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THEY HEARD THE kitchen door sliding shut, and with an unexpectedly heavy sigh, Karl left his place by the deck railing and took the chair Brad had just left. Leo watched him, her stomach knotting with both apprehension and guilt. She’d obviously touched on something Brad must have felt was a private matter. Some secret, like he’d said. The worst part was the look on Karl’s face—a sad, dark, chaotic visage in his wide eyes. The curiosity drove her nuts, and she still couldn’t help thinking Karl was about to put himself through hell just to answer her questions. Leo couldn’t decide what she wanted more—to hear everything explained or to avoid putting Karl through whatever shit he was about to lay down.
“You’re gonna tell me what happened, right?” Leo asked. She couldn’t help it; she had to know what was going on, what she’d walked into. What she had coming for her if she stayed with these people whose pasts both scared the shit out of her and made her feel right at home.
Karl glanced down at his hands, having pulled from his back pocket the folded picture he’d taken from his ransacked home. “Yeah,” he whispered, tracing a finger over the photo. Leo caught only a glimpse of red hair from where she sat, but she remembered the picture of the smiling woman all too well. “But I’m only going to tell you this once, because tonight’s the night you get answers from me for free.”
What did he mean by that? Leo frowned at him, but she held her tongue and repeatedly told herself to keep her mouth shut. It felt like Karl was made of glass right then; if she pushed too hard, he’d crack and shatter into a million pieces. And broken people were even harder to put back together than glass.
“That’s your wife, right?” she asked jerkily. Her voice sounded like trying to close a door on a rug.
“Her name was Tracy,” he started, his voice gruff with suppression. No tears, no frown, just that low, scratchy hiss of air and sound. “She worked as a banker. Handled our money pretty well. More than anything, she loved to dance outside.” His mouth twitched, and he lit another cigarette, cradling the picture in his lap. “We had a huge backyard, had a little row of trees she went crazy over. She convinced me to hire a landscaper to take care of the place.” His eyes flicked up to meet hers, and Leo held her breath. “You know what I do when I spin a beat,” he added.
Leo remembered vividly the high of floating out of her own body, both during the beat Louis had so cruelly forced from Karl only days before and during the drive back to Sleepwater with a wounded Bernadette. She nodded.
Karl cleared his throat. “We didn’t have enough money to actually pay a maintenance guy, so I paid him in trade. With beats. Like any drug, any high, the guy got hooked. I had no idea that would happen. I’d never spun beats that many times for the same person before. The guy would show up three, four times a week, begging for work so I’d tell him a story. He even brought a tape recorder once, tried to take it home with him. That was before anyone figured out recordings don’t ever work.”
Leo found herself wondering at that last bit. She’d never thought of it before, had never tried to record a beat herself, and hearing there was an apparent limit to the power of her words sent a shiver rippling underneath her sweatshirt. She wanted so badly to ask him more about recordings, about what that meant for them, but interrupting him now would only set her fifty steps backwards. This wasn’t the time, but she’d bring it up later. She looked up at Karl and saw that he’d been staring at her, somehow aware of her having lost her focus for a few seconds. She nodded, and he continued.
“When he found out he couldn’t record it, the guy lost his shit. Broke into our house while I was out, tied Tracy up, and gagged her. When I got home, he gave me a choice. Agree to give him an endless supply of my beats or lose my wife. The guy was sweaty, twitchy, like he was on crack or something. But it was me. He was... high on me.”
Karl’s mouth twitched again, but down this time. He stared at Leo’s knees, and his nostrils flared. “So I did it. I told a story. I gave him what he wanted. He stopped twitching, eyes cleared up like he got his fix. He killed her anyway. Slit her throat. She was smiling, foggy, not in her right mind. She had no idea what was going on in the end, because I got her high, too. Too high to be afraid.” He leaned back in the chair and blew smoke up towards the sky like a man enjoying his freedom. But when he looked back at her, Leo saw the wetness in his eyes reflecting the lights wrapped around the porch.
Her breath had pretty much stopped in her chest. She didn’t know whether to scream or cry, but it was harder to think of something to say. His admission was the last thing she’d expected, and she felt a wave of nausea. Maybe this hadn’t been important for her to know. Maybe she’d asked the wrong questions and could have gotten everything she needed without dragging Karl back down this road. She swallowed the sharp, dry razors in her throat and held his gaze. It was the most he’d ever said to her, and she didn’t want to make him stop.
