger.
“It’ll kill him, you know that. To lose you and me. To understand what I did to your family. He won’t come back from it. He’ll die alone.”
The thought put a vise on my heart.
“Who called him that morning?” I asked, thinking of the call he took. “What upset him so much?”
Mike shook his head. “Beckham had some idea that Paul might know where the money was. He may have called, tried to intimidate him. I thought Beckham was crazy. But turned out, he was right. Paul knew where it was all along. Just left it. Well, not all of it, right? I wondered how he was paying for NYU.”
I didn’t say anything.
“I guess he took his cut after all,” said Mike. “He’s as dirty as the rest of us.”
The thinker panics. The watcher waits. The Red Hunter acts.
I moved in quick, a hook to his jaw flew in so fast that he never even got a hand up to block. He absorbed the blow with a tilt of his head, lifted a finger to the line of blood that trailed from the corner of his mouth.
“Zoey,” he said. “I’m not going to fight you.”
I took the gun out of my hoodie and his eyes dropped on it. I was aware of Seth to my left. I could hear him breathing
“Where’s your gun?” I asked Mike. “The one you used to kill those two.”