can,” I lie. I barely think of my mother anymore. Or my father. “So if you want to talk, I can listen,” I say, taking a seat on the stump of a tree closer to him but still at a distance. The stump isn’t a product of a saw. It wasn’t cut down; the bark is torn and the rings rough and jagged beneath my ass from where a storm long ago brought down the old tree.
“What are you, like … eleven?”
“Fifteen,” I tell him and smile. Charlie, the brother of Elizabeth Riggins, is almost twenty. He stayed in his hometown of Fallbrook to be close to his mother, and I imagine her hands dig deep in his pockets with that very hug he offers her each time she gives him a sob story. A broken home and a drug addiction aren’t uncommon around here. It’s a prime location for dogs to run free.
“So she fell in love with the wrong guy? It’s like Romeo and Juliet.” I speak nonsense, now seated lower than him so he’s forced to look down at me. Pulling an apple from my jacket pocket, I bite into it watching as he shakes his head yet again.
Charlie Riggins will think me a young fool, but I know him for what he is. A young man at the precipice of who he’ll become. He’s mourning and barely holding back a smoldering fire that burns within.
“Romeo he was not, kid.”
I smile every time they call me kid. They always do that. Children aren’t threatening and they don’t understand. That’s their first mistake.
“He was a bad man,” Charlie comments with his gaze settling on the cuts in the stone. His fingers trace over the quote. I’d planned on asking him what it meant, but silence holds back my swallow, the fresh apple tasting like the corrupt fruit it is instead.
Bad men always lose. A voice I only hear at night whispers that fact to me.
“So what are you going to do about it?” I ask Charlie, nearly choking as I swallow.
“Do about what?” he says with all sincerity.
“About the man who killed your sister?”
“I don’t know that he killed her.” The hair on the back of my neck stands on end; I didn’t expect him to lie to me. He knows he killed her. Even if he doesn’t have the proof I have, he knows.
“You blame him, though?”
“Yeah … he took her—it doesn’t matter.” He stops himself from saying more, not wanting to tell me she was last seen getting into the car with him. Plenty of witnesses saw them fighting, although they don’t know what they were fighting over. It’s the same thing it always is. Money.
Finley stole from his boss and she saw the money, took it and spent it. Addiction will make you do stupid things. Finley killed her to save his own ass with the boss.
He’s a dog and I have a plan for him. A plan that involves Charlie.
“There’s a guy I’ve heard of. His name is Marcus.” I tell him the story I’ve developed and worked out over the last few months. “I think he knows a lot of bad guys, and I think he wants them dead.”
“Dead?” Charlie sounds shocked I’d use that word. Although I can feel his gaze on me, I don’t look back up at him.
“He said they deserve to die,” I say before taking another bite of the apple, although this time, it tastes sweeter.
“Oh yeah?”
He doesn’t take me seriously. They never do.
“Yeah, he killed a bunch of Talvery’s guys last week.”
That gets Charlie’s attention. The atmosphere turns darker as the sun falls behind the tree line. Soon it will be nearly pitch black under this canopy. I don’t have much time left to convince him.
“I’ve heard if you pray at the graveyard, he hears. That’s why I’m here. I wanted to pray.”
Goosebumps and the chills that come with my story are an added blessing. The wind whips by and Charlie slips his hands into his hoodie’s pockets, still refusing to take his concerned eyes off of me. I can practically see the wheels spin in his head as he contemplates Finley’s death. Praying for a justice that he knows damn well he’ll never get otherwise.
“What are you praying for?” he asks me and I finally meet his gaze when I answer, “That the men who hurt us get what they have coming to them.”
The coldness swirls around me and another minute passes, the night sky getting