JULIA MET RAY and Angie at Colombia, damn the anonymity of Starbucks, not caring who saw them.
She’d offered to buy them dinner at the best restaurant in town, but Ray waved her off. “Don’t want to be around alcohol.”
Angie, too, was on the wagon. “That shit almost killed me,” she said. “Bit of a wake-up call.”
Julia smiled up at the barista, who delivered a whole triple-berry pie with three plates and three forks to their table.
“Dig in,” she told Angie and Ray. “If you wouldn’t let me buy dinner, at least let’s go big on dessert. Angie, I think it’s great that you’ve quit. But you’d have to drink a whole bottle of whiskey, maybe more, before you hit the equivalent of the dose Wayne pumped into your veins.”
Angie shivered. “Don’t remind me.” She turned her head and discreetly removed her new dentures, wrapping them in a napkin. “I don’t want to stain them,” she explained. An anonymous benefactor had funded Angie’s trips to a prosthodontist, along with the dentures, after reading Chance’s stories in the newspaper.
Chance had gone far, far beyond reporting the arrests. He’d delved into the fight club allegations, his story buttressed considerably by quotes and financial records from Wayne’s ex-wives, who were only too happy to dish dirt.
“Word to the wise,” he’d said when Julia called to compliment him on his work. “If you’re going to get involved in any sort of criminal enterprise, never, ever piss off the significant other. Make sure it’s roses and chocolates and plenty of great sex into infinity.”
Julia apologized now for ordering a pie that posed such a danger to Angie’s bright new smile. “I’m sorry. I should have ordered banana cream. Something like that.”
“No apology necessary. This is my favorite. Worth the inconvenience.”
Angie looked good, her hair clean and glossy, its color newly discernible as a dark auburn compared to Julia’s frank ginger. She’d gained a couple of pounds, and even that little bit, along with the dentures, had erased the hollow-cheeked look. No longer did her very appearance telegraph homelessness, and indeed, she no longer was.
“How’s the new place working out?”
Angie and Ray looked at each other. “Tiny,” they said at the same time, then burst out laughing.
They’d been approved for Duck Creek’s experiment with tiny homes. A settlement of about a dozen of the portable houses, set in a circle with a small park with picnic tables and barbecue grills in the center and anchored by a washhouse with showers, toilets, and laundry facilities, was the town’s first step in getting transients permanently off the streets.
Predictably, a small but exceedingly vocal group in town had lost its shit over the project, railing against handouts and issuing dire warnings that it would only attract more vagrants to Duck Creek. Others had volunteered donations of cash, food, and clothing. And the majority of people in Duck Creek went about their lives, possibly vaguely aware that there were fewer people seeking handouts outside the downtown businesses than before.
Just outside the tiny house complex, a portable office building housed city social services workers who assisted the residents with finding health care and jobs, even acquiring suitable clothing, and—because many, like Ray, had ongoing legal issues—managing their court dates and fines and fees.
The people living in the settlement were required to police the grounds, keeping the area and the washhouse clean. Alcohol was discouraged but not forbidden, but public drunkenness or fighting—any brush with the law, in fact—was grounds for immediate eviction.
“Seriously, it’s great,” Ray said. “It beats a tent, or just a tarp, any day.”
“Heat and hot water on command,” Angie marveled.
“Our first day there,” Ray said, “she turned up the thermostat to about eighty and lounged around in her underwear all day, pretending she was at the beach.”
“Other than those summer heat waves we get every once in a while, it was the warmest I’d been in years,” Angie said.
“We’ve had to learn a few things,” Ray said. “Like, never to cook onions. Every single thing in the place—our clothes, the sheets, I swear even the walls—smelled like onion for days.”
Julia felt almost guilty, thinking of her spacious kitchen with its efficient vents and fans that sucked away odors within moments; guiltier still that Ray and Angie owed their recent good fortune to near-death experiences at the hands of someone who was supposed to protect people.
She served up another round of pie. “I do believe we’re actually going to finish this thing.”
Angie poked at her slice with her fork. “When do you think the medical examiner will be done with her report?”
