Chapter Twenty-Eight

After Edmée secured the snake, she and Billy Ray stayed long enough to go through the apartment to make sure that there weren’t any more surprises. When she was alone, Raven stood in the doorway of her bedroom examining the bed, the lamp now put right with a new bulb burning brightly along with the overhead light, and the now locked window. Raven knew she would be sleeping under the light if not for the coming weeks, then at least for the next few days.

Billy Ray and Edmée didn’t think someone had targeted Raven. Probably just a curious snake that climbed into her open window. She thought about the mysterious man who had been stalking her. There had always been a measured distance between them, as if he wanted to be, what Floyd would call, polite in his torture.

Now all that had changed, that is, if he were real. He had been in her apartment. She had felt his wet breath in her ear. And that word. Repent. Repent. What did he want her to repent for? The killing of Lovelle? Being her father’s child? That’s what Stevenson wanted her to do. Except he didn’t want her on her knees asking for forgiveness. He wanted her in handcuffs.

Suddenly, she was sure it was Stevenson who had slipped into her apartment. The thought, both the words and the surety of it, hit her so hard that for a moment all the breath left her body. Stevenson. She put a robe over her pajamas and dropped the Glock into one of its deep pockets before heading for his rooms. As she rounded the corner, she almost knocked over an end table. She managed to catch it before the frosted glass lamp atop of it crashed to the floor. After she righted the table, she continued her journey with a speed and a purpose, weaving past the small tables and curios Mama Anna collected and placed throughout the large house.

His door flew open before she could bang on it, which she had intended on doing. He stood there, wary and confused but awake, which provided more proof for his being the culprit.

Raven had been going full throttle on only a few hours’ of sleep since Monday. When she did close her eyes, all she saw was Noe hanging upside down somewhere while his blood flowed in sheets from his cut throat, and now Floyd, in her dreams. She was in no mood to play games with Stevenson.

“You walking abortion,” Raven told him now. “You freak.”

The confusion left his face. It was replaced not by fury, but understanding, as if he knew that this was a conversation that they would eventually have. “Look, I understand that you’re angry with me….”

“Angry with you,” she said. “I couldn’t care less about your lying butt. I’m just here to deliver a message.”

“Message? In the middle of the fucking night?”

“It wouldn’t be the middle of the night if you had kept your crusty feet out of my apartment.”

“What?” he asked. “What the hell you talking about?”

“Don’t give me that,” she said. “Whispering in my ear, telling me to repent. Leaving a snake in my bed. You are one sick, wasted piece of semen.”

His face cleared, and now there was another emotion. For a minute she thought it was concern. “I wasn’t in your—”

“That’s a load of crap.”

“I swear to you I wasn’t. I don’t have a key. You never gave me one, remember?”

“Then why are you wide awake? Why did you open the door?”

“I’m awake because I haven’t been sleeping. I opened the door because of all the ruckus in the hall.”

She was about to tell him that he was a lying piece of excrement when she heard someone clear their throat. They both looked down the hall to see Mama Anna standing there in a thick orange robe, her long gray hair parted down the middle and braided into two thick plaits falling on either side of her wide shoulders.

“What in Sadie’s hell is going on around here with all this hollering and banging?” she said. “Quiet down, and keep your drama behind closed doors. I got a place to run.”

Stevenson apologized like the good little boy he had always tried to be and started to close the door. But Raven stopped it with one flat hand and pushed her way inside. This was the first time she had been in Stevenson’s rooms since she found out that he was undercover. How could she have missed it? Everything was just too neat, even for someone staying in temporary quarters. She picked up a silver frame with two kids in it. She had seen it before; they had even talked about it. Now she turned the frame toward him.

“They even yours?”

“Yes,” he said, watching her warily. “I never lied to you about any of that.”

“Such a good boy,” she said as if she were talking to a dog. “How does it feel to be such a good little boy?”

She walked around the room, aware of the weapon bumping against her thigh.

“Say what you have to say and get out,” Stevenson said.

But, of course, she didn’t. She felt evil, a mean evil that started the moment she heard that whispered word, repent, in her ear, the instant she felt the snake in her bed. Something substantially uglier was replacing her anger. An unadulterated and exhilarating enmity that made her feel like her veins were filled with an electric current. She both loved and loathed the feeling. She looked at Stevenson. He no longer appeared human to her.

“Tell me,” she said. “Do you bang all your suspects? Or just me?”

Stevenson looked at the floor, took a couple of steps back. Raven moved around him, circling like a predator.

“That wasn’t the ideal way,” he said. “But the only way that I could get you to talk to me.”

“Of course when that didn’t work,” she said, “you decided that the only way to get me to break was by messing with my head? First by blowing my mind by telling me you were really a cop, and then by breaking into my apartment and leaving a snake in my bed?”

