up at the ceiling. He picked up a rubber squeeze ball from the end table and started tossing it up and catching it, over and over. “I didn’t expect this,” he said. Throw, catch. Throw, catch. “I have so much unresolved from back then, not just D.J. And after we ran across him again, I spent so long obsessing … and then he just, just walks into my life and back out again? Casual as you please?” Throw, catch. Throw, catch. “I don’t even know what to think. If I should want him caught. If he’s unredeemable. If he’s … I don’t know. I mean, he’s going around blowing up buildings—that’s, that’s wrong, right?” He started laughing again, this time a little hysterically. “I feel like someone set a magnet on my moral compass.”
I felt very inadequate to this conversation. But I supposed sitting for a tick and listening … well, it was the least I could do. For a friend.
Checker sniffed a little. “Even though all of you ended up okay, what he’s done—it’s logically equivalent to killing you and Tabitha and Arthur, isn’t it?”
“By that logic, every drunk driver is morally equivalent to a murderer,” I said.
“Some people do think drunk driving is morally equivalent to murder.”
“Are you one of them?” I asked.
Checker threw the ball another few times and didn’t answer me. “He was like family, you know?” he said instead. “It’s hard to make that tie mean nothing. And I think part of me—I think it doesn’t want to. As scared as I got thinking about him—I, I built him up into this monster in my head, and instead, he’s just … the same stupid kid, and I don’t know if that’s better or worse, because he’s killing people, not even people who are his enemies or something but just random people, and he’s utterly okay with it, and I don’t know if I should hate him, or if it’s horrible for me not to hate him, or if—and Diego…”
“What about Diego?” Diego and the kids had been getting their lives mostly back to normal, as far as I had been told.
Checker sighed, and his voice went a bit small and croaky. “He’s furious with me.”
“Why?”
“I’m not supposed to do this sort of thing.”
“What sort of thing?”
“The sort of thing where I shut down the entire police force of Los Angeles to get his arrest record wiped and then am an accessory to bribing the arresting officer into not reinstating it. After having a calm discussion with you about that arresting officer and why we shouldn’t kill him. That sort of thing.”
“Oh,” I said.
“And between that, and D.J.…” He scrubbed his fingers across his face again, knocking his glasses askew. “What kind of standing do I have to judge anybody anyhow?”
I didn’t know what to say. “You and Diego, um. Are you two gonna be okay?”
He blew out a breath. “He’ll forgive me eventually—I mean, it’s Diego. Doesn’t mean I don’t feel guilty as hell. In one night, I threw out everything he ever tried to teach me.”
“Well, if you could go back, would you do it again?” I said.
“Fuck, yes. In a heartbeat.”
We didn’t find out till later, but it turned out Diego was so mad about what we’d done that he tried to go into the police station as an honest man and turn himself in. But Sikorsky denied the arrest, saying it had only been a pickup for questioning and Diego was confused.
From what Checker didn’t say, I half-suspected that result made the hurt in their relationship harder to repair, but Checker still claimed to have no regrets.
Or maybe he had regrets, he just still wouldn’t change anything. That made sense to me.
forty-two
FOR THE first few weeks following our rescue of Tabitha, I saw a fair bit of Pilar and Checker and not much of anyone else. I heard the filtered gossip: Diego had found a temporary rental house for the family a few neighborhoods over from their old one, Arthur had moved back to his own place to convalesce, Tabitha was begging for my phone number. I satisfied myself that they’d all ended up alive and mostly unharmed and put off the rest, spending my days on Pilar’s couch drinking whiskey and eating the catering leftovers she brought home for her fridge. Sometimes Checker came over while she was at work and insisted on watching the worst movies we could find together on her television.
Simon called when he was well enough to