Chapter 3 #2
“Kezia Silver. But I go by Sylvie.” Surprisingly, yet another truth. I honestly can’t explain why the hell I just gave him that. I’m particularly fond of that alias. It’s the one I use most often. I don’t want to change it. But then again, dead men are great at keeping secrets.
“You want my name…or d’you already have it?” The liquor pokes at his competence again.
I smile. “Patrick? Chad? Brandon? Maybe Dick? Short for Richard of course.”
It’s the first time I’ve heard his laugh this close. His boozy growl is thick with something unfamiliar. Warmth. Genuine warmth. And I like that I’m the one who caused it.
He outstretches his massive mitt of a hand. A handshake. Goodness gracious. “I’m Jeffrey Callen. I prefer Callen if you don’t mind. I’m done with women who call me ‘Jeff.’”
“Callen it is,” I answer quickly.
“What do you want, Ms. Kezia? Because I’m eleven years your senior, and I’m not taking you home. That’s predatory.”
I point to my chest. “Is it predatory if I take you home?”
Score. Another laugh which rings out in the empty bar like a melody. “See? Like I said. Y’r trouble.”
“What were you drinking?” I nod toward his empty shot glass. “Can I buy you another?”
“Lighter fluid from the taste of it. The bartender is no mixologist.”
“Well, I bet I can make you something you like.” I lean in trying to tempt him yet again, but I watch his eyes, and his eyes stay on mine, polite and tired and entirely unhooked.
“Okay, you’re very pretty,” he says, like he’s reading it off a card. “Genuinely. Top tier. But I’m going to save you some time—I’m not looking for anything. Not tonight, probably not this decade. So if you’re working, find a better mark. I’m not a man who pays for his dates.”
It’s so flat and so accurate that I laugh before I can stop myself, and this time it’s my laugh that’s genuine and real.
“You think I’m a hooker?”
“I didn’t say…” He looks down, a little embarrassed. “I didn’t say ‘hooker,’ but maybe a working woman…I don’t know.”
I have to speak between my deep huffs of laughter.
“Callen, I’m not a prostitute. I came in here looking for a cheap drink, and I saw a man with a little fire in his eyes.
That’s all. Stop answering a question I didn’t ask…
yet. Let’s just start with a conversation.
My dad was in combat his whole life. I’m just curious about stories from a SEAL. ”
“Former SEAL,” he clarifies.
“Once a SEAL, always a SEAL.”
“Ah. Wrong, missy. That’s Marines.”
Whoops. Sloppy. I search my rolodex and pull whatever I can right out of my ass. “The only easy day was yesterday, right?”
He points to my chest. “Attagirl. Was your dad Marines?”
I’m certainly not going to tell him my dad was an Irish mob boss who probably killed enough men to fill an Olympic-sized swimming pool with dead bodies. “No. A little off the grid. Wet work so to speak.”
“Should you be telling me that?” Callen asks.
“Probably not. But you tricked me.”
He shakes his head and the dim overhead lights catch the angle of his strong jaw. The honey specks in his brown eyes glow. There we go, back on track. I’ve got him right where I want him now. I know when a man is falling under a spell I cast.
“I didn’t trick you,” he says.
“Fine, you charmed me. Now, tell me, want me to go? Or want me to stay?”
He’s silent for so long, it’s a little uncomfortable. Then finally, after a glance to the bar: “I’m going to grab another whiskey. What’re you drinking? On me.”
There you go, buddy. Relax into the trap.
“CHEERS,” HE SAYS for the umpteenth time, and I stare in horror because he’s taken down enough liquor to silence a testosterone-fueled rhino.
“Another?” I ask hesitantly.
“If a little’s good, more must be better,” he answers sloppily, holding his shot glass in the air. A little dribbles over the top and onto his hand, but he’s too far gone to notice.
“You’ve had way more than a little, Callen,” I scold.
“Narc.” Then he throws his eighth shot back. Yes, I’m counting his drinks. If he drinks himself to death, there goes my answers. There goes my money.
