She drew herself up. She was better than this. She would never again be that empty-headed showgirl who turned her back on cruelty for an illusive safety. “What did he say?”
“You have a heavy weight on your shoulders, and he doesn’t want to add to it. He told me to be kind.” Walter laughed with every appearance of warmth. “Can you imagine? But let’s be honest for a moment, Tamara. No one knows you quite as well as I do, do they? There are moments where kindness is the last thing you need.”
She swallowed the last of her spit. “Like now?”
He spread his hands. “What do you think, Tammy?”
“I have to go back.”
“Good,” he said, “I hoped you’d do that.”
“Why?”
There was a strange light in his eyes, something like the spark when he held his wife and laughed with his children, but shaded by Red Man’s knowing, carefully deployed cruelty.
“You need each other.”
10
Victor wanted to know how much Dev’s hands could tell.
Victor didn’t let them go after Dev stood up to him. He got the gun on Dev, and made Dev touch his skin and then he started saying names. Runners and soldiers Tamara knew, some hatchet boys from other gangs, a few women she didn’t recognize. And after each name he asked Dev if this person or that person was a threat. And if they were, how much. She could tell, Dev’s word was going to execute these people. Of course Dev hated it. He never wanted a part of that. So he just said no. Every time. He didn’t even pretend.
Tamara stood there, watching. She was terrified, praying with everything in her that she could just disappear. Victor got quiet after a while. He stared hard at Dev and then, appallingly, right at her.
“He’s lying, isn’t he, Tammy? He’s not even trying?”
Tammy closed her eyes. When she opened them, she was still there. Dev and Victor were both looking at her, expecting something, a performance that she couldn’t give.
Victor’s nostrils flared. “You aren’t afraid for your man?”
That was when she realized how she’d gone wrong. She should have started crying, she should have knelt and begged for Dev’s life. Oh, Tamara was sure scared. But as Aunt Winnie could have told her, she was scared of the wrong thing. And maybe Dev knew, because he looked at her wide eyes and said, “Go, Tammy. Leave, I’ll be fine.”
Victor got this funny look, like he was seeing all sorts of things in her he hadn’t bothered to notice before. His voice got flat and hard. “Stay. Answer the question.”
She stayed. Even then she didn’t worry about him hurting her. She didn’t even worry about Dev. She just worried that Victor might not take such good care of her if he got the notion she thought about anything but snake dances and Tuesday-night billing.
She babbled. Tried to say that she didn’t understand, that she didn’t like this game, but Victor cut her off. “Yes or no question? Is your man lying?”
And Lord save her, but she looked him straight in the eye and she said yes.
He looked sad for a moment. Sloppy drunk and sad. She knew she’d done it all wrong. He lowered that gun.
“Maybe you aren’t much of a lady after all, dollface. Not very loyal?”
She knew better than to answer that dangling interrogative, but her mouth kept moving. “I’m plenty loyal, Vic. You know you can trust me.”
Her mouth and her coward’s heart. She wanted Victor’s silver grin more than she wanted Dev’s smile in the morning. Victor just laughed. Dev moved toward her, but Victor kicked him and he fell. Vic should have been too drunk to aim that kick, straight to the ribs. But violence was always one of his talents.
“You’re just a dog, aren’t you?” he said to Dev now, waving that gun. “A poor dog, aren’t you? You trade Phyllis for this fine piece of sugar, and look, she’s got as much womanly sentiment as my Colt. You’re a real poor dog, making me feel sorry enough to let you go. A lying bastard who thinks he’s better than me. But at least I don’t have a girl that would leave me on the ground like that, you poor dog.”
Dev didn’t say anything. He was panting like it hurt to breathe. Tamara wanted to cry. She wanted to get down there with him and cry into his shoulder until she could stand to look at herself again. But she just stood there and tried not to shake.
“Tammy,” Dev said again, “get out of here.”
Victor gave her more of that funny look. She’d never seen him like that before. And then he surprised her. “You know what, take him. He might be a lying bastard, but he’s a poor dog, so why don’t you take him home, dollface?”
Tamara and Victor stared at one another. Those narrow brown eyes. That lingering whitewash of the smoke from his cigarillos. She was scared then. She was terrified that he could see her.
Later, Dev said that he understood, that she just wanted Vic’s protection. But it was worse: she didn’t want him to think of her as anything more than his pin-up girl, the curator of his better image. She didn’t want to be like Phyllis. She wanted to be small enough to hide behind him.
Which was why she’d laughed. Her brightest laugh, soft as silk tassels and the calfskin soles of new dancing shoes. She knelt and lifted up Dev by his armpits and sat him down in the nearest chair. He winced. Maybe one of his ribs was already broken. He didn’t say anything to her, then. He had known what she was about to do.
“I think you two must have some business to discuss. And you know I don’t do business, sugar.” She laughed again, pecked Victor on the cheek where his stubble burned
