face with trembling hands. She came out of the ladies’ room, half-expecting Dezz to have his ear pressed to the door, and then she could simply kill him on the spot. But the hallway held only a trio of laughing women.
She returned to the booth. Dezz dumped his sixth sugar packet into his iced tea, watching a mound of sweetness filter down past the cubes into the tea. She considered him: the high cheekbones, the dirty-blond hair, the ears that protruded slightly, and instead of being afraid of him she pitied him. For just one bent moment. Then she remembered the deputy and the woman on the highway, him shooting at Evan, and disgust filled her heart. She could shoot him, right here in the booth. His hands were nowhere near his gun.
But instead she sat down. He had ordered iced tea for her as well.
‘Sometimes,’ he said, not looking at her, ‘I really hate you and then I don’t.’
‘I know.’ She sipped at her tea.
‘Do you love Evan?’ He asked this in a soft, almost childish whisper, as though he’d spent his day’s ration of bravado and bluster.
There was only one answer she could give him. ‘No. Of course not.’
‘Would you tell me if you did?’
‘No. But I don’t love him.’
‘Love is hard.’ Dezz poked his straw into his sugar hill, stirred it down to nothing. ‘I love Jargo and look how he talks to me.’
‘That deputy. That poor woman. Dezz, you understand why it was a terrible mistake. How you put us at further risk.’ She had to treat it like a tactical error, not a human tragedy, because she was not sure that his unfinished jigsaw of a brain understood sadness and loss.
‘Yeah. I know.’ He crumbled a tostada, flicking the fragments across the table, stuck his finger in the salsa, licked it clean. The waitress came and took their orders. Dezz wanted tres leches cake first, but Carrie said no, dessert after dinner, and he didn’t argue.
Her hate for him did not ease but she wondered what chance he had ever had, with Jargo as a father. ‘Where did you go to school, Dezz?’
He looked at her in surprise, unaccustomed to a personal question. She realized he never regularly spoke to anyone other than Jargo and Galadriel. He had no friends. ‘Nowhere. Everywhere. He sent me to school in Florida for a while. I liked Florida. Then New York, and I didn’t even know if he was alive or dead for three years, then California for two years. Then I was Trevor Rogers. Trevor, isn’t that a name that suits me? Other times he didn’t bother with school. I helped him.’
‘He taught you to shoot and strangle and steal.’ She kept her voice lower than the Tejano music drifting from the speakers, than the laughter from the tables.
‘Sure. I didn’t like school, anyway. Too much reading. I liked sports, though.’
She tried to imagine Dezz playing baseball without taking a bat to the opposing pitcher. Or three-on-three basketball, occupying the court with boys whose fathers did not teach them how to disarm an alarm system or slice open a jugular. ‘You don’t do this often, do you? Just sit and eat with another human being.’
‘I eat with Jargo.’
‘You could call him Dad.’
He sucked a long draw on his sugar-clouded tea. ‘He doesn’t like it. I only do it to annoy him.’
She remembered her own father, her clear and unabated love for him. She watched Dezz swirl the tea in his mouth, look up at her, then look down back to his drink in a mix of contempt and shyness. She saw, with aching clarity, that he believed she was probably the only woman he could talk to, that he could hope for.
‘I’m still mad at you,’ he said to his tea glass.
Their plates arrived. Dezz forked a chunk of beef enchilada, looped a long string of cheese around his fork, and broke the thread with a flourish. He tested out a smile. It chilled her and sickened her all at once. ‘But I’ll get over it.’
‘I know you will,’ she said.
The apartment was quiet and dark. Jargo had rented the two adjoining apartments as well to ensure privacy. He set a small digital voice recorder on the coffee table, between the knives.
‘No objections to being recorded, do you, Mr. Gabriel? I don’t want to trample on your constitutional rights. Not the way you did on other people’s in years gone by.’
‘Fuck you.’ Gabriel’s voice was barely a creak, faded from blood loss, pain, and exhaustion. ‘Don’t you talk to me about what’s moral or decent.’
‘You hunted me for a long time. But your license got revoked.’ Jargo selected a small knife and a long blade geared for holiday duty. ‘This big beauty is designed to cut turkey. Rather appropriate.’
‘You’re nothing but a goddamned traitor.’
Jargo inspected the knife, ran its edge along his palm. ‘That line is awfully tired. Traitor-baiter. Baiting isn’t a very strong action. Catching is more impressive.’ He came closer to Gabriel. ‘Who are you working for these days? CIA or Donna Casher or someone else who wants to bring me down?’
Gabriel swallowed. Jargo held up the thin silver of the small blade, raised an eyebrow. ‘This one’s not for turkey. It’s for sausages.’
‘You’ll kill me regardless if I talk or not.’
‘My son didn’t leave me much of you to work with. But it’s your choice whether the end is fast or slow. I’m a humanitarian.’
‘Fuck you.’
‘Not me. Your daughter. Or your granddaughters. She’s, let’s see, thirty-five, very rich husband, living in Dallas. I’ll send my son up to her showcase home. Dezz’ll fuck her, make rich hubby watch, tell them the reason their wonderful lives are being cruelly abbreviated is her dumbass father, then gut them both.’ He paused and smiled. ‘Then I’ll sell your granddaughters. I know a reclusive gentleman in Dubai. He’ll pay me twenty thou for them. More if I don’t break up the set.’
Gabriel’s eyes moistened in terror. ‘No. No.’
Jargo smiled. Everyone, but him, had a weakness, and that made him feel so much better and secure in his place in the world.
‘Then let’s chat like the professionals we are so your family gets to enjoy their storybook life. Who are you working for?’
Gabriel took two deep breaths before answering. ‘Donna Casher.’
‘What exactly were you supposed to do for her?’
‘Get fake IDs for them, get her and her kid to her husband. Then get all three of them out of the country. Protect them.’
‘And your payment was what?’ Jargo moved closer with the larger knife, brushed its edge along Gabriel’s jaw.
‘Hundred thousand dollars.’
Jargo lowered the knife. ‘Ah. A cash basis. Would you like a drink to kill the pain? Kentucky bourbon? Mexican tequila?’
‘Sure.’ Gabriel closed his eyes.
‘And I heard you were off the sauce. Shame to backpedal. Well, you can’t have a drink. Not yet. I don’t believe that hundred thou was the whole payment, Mr. Gabriel.’
‘Jesus, please, don’t hurt my girls. They don’t know anything.’
Jargo leaned close to Gabriel, studied Gabriel’s face as though admiring the deftness of a painting, and flicked out his hand. A shred of cheek parted from Gabriel’s face. Gabriel gritted his teeth but didn’t scream. Blood dripped from the cut, in a slow ooze.
‘I’m impressed.’ Jargo got up, went to the bar, opened a bottle of whiskey. Sniffed at it. ‘Glenfiddich. Mother’s milk, during your glory days at the Company. At least what I heard in the rare moments I gave you any thought.’ He tippled a stream onto Gabriel’s cut. ‘The drink you wanted. Enjoy.’
Gabriel moaned.
‘Now. An old spook like you, a hundred thousand won’t keep you in Fritos and Ripple.’ He produced a piece of paper from his jacket, held it up. ‘We traced this e-mail from you to Donna Casher. Decode it for me.’
The old training died hard. ‘I don’t know what it means.’
Jargo flicked the blade along the ear’s surface, scored blood from the lobe. Gabriel jerked. ‘With two bullets