We toss another round back. Or at least he thinks. He drinks. I let the whiskey merely touch my lip and set it back down. I’ve been running the oldest con in the book since the first pour, and he’s too wasted to catch a second of it.
Shot one, when he turned to bark at the bartender about a lime, I poured mine out onto the sticky floor which swallowed it up like it was thirsty. You can’t make out my splashes from the wet spots that were there before. Yuck.
Shot two, I waited until his eyes went loose and unfocused mid-story about a dim sum place across the river, and I simply swapped our glasses—mine empty, his full—and slid it right back under his grip.
He was so gone, he thought he forgot to drink.
So I guess that was a double for him. He noticed my empty glass—toasted me for it, actually. “Attagirl, keeping up.”
Shot three I actually drank. All of it.
By the time we’re too many rounds deep on his side, he’s a disaster.
A big, warm, articulate-in-his-own-head disaster, gesturing with his hands like the words are just out of reach and he can grab them if he swipes at the air hard enough.
He tells me about a dog he had as a kid.
He tells me the bartender is “a good man doing his best,” which the bartender is not.
He tells me my eyes are “unfairly sexy.”
I watch him tip further and further over the edge of himself, and something in me goes quiet and strange.
He’s so harmless right now. Genuinely. This supposedly lethal, government-owned, black-box-guarding man is sitting across from me soft as a kitten, and he’d let me drop him into a river to his death if I smiled while I did it.
I’ve spent my whole life preparing for the moment people turn on me.
With this sweet dope, I feel safe. He’s not going to turn.
He doesn’t have it in him tonight. Maybe not ever.
And that’s why I’m unarmed. No flags, no alarms, no doubt.
I guess my judgment has proved him worthy. But what the fuck is my judgment worth?
“You know,” I say, scanning the room as if we have new company. We don’t. Drunky-drunk from the bar is gone. The bartender is asleep. We could rob him blind, except there’s nothing here worth taking. “I bet I could tell you anything right now. Anything at all. And you’d forget it by morning.”
He considers this with deep, swaying seriousness. A man trying to swim at the bottom of a bottle. “Prolly.”
That’s the beauty of a confessional. You don’t need a priest. You just need someone who won’t remember your face.
“I killed my best friend about a week ago.”
My truth lands in the sticky quiet and doesn’t echo. He doesn’t gasp, doesn’t pull back. He just looks at me, patient, waiting for the rest of the story like he expects a justification.
“Self-defense. She tried to kill me first. She’d have done it without blinking.
She deserved to die, and I’d do it again.
” I pass the shot glass between my hands, back and forth like a hockey puck that never shoots for the goal.
“But it hurt. I think it broke my heart.” My throat constricts.
Speaking suddenly takes more effort. “The thing is, I didn’t even know I still had a heart.
Not until it broke. Four years. She was the longest friendship I’ve ever had.
She was my best friend. And I killed her before she could kill me. Am I a monster?”
I have never asked that out loud. I’ve been too afraid of the honest answer. Because I already know it.
Callen nods. Slow. “I’ll swap you,” he says.
“Swap me what?”
“A truth. If yer tellin’ the truth. Fair’s fair.” He drags in a deep breath. “You killed your friend. I let my brothers die in vain. In Kesara. About a decade ago.”
I go very, very still. Eyes wide, ears perked, every cell on alert. Here we go. Time to work.
“Kesara? I’ve never heard of it.”
“Most haven’t,” he answers simply. “Doesn’t matter where. Place you never heard of. Stories that’ll never be known. My team went in and my team didn’t come out but I did. The woman that saved me…well, sorta an operative… She was a different kind of soldier I guess. Not Navy or Marines.”
“A woman? Interesting. Wait, what’s the appropriate term for a lady soldier? Soldierette?”
“Soldier,” he answers firmly.
Touchy. “Noted. Soldier she is.”
“Anyway, she said it was friendly fire. And you want to know what I did about it when I got back?” He grabs his empty shot glass and tries to take it. When he realizes it’s bone dry, I swipe the bottle off the table and set it by my hip.
“You’ve had enough, Callen. Now, tell me what you did about it.”