Chapter 12 #2
Devine nibbled at his inner cheek repetitively.
Back to Joey: “If you’re going to stay, whoever you are, understand a few things.
If you lie or seek to manipulate me one inch, I will dismember your mind.
You’re what? Seventeen? Eighteen? Your prefrontal cortex isn’t even fully myelinated.
I know, I know—you’re skilled, you’re tough, you’re nobody’s fool.
But the way you stand, legs loose, don’t know where to put your arms, like you don’t have a place in the world.
And that perky little suit, trying so, so hard.
Dressing for the role. But even though it fits, it still doesn’t, not really, am I right? ”
Joey looked at Evan, her eyes flared. She sipped in a breath.
He tore his gaze away from her. Leaving her on her own.
“You’re a loner,” Devine told her. “Difficulty making and holding friends, no parents to speak of, at least any worth anything. Unwanted. An Orphan, just like him.”
Evan didn’t defend. He didn’t protect. She’d said she was ready. Now she had to earn it.
“That diamond around your neck, a little rich for your trailer-park blood, isn’t it?
” Devine said in a low purr. “A gift? From whom?” His gaze drifted from her to Evan and back once more.
“Your shoulders cant toward him submissively. Your eyes search for his help, his approval. You care for him. And him for you. If you fuck with me, here inside my domain, I will use that against you, understand?”
Evan thought, Don’t give anything to him.
He kept staring at Devine. It took everything he had. He couldn’t see Joey’s face. He didn’t know if her lips were trembling or if her cheeks had colored or if she was about to break. Devine’s glare at her was hard, reptilian.
The pause drew out and out. Evan felt his molars grind.
At last Joey’s voice sailed over, cool as a jazz riff. “Understood.”
A half-second pause. And then Devine exhaled through his teeth, the menace evaporating from his face. He came back into another version of himself, bouncing on his feet, eyes darting for the next distraction to take on.
An assistant flew in, toting a bottle, nearly skidding out on a patch of—dog piss? water? champagne? A crash would have cost thousands of dollars of alcohol.
Devine tossed the flute aside—smash, tinkle—and snatched the Macallan out of the young man’s hands.
Evan said, “Take a settling sip, and—”
Devine gulped down a fourth of the bottle. Rawlings’s hand had raised itself to grind the blond bristles at the flare of his crew cut. He seemed to realize he was literally palm-smacking his forehead and dropped the pose quickly.
Devine leaned closer to Evan, his forehead bulging with terrifying power, his breath fumes.
“We have to reverse the Tower of Babel.” He was pleading now, eyes bloodshot, cartoonishly bulging.
Evan had forgotten how those probing eyes could feel, violating and potent.
Devine’s loose fist hovered before him, as if he could barely restrain it from snarling into Evan’s shirt. “We’re all gibbering past each other.”
“Devine,” Evan said, “if you want my help, you have to cede operational control to me here at the house.”
Devine’s head retracted on his neck. “Cede control to you? Some street operator?” He spit the words.
“You don’t have an inkling of what I have to do to keep myself on the rails.
And you, all of you, should be grateful I’m willing to do it.
” Now with menace: “Because you have no idea what I’d be like if I didn’t. ”
Evan put twenty-five percent testiness into his voice: “Cede.”
“You want to give me orders? A control freak with OCD roar-roar-roaring in your brain? Fuck off.”
Evan said, “Okay.”
He jerked his head at Joey, plucked his gun out of Rawlings’s hand, and started out.
Rawlings said, “Let’s just hang on,” but Evan ignored him.
“That’s it, is it?” Luke bellowed after him. “The great Nowhere Man, afraid to speak his real name, scuttling out with his tail tucked?”
Joey hustled to catch up, moving at Evan’s side, breathing hard. They walked out of the master suite and down the hall.
“Can’t take a little heat?” Devine drifted after them, twenty feet behind, words sharp with disdain. “Scared to play in the chaos, sit at the big-stakes table?”
Unrushed, Evan crossed the landing, started down the grand curve of the staircase. Joey’s legs blurred, her carriage stiff, her stare fixed ahead.
“Go on, then! Get out! Back to your squalid little missions, your gutter games, shooting marbles in an alley.”
Devine had his hands on the rail of the banister above, screaming down at them over the rush of the waterfall. Below, Keshishian and the guards waited in a loose cluster, a command without a commander.