Amanda Pinkham was reviewing her findings in Leslie Harper’s death. She’d noted the damning bruise on Harper’s arm that could have been an injection site, as Ray’s had turned out to be, but so far, nothing tied Wayne to Harper’s death.
“Everything’s still circumstantial,” Julia said, and she could tell that, just like her, Angie suddenly found the surpassingly flaky pie crust tasting of nothing at all.
“I wasn’t going to bring this up here, because I wanted this to be a happy occasion,” Julia said finally. “But I might as well. Ray, what were you going to tell me back before all of this happened? Was it about the fight club?”
Ray stared into his pie as though trying to retrieve the answer from among the glistening berries. “Sort of. Mostly, I wanted to tell you about Billy. He was Wayne’s secret weapon, a guy so big that everyone would bet on him. Then Mack Coates”—he wrinkled his nose as though he’d just bitten into a berry gone bad—“would scout around until he found some little guy, someone like me, but who knew how to use not just his fists but his feet and knees and elbows and even teeth if need be. He’d let Wayne know, and Wayne or one of his goons would pick him up on some sort of trumped-up charge. Then, when it came time for a fight, Wayne would place his own bet on that guy and cash in. Plus he took a cut of everybody’s bets for running the whole shebang.”
“I don’t get it. So many people must have been in on it. How’d he get away with it for so long?”
Ray gave her a pitying look. “How do you spend all day defending criminals and not pick up on some of their tricks?”
She noticed he didn’t include himself in that phrasing.
“They didn’t do the fights very often, and only a few people were in on it each time. Besides, he picked guys like him, guys with a lot of debt, guys who boosted some of the take from drug busts, those kinds of guys. If any of them told, they’d be busted right along with him. As for the guys doing the fighting, bad things happened to people who got squirrely. Remember that guy a year or so ago who gouged out his own eye?”
Julia flinched. “God. That was awful. What was he on, bath salts? Something like that.”
“Bath salts, my ass. They put one of Mack Coates’ finds on him. A sneaky little shit, just like Mack. Where other guys punched, this guy used his thumbs, went straight for the eyeballs. Billy nearly lost one of his. That’s when I started calling you.”
Someday Julia would get over the way she’d put Ray off. This wasn’t that day. Would Billy still be alive if she’d returned Ray’s calls? Leslie Harper had already been dead by then, but what about the rest of them?
She tamped the guilt deep inside, to be dealt with later. “Speaking of Billy. What happened that night? Did you guys really get into a fight?”
Ray pushed his plate away. “Oh yeah, we fought. Not physically, though. Argued. He was giving me crap about fooling around in the parade the day before. I told him to quit worrying about me and start worrying about himself. Said I was going to tell. He said they’d kill him, but I told him it looked like they were going to kill him anyway. It was only a matter of time before Wayne picked him up on some sort of bogus charge and set him up for another fight. So then he said he’d just leave town. ‘I’m going right now,’ he said, and off he went. Like he could get anywhere in the middle of the night.”
Julia had hoped for something more. “So you didn’t see what happened to him after that.”
But Ray surprised her.
“Oh, I saw it all right. I walked around a few minutes, trying to give him time to cool off. Then I went after him, thinking maybe to talk some sense into him.”
All this time, Julia had thought the case against Ray circumstantial, given that by all accounts—albeit discounted by authorities—he and Billy had gone their separate ways after their argument. She stiffened, hoping she hadn’t been wrong. Ray’s next words doused that flash of fear, although she would have preferred her belated suspicion to the scenario he sketched next.
“I caught up with him right about the same time Wayne did. Here we go again, I thought. That fucker’s down here to scoop him up for another fight. Except he must’ve heard us arguing, heard what we were saying. Knew what was afoot. But he didn’t let on, just told us he was taking us in for vagrancy and cuffed us.”
Julia’s fork fell from her hand. “And you just went along with it? That’s not even a misdemeanor. It’s just a municipal citation. All they can do is write you a ticket.”
Ray and Angie turned deeply pitying looks on her.
Angie pushed a strand of hair behind her ear. “They can do whatever they want to the likes of us.”
Of course they could. It was why Leslie Harper had been pushing so hard for reform.
