Working Stiff

“Annie’s okay,” Bryn murmured drowsily. “She’s just a kid; that’s all. And we push her too hard.”

“We?”

“The fam. Especially Mom, and my sister Grace. Grace is kind of a bitch. Not as bad as George, though.”

“George is a girl?”

“George is a pissy little bitch of a man. He’s not gay, which is too bad; he’d be a lot more fun that way. He’s just a jerk. He runs a pharmacy in—” Her brain finally caught up to her mouth. “You already know all this. I told you all about them, in the car.”

McCallister shrugged. “I like hearing you talk about them.”

“Remember Kyle?”

“The one who’s three years into a fifteen-year sentence for armed robbery?”

“Kyle is still more fun than George.”

“Ouch.”

Her brain was waking up. Small talk, it seemed, did wonders. “Anyway, Annie just wanted some space, so I’m letting her stay a few days. It’s not a big deal, and I won’t tell her a thing.”

“She’s a walking, talking security breach, and you should have run it by me, but what’s done is done. I’m just concerned for your safety.”

“From Annie? She grew up wanting to be a fairy princess. She’s not exactly dangerous.”

“That’s what I’m concerned about.”

She couldn’t work that out, tired as she felt, so she let it lie. “You got me to talk about my family,” she said. “But you never return the favor.”

He glanced over at her, frowning, and shook his head. “It’s not the time, Bryn.”

“Come on. Humor me.” She needed something else in her head besides … that. Besides the smell, the insects, the desperation in Violetta’s eyes. The rasp of the saw. “Tell me about your brother.”

“I can’t.” He paused, then let out a sound—not a laugh, more of a sigh. “Can’t. That doesn’t sound right either, considering … it’s just words. All right, if you really want to know. Jamie was … different. My parents couldn’t see it. He was a charmer, but he was cold inside. A sociopath with no real empathy or connection to anyone else. Including me. And I was his favorite target.”

“You.”

He shrugged. “I learned to cope. I had to. Jamie’s little games were often meant to maim or kill. I couldn’t complain; when I tried, he blamed it all on me, said that I was the bully. They believed it.”

“My God.”

“By eighteen, I wasn’t going to let it go on anymore. I went to my father, but he didn’t want to hear it. So I left. I went straight into the marines, enlisted as fast as I could, and got the hell away from the whole family.”

“You told me Jamie … died.”

“By the time I came home, eight years had passed. I think he was truly surprised. He fully expected me to die in the line of duty.” McCallister’s eyes were unfocused now, looking into something far away and not at all pleasant. “He was out on his own by then, with his own house out in the country. I came back from deployment and intended to just stop in and try to mend fences with him, as much as possible. But when I got here, he was … He’d found a new hobby. One that suited his personality.” He swallowed, a visible bob of his Adam’s apple above his collar. His hands gripped the steering wheel a little too tightly. “I found out later that he’d made a business of it, but I didn’t know that at the time. I just knew that when I went looking for him, I found him upstairs in one of the rooms with cameras and a victim. I shot him. I had to, to save her life.”

“What was he—”

“No,” he said. “Don’t make me tell you. Please. We’ve had enough today” He let the silence fall for a moment before he continued. “I’m not sorry I killed him. I’m just sorry that I let him walk away when I was eighteen. It would have saved lives if I hadn’t been … weak.” He smiled, but it looked painful and false. “My mother was already gone by then. My father passed on soon after that, thinking I was a murderer. Thinking that I’d set Jamie up and killed him in cold blood. I was written out of the estate, of course. I didn’t really mind.”

Bryn thought about her own family, with all its problems and squabbles; she might not totally love many of her siblings, but at least they weren’t sociopaths. And, although he wasn’t saying it outright, murderers. It brought back the haunting question of what had happened to Sharon, all those years ago. Maybe she ran into another McCallister. The wrong McCallister.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m sorry for making you tell me that.”

“No,” he said. “No, you needed to hear it. And I guess I needed to say it, too. It’s all right. Now it’s done.”

McCallister drove in silence the rest of the way, parked the van, and walked with her into the mortuary through the back entrance. He kept his shoulders hunched and his hands in his pockets. It was as much cover as possible, but she still felt an uncomfortable, probably imaginary weight of eyes on them until they were safely inside.

Joe and Doreen weren’t back yet from the hospital run, so Bryn took McCallister directly to her office, locked the door, and opened up a locked drawer in her desk. She set up six miniature bottles of liquor: Scotch for McCallister, vodka for herself.

“Did you raid the minibar somewhere?” he asked, but didn’t turn down the tiny servings. He unscrewed the first and downed it in two gulps, then opened the second.

“Certainly not at the Hallmark Motor Court Inn.”

That got her a shadow of a smile. He saluted her with the bottle, downed it, and sat down. She concentrated on the soothing fire of her vodka as it slipped over her tongue, down her throat, clearing away the taste of rot and despair. Somehow, she managed to drink her third before McCallister had properly started his, but then, as he hadn’t quite said, she’d been holding the saw.

“So,” she said, and leaned her head back against the leather of the chair. “Did you sleep with your boss?” Silence. She opened her eyes just a slit. McCallister continued sipping his Scotch without comment. “You’re really not going to tell me.”

“Is this the question that comes to your mind right now?”

“Evidently it is.” She was starting to feel numbed again, but in a slightly better way.

“Do you have any more of these?” He held up the liquor mini. She opened the drawer, pulled out two more, and pitched him one. “This is bourbon.”

“You’re really going to complain?”

He upended it while she sucked down her fourth vodka. This one was lemon-flavored. Nice. “If I say yes, what does it matter to you?”

“It doesn’t.” It did. It did, and he knew it, the bastard. Why it mattered to her was a mystery she didn’t care to explore at the moment; her emotions were confused, raw, and horribly tangled. “Was it good?”

“With her? Not likely.”

She almost choked on her drink. “So you did do it.”

“I didn’t say I did. If such a thing had happened, for which there is no evidence and no admission, now or ever, then it would not have been a good time. Just … maintenance.”

“Of your low reputation and your alibi.”

His lips twisted into a brief, unhappy grimace. “Something like that.” McCallister got weirdly funny and precise when he drank. If he felt anything like Bryn, he had to be at least slightly tipsy. Overcompensating, probably. “It’s not all fun and games in my business.”

She had a nauseating flashback, and suddenly she realized that she reeked of dead flesh; it had soaked into her clothes, her skin, her hair. The whole office stank with it.

Fun and games.

Violetta Sammons’s disconnected head rolling free.

The rasp of the saw vibrating in her hand.

The vodka rushed up on her, and Bryn barely made it to her trash can before she threw up. Between the convulsions, she gasped for breath and sobbed, and McCallister came around the desk and silently handed her