“I dropped something,” Linc said.
I turned to him. “You can feel free to shut the fuck up until I tell you to talk.”
He didn’t flinch, just returned my stare as his mouth closed into a tight line.
“Who the hell
My right fist clenched and if I’d been closer, I would’ve punched him.
“I’m the guy that was hired to find your sorry ass,” I said. “Both your aunt and your brother asked me to figure out where the hell you’ve been because for some unbelievable reason, they seemed to give a rat’s ass about you. And if you speak again before I ask you a question, I’m going to choke the shit out of you.”
“He’s an investigator,” Dana said.
Linc finally wavered and he slid back into the sofa.
I took a deep breath, summoned up a little composure, and looked at him again. “Let’s start with Rachel. What do you know about her?”
He looked at me for a moment, maybe wondering if I was setting him up to say something so I could jump down his throat again.
He chewed on his lip for a moment. “I know she was shot.”
“Any idea who did it?”
He hesitated. “I’m not sure. Maybe.”
I felt my blood pressure spike. Wouldn’t look good to murder the kid I was hired to find. I tried a different approach to see if I could get a straight answer.
“What do you know about your brother?” I asked.
His expression soured and it was clear he was in the dark. “Peter? What about him?”
“He’s dead.”
His features drooped and the sour expression morphed into confusion, the first sign that the tough facade had a real weakness. “What are you talking about?”
Part of me felt bad for dropping the news on him. But the other half of me recognized that he was indirectly responsible for Peter’s death.
“He hired me to find you,” I said. “He was found in a canyon the next day.” I paused. “Killed by a couple of other guys looking for you.”
He looked away from me, his eyes focused on the floor. His shoulders bunched, the weight of what I’d said taking him out of our conversation for a moment.
Then he lifted his head up.
“You and I need to talk,” he said, then nodded at Dana. “Without her.”
“Oh, fuck you, Linc,” Dana said, irritated.
He didn’t look at her, just at me.
There was something in his eyes that I hadn’t expected to see. It was the same desperation I had seen in Peter’s face the day he hired me to find Linc.
“Dana, please. Go wait outside,” I said.
“Fuck you, too,” she said. “I helped you find him.”
“Dana, this isn’t the time. You’ve been a huge help, but right now I need you to give us a few minutes, alright?”
She gave an exasperated sigh and threw up her hands like a great stage actress. “Fine. You don’t need me? Then I’m outta here. I’ll go someplace I’m wanted. You two dickheads have a great time.” She spun on her heel and walked out the front door, slamming it behind her.
I looked at Linc, at this kid who I’d been pursuing for what felt like too long, and thought about how ugly the situation had become. I thought about pulling out my gun and putting a bullet in his chest.
But that wouldn’t have given me the answers I wanted.
“Talk,” I said.
Thirty-eight
“My brother’s really dead?” Linc asked.
“Yeah. You want the details?”
He thought about that for a moment, indecision lingering in his eyes before he finally nodded.
I told him about Peter hiring me, then finding the skinheads at his house, and how they’d killed him. I left out the specifics of what they did to me.
Linc leaned back in the sofa, his face heavy with something between sadness and anger. “It all blew up on me. And now I’m totally screwed.”
I had a million questions I wanted to ask Linc. But his body language indicated that he seemed on the verge of unloading his story-where he’d been, what he’d been doing-and I didn’t want to get in the way. Sometimes, the best way to get answers is to shut up and listen.
“Maybe that’s what I deserve.” He shifted his eyes toward me. “You know about our parents?”
“I know they’re dead.”
“My mom died of cancer.” He looked out the window. “It sucked.”
“I’m sure.”
He studied the window for a moment. “I need help. I don’t know how to get out of this on my own.”
I wasn’t willing to commit to anything yet. “Then you better keep talking.”
He drummed his fingers on his thigh, his anxiety trying to work itself out. The anger was now removed from his expression, replaced entirely with a look of desolation and dejection.
“My dad died in a fight,” he said with a twisted smile. “He was a skinhead. But he hated that term. He liked Aryan Warrior or Caucasian Centrist.” He shook his head. “So fucking stupid.”
“You don’t believe in that stuff?”
He raised an eyebrow. “That’s what you’ve heard, right? That I followed in his footsteps?”
“Yeah.”
“You have to be really fucked up to believe in that shit,” he said. “I’m not.”
I resisted the urge to point out that non-fucked-up college students didn’t usually sell guns.
“Then why did your aunt tell me you were involved?” I asked.
He ran a hand through his hair and took a deep breath. “I wanted to know my dad. After my mom died…I needed to know him. It was the only way I could figure out how to get close to him.” He paused. “I thought if I understood it better, I could find a way to pull him out of it.” He paused again. “Peter wanted no part of him. He had just written our dad off, but I couldn’t do it. I thought maybe he could still end up being a regular dad. Or at the very least, a dad who was pretty much normal.”
Peter had told me about the rift between him and his brother. Peter had probably taken Linc’s ideas as lunacy and Linc had obviously taken Peter’s resistance as cowardice. Both of them had been half right and all wrong.
“You can’t fake it,” Linc continued. “To really be accepted, I had to act the part. To everyone, even my family.” His eyes shifted away from me again. “And I thought it was the only way for me to really understand what he thought was so great about hating people.”
He rubbed his hands together like he was cold.
“But it was…awful,” he said. “And I didn’t understand why my dad believed in it.” He leaned forward. “And it just hurt that my dad was such a piece of crap.” He looked up, embarrassment and sorrow shaping his face. “Because he really was. Peter was right all along.”
I thought about my own parents. I knew next to nothing about my own father, something I had learned to conveniently compartmentalize out of my life. I wasn’t close to my mother and I still didn’t understand why she couldn’t pull herself out from the boozy haze that had become her life.
He was telling me a story I knew pretty well.
“I was trying to figure out how to leave National Nation when my dad was stabbed outside a bar,” he said, his voice cracking. “A couple of black guys gave him what he deserved.” He paused and cleared his throat, tears clinging to the corners of his eyes. “Only he was my dad, you know? He was an asshole, but he was still my