Julia was still trying to puzzle it all out. “So he cuffed you, but then he let both of you go?”
“Yeah. Eventually. He just stood there and stared at us for a while. Understand, it was nighttime. We were down by the creek, off the trail, no lights there. He had us sitting on the ground in the snow. It was fucking freezing. I’d dragged Billy away from the fire to talk to him, so we didn’t even have that to keep us warm.”
Julia remembered how cold it had been just a few short weeks earlier, the sky hard and blue during the day, the sun a cheat, illuminating without warming. Then, at night, the temperature plunging further still, the air crackling with cold.
She tried to imagine the two men, their butts slowly freezing in the snow, hands—probably bare—cuffed behind them, the metal cuffs colder by the moment. Wayne looming over them, seeming even bigger than normal in his bulky winter coat, his warm boots, his thick gloves.
The pie sat forgotten before her. Her coffee grew cold.
“He pulled something out of one of those pockets on his belt. A needle. He uncuffed one of Billy’s hands and told him to sit still or else, and like the big dumb fuck he was, Billy just sat there and took it.” Ray took a breath. “Then he came for me.”
Angie put a hand on his arm. “You don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to.”
Julia held her face very still, because yes, he did. As far as she was concerned, he very much had to talk about it. Anyway, it didn’t matter. Ray was too deeply immersed now, reliving that night, his words coming in staccato bursts.
“I didn’t know what was in that damn thing. Figured it was something that would kill us right off. I screamed and hollered and kicked for all I was worth. Tried to scoot away on my ass. Almost went into the creek—if I’d gone through that ice, it would’ve killed me for sure. But he finally got me.”
Ray’s breath made a tearing sound.
“After that, I just lay there, waiting to die. But he unlocked me and went over to Billy and uncuffed his other hand. Soon as those things were off me, I ran. I heard Billy running too, the other way, Wayne chasing after him even though he’d just uncuffed him. I got lucky. Ran into Angie, and she’d found another unlocked car we could sleep in that night. Woke up with a hangover like I’d never had before, even in the worst of my drinking days. But at least I was alive. Best as I can figure, he didn’t get the whole dose in because of the way I was carrying on.”
Angie broke in. “Like me, the first time he tried.”
“Yeah.” A ghost of Ray’s old, cocky grin crossed his face. “You and me, babe. They couldn’t take us down.”
“Meant for each other.” Tears wobbled in Angie’s eyes.
Julia went to the counter to order another round of coffee, hoping neither had seen the moisture in her own eyes.
Ray took up his narrative when she returned, his coffee sitting untouched.
“I tried calling you and calling you. Somehow made it to my court hearing. Tried to figure out what had happened, but none of it made sense to me until they arrested me and tried to hang Billy’s death on me. Then it made all kinds of sense. I was supposed to be dead, but since I wasn’t, Wayne must have figured on pinning Billy’s death on me. But what was I going to do? Who could I tell? Not the police.”
Me, Julia thought. You tried to tell me. And I let you down.
“I’m so sorry,” she said.
With his story purged from his system, Ray’s face regained a little color. He straightened in his chair and shrugged. “You got him in the end. That’s what counts. And can’t say as I blame you for avoiding me. I know I can be a pain in the ass.”
Angie, too, cheered up. “I try to tell him it’s his best quality.” She renewed her attack on the pie, finishing the piece before her, then running her finger through the berry juice on her plate and popping it into her mouth. “What happens now?”
Julia suspected that, given their intimate knowledge of the court system, they already knew the answer.
“We wait. Multiple victims—alleged victims—means multiple investigations. Could take weeks. Months. I don’t see them letting him out of jail, though.”
Resignation tinged Ray’s words.
“Are you kidding? He’s lawyered up with Tibbits. He’ll be out of jail tomorrow.”
Dan Tibbits, Duck Creek’s most prominent and most expensive defense attorney, produced such reliable results that the slogan whispered behind his back was If you did it, better call Tibbits.
“You’re forgetting something,” Julia said. “Tibbits will be up against Claudette. You think the fights Wayne engineered in the jail were bad? This will be a legal bloodbath. For the record, my money’s on Claudette.”