and looked down at the red-stained towels wrapped around my belly. The blood was starting to soak through but you couldn’t really tell with the black denim.
“Did you finish cleaning inside?” I asked.
“Yes, but-I hurried. I might have missed something.”
I doubted it. She was too sharp for that.
“He’s got a pizza,” she said. “He does that sometimes. Brings food for when they play cards.”
“It’s okay, just go tell him that Dad isn’t here.”
“He knows you’re home. He saw your car. It’s got the bloody towels and sponges and some of my clothes in a bag in the trunk. That window in the living room is broken. I cleaned the blood off and closed the curtains over it. And the front screen is busted to shit.”
“Tell him Butch did it. You broke up with him and he came here and kicked the door in. I beat the crap out of Butch and sent him home.”
She nodded. One side of her mouth lifted in a pained half smile. “Good thinking. In case there’s any blood left around. Or on you.”
“I’ll be inside in a minute. You split.”
“No, I’m not leaving you alone,” she said.
“You’ve done enough, Dale. I’m sorry you’ve been dragged into this.”
I couldn’t say any more. This was family. These were the things of which we do not speak.
She went inside. I put on my game face. I knew I didn’t have much of one, but I made the effort. The pain meds were wearing off and my belly burned. Every time I moved a little, I could feel my skin splitting further. I waited another minute, then followed her in.
Dale had cleaned the place up fine. You couldn’t tell there had been a fight in the living room. You couldn’t tell a man had died here. Gilmore was sitting at the card table, holding a slice of pizza, the box open and turned to the seat opposite. He looked up at me and said, “Thought we could share a pie. You hungry?”
“Starved.”
I got a couple of beers out of the fridge. I checked the clock. I hoped my parents would be gone at least another half hour. The thought of facing them weakened my resolve. I sat down, passed Gilmore a bottle, and he gave me that fucked grin.
I wondered if I should play up to him, smiling and kicking back, wasting time until he got his fill of the Rands for the night and took off. But looking at his teeth I was overwhelmed with rage. I wanted to scream at him. I wanted to scream. I picked up the beer and pressed it against my lips and drank deeply and tried to fight off the urge.
“Your old man went out?”
“To dinner with my mother.”
Gilmore nodded like a proud father whose son has just gone off on his first date. “Good for them. I keep telling them they should do that kind of thing more often. Spend time together out of the house.”
He really did think of himself as some lost begotten son. I wiped my mouth and said wi;, “What’s the word on Mal’s murderer? Anything yet?”
“It’s an ongoing investigation.”
“You bastard. You actually said ‘ongoing investigation’ to me?”
He quit grinning. “I’m not on the case. And even if I was I couldn’t tell you anything pertinent. You know that.”
I nodded. This had nothing to do with cards, with friendship, with checking up on my father. Gilmore was reaching out. He couldn’t do it with his wife and kids, so he came here. Pizza is what you had on family nights.
“How’s your father holding up?” he asked.
“As well as can be expected.”
“He seems like the rock, rugged, solid, but your mother is really the strong one who can handle the serious hurt. She holds it all together. Your old man, he’s a little softer than you might think.”
“Because he takes photos of your family for you? Because he crept my old girlfriend’s house?”
“He told you about that?”
“No.”
“But you found out anyway.”
I wasn’t in control and I knew I was going to make a bad mistake. Maybe I already had. Gilmore’s expression could mean anything. I reached over and slid a slice of pizza out of the box and chewed a hunk off. My stomach surged with bile, but I kept eating.
He wasn’t a fool. He saw me sweating. He could sense the bad news coming. The question was whether he’d follow up or let it drop. He scanned the room. He checked out Old Shep. He eyed me carefully and I kept on chewing.
“You’re bleeding,” he said.
“Your asskicking scraped me up pretty good.”
“Dale said you got into it with her boyfriend.”
“Nothing major.”
“It looks like he did some damage.”
“It’s tough to make a stoner see reason.”
“A lot of people refuse to see reason.”
He took a last bite of his crust, then sat back and stared at me. His shoulders shifted a little. I fed the rest of my slice to JFK and cleaned the grease off my fingers. I saw that I’d left the slightest dab of dirt under a pinky nail. Then I took another slice. I forced myself to down it bite by bite. I thought of Grey out there in the mud. My brother would be dead in three days. My sister and I would share this sin for the rest of our lives. I heard the faint sound of metal snapping against metal. It was Gramp playing with the switchblade.
Gilmore pursed his lips. “You’re in trouble. You can talk to me, Terrier. I can help you, if you want. You’ve been looking in all the wrong places for a killer. I can imagine what you’ve found. Or what you think you’ve found. I heard about you pulling a piece at Danny Thompson’s place. That was really fucking stupid. A Rand with a gun-I never would have believed it. What if he comes after you?”
“What if he does?” I said.
“You don’t need that kind of grief.”
It almost got me laughing. “Anybody question him about Mal’s murder?
“Of course. And they’ll stay on him.”
“Even if it turns up dirt on you?”
Gilmore leered at me with surprise. “You think if he killed Mal I’d hush it up to hide my dirt?”
I looked into his eyes. They were like tidal pools heavy with flotsam. A couple of days ago I’d thought he might be a serial killer. Now I almost felt sorry for him. And I feared him. In his own way he had loved Mal the way he loved my father, the way he loved me. Like a child standing outside in the snow, staring through a window at a family he wished he was part of on Christmas Day. I thought, This guy is crazy, but he’s not our kind of crazy.
“You’re making bad moves,” he said. “Like with Cara Clarke. She hanged herself, but who knows what pushed her buttons. Who pushed her over the edge. You think you might’ve had something to do with that, Terry?”
I kept eating. We were just two pals enjoying some pizza together.
“You never should have come home,” he said.
He wasn’t going to get an argument from me there. He shifted his weight. I thought, If he takes another poke at me, even if he is a cop, I’ll break his jaw. He must’ve realized it, because we each held our ground.
I still had the butterfly knife. I wondered if this was the moment when I became my brother, when I became my uncle. What would I do to stay out of prison? What would I really do to protect my sister? Gramp’s snicking blade beat into my temples until I could barely hear myself breathing. Gilmore was here because he wanted a family, and we Rands were losing ours, one by one.
Dale sashayed into the room then. She’d been listening. She’d done another quick change and had on the clothes I’d seen her wearing the other night at the lake. The tight leather jacket, the sexy pants. She looked twenty-five and gorgeous as she paraded in front of Gilmore. “Ugh, anchovies and onions?”
Gilmore kept glowering at me. It was his default expression. Dale bent over the table, grabbed my bottle, and took a long sip. Beer leaked over her chin. I wanted to tell her not to overplay it. He’s too crafty. He shifted his gaze to her. He looked at her hips, her chest, her pulsing throat. He wasn’t thinking about reading tween vampire
