“I thought maybe,” she said, her voice much softer, perhaps a tiny waver in there somewhere, “you were one fucking person on this sorry fucking planet I could trust.”
“Some mouth you’ve got,” he said, trying to kid her a little.
Mistake.
Her eyes narrowed and her pretty face contorted in ugly rage. “You really want to talk about my fucking language now? Or is this just a joke to you, Detective Pryor?”
He patted the air with both hands as if trying to hold back an invisible wall closing in on him. “I take this very seriously. There’s nothing more important to me than this.”
“Than what?”
“Than helping you. Helping you find the monster who did that terrible thing to you and your family. What do I have to do to prove myself?”
She screamed: “Be honest with me!”
Then she stood there, eyes averted, clearly embarrassed, hugging herself, shivering but not with cold, and he wished he could take her in his arms and soothe her, but he knew — despite whatever stupid moves he had already made — that that would be the stupidest move of all.
Then she began to speak in a voice so soft he had to strain to hear. “What happened to my family, what happened to the families of the other members in the support group, has taught me a valuable lesson. And that is that no matter how hard you try to be good and do the right thing, in the end, it just doesn’t matter because truly bad shit can happen to anyone, at any time, and there’s nothing you can do to stop it.”
“Jordan...”
“There are only a few things you can try, when the world is a fucking minefield. You can stay inside. You can carry a mine detector with you, everywhere you go. And there’s one other thing — you can find people you can trust, who can lend you support, like the little coffee shop team we’ve put together.”
“I understand.”
“Do you? I trusted you the way I trust them... no, more, because you’re someone I knew before, back in my other life, and you are like a... a little window onto who I used to be, and that was comforting if scary. I was ready to let you in, Mark. I was ready to let you in.”
He nodded. Then he gave her his smallest smile, but a smile, and gestured to the pizza and soda. “You did let me in. Let’s sit and eat and talk. Like the old friends we are.”
“We weren’t friends, we—”
“Please don’t start that again. We were friends. We did like each other. And I still like you. I know I let you down. I won’t again. Jordan? I won’t let you down again.”
Her body language had shifted into something more relaxed, her weight on one leg now, though her arms were still folded. Her rage had dissipated into a sullen, hurt expression, though her eyes were clearly trying to forgive him.
“I went behind your back,” he said. “To talk to your friends. Why? Because you wouldn’t talk to me about that night. About what happened to you and your family.”
She stiffened a little, but the rage was gone, or anyway tamped down.
He went on: “So I talked to your friends. They didn’t tell me anything that you’d shared with them. I tried, I used my badge and everything, I couldn’t pry anything from them that you told them in confidence.”
In a voice small enough to remind him of how she’d sounded in high school, she said, “That’s because they’re my friends.”
“They are your friends, yes. And I know you’ve been working as a team, to try to put something together that proves one predator is responsible for what happened, not only to you, but Levi’s folks and David’s family. We’re all working toward the same goal, Jordan. I am your friend, too.” He was trying not to choke up but not having much luck. “I swear to God I am.”
“Okay,” she said, with a smaller smile than might seem humanly possible.
It was enough to make him grin at her as he wiped some moisture off his face with his sleeve. “Now, can we frickin’ eat before I starve and the pizza gets completely cold?”
That widened her smile. “I suppose we could eat. Get the plates.” She nodded toward the cupboard by the sink. “And a couple of glasses.”
While he did, she broke two bottles of soda off the six-pack and put the rest in the fridge. He glanced around the apartment and its sparse furnishings — not even a TV; a mattress with a box spring on the floor, a desk with a laptop and a chair. It was a sort of cell — a nice cell, but he couldn’t help thinking that the Rivera murders had consigned the wrong person to jail.
She was getting ice cubes from the freezer when he noticed a colored-pencil sketch of a male face held to the door by a Cleveland Indians refrigerator magnet, a rare personal touch in the apartment. The portrait wasn’t of her brother Jimmy or her father, or even him for that matter. It was someone he’d never seen.
“Who’s this?” he asked as she dropped cubes into the two glasses.
Her hesitation was brief, only a second or two, and she didn’t turn toward the picture. She simply said, “Some guy I met once. Thought he had an interesting face. Just a sketch I did.”
“I didn’t know you could draw,” he said.
She shrugged. “A little. Old hobby. Maybe I’ll pick it up again... I thought you were starving? You want to eat or play art critic?”
He accepted the plate she thrust at him along with a napkin and a glass of Coke Zero. They sat at a black-topped kitchen table with two chairs.
Surprisingly, the pizza had stayed fairly warm. Sitting opposite, the two ate in relative silence for a while. She was on her third slice and he on his second when he finally couldn’t stand the silence any longer.
“I really should have asked you out in high school,” he said.
“Oh, were you thinking that we finally got around to our first date? Well, this isn’t it.”
“Too bad. It’s memorable.”
She laughed a little. Actually laughed!
“I was just scared you’d turn me down,” he said.
“You should have just asked me,” she said, matter-of-fact.
“Yeah?”
“I would have been a hell of a lot more fun back then.”
“Maybe. But not as interesting.”
“Oh, you like ‘interesting’ in a woman?”
“Not particularly.”
That made her laugh again. Just a little, but coming from her it seemed huge. “I don’t believe I’ve ever heard you swear.”
“I don’t.”
Now she was grinning. “Is that why you made the remark about my ‘language’?”
He smiled as he started a third slice. “Maybe. You do swear like a stevedore.”
“Wow, that’s an old-fashioned expression.”
He nodded. “Something my dad would say.”
“Why don’t you swear? Are you religious or something?”
“I go to church, but it’s not that.” He finished the slice, sipped some Coke Zero. “There’s a story behind it, if you want to hear it.”
“I think I do.”
Mark told her about Kyle Underwood, the bully at school, and how he’d stood up to the kid, with fists but also with defiant dirty words, which his dad had heard him shouting out at school. How his dad had grounded him for a month and told him never to swear again.
Her eyes were large. “And you never have since?”
“Well, I’m not perfect. If I hit my thumb with a hammer, maybe.”
“I don’t think so. I think you say shoot.”
That made him smile. “Yeah. I can’t remember the last time I slipped.”
“You’re not grounded anymore, Mark. You can swear up a storm if you like.”
“It’s no big deal. Just a habit. Maybe it’s a way of just... still paying respect to my dad.”