To see her succeed.
To give her every damn thing she needed in order to grip success by the balls.
I crouched to brush the dirt off one of the graves and squinted to read the name. I didn’t care what it was. I was halfway making a point. Showing her that I’d crawl my way through this entire place until Sunday if that’s what it took to find Hunter.
“You’re in the wrong spot,” she said, exasperated. “You should know that. We spent enough time in here to—” She cut herself off and turned on her heel. “Come on.”
I followed her. “I knew you remembered.”
“Shut up. It doesn’t matter what I remember or what we did together or how long we knew each other. All that matters is that it’s over now and it’s your fault.” Her voice shook as badly as her body had before.
“You trying to convince me or yourself?” I asked.
“Shut up.”
“Yes ma’am.”
“Oh my god, shut up!”
I feel like it’s disrespectful to grin in a graveyard, but as Danton’s Most Wanted, I wasn’t real concerned about minding my manners.
The stones grew sharper and shinier as we walked, and the overgrowth receded until we came to a place that was all freshly mowed lawn and glistening concrete. Flowers in various stages of decay lay respectfully across mounds of earth, identifying those whose deaths were still fresh enough to earn attention from those they’d left behind. And those who had been forgotten as the years drew on.
Hunter’s headstone was small and cheap, a generic curve jutting out of the ground. The only thing that set it apart was the die-cast Oldsmobile perched on top of it. I chuckled.
“Who did that?” I asked.
Daisy was fighting a grin. “Mom did. She had it cemented on there, too. It’s going to be there forever.”
“She has no idea, does she.”
Daisy lost the battle. Her smile was almost bright enough to illuminate the entire graveyard. “No,” she said, her voice glittering with suppressed laughter. “She thought he just really liked Oldsmobiles.”
“Think his sample stash is still in there?”
She shot me a wicked look. “I made sure of it. There’s a whole handful of drugs sealed into that thing’s undercarriage.”
My laugh echoed off the somber graves around me. “Good work. Leaving presents for future archeologists.”
Her amusement faded and she shrugged. “I don’t think anybody’ll be studying Danton. Nothing important ever happened here. Do what you came here to do so we can leave.”
She leaned against a neighboring headstone and fixed her eyes on me. Damn it, I had things to say and I didn’t want to say them in front of her, not now that I knew how she felt about me. I tried to shut her out and focus, but she was taking up my whole mind.
“You wanna give me a minute?” I asked.
“You have your minute. I won’t say a word.”
“Daisy, please don’t be a brat about this. Let me say goodbye to my best friend in peace. Please.”
She narrowed her eyes at me for a moment, then shrugged and stepped away. It was a nominal gesture—she was still well within earshot—but at least I could avoid looking at her now and could pretend that I was alone.
I traced my finger over the cold metal model car, grinning at the thought of his mother commemorating his life with his drug stash. I wonder what Kash would have thought about it if he could see it.
“You’re an asshole,” I told him. “You see what you did? Convinced your poor mother that you had some kind of toy car obsession. I told you to use a book.”
I brushed a bit of dirt off of his name and read it slowly. It was hard to believe that he was gone. Somehow harder now, than it was when I was in prison. I guess that’s what happens when you aren’t there to watch a person get lowered into the ground. Something akin to parents of missing kids never being able to really and truly let go; hanging on to hope because they’re sure little Tommy could still be somewhere out there.
Looking at Hunter’s headstone, though, caused emotions to flood me in one fell swoop, causing my chest to tighten and my heart to squeeze.
“Yeah, yeah, I know. You don’t read and everybody knows it. Would have been suspicious. Don’t know how a grown man walking around with a book is more suspicious than a grown man walking around with a toy car, but I figured you knew what you were doing.”
I frowned at the gravestone and settled down on the earth. I was probably sitting on his feet. “What were you doing, Hunter? You were supposed to be with me. I put off that deal for an hour waiting on you, you know. Dude was pissed. Just about took my head off when I wouldn’t give him a discount for the ‘inconvenience’. I mean, come on, who puts their ‘customer is always right’ face on in the middle of a drug deal?”
I saw the scene in my head for the billionth time. Me, on some street corner fighting with some new customer. My mind zoomed out to take in the whole town, then the fishing pond, then the picnic area, then just a little farther to the edge of the woods—maybe three miles from where I’d been—to see Hunter getting bludgeoned to death by some shadowy figure. In my head, the figure had my face and build. Guilt’ll do that, I guess.
“I could’ve used your help in prison,” I said. “There were these two guys—you remember what we did to the Marley brothers in eighth grade? With the mummy in the locker thing? These two would have pissed themselves. Thought they were so big and bad, scared to death of things that go bump in the night.” I chuckled. I could almost feel Hunter’s presence reminiscing with me, just close enough to remind me that he was very much gone. The emptiness inside of me spread,
