The Dangerous Edge of Things - By Tina Whittle Page 0,56
out of the office—and then lie about it.”
“She needed help.”
“Which had nothing to do with the fact that she was a young, attractive woman?”
He made noise of disgust. “Oh, please. She was alone and desperate and scared.”
“About what?”
“I don’t know! But I do know that I had nothing to do with it! And you should know that, too!”
Tears blurred my vision, and I wiped my eyes with the back of my hand.
“You could have explained that to me instead of leaving me to deal with all this crap by myself!”
“What did you want me to do, turn around and come back here?”
“That’s exactly what I wanted you to do!”
Eric waved me off. Under the bleak fluorescence, he looked washed out and utterly alien. Not even familiar, much less my own flesh and blood.
“I didn’t have time,” he said. “This workshop wasn’t something I could abandon just because some girl I barely knew died across the street from my house. Life goes on, Tai. The grown-ups go with it.”
It was all I could do not to fling cold coffee on him. “You don’t get to lecture me about being a grown-up, not after what I went through with Mom.”
“What do you want, a medal?”
“I want you to take some responsibility!”
He laughed, a grating nasty sound. “That’s rich, coming from you. You’ve never stayed in one place for more than a year, never had a relationship for more than six months. Face it—even when she was dying, Mom was the one taking care of you. And now I’m the one stuck taking care of you.”
“I can take care of myself!”
“You can’t even keep a job!”
“I have a job, thank you very much!”
He dug one hand into the hair on his forehead. “Are you insane? You’re an arms merchant for a bunch of rednecks. There’s a goddamn rebel flag hanging on the wall! Do you have any idea how embarrassing this is to me?”
“You work for a company full of gun-toting corporate tools, and you have the gall to be embarrassed by Uncle Dexter? Like rich people with guns are cool and poor people with guns are trashy and dangerous?”
“One of those trashy dangerous people killed a girl five days ago! Have you forgotten?”
“Of course I haven’t, you idiot, but all you do is lecture me about being an embarrassment and then go back to pretending that Eliza’s death doesn’t affect you!”
He wasn’t listening, was just ticking off on his fingers. “I gave you a bed under my roof, I tried to get you a decent job, I—”
“I don’t need your bed, or your roof, or your goddamn decent job!”
“Where else do you have to go?”
“Here.”
He got steely quiet. “There’s a killer out there, Tai.”
“Lucky for me I got a whole bunch of guns.”
“You don’t even know how to shoot.”
If I’d had a gun in hand, I might have shot him just to prove the point. “You don’t know anything, big brother.”
I threw him out. I was trembling, and my chest felt hollow and crumpled. Despite my best efforts, the tears came hard and fast, blurring the lights into hazy globs. I lit up a cigarette. Then I blew my nose and double-checked the deadbolts. Then I engaged every device I saw on the keypad, including the motion detector. And then I got a .38 revolver from the safe and filled it with bullets. Dexter had a pull-out sofa in his office. It was brown velour and smelled like gun oil and stale popcorn, but it was the bed I had made, and for better or worse, I was going to lie in it.
***
The gun didn’t help. Neither did the security system. I stayed awake most of the night, all the lights on, dozing in fits and starts. Which is why I was fully awake when my cell phone rang at six in the morning.
It was Janie. “They found Bulldog.”
“They did! Where?”
“Meth lab in Smyrna. Son of a bitch got himself blown up last night. You feel like driving me out there so I can ID the bastard?”
Chapter 29
Gravel crunched beneath the tires as we pulled into the storage facility, past the barrier that kept out the news crews but far away from the smoking heap at the end of the driveway. The security zone, Garrity had informed me.
“Tell them you’re bringing in the identifying witness,” he’d said, “and they’ll let you in. Do exactly as you’re told, and I mean exactly. A meth lab burnout is not the place to go snooping.”