“I wanted to kill him,” Karl continued. “I would have if I ever caught him, and I chased the motherfucker out of South Dakota. By the time I realized he’d fucking vanished on me, Tracy’s death was all over the news, and they’d named me as a suspect. I couldn’t go back, didn’t have any family to answer to or worry about me. So I kept running. That was about a year before I met Sleepwater here in Wyoming, and I swore I’d never use my words again. Louis was already... back, but he hadn’t made his choice to blackmail us yet. I was there when he told the others about his own hell, and he heard the version of mine.”
“He threatened to turn you in if Sleepwater didn’t blow up some fucking lab?” Leo’s face burned, and she wanted to get her hands around the flaming fuck’s goddamn neck.
“Yeah, as a wanted murderer,” Karl replied. “We all have our secrets, our legal shit, but I don’t think anyone else has been wanted for killing their wife.” He grabbed the back of his head with both hands and rubbed vigorously. “I pretty much had to do whatever he wanted after that. Keep him happy.”
When Leo had been arrested outside The Purple Lion, she’d put Karl in serious danger. And she’d forced Louis, in whatever twisted way he justified it, to come to Karl’s house and blackmail him into a private beat session. A tingling wave shot down her legs as she realized her inability to keep her fucking temper in check had forced Karl to break his promise to himself. He’d done it as much for her as he had for himself, and it all made sense. Louis had mentioned Karl ‘running’, had waved that threat right under his nose like a flippant, puppet-master flag. Karl had obviously agreed to work for Louis, as much to bring new beat spinners to The Purple Lion as to stay under the man’s watchful gaze. To do whatever else Louis might have wanted...
Karl looked up at her and must have read the horror on her face. “When I said I had to do whatever he wanted, I meant in a business capacity. I haven’t been in a room alone with him, if that’s what you’re thinking.”
A mortified spray of bile hit the back of Leo’s throat, and she swallowed hard, having to look away from him. She couldn’t imagine what he’d been put through, but she realized that even through his wife’s death, Karl wasn’t a victim. She felt ridiculous for having thought he would have whored himself out to Louis, of all people, just to keep good on a deal. “Right,” she said, her voice like sandpaper.
“Leo,” he called, forcing her to look up at him again. “Some of these guys have no idea I’ve been working for Louis. They felt the terms were settled when we went after Salco Genomics, and they didn’t want anything else to do with him. Making that deal for me had been a group choice, and they all felt responsible. I think it’s better not to bring up that either one of us has seen him lately, yeah?”
She nodded. That was why Bernadette had changed the story when she’d met everyone the night before. Now she was the one who had to keep secrets. Thinking about Bernadette suddenly brought the whole day back to her mind, and she welcomed the less tragic change of topic. “So they think Louis trashed your place and went after Bernadette?”
“Right. But we kept up our end of the deal, and Louis didn’t have The Purple Lion when we made that agreement. He’s got too much to lose now to even think about a legal spotlight. I really don’t think it’s him.”
Right, spinning beats was illegal, and that was still the governing force of Louis’ world. No, Leo didn’t think the man was that stupid, either. “So who do you think it is?” she asked.
A wry smile twisted the corners of Karl’s mouth. “Like Brad said, it could really be anyone. Salco Genomics was the first, just a few years ago, and we haven’t really stopped. The number of people joining the different Sleepwater houses exploded when the beats became illegal, and while they got their shit together and realized they had to keep it under wraps, we still got a few people coming back from those fucking... places. Experimented on, like Louis. We, uh... we couldn’t keep watching it happen. There are a lot of people with a lot of money out there, and Sleepwater has pretty much pissed them all off—government, Laleopharm, MindBlink, probably a few military branches, for all I fucking know. Anybody who had money tied up in the research we’ve destroyed is just as much of a possibility.”
“Jesus,” Leo whispered. She’d had no idea this shit was happening in the world, that anything as grotesquely conspiratorial could ever be a reality. And she’d been dropped in the fucking middle of it.
Karl gave a sarcastic huff. “They’re kidnapping people, Leo. People like us. You think Sleepwater’s making the wrong choice?”
She sat back in her chair and folded her arms, staring at him. Maybe, all along, this was the decision Bernadette had told her she’d have to make. And it really wasn’t that hard.
“No,” she said. “No, I fucking don’t.”