Sunshine and Blood #4
“He’s in town, and I thought I’d treat,” Eric said, with the imperiousness of somebody with something much better to do. “Can I go, or do I need to fish my wallpaper samples out of the trunk?”
Oh, that was the ticket. At the faintest whiff of interior decorating, the man backed up with no more than a grunt and waved him on.
Eric waited until the roadblock had disappeared from his rearview to put in his AirPods and call Ace.
“How bad was it?” Ace asked without preamble.
“Brady’s face photoshopped to look like a mugshot,” Eric replied, still seething.
Ace sucked air in through his teeth. “That’s low, even for them,” he muttered.
“And they recognized the car,” Eric said. “I think—”
“We had the right idea from the get-go? Yeah. Me too. Get something with leg room,” Ace replied.
Jai’s voice, sounding tinny from being on speaker in the garage, spoke up next. “There is no other car like that one.”
“I’m sorry,” said George, but it sounded insincere. With a quirk of his lips, Eric wondered how much fun it was for George to be on the short end of a bench seat.
“Any specific color?” he asked, boggling.
There was a cacophony of laughter, and he realized belatedly that any car he brought into the garage would be stripped of its VIN, registration, and original color probably before he and Brady woke up in the morning.
“You pick whatever color your heart desires,” Ace said, being sweet to be sarcastic. Eric could appreciate that.
“Pink it is,” he said dryly, and that was met by a round of hoots and cackles.
“Just remember, tell me the difference between the trade-in and the—”
“I think not,” Eric said, hoping this wouldn’t be a thing. His Eric Christiansen accounts alone had plenty of cash on the cards. “This is to keep Brady safe. I want in on that action.”
“So you are buying the car?” Jai said. “Good. A Lincoln Navigator. Get black so we can paint it silver with blue pinstripes.”
“Cause a pin-striped Navigator ain’t memorable?” Ace chided.
“Pinstripes,” Jai said, sounding like a pouty child. “All my life, I’ve wanted pinstripes.”
“All your life, you’ve wanted boots that didn’t pinch your toes,” George said, sounding for all the world like the adult in the relationship. “Get whatever you can,” he called to Eric. “Even if it’s spouting smoke, they’ll have it fixed by tomorrow morning.”
“Fair,” Eric said. “I have to move it, or you all will be eating each other instead of pizza. Out.”
He hung up, mostly because he wanted time to think, but he couldn’t help but smile. Ten days he’d been here in the desert. Ten days, and he felt like he could take care of the people who helped take care of him.
It was somewhat of a miracle, he thought wistfully, but the storm that Ernie had predicted was already howling around their ears, and the louder it got, the more Eric became convinced of one thing.
Brady’s mission had to succeed—which meant Brady had to live to see it through.
Eric couldn’t commit his friend circle to give their lives for him, although he’d already seen the lengths they’d go to keep their little community and the children therein safe.
He was pretty sure Ace would rather die than do the wrong thing.
Eric Christiansen, who used to be Charlie Grackle, had done the wrong thing for both wrong and right reasons for the last twenty years of his life.
He could no longer draw the line between the two.
Ace had killed two men who’d very much needed killing, and he’d done it because there was something heinous going on in his community and he couldn’t stand it.
Eric had killed three people a year, on average, for very much the same reasons Ace had, but Eric had taken payment for it and hadn’t regretted a cent.
But Eric had come to Victoriana for a reason—he’d wanted peace badly. He’d wanted to hang up his guns and his spurs and find a community that didn’t have a knife aimed at his back when he dropped his guard.
He’d found exactly that—and it was better than he’d ever dreamed.
But he was realizing that in order to keep it, he’d have to do more than kill for it.
He’d have to commit to something, someone, with more than just his guns or his shuriken or his pressure syringe.
He’d have to commit with his morals, his backbone, the ethics he’d thought he’d ditched out on when he was seventeen years old and went searching for his best friend at a family barbecue at the beach and had found her being assaulted by his father.
Jayanne had been grateful—so grateful—that Eric had stopped the old man with a rock to the head.
But she’d also been terrified of Eric, and it had been that look in her eyes, of revulsion, of fear, that had made him run.
His first kill—and he hadn’t regretted it one bit.
He should have. He knew that. There should have been some tender connection with his father’s memory, some avenue for him to find a human feeling for the man he’d killed.
