Faye tried not to think about what it must be like to sit in a penitentiary, waiting for the years to go by. She watched the young people around her, learning to operate a microscope while they grooved to music that was older than they were, and she wondered if they were any older than Jeremiah’s stepbrother.
“Just because he got caught, it doesn’t mean that they all do,” she pointed out.
“True. But here’s something else for you to think about when you’re judging who’s dangerous and who’s not. People are good at fooling themselves. If you could peel back their skulls and look inside their heads, how many people doing time in the pen really thought they were going to use that gun? Not many, I don’t think. I think they see it as a shortcut.”
Davion was back at one of the microscopes, using the hand with the wisdom tattoo to make a fine adjustment. Faye couldn’t imagine a man his age living behind bars for years on end.
“A shortcut? You think they look at a gun and see a shortcut?”
“Yeah. I think most of them pick up a gun, believing it’ll make all the people standing between them and some money just step aside. Like magic.”
“Guns are magic? I guess maybe they are, when you want something that belongs to somebody else.”
“I’m not saying it’s right. My stepbrother belongs where he is. He could’ve killed somebody or got himself killed. That’s why we have laws—to keep everybody alive. And hopefully happy. I’m just saying that I don’t think many people leave the house thinking ‘I’m gonna kill somebody today, and I’m gonna enjoy it.’ That’s who killed Frida. Somebody who doesn’t think twice about anybody but themselves. Somebody who left his house that morning planning to kill somebody and enjoy doing it.”
“Do you know anybody like that?”
“I certainly hope not. And I hope you don’t, either.”
Chapter Nineteen
Three hours at the museum had proven to be the limit for Faye’s crew. Attention spans waned and, as the morning passed, blood sugar levels dropped. Tempers frayed. When Stephanie leaned toward Davion, locked eyes with him, and deliberately flicked out a finger that knocked a twenty-five-hundred-year-old spear point out of his hand, Faye knew that it was time to go.
They all rode in Jeremiah’s car, which was old enough to have bench seats in both front and back, complete with seat belts. Nothing else, short of a van or a big SUV, would have carried the whole crew, but this tank did. Faye had thought that he’d need her car to help with transporting personnel, but Jeremiah was a self-sufficient man.
Less than half an hour after Stephanie’s spear-flicking move, they were standing in the parking lot of the motel that would be their new home. Faye had grown more depressed by the mile after they left the museum’s verdant grounds. As they neared downtown, they sped past tourist-trap motels, chain restaurants, and strip malls for people desperate to shop. Spindly trees planted in parking lots were a sharp contrast to the trees they’d left behind, and it made Faye sad to look at them struggling to grow.
After parking their cars, Faye and Jeremiah headed toward the motel lobby to check in, and also to make a decision that might be the most important one of the day: Where were they going to eat lunch? Faye judged that the blood-sugar situation was growing dire, so this decision couldn’t wait.
The aging motel had a generic two-story façade and overflowing trash cans on either side of a front door that creaked as they passed through it. The lone clerk was slow to answer the bell, giving Faye time to look around the small lobby, where dirty footsteps crisscrossed a floor covered with small gray 1980s-era tiles grouted in black. Dusty silk flowers decorated the counter where she waited. Faye could hear her grandmother’s voice saying, “You get what you pay for.”
Her heart fell when she thought of how happy her crew had been with their cabins, and their outdoor meals, and their burnt marshmallows. She’d taken a lot away from them when she’d decided to play it safe and move them here.
She handed over her credit card. As she waited for the clerk to make key cards for them all, Jeremiah asked, “Where do you want to eat?”
Faye had counted five overpriced and boring chain restaurants within an easy walk of the parking lot where her crew stood. Gesturing in their general direction, she said, “How much money did you save from the training budget? Can we afford to eat at any of these places?”
“Maybe, if we make them to stick to soup. But no worries! I know a barbecue joint, not too far from Beale Street. It’s walking distance from here, and I get the family rate.”
“You’re related to the owner?”
“Not by blood, no. But that don’t mean we ain’t brothers. Armand and me? We go way back. Get me?”
“Armand? Didn’t Frida—?”
An unidentifiable look flickered over Jeremiah’s face. “Come to think of it, yeah. Frida started working for Armand a few months ago. Does that mean you wanna eat someplace else? It’s not really fair for Armand to lose business because of what some asshole did to Frida.”
“No, it’s not. Let’s go.” Faye said this in a this-totally-doesn’t-weird-me-out tone of voice, but there was a place at her center that was shaken to think of walking in the workaday steps of the woman she’d only known while she was dying.
She shook it off.
“You’re telling me that Armand knows how to do barbecue right?”
“Massage the pig pieces with a dry rub. Cook it low and slow. Serve it just like you cooked it. No sauce. Ain’t no other way to do it that’s worth the time.”
Joe, who was a fan of beef barbecued after a long marinade and served with lots of sauce, would have begged to differ, but Joe
