‘You know I love you, Sam,’ Cindi said to Kelson, ‘but defending my honor? It’s insulting.’
They sat at the table in the apartment while Rodman ate an omelet he made after calming down. Bound and gagged, Ramsey Garner and the man in the black T-shirt lay on the floor.
‘I didn’t mean to insult you,’ Kelson said.
‘And it’s embarrassing to you. You boys want to fight each other, all I need to do is stand back and let you knock each other down.’
‘Or crumble some Demerol in our scrambled eggs?’
‘Mama’s little helper.’
‘I was trying to help.’
Rodman swallowed a piece of toast. ‘Cindi takes care of herself.’
Kelson smiled at the big man. ‘That’s why you crashed through the door?’
Rodman picked up his cup of coffee, considered it, downed half of it. ‘Maybe it’s a boy thing. Wanting to save the girl when we can’t even save ourselves.’
Cindi smiled at him too. ‘You didn’t want to save anything when you came in. You wanted to stomp on it.’
Rodman narrowed his already narrow eyes. ‘Speaking of.’ He stood and picked up Ramsey Garner the way another man might heft a sand bag. He carried him toward the back of the apartment.
‘What are you doing?’ Cindi said.
‘Throwing him off the fire escape.’ But a few moments later, the sound of the shower came from the bathroom.
Cindi used Rodman’s fork to spear a bite of omelet. ‘Going to take more than cold water to make that hophead talk sense.’
But when Rodman dragged Garner, still bound and gagged, back into the room by his shirt collar, leaving a trail of bath water on the floor, the freckled man looked awake and angry.
Rodman released his collar and Garner flopped to the floor. ‘Look what I found,’ Rodman said, then stepped over Garner, straddling him. He stared down at him. ‘My girlfriend thinks I’m the kind of man who’d piss on you,’ he said with perfect calm. ‘Do I look like that kind of man?’
Garner’s eyes shined with anger.
‘I need an answer,’ Rodman said, ‘because I’m trying to figure out who I am right now. Call it an identity crisis.’
Garner made a sound like he was spitting into his gag.
‘Option two,’ Rodman said. ‘My friend Sam and I go out for an hour and leave you with Cindi. I’ve got this testosterone thing, but she’s hardcore.’
Garner made more sounds.
So Rodman pinched the gag in his big fingers and pulled it from Garner’s mouth. ‘You trying to say something?’
‘Fuck you.’
Rodman put the gag back over his mouth. He hovered over him, and, when he spoke, his voice was calm and quiet. ‘I’ll tell you a little story. Fifteen years ago, Sam and I went to police academy together. I always wanted to be a cop – since I was a kid, right? Then my little brother stepped into the middle of a drug bust and a cop shot him. The cop said my brother had a pocketknife, but if he did, no one else saw it. The review board ruled the killing justifiable. I dropped out of the academy the next day. Everyone said I was distraught. I suppose I was. But the real reason I dropped out was I knew if I ever bumped into the cop who shot my brother, I would tear his lungs out. I don’t know why I thought about his lungs. They just seemed right for big hands like mine. You got anything to say to that?’
Garner nodded.
Rodman pulled the gag off.
Garner said, ‘Fuck you.’
Rodman said, ‘Some guys never learn.’
He grabbed Garner’s collar and lifted him to his feet. Garner’s ankles were bound tight, and Rodman held him, wobbling, as if he might let him fall to the floor again. But he pulled him to the table and pushed him down in a chair. A pool of shower water stood on the floor where Garner had been lying. Another pool formed around his feet.
‘You’re a mess,’ Rodman said.
Garner eyed his partner on the floor by the couch. ‘Is he dead?’
‘Sleeping,’ Cindi said.
‘You did this?’ the freckled man said.
‘You’re an easy trick,’ she said.
‘Cunt.’
She got up. Calm. Like maybe she would clear the table. But she slapped his face. She sat back down on her chair. ‘I get so tired of men like you,’ she said.
A welt rose on his cheek. ‘Bitch.’
Kelson said, ‘Explain what happened. How the library bomb worked. How the Cranes got you to set it up. Exactly what you told Victor Almonte to convince him to do a suicide job.’
