He looks surprised. “Yeah, he’s in his cage. You can go in. Want to watch him for a bit. I have some business to take care of.”
“Sure,” I say. He doesn’t even go back inside the house. I watch from the open doorway as he drives off in his Lincoln. Mo has never invited me into his house. I suppose he’s desperate enough to let his former neighbor play babysitter to his motherless son. Little Mo is playing with a set of plastic keys as he sits in a stained pack-and-play in the living room. His face is smeared with chocolate, but other than that, he looks fine. When he sees me, he smiles. I can’t control the utter happiness I feel. We spend the afternoon together, and when he naps, I walk around the house and look in Mo’s drawers. I find tiny baggies of cocaine under the bed he shared with that child-beating whore, Vola. I empty them out one by one into the toilet, then I re-fill each bag with flour and replace them. When I drive out of the Bone, long after the sun has gone down, for once I feel refreshed. I haven’t thought about Leroy in hours. My mind is a clear sky.
A WEEK LATER, I drive to the Bone to pick up Judah and deliver him back to SeaTac airport.
“How was it?” I ask as we cruise onto the highway. The air is warm, and my hair is whipping around my face.
“Good. I’m ready to come back.”
“Great,” I say. But it’s not great. Judah going back to the Bone feels like a bad omen. If the Bone can call him back, what can it do to me?
“You don’t mean that,” he says. “You hate that I’m going back.”
“Yeah.”
We don’t say much after that, but when we cross the water into Seattle, he asks me something that makes the hairs stand up on the back of my neck.
“Did you do something bad? Is that why you don’t want to go back?”
“Why would you say that?” I narrowly miss hitting a car and swerve back into my lane. I press my foot against the accelerator.
“When I asked you about it in California, you ran. Didn’t even say goodbye.”
“There’s more than one reason I did that,” I say, thinking about Erin/Eryn/Eren.
“Margo, tell me what you did … also, you’re going really fast.”
I change lanes, then change again. I can see the tension in his upper body. I cut off a semi and the driver blares his horn.
“I killed Vola Fields and Lyndee Anthony. I killed a man in an alley who was trying to rape a girl.” I hesitate for a moment before I add, “And then I tried to kill Leroy Ashley.”
He’s quiet for a long time. Traffic gathers along my exit. I slow down, but I want to keep driving, keep going fast.
“Who is Leroy Ashley?”
“A rapist,” I say.
“But, you haven’t killed him yet?”
I glance at him, and he’s looking at me.
“No.”
I see the relief.
“How do you know?”
“How do I know what, Judah?” I flick the hair out of my eyes, annoyed at his questions.
“That he’s a rapist!”
“It’s a long story,” I say. “But, I know.”
He’s rubbing his jawline, looking out the window then back to me. If he had working legs, I wonder if he’d already have asked to be let out of the car.
“Why, Margo? Why didn’t you go to the police?”
I laugh. “Are you kidding? After what happened with Lyndee? Judah, why are you even saying this to me?”
“Why did you have to kill them? You could’ve…” He’s focusing on the women, not Leroy. Maybe because I haven’t killed him yet.
“What? Sat them down and had a nice little chat with them about what they did?”
“Maybe … it seems more reasonable than taking someone’s life.”
I think about this. Possibly for the first time. Why did I have to kill them?
“I had no proof,” I say. “The police wouldn’t have done anything. I believe in swift justice.”
He slams his fist on the dash, and then keeps it clenched as he speaks to me through his teeth. “You are not the law. You do not get to administer your own brand of justice on humankind. How could you be so stupid?”
“Stupid?” I sound distant when I say it. My tongue is fat with the confessions I’ve just made. I never considered what I did to be stupid. I never considered what I did. I just … did what my body told me to do. I moved like a person who has cut ties with her mind and was relying on the guidance of some deeper force. A possession of sorts.
“Maybe…” I say. And even to me, my voice sounds noncommittal. Judah stirs at my words. Becomes angrier. His irises boil around his pupils, making him look like a cartoon version of himself. Eyes never lie. Not the emotions we convince ourselves to experience, or we convince others we are experiencing—the real ones. You can listen to words, or you can listen to a person’s eyes.
“Why are you so angry with me? You left me.”
But he’s not listening anymore. He’s putting things together.
“That’s why you were in the hospital,” he says. “You almost got yourself killed.”
“Go on,” I say. “Rail me with how stupid I am. How I should have told the police, left the punishment of criminals to the infallible law. But you and I both know how it really is. We lived in a world where children were not protected from their parents. Where you can hurt someone because someone once hurt you.”
It’s all true to my own ears. They lived in a form of ignorant hubris—Vola and Lyndee. At least Leroy knew what he was doing. He was looking to be caught. Even if he didn’t know it.
I want to execute my plan, and this time I am not acting on impulse. I will not make mistakes. I am, I think with little mortification, an evolving killer. We are at the airport. I help him out of the Jeep and into his chair. When I bend down to say goodbye, he’s teary-eyed.
“Why does it have to be like this, Margo?” he asks.