He was the raw current and I the badly insulated wire; the room seemed to flicker and dim around me, leaving only my scarred hand and his fingers—darker, smoother—resting against my stark metacarpals. I heard his voice, faint and crackled, but it took two shaky breaths for the meaning to reach me and by then I knew that I’d betrayed myself.
“Someone’s looking for you,” he repeated slowly. Behind us, Tamara and her long-lost beau were talking over each other, discovering between them the story of how they’d come to meet in a clip joint years after leaving the small Virginia town where they’d met. Dev and I might as well have been alone.
“Must be Victor.” I pulled my hand away, so he couldn’t tell me any more, and drank the French 75, which at first tasted faintly of champagne and then of nothing at all.
“Victor?” For a moment I thought he’d touch me again, but Dev reached for a glass instead and poured himself a shot of that good bourbon. “I couldn’t tell … I don’t know that it felt like him. Are you two on the outs?”
The false bookshelf fell back into its recess and Victor walked out, his arm slung around the dentist’s shoulders, and Red Man a few paces behind them. I wondered what business the dentist had with Victor, but I didn’t care enough to ask. Victor spotted Tamara, lips locked with her soldier boy, and gave the smallest of frowns. She would hear about this later—Victor liked Tamara to at least tease availability on busy weekend nights. Certainly Dev knew better than to kiss her in public.
“Not on the outs,” I said, watching them, “he just wants me to do a job.”
“And you don’t want to?”
I started to answer, and then realized that I couldn’t. After all I’d done, what should my wanting have to do with my yes or my no? I didn’t trust myself anymore and now the hands had sent their second dream, their warning, another round of their dangerous luck.
“I’ve been asking myself,” I said, “what you would do.”
I hadn’t known this was true until I said it. It surprised us both. Dev rested his lips on the edge of the tumbler.
“That might not work as well as you think, Pea.”
Walter said that woman was murdering people like Dev and me for our hands. Stopping that evil was a pure and fiery purpose, and I craved it with the flat desperation of any junkie six months, three weeks, one night clean.
“I haven’t done a job in seven months.”
Dev started. The wrinkles spread like stars around the corners of his eyes and he leaned forward.
“How about that,” he said. “Six months more than you managed for me.”
“I didn’t … back then I still thought that justice…”
“You thought it was worth the karma.”
“Victor won’t let this one go.”
His gaze flicked over my shoulder, to Victor’s usual table. I didn’t turn around.
“Another French 75?” He pulled out a clean glass before I could respond. While he busied himself behind the bar, he said in a low, conversational tone, “Who is it now?”
“Some woman. Maryann West. Red Man—Walter says she’s—” I stopped short. How to explain without invoking the memory of everything that had gone wrong between us a decade ago? The day Walter tempted me with Trent Sullivan and his stolen hands; the night I left Dev to kill and the night he found me too late. Dev had waited until he washed the blood away to make it gently, perfectly clear that he wanted nothing more to do with me.
“Maryann West?” Dev repeated. His hand trembled as he filled my glass.
“Don’t tell me you know her?”
Dev shook his head once, an emphatic negation. “What does Victor say this woman did?”
And here we came to it. I felt as though I had waited months for this moment and now I only wanted to hide, or kill something. “The hands,” I said to my drink. “It’s happening again, Dev. She killed someone like us.”
His breath caught. “Now, see, that’s curious, Pea. Because the Maryann West that I know used to be Trent Sullivan’s girl. You’ll remember him—the fellow you murdered on his bed while his girlfriend screamed herself bloody in the bathroom?”
We stared at each other, long and hard enough for Charlie to finish his set with a tumble of notes. People jostled us, called for drinks, but Dev still stared and I couldn’t catch my breath. Maryann West was Trent’s girl? Impossible. Wouldn’t I have recognized her voice? But regret had amplified and distorted those screams in my memory. If she was really Trent Sullivan’s girl, it wouldn’t be a coincidence.
But after so much time, why would she commit the same crime that got her lover offed? For the first time in fifteen years, I wondered: had Victor always told me the truth?
“How do you know her?” I asked.
“Two G&Ts, Dev!”
“Hey, what sorta whiskey you got?”
“Trent used to work for Victor. You had to know that.”
I had to know? I started shivering.
“Walter didn’t tell me.”
“And since when has Walter told you everything?”
Everything important. Hadn’t he?
“You gonna make that drink or what?”
“Hold on one minute, Charlie!”
“Aw, Christ.”
“Do you hate me, Dev?”
His expression stripped me; bleak and remorseful and entirely closed to the possibility of hope. “I’ve never hated you, Pea. I—I just couldn’t stay.”
What are you? Dev had asked the first time I ever saw him, blood sticky on my arms while I heaved in an alley. A break in the clouds let the moonlight through and I saw his eyes, dark and knowing. He saw a girl covered in blood in a New York alley, and he never once thought to ask if it was hers.
A knife, I’d said, and