Garner spat at him.
‘Does the army train you to do that? Insult your captors? Rock them back on their heels?’
Garner called him a motherfucker. A cocksucker. A half dozen other names.
Kelson laughed at him and said, ‘You’re betraying the fear you won’t admit to.’
Rodman said, ‘You can talk to us, or we’ll let Cindi loose on you.’
Garner forced a grin. ‘I like it when a nigger girl hits me.’
‘You like it when I knock out all your teeth?’ Cindi said.
Garner licked his lips. ‘You let me lick you afterward, that’ll be fine.’
‘How’d you get this way?’ she said. ‘Did your daddy spank you too hard when you were three? Did your mommy tickle your tinkle in the tub?’
Rodman said, ‘Answer our questions, we’ll let you go.’
For the first time, Garner cut the psycho act. ‘Why would you let me go?’
‘Why would I want you here stinking up my apartment?’ Rodman said.
‘And what about him?’ Garner nodded at the unconscious man in the black T-shirt.
‘We keep him here until he wakes up,’ Rodman said. ‘Feed him coffee. Get his heartbeat where it belongs. Chat with him. If he behaves, we let him go too.’
‘He won’t talk to you,’ Garner said.
‘Then I’ll throw him off the fire escape.’
‘He doesn’t talk,’ Garner said.
Rodman looked at Kelson.
Kelson said, ‘It’s true. I don’t know if he can. He whispers some, though.’
Rodman told Garner, ‘Then if you want to lug him out of here asleep, be my guest.’
Garner thought some more. ‘What do you want to know?’
Rodman pointed a thumb at Kelson. ‘What he said. How did the whole thing work?’
‘I told him before,’ Garner said. ‘I did a variation on a cell phone trigger.’
‘What was the variation?’ Kelson asked.
Garner stared at the man in the black T-shirt, as if willing him to get up and help. He said, ‘The accountant – your friend Neto – needed to finish the transactions. I gave him a number to text when he was done. The text set off the backpack.’
‘How’s that a variation?’ Kelson said.
‘You usually use a cell phone trigger to keep from getting blown up,’ Garner said. ‘I used it to contain and destroy the evidence, including Neto and the phone. Good plan if Neto’d sent the money where he should’ve.’
‘But a blast gets attention,’ Rodman said. ‘Why do it?’
‘Talk to Chip Voudreaux. His idea.’
‘Not the Cranes’?’ Kelson said.
‘Voudreaux handled the details. He asked me to help, and I know explosives. I guess you use the tools you’ve got.’
‘Stupid way to do it,’ Rodman said.
‘How did you convince Victor Almonte?’ Kelson said.
‘Like I said, I told him this was part of the bigger effort. Almonte came back from Jalalabad broken. I fed him a story about a computer whiz kid who was using the library to send funds to the insurgents. Neto played his part like he was born to it. Those last days, Almonte got healthy. That bomb didn’t rip him apart. It put him together again.’
Cindi said, ‘Keep telling yourself that.’
He gave her a superior smile. ‘Unless you were there, you don’t know.’
‘You’ve got a sick head,’ she said.
Rodman said, ‘How does Genevieve Bower tie in?’
‘Does she need to?’ Garner started to look smug again. ‘She was Harry Crane’s hobby twenty years ago. He should’ve cleaned up when he got tired of her. Now he’s got me and the others to do the job.’
Cindi said, ‘You take any job no matter how nasty?’
‘I don’t judge,’ Garner said. ‘You know how many fifty-year-old Afghans I saw with fourteen-year-old wives? Send Harry Crane over there, he’d be a warlord, and all the fathers would give him their daughters. Not so long ago, he could’ve stayed in the good old USA. He could’ve floated down the Mississippi and plucked you off a plantation when you were fourteen, and afterward the other men would pour him a glass of whiskey and congratulate him on his good taste. No, I don’t judge.’
‘Well, I do,’ she said, ‘and I think you’re filthy.’
‘Each to his own.’
‘Not in my home,’ she said, and she got up and hit him again.