Blow - Kim Karr Page 0,38
rebelled against my father and just kept getting into so much trouble. She was three years older than me, but sometimes I felt like the older one. Still, we’d shared so much in our childhood that I thought we were connected forever. I was wrong, though. She knew I needed her, yet she left, and after that she never called or told me where she was. I never heard from her until that day.” She paused for a moment to gather herself.
My muscles went stiff as I watched the pain she felt flash across her face.
A few seconds later, she put a finger to her lips as if trying to quiet herself down.
The gesture made my heart pound like that of a wounded animal. It killed me, but there wasn’t anything I could do to ease the pain of the past. This I knew all too well. All I could offer her was my ear. “It’s okay, Elle. Go on.”
As if determined to brush off the feelings, she lifted her chin. “One day I got a phone call from Michael. He told me who he was and asked me if my sister had been in contact with me. I guess he’d found my number among her things. I told him she had, but nothing else. He asked if she was with me and I told him no. That’s when he told me she had left the morning before and never came home. She was missing and he was worried about her. I’m not sure why, but I felt compelled to come to Boston. And once I did, once I met Clementine, I couldn’t leave. It wasn’t until after I decided to stay that Michael told me what she had been involved in and explained why he hadn’t involved the police. It made sense, then, anyway. Now I’m not so sure.”
Elle’s bare toes were sticking out of the blanket and her fingers were clutched around her knees. Her nails were glossy but she wore no color. They were short but shaped. I could tell she didn’t care about the shit that didn’t matter. In New York, I’d spent so much time around artificial beauty—boob jobs, plumped lips, fake nails, haute couture. In Boston, I never even looked at women. She was like a breath of fresh air.
Focus, asshole.
Focus.
“What does O’Shea think happened to her?” I asked.
“We’re being honest with each other, right?”
I nodded.
“According to Michael, she was running some kind of white-collar drug op. He said as far as he knew she had been clean since Clementine was born, but then started up with the coke again. Something happened and her last deal went bad. He thinks she’ll come out of hiding sooner or later. Or he’s hoping.”
“Where was she getting the coke from?”
If I had to guess, I’d guess Tommy was involved or that there was some connection to him. My guess is that although Patrick didn’t condone it, Tommy was much more involved in the drug market than his father had a fucking clue about.
“I don’t know. All I know is that according to Michael, she was selling to Michael’s colleagues and connections before she disappeared.”
I narrowed my eyes. “Are you sure it was her and not O’Shea?”
I didn’t have a fucking clue who it was. Up until the point that my gramps went into a home last year, Patrick kept my father on the easy shit—his role, as counsel, was to make sure Patrick’s businesses used for money laundering looked legit, liquor licenses were granted, real estate issues were taken care of, prostitution charges were avoided, and payoffs were made. Nothing to do with the drug side. The side that Patrick liked to think didn’t exist. The side that Tommy ran.
It was still no surprise Pop had been ordered to make contact with Michael, though. My father had also always been sent to deal with the more influential people of Boston. He had the finesse, my gramps used to say. So at first, when he was told to pay O’Shea a visit, I thought it was no big deal.
Hell, I even volunteered to drive him there.
My false assumption had been that either Michael had reneged on a gambling debt and needed to pay up or did some damage to one of Patrick’s girls and had retribution to pay. Or who knew—it could be any other kind of bullshit that Patrick wanted to flex his ego over.
It was a common thing.
It wasn’t until we were on our way to