wearing the same clothes from the courthouse this afternoon, though her hair has fallen now, down around her shoulders. “Can’t say that I expected to see you again,” she says, pulling a pack of cigarettes from her purse, a shoulder bag, he notices, larger than the one she was carrying earlier. “I was under the impression we had an agreement.”
“You’re in a lot of trouble, Elise,” Jay says, cutting to it.
“You think?” she says, the smile on her face edged with some thing he may have earlier mistaken for nerves. On closer look, Jay thinks he sees something cagey in her expression, something hard in her brown eyes. When the bartender approaches, Elise orders a shot of tequila and a beer back. “I don’t know,” she says to Jay. “I thought it went pretty well in there today.”
“I’m not talking about your case, Elise.”
“Aren’t you though?” she says, laying a five-dollar bill on the bar top when the guy returns with her drinks. She downs the tequila shot and lights the cigarette in her hand. “Last we talked, I remember you mentioned something about money, so . . . you want to tell me what this is going to cost me and we can be done with it?”
“This isn’t about money.”
She laughs then, a girlish trill at the back of her throat. She waves her cigarette in the air, almost wagging it like an extra fin ger, as if she were scolding a young boy for wasting her time. “Listen to me, Elise,” he says.
“I’m not going down on this,” she says, cutting him off, her voice hard and cold as gunmetal. “Not for anything. You under stand?”
“Then you ought to know,” Jay says, feeling a fire in his belly as the words come up through his throat, “that Thomas Cole
The light in Elise’s eyes dims dramatically as the words settle around her.
For a moment, Jay actually feels sorry for her, and his pity, it’s clear, infuriates her. The skin around her neck, where she was once scratched and bruised, glows bright pink, the color climb ing up her throat to the jawline. “I’m not sure I know what it is you’re getting at,” she says.
“The man who tried to kill you? Thomas Cole
Then, because she says nothing, he asks, “You understand what I’m saying?” Elise looks at him and smiles darkly. “What ever you think you know about me and Thomas Cole, Mr. Por ter,” she says, “trust me, you don’t.”
“I know he had a very good reason to worry about you talking to the FTC.”
“Thomas knows I would never tell them anything,” she says.
“You so sure?”
“You know, I have to say I find your concern for me to be a bit uncalled for. Frankly, the details of my personal life are none of your fucking business.”
“This is not just about you,” he says, almost hissing at the girl. “Those men at Cole Oil have committed a crime on a mas sive scale, and you have helped them. Buying up that land out there, keeping their secrets. You cannot stay quiet about this unless you want to get yourself dug in deeper. You’re already looking at serious jail time over some shit that didn’t even start with you. You could go to prison. You understand that, don’t you?”
“Oh, that’s not going to happen,” she says, rather confidently. “I told you, it was going good in there for me today.”
She has no idea what she’s up against, he thinks. “What if you get subpoenaed by the federal government? Huh? What then?”
She shakes her head at the notion. “That investigation is taken care of.”
“What is that supposed to mean?”
Elise picks up her empty glass and motions for the bartender to refill it. “And anyway, Thomas and I have come to an under standing. He knows I won’t say anything about his business deal ings,” she says, taking a long drag on her cigarette. “And I know the line he won’t cross . . . not ever again.”
On the bar in front of her, the bartender pours another shot of tequila. Jay watches Elise throw back the shot, swallowing the heat and the sting of it, a look of bitter resignation in the dim light that’s left in her eyes.
“You knew,” he says, turning the words over and over, as if he were trying to get a better look at them, to get a better under standing. The one piece in this he had never really considered. “You knew it was him this whole time.”
Elise does not deny or confirm this.
She downs her beer without looking at him.
“Why are you protecting him?” he asks softly, as if he were afraid the strength of this sort of basic logic might break her in two.
“Thomas has done a lot for me,” she says unapologetically. “He paid for my real estate license, you know that? I wouldn’t even have a job if it weren’t for him, be back in a shit-hole club somewhere. And I am
“Elise, the man tried to have you killed.”
“And look how that turned out,” she says with a sharp, caustic smile. “I got a forty-five and a twelve gauge that says he won’t try that shit again.”
Here she is. The girl from Galena Park.
The tough little pistol who’s not taking shit from nobody.
“You’re a fool,” he says.