Evan kept on. Down the stairs. Onto the vast marble plain of the foyer.
Past the waterfall feature, toward the towering front door, Kesh and the guards already parting to make way for his and Joey’s egress, pleading in their eyes: Don’t leave us here with him.
And then Devine shouted, “Wait!”
The word rang off the hard floors, doubled back off the high, high ceiling.
Evan halted. He did not turn around. Joey was two steps ahead now. She pivoted and looked back at him. He could see she was rattled, that she could practically taste the freedom of the porch. The silence drew out, broken only by the white-noise rush of tumbling water.
Devine’s words wafted down: “I’m sorry. Okay? I’m sorry.”
From the quaver in his voice, Evan knew he meant it.
“Just … come back. Come back a moment.”
Still Evan faced the door, and Joey’s eyes were on him and so were the guards’, everyone statue-garden suspended, stunned by Devine’s concession.
Evan turned around.
He looked up at Devine floating above, a crazed Juliet. Devine cleared his throat. His mouth bunched and bunched again, as if trying to clear a logjam, the words for once not ejecting with manic dexterity. “Please.”
Evan’s chin gave the slightest dip. Calmly, he started back upstairs.
By the time he and Joey reached the landing, Devine had receded into the master suite.
Evan entered the bedroom, Joey resuming her place by the hearth. At their return, Rawlings heaved a sigh of relief. On the floor at his feet was an old-fashioned black doctor’s bag.
Devine was pacing in tight circles, draining what remained of the scotch straight from the bottle. He finally halted, bottle swaying at his side, his torso swaying along with it. For a few seconds he listed on his feet, nearly pitching over. And then he did.
His knees struck the floor and he was vomiting prodigiously, action-painter swaths across the marble, his hands tracing patterns in the finger paint of his bile—Van Gogh’s pyrotechnic stars, Byron’s cloudless climes, Schumann’s Florestanian virtuosity.
Tears beaded at the corners of his eyes, springing fully formed as if pushed through the skin itself.
That was good. He needed to purge all the poison.
He groped blindly for his black box, found it, thumbed the button. “Have the maids—bedroom—”
More retching, now unyielding. He looked even more diminutive on the floor, his slender torso, the wreath of soft blond hair around that shiny pate.
Evan crouched before him. “You’re not in control, Devine.”
Devine laughed. “You think this is out of control?” He shoved himself up to sit, wiping his chin, eyes suddenly hard and lucid. “You’re like everyone else. You want all the brilliance with none of the mess.”
Staff ran in, more mops, more buckets.
“You want me to help the girl,” Evan said. “You want me to help you. Then cede.”
Devine glared at him, a wild-eyed stare presaging a violent outburst. Evan met it, unblinking. At last a change rippled across Devine’s face. He stood up, steady on his feet, abruptly sober. He wiped the bile from his mouth and stared at Evan. “Do. Your. Worst.”
Evan walked to the doctor’s bag, opened it, and got to work spiking a 1,000 ml bag.
He approached Devine, Ringer’s solution and IV needle in hand. He stopped in front of Devine, crowding his space. “Give up the vein.”
Devine hesitated. Then he swallowed, cuffed his sleeve twice, and proffered his arm, baring the median antecubital vein.
Evan sank the catheter. Devine didn’t flinch. He didn’t even blink.
Evan handed the bag to Rawlings. “Take him into the other room.”
“Don’t you dare,” Devine said, “ask my men to lay hands on me.”
“Then decree it,” Evan said.
“Why?”
“I need space from you and your mouth. So I can fucking think.” Evan nodded at the door.
Devine’s nostrils quivered. He drew himself up onto his heels, an erect dancer’s posture, suddenly elegant, even dignified. “Ten minutes. Ten minutes and we’ll resume. Then you’ll see. Then you’ll fucking see who’s in control.”
Shoulders pinned back, each movement precise, he glided from the master suite, Rawlings in his wake.
A click as the double doors parted and then swung shut.
A moment of quiet.
Evan exhaled.
The bathroom door opened and Monica stumbled out. Streaks of vomit marred her now-buttoned shirt, untucked to cover the negligible entirety of her micromini skirt. She swayed on bare feet, eyes downcast, her manner confessional.
“There was a girl,” she said. “And I left her to them.”