“I told you that wasn’t me.”

“I know what you told me. You told me a lot of things.”

His cheeks filled with air as if he didn’t want the words he was about to speak to escape. He let out a big sigh. “It wasn’t all just pretend.”

Raven started laughing.

“It wasn’t,” he said. “It did start because I had a job to do. But I did grow to care about you.”

“Be for real.”

“I’m being for real. Why do you think I’m still here?”

“You’re still here because you think I’m going to slip up so you can cart my sorry behind back to California for killing that maggot.”

A curious light slipped into his brown eyes. For a moment, it looked like compassion.

“You can’t kill a man in cold blood and not pay some kind of price, Raven. Nothing good comes from killing, even what you think of as righteous killing.”

“And it’s up to you to decide what the price is?”

“No, not up to me. It’s up to society. Believe it or not, it’s for your own good. You won’t be able to live with yourself. Whatever satisfaction you felt when you killed is going to turn into a poison that will eventually eat away at you until it claims your soul. The only thing that’s going to bring you true peace is your confession.”

“And go to jail for the rest of my life?”

“At least you’ll have taken responsibility. There’s honor in that.”

“I’m not looking for honor, Stevenson. The only responsibility I have is to myself, my friends and finding Noe. I owe you nothing. I owe Lovelle nothing. I owe society nothing.”

“Don’t lump what’s good in this world in with Lovelle. That’s where you’ve messed up.”

“When do you pay for what you’ve done?” she said. “What does your boss say about your methods?”

She wasn’t surprised that she didn’t get an answer. She walked to him, the weapon heavy in her pocket. “Oh, not so ready with the pretty words now, are we?” she said, tracking his eyes with her own as he tried to move away. “You don’t think I checked you out after you pulled your jack-in-the-box stunt at BLPD? They fired you months ago, WynnDel. You weren’t even a real cop when you followed me out here. How’d you keep hold of your badge? Did you run away so fast they didn’t have time to ask for it back? Huh, WynnDel?”

“Don’t call me that.”

“They fired you because you became obsessed with someone who had the audacity to shoot someone down in your town, your house.” She laughed. “Your town, like someone gave it to you.”

The weapon was out of her pocket and in her hand now, not pointing at him, but gripped lightly and pointed at the floor like a whispered threat.

“You threw away your family, your entire career. You went psycho.”

“I’m not crazy,” he said, in a quiet, dignified way. “You, you are. Look at yourself.”

“And when the chief didn’t believe you, you had some friend of yours call in, didn’t you? Pretending to be your supervisor, telling the chief you could work on loan. You aren’t even a rogue cop, you’re a pretend one.”

“Look at yourself!” he said again, shaking a hand at a mirror over the small fireplace. “You don’t even look like you. Your eyes are crazy. You’re threatening me with a weapon. Me, I’m just trying to make sure justice is done.”

“Don’t you understand that the world doesn’t need or want your justice?”

“What are you going to do? Shoot me?”

Raven felt cold and powerful. “Maybe.”

He said, almost whispered, “This isn’t you.”

“How would you know who is and isn’t me?”

“Shoot me or put the weapon away. It’s pissing me off.”

“Let me tell you something, WynnDel. I would love nothing more than blowing your brains all over the stock photo of your so-called kids. But I like Mama Anna. It would be too much for her to clean up. I know she would do it herself because she’s too stubborn to hire anyone.”

She had to give him credit. If he was afraid, he did a good job hiding it.

“Make your point.”

“So, not tonight,” she said, lightly touching his chest with the barrel of the gun. “But you call off your boy, the Floyd look-a-like your crazy behind hired to stalk me. No more snakes in my bed, and that includes you.”

His eyes narrowed. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“Don’t lie. The best thing you can do is to shut up and listen. If I ever catch you in my rooms again, if I even get a whiff of your aftershave through the air vents, I’ll kill you where you stand and swear that you had a heart attack.”

“You’ll never get away with it.”

“Oh, I will,” she said. “I will get away with it because you, son, are a rogue, psycho, stalker, pissant, waste of human flesh. They’ll think you’ve finally snapped and I’ll do everything I can to make them believe it’s true. You get me?”

“Yes,” he said, his voice hard.

“Good.” She walked around him and out the front door.

Back in her apartment, she fell against the door and slid to the floor, the gun thudding next to her.

You done all right, Birdy Girl, Floyd said in her head. Sounded just like your ole man. Just like how I told you when you had to face the bullies at school. Act like you crazy. Make ’em think it. Then them no-accounts will leave you alone.

“The problem is, old man,” she whispered out loud, “I’m not sure I was acting.”