She reached across to the pizza box and claimed it. She didn't care who had bought it. She hadn't eaten all day. Cost of living in the shadows, but it was better than not living. She'd been down that road before.
But if she was going to eat someone else's pizza, maybe she should haul the evidence back to her den. She hoisted her backpack to one shoulder, grabbed the still-warm box in both hands, and left the lounge.
I'm pretty sure Daddy didn't recognize me. He'd have been looking for green hair and Hot Topic, not 2 AM all-nighter student grunge. He did look a lot like Gary, though, more than that obit photo of Daniel Morgan.
She clicked the stairwell door and nudged it open with one foot without stepping through, checking the corners and shadows and listening. She was paranoid, whatever diagnosis you pinned on Gary's father. Or his whole family, him included. She'd learned paranoia the hard way.
Daddy looked a lot better than the average John, back when Tina and I were running the badger game. Underage worked real good for that, statutory rape charges carried more clout than blackmail. And I didn't actually have to do it with most of those marks. Tina usually showed up first. No way for the John to know her camera didn't work. Trashcan special.
Paid better than straight hooking, too.
They'd caught a judge once, real good shakedown for a blank roll of film. Slime must have been looking ahead to the State House or federal bench. And that Baptist preacher, spouting hellfire and damnation with his pants tangled around his ankles . . .
She unlocked Gary's door with the key he'd given her, no way to trace it because he'd filed it out of the blank himself. She waited outside the doorway for a minute before reaching around the frame and switching on the light. Someone Lover Boy called "paranoid" might have left a trap behind, might have let another person in. Just because she'd seen one man go in, one man go out, didn't mean a second man hadn't just wandered by from down the hall.
She'd outlived Cindy, outlived Tina, outlived a bunch of others. Not paranoid, just not taking chances she could avoid. She squatted in the hallway and looked under the bed, checked through the hinge side crack for anyone lurking behind the door. Then she sighed her breath out, relaxed, and stepped inside.
A note hung on the computer monitor. Call Ben? Jane frowned. There'd been a Benjamin Morgan in that obit, Daniel Morgan's older brother. "Predeceased," the obit said. Date of death given, over twenty years ago. Didn't make sense for Gary's "father." Except, Lover Boy said his paranoid father wasn't really dead.
His voice came back to her. "We've been hiding people for centuries. Morgans don't end up in jail."
This family was getting interesting. Complicated, but interesting.
She locked the door behind her, now that she could trust the room. Now that the door had become a defense rather than the jaws of a trap. Remembering that other key, she set the jam bar that Gary had rigged up, a four-foot length of angle steel that braced between the door knob and the closet. Daddy would have to break the door off its hinges to open it with that in place. Paranoids, all of us together.
She slid the pizza box onto a bare section of desk, grabbed another slice, and chewed. Too bad she hadn't been able to snag a liter of Pepsi to go with it.
Gary.
She squeezed her eyes shut against the sudden burn of tears. Maybe he'd come back here. Maybe he wouldn't. Maybe he'd kill her even if he did come back. She thumped her backpack down on the bed, blind, not caring about the laptop inside. She could steal another.
One thing she knew he wouldn't do, was call the cops. Those files told her that.
I can't believe the gun went off. Fucking .25 automatic, I was switching the safety on and the bastard fired. Fired twice. Cheap-shit Spanish junk went off and my finger was nowhere near the trigger.
She didn't know if she hit him. Odds were against it. Most of her guns were back alley specials and you'd be lucky to hit a barn from inside the hayloft with one of them. She kept them mostly for show, she'd never had a chance to practice, had fired any gun maybe ten times max in her life. She hoped she hadn't even come close. He ran away. He couldn't have run with a bullet in his back.
Yeah, sure. That baby .25, you'd have a hard time stopping a mouse with a single shot. Doesn't mean it wouldn't crawl off and die in its nest.
She'd bought the gun because it was so small. Small enough to tuck into her bra, tuck into the front of her panties. If she wasn't wearing either, the waistband behind her back would do, or taped to her armpit under a loose sweater, even the crotch of her pants. The ways she'd carried it, it looked a pure mess. She'd never have bet good money it would fire.
It would. It did. Fucking piece of junk.
Forty feet away, not aiming, she couldn't have hit him. She found herself gnawing at a thumbnail instead of pizza.
Gary. The room felt cold and lonely without him, nothing to do with the hyperactive heating system in the dorm. She'd been alone almost all her life, long before her parents split. Alone, even with Tina guarding her back, even with Cindy sharing a bed at the Sweeneys.
She'd never felt lonely before.
She'd told him things she'd never told anyone before. She'd told him things, showed him things she damn well shouldn't have, their first day talking and on, almost as if she'd been talking to herself. And he understood what she said, saw things like those scars that no one else had seen. And he'd never tell.
Fucking gun. Bottom of the river now, serves it
