“You were the other shooter,” I said.
He nodded, his eyes oozing pain.
“Why did they take Malia?” I asked.
“They knew she and I were together.” He hesitated for a moment. “Lonnie saw us together a couple of weeks ago. We were having lunch at the pier in Imperial Beach. We were walking back to the car and I saw him with Mo at the other end of the lot. I tried to duck out of sight and thought maybe I had, because they didn’t follow us out of the lot.” He shook his head. “But I knew it. I felt him looking at me.”
I remembered the look I’d gotten from Lonnie at Peter’s house. It was enough to make anyone uncomfortable.
“She was supposed to call me after her first class yesterday. She didn’t, and I knew something was wrong. When she finally did call, she was crying and screaming,” he said, his voice wavering. “They’d been waiting for her in a parking garage at school. Lonnie got on the phone and told me if I didn’t show up, he’d kill her.”
I gave him a minute before asking my next question, the one that had been in my head since I’d stepped into Peter Pluto’s home.
“What did Lonnie want from you?”
His jaw went rigid. “I owe them money.”
“From the gun sales?”
“Yeah.”
“Here’s a question. Why the hell would you steal their money?” I asked, unable to keep the bewilderment out of my voice. “Both your aunt and your brother told me about your trust fund. Did you blow through it?”
“My trust fund only covers school and what I need to live on,” he said, irritated. “And that’s it. Tuition goes straight to the registrar and I get a monthly stipend deposited into my checking account. It can only be used for that stuff until I’m twenty-five.” He paused. “I didn’t take the money for me.”
I was skeptical that a kid who had recently lost both parents couldn’t pull more out of his trust fund if he needed it. “You couldn’t get more money from it after both of your parents passed away?”
He shook his head adamantly. “No. I tried. But there were no exceptions to how the trust was drawn up.”
I nodded. “Okay. Who did you steal the money for, then?”
He put his hands over his eyes again, pressing his palms into them, like he was trying to force whatever he was thinking out of his head.
He pulled his hands away and folded his arms across his chest. “You saw Malia’s house. Her neighborhood. Her financial aid didn’t cover everything. She was out of money for tuition. She wasn’t gonna be able to finish her last semester. If I could’ve used my own money, I would have. But I can’t. Couldn’t. So I took the money from the last sale I made, gave it to her, and told her it was from my trust. She didn’t want to take it, but I finally convinced her.”
The money explained why Lonnie and Mo had been looking for him when I’d run into them at Peter’s house. They killed Peter as a warning for Linc to pay up. And they’d killed Malia because they wanted to stick it to him, since they still hadn’t seen the money. And, probably, simply because she was a black girl dating a white guy.
Linc squeezed his hands together tightly, his fingers turning bright red. I wondered whose imaginary head was between his hands.
“Even if I had the money to bring out there, they were gonna kill us. But I didn’t know what else to do. I couldn’t figure out how to get her out of there. And then it was too late.” He shook his head, the misery clenching his features. “I’m so stupid.”
I didn’t know where I stood on Linc’s stupidity. On one hand, he had attempted to help Malia and escape what he realized had become a situation that had spiraled out of his control. But on the other hand, the one that I wanted to slap him with, he had taken the worst route possible to try and make those things happen.
“Why were you back at the apartment this morning?” I asked.
“I wanted to get the guns I had left,” Linc said. “I’d already brought some of them here, but I wanted to get the rest. To get rid of them. I was gonna try and find someone else to sell them to, so I’d have some money to get the hell out of here. But they were gone. So I just grabbed my clothes and bailed.”
I was glad I had told Wellton about the guns in Linc’s apartment, because I felt confident that Linc would’ve somehow screwed up getting rid of the guns.
“So now what?” I finally asked. “You said you need my help. You want to escape? Get away from these guys?”
His head snapped up, anger back on his face. “That’s what you got from all this? That I’m just some scared kid who doesn’t want to get hurt?”
I said nothing because that was exactly what I thought.
He stood. “I don’t wanna hide from them anymore, you asshole. Those fuckin’ skinheads killed my brother and they killed Malia. As far as I’m concerned, they killed my father, too. Fuck them and their money.”
“What do you want, then?” I asked.
“I want you to help me finish this,” Linc Pluto said, his voice full of anger, back to where it was when I’d first sat him on the couch. “Finish them.”
Forty
“I’m not gonna help you kill anyone,” I said.
Linc stared hard at me for a moment, as if he couldn’t believe what I was saying. Then he shrugged. “Fine.”
“Fine?”
“I don’t need your help.”
I stood. “Yeah, you do.”
He sneered. “Oh, right. You’ve done such a bang up job so far on all this.”
The sympathy that I’d been feeling for the kid for the last few minutes was quickly shifting into anger. “And if your brother had been smart and just left you alone, I wouldn’t have been dragged into any of this.”
He turned away from me. “Fuck off.”
I grabbed his arm and spun him back. “Hey. You think I don’t feel bad about what’s happened? To your brother and Malia and Rachel? I do. And I wanna get it set straight. But you hunting down a bunch of assholes and killing them does nothing. For anyone.”
“Does for me,” he said, and lunged at me with his free arm.
His fist glanced off my shoulder. I slid my hand down to his wrist and twisted hard. His face screwed up into a knot of pain and I kicked his legs out from under him. He landed with a thud, the air rushing out of his chest.
“You can’t even take me out,” I said. “And I’m not even close to being as dangerous as Mo or Deacon or any of those other guys.”
The adrenaline surge made my skin tingle. I watched Linc lay on the floor and try to get his breath back. He was wincing, the pain in his back probably surprising him. Landing flat on your spine will do that.
“The best place for you is somewhere safe,” I said.
He grunted. “Where’s that?”
I ignored the question. “I will take care of this,” I said. “I’m better equipped.”
“You weren’t yesterday. You couldn’t save Malia.”
I resisted the urge to plant my foot in his ribs. “Neither could you, asshole. However, I will make sure Lonnie and Mo pay for what they did to Peter and Malia. And I will make sure that Deacon and his boys back off.”
“I can do it myself,” he said, sounding like a four-year-old trying to use a fork for the first time.
“No, you can’t,” I said.
He pushed himself up into a sitting position, reaching around to rub his back. “Why?”
“Why what?”
“Why do you care?” he asked. “My brother hired you. He’s…gone. It’s none of your business anymore.”
Lonnie and Mo had made it my business, but I didn’t feel the need to explain that to Linc.
