Chapter 13 #2
"Mom told me last week. I know what you did to her at the benefit. I know how you made my sister. How you raped her. The birth certificate too."
Hatchet stares at me.
"Vega died this morning. The man you sent to put hands on my woman. He didn't make it out of Juárez."
He closes his eyes for a second.
When he opens them, the smile's gone. What's left is something tired and trapped.
"I'd rather die a Reaper's Reject than spend an hour wearing your cut," I tell him. "That's the only thing I came here to say."
I pick up the knife.
I press the point to the base of his right thumb and he goes ice still.
I push it in, slow, and twist.
He screams.
I let go of the knife and let him scream. When he stops, I do it again. The other thumb.
He screams a second time.
The third one's in the tendon at the inside of his right wrist, where I can feel it moving under the skin when he tries to fight the zip ties.
I push the knife in and find what I'm looking for. I don't sever. I damage.
The directive my mother used to drill into me about working with trauma patients.
The goal here is to permanently make him lose his function, not amputate. He won't ever close a fist again. Then again, he won’t walk out of here either.
Not that it matters. I want him to suffer, so I start on the other wrist.
By the time I move to his fingers, he's stopped trying to be brave. He's bargaining.
He bargains the only way he knows how. He starts with money and ends with Wren.
Protected, made safe, never bothered by another Kodiak again, on his honor.
I don't answer.
I keep working.
When the bargaining stops, he starts pleading. He names me.
Emiliano. Mi hijo. Por favor. Spanish like he's remembered he's supposed to know it.
I don't answer that either.
I work in silence until the work on his hands is done.
His hands will never be hands again.
I set the knife down on the table.
His head's hanging. Sweat on his face, blood pooling on the wood between us. He's breathing through his mouth, looking at me.
The kitchen's so quiet I can hear the refrigerator cycling and the pot on the burner where the coffee's started to burn dry. The window over the sink's full of sun now.
I don’t even know how much time has passed.
He speaks one more time. "I loved her, you know," he says. "In my way."
Mom.
I pick up the knife and cut his pathetic throat.
He looks at me.
I look at him.
His mouth moves. Wordless, and eventually he stops moving.
I watch him a while longer to be sure.
The chain at my neck's hot in my palm. I don't remember reaching for it. I let it drop against my chest.
I sit with him for one more minute.
Not for him. For me.
For the child version of myself who used to wait at the window of the apartment in South Dakota for a man who wasn't coming.
I sit there until the heat of the chain has cooled in my palm. The child in me has understood that the man never existed, and he was never going to.
Instead, a predator lived in his wake… and the thing about predators is, monsters will find them.
I did, and I dealt with him.
I stand up, set the bone-handled knife on the counter beside his coffee mug.
I don't clean it. I leave it where Alejandro's people will find it.
I turn off the burner under the dry coffee pot on my way out. I don't know why I do it, but I do it anyway.
I walk out of the kitchen and through the front door.
Python's on the porch with his rifle held low. He doesn't turn when he hears me come out. He waits.
I stop beside him. "It’s done."
"Yeah," he answers. "Figured as much."
He glances at me once. He doesn't comment on what's on my hands. "Cleanup crew's two minutes out. Let’s ride."
I get on my bike and we take off.
Brick falls in beside me on the way back.
He doesn't ask anything or try to fill the air.
The sun's all the way up now.
The desert's turned from gold back to dust.
The Sierra Madre to our left is sharp against a blue that doesn't have a single cloud in it.
I keep my hands on the bars.
There's dried blood between two of my knuckles on the right that I haven't wiped off.
I don't wipe it off now. It's evidence of something, and I'm not ready to make it disappear yet.
I let myself think on the way home, the way I let myself think on the way out.
Mom, and what I'll tell her on our next Sunday call.
Probably nothing. She'll know without me saying.
Wren and the voicemail I left her, and whether I'll ever be able to tell her what I did this morning.
Whether she'll consider it a kindness or another reason to never speak to me again.
I'm not afraid of being my father anymore.
He's gone, and he's not someone I have to outrun.
The clubhouse is about twenty minutes out.
I let myself think about Nova for the whole twenty minutes.
She is the best goddamn thing in my life.
She's in the courtyard when we ride through the gate.
The light is mid-morning now, hot already, the desert sun coming down full on the bikes and the concrete.
The yard smells like coffee from the kitchen window and engine heat from the bikes still ticking from the ride.
Nova's wearing one of my t-shirts and a pair of jeans. Her hair's loose. The flashcard with my note on it's folded in her hand.
She doesn't say anything when I get off the bike. She walks to me and stops a foot away.
I look at her. She lifts her hand and puts it flat against the center of my chest.
I cover her hand with mine.
We stand there. Around us, the brothers handle the rest.
The gate swings shut behind us.
Nova doesn't move.
Her hand stays where it is.
She's reading me with that nursing brain of hers—pulse, breath, what's on my shirt and what isn't, what my eyes are doing. I let her. I'd rather be read by her than by anyone.
"It's done," I tell her.
"I know."
She tips her forehead to mine.
I close my eyes for the first time since I left her in bed at five-eighteen this morning.
We stand there until I can breathe again.