Pea runs down the porch steps, bruises her feet on the gravel as Tamara falls out of the passenger door. The strength of their embrace is all they need to say. I approach slowly.
“Hello, Walter,” I say as he pulls himself from behind the wheel. He stretches his arms over his head, a gesture neither deliberately menacing nor wholly benign.
“Good to see you, Dev.”
“Didn’t expect you to come in person.” That’s all I’ll say this near to Pea.
He nods. “We had reason.”
We catalogue our subtle changes in the months since my precipitous departure. A few more grays salt the temples of Walter’s slicked-back undercut. A certain softness in his cheeks and belly hints at a life more pleasurably lived. And mine: natural hollows edged a little more sharply with shadows and light.
Tamara holds Pea at arm’s length and says, “Well, you couldn’t look more country if you were holding a fishing pole, sugar, it’s just fabulous to see you so well. Walter and I were so worried, weren’t we, Walter? That’s why we came all the way here, we left this morning. I insisted after what my cards told me—don’t put that face on, Pea, my cards have helped you out a dozen times over, even if you don’t ever play the numbers.”
Pea gives her a wry look. “And neither do you.”
Tamara shrugs with imperial disdain. “It would be disrespectful.”
“Tammy, Phyllis,” Walter says, “why don’t we all sit down with a bottle of wine and some dinner and have a conversation?”
Tamara slides Walter a look of exasperation and fondness. She puts her arm around Pea’s shoulders.
“Pea, have you gone completely country up on this muddy hill or do you have something to wear?”
Pea’s glance at me is a submerged laugh sparking with challenge. “Do I look naked to you?” she asks Tamara, who clucks her tongue.
“Do you at least have shoes?”
Pea puts her hand on her hip. “And a python and a grass skirt.”
Tamara’s laugh brings blood to my cheeks. It’s the memory of what that bright sound used to mean to me, but it’s the living reality, too. Walter just watches us.
“Be right back, Dev,” Pea says and pecks my lips. She sounds breezy, cheerful. Her fingers press a four-point warning onto my goose-pimpled flesh. I nod slightly to show her I understand—she doesn’t know I called him. They walk into the house. I love the way Pea matches her grace to Tamara’s: a viper arm in arm with a bird of paradise.
“You took your time calling about that letter,” Walter says.
“I called my old handler first.”
He laughs. “And I see how well that went. The fuzz is a bad bargain for folks like us, Dev. Like the army.”
“They didn’t always do badly by me.”
“And I’m sure you’ll do just fine with the colored troops.”
The humor does not escape us. Walter smiles with a hard-eyed flash of teeth that makes rookie runners shit their knickers. I smile back. The memory of killing Victor may sicken me, but that is a debt Walter will spend a long time repaying.
“Do you really believe in Tamara’s cards?” I ask. “Did they predict something dire?”
He shrugs. “When our Tammy starts laying those cards down, something gets into her, I won’t deny it. But maybe she just missed Pea.”
I look back at the house. “But we should be safe here.”
“You haven’t told her about the draft.”
I like Walter, I always have, but I haven’t felt so close to violence since I hammered a throwing knife into his boss’s right temple. I slap my palm into the Packard’s chrome, right beside his shoulder. His gaze doesn’t leave my face.
“She. Stays. Out.”
“That’s her choice, isn’t it?”
“Not if I’m her reason for getting back in.”
“And you think she will if she finds out?”
Pea’s laugh spills from her open window, with a thread of words, “… as if you wouldn’t know, all you’ve done…”
Pea with dirt on her hands, instead of blood. Pea who laughs. Pea who plays with the knives she once used to slaughter. Walter wasn’t there—she let me kill Victor.
“You kill enough,” I say, so softly that my voice is gravel, “and you wake up one morning without a soul.”
Walter tilts his head. “Doesn’t affect us all the same way, now, does it?”
But his throat vibrates faintly. His breaths are too deep, too steady. Walter leans against a dead man’s car, but that doesn’t mean he has the dead man’s heart.
“Do you ever miss him?”
He jerks. Doesn’t even pretend to smile. “Why the fuck would I do that?”
“You were friends, once. Had to have been some good times.”
He takes a breath, lets it out. His hands go flat against his thighs. “So if I don’t miss him, I’m already a monster? You imagine this matters to me?”
I don’t answer.
Walter had come into that room, I’m not sure how long after. I remember his conversation with Pea.
“He did it?”
“Dev, baby, you gotta get up. Walter, where are the cops?”
“Taking their sweet time. Christ, it smells foul in here. Did Victor shit his pants?”
“Cost of business, Red Man.”
A pause. “Yeah. I know. But that boy’s a mess. Is he having some kind of fit? Why the hell’d you let him do it?”
“He’s hardly a boy anymore.”
“Thanks to you, Pea.”
Pea had lifted my hand to her cheek. I couldn’t feel much, but the warmth of her had shocked me like boiling water. I flinched away. Later, I would understand how much that must have hurt her but at the time the only one I could hold was myself.
In front of my house, far from that dirty city, Walter steps away from me and the car in one fast, fluid motion. He watches the silhouettes of the two women in the window.
“I won’t tell her,” he says.
“Does Tamara know?”
He shrugs. “Maybe her cards told her. But if she’s guessed, she won’t tell.”
My hands are shaking. I put them in my pockets, not to keep Walter from seeing—of course he has—but so that Pea might not