In the following months of living rough, finding odd jobs, putting out for the odd blowjob just to find a corner, a couch, a rathole to live in, he’d assumed his change of circumstance was some sort of punishment for that terrible, biblical sin.
And then a friend of Jayanne’s—a cousin, actually—who’d been stalked and assaulted, and then reassaulted by her husband’s boss, came to him in tears. Angie had a good home, kids—she’d risk all that if she went to the police, and her husband would lose his job.
At thirty-seven, Eric could think of other things to do to help her. At seventeen, still gargling mouthwash from the blowjob he’d had to give to get rent money?
Well, it didn’t seem like such a moral sacrifice. And she’d brought the gun, bought off-books at a gun show when her husband thought she’d been getting her nails done.
He’d suffered a pang of conscience before he’d done the job, though. He hadn’t been stone cold, not then. He’d wanted to make sure he wasn’t killing a saint.
He wasn’t. The guy was the CEO of a hedge fund who would buy perfectly functional companies and wreck them with his own debt.
He’d leave work on a whim, and Eric spent some time tailing him, looking for the best opportunity to kill.
He’d followed the guy for two weeks, amazed—and appalled—when his mark stalked women, different women, practically one a day around their lunch hours, their day-care pickups, their trips to the grocery store.
The behavior was calculated and intimidating, and Eric’s initial skepticism—Angie had claimed to be terrified—began to dissipate.
Of course she was terrified. This guy was everywhere.
He’d purposefully bump into his marks sometimes, insinuate himself into their days, touch their hands, breathe on their necks while they were in line at the grocery store, lean too close when he spoke.
Women recoiled—they knew what the guy was—but he was rich, and often he wielded some sort of control over their lives.
He told one woman that he was glad to see which public school she’d applied to get her middle-schooler in—he’d love to put in a good word for her, right?
All the while running his hand down her back.
It had been gross, demeaning, and Eric’s rage had built, but he’d been green, and he hadn’t been able to spot an opportunity.
Until one day opportunity struck him flat-footed. He’d followed the guy from work that day, wondering at the oddness of the hour—he’d left early—and then surprised by the direct route—straight to a modest apartment building on the wrong side of town.
Oh, this woman. She sold coffee at a kiosk in front of the guy’s office building. Sweet girl. She’d given Eric a day-old bagel on more than one occasion as Eric had lurked outside the building, probably looking hungry.
Eric had paused outside the low-slung two-story stucco structure, hiding in the shade against the wall, when he saw his target. He’d changed clothes in his car—that was Eric’s first impression. He was wearing all black, laughably so in the bright suburban sunshine.
The man carried a small kit with him, a fanny pack, which looked douchey, but it was practical. As Eric watched, the man used a lockpick at the window and then the blade of a slim knife to remove the window screen and bump the almost laughable lock.
The mark had climbed into the woman’s bedroom and grabbed her as she exited the en suite bath, with fresh clothes and wet hair from the shower. Later he’d learn it was to go to another job, but right now it didn’t matter.
This… this swine, who had been scoping out, stalking, and intimidating not just one woman but several, was now going to… to… to do what Eric’s father had been doing when Eric had crashed that rock down on the back of his head.
Before he could even think, the gun was in his hands, and they were rock steady, although he’d never so much as fired a weapon before.
Eric stood in front of the open window and aimed, and as his target turned his head and lowered the knife, he’d called out, “Lady, duck!”
She hadn’t just ducked, she’d slid to the floor in a puddle of fear, and Eric had stared into the slack, dumb face of pure fucking evil and pulled the trigger twice in quick succession.
The woman scrambled to her feet, and it had looked as though she was holding her breath. She gazed at Eric—white-faced, shaking, and shell-shocked by his own audacity—and then had mouthed, “Run,” at him.
Oh yeah. That.
He’d tucked the gun into the back of his pants and pulled his hoodie over it and then strolled away. It was the middle of the day. The few people who had heard the shots hadn’t started to gather yet, and as Eric rounded the second block, he heard the far-off shriek of sirens.
Years later he’d realized the woman had given him a five-minute head start, but even better than that—she’d claimed she never saw the man who’d saved her. Man—that’s what the newspapers (yes, in those days it had been newspapers) had said the next morning.