An Honest Lie(89)

“This isn’t a court of law, Taured. This is two people chatting in a kitchen...ah...excuse me...” She turned the steaks with the spork, then licked her lips, wanting her words to hit in the right way. “This is my court.”

“Your court? Do you mean to judge me?”

“I do.” Could he tell that something was wrong? His movement was nonexistent at this point; he was still, only his eyes and mouth moving.

He laughed, just a little laugh—like a chuckle. The past came back to her in a hurry: the heat of the day, the way the bat had felt in her hands on the softball field, slippery and heavy...the fear. Oh God, the fear was so big and she had been so small.

He had big hands, and he’d grown wider in the intervening years; he was no longer a lanky thirtysomething, but a guy in his late fifties. He was half-perched on the stool Ginger had pulled over, the gun on his knee, his finger still curved around the trigger. One of his feet was settled firmly on the floor, the other resting on the stool’s rung.

“I stole a floppy disk back then. Out of an envelope in your car... Do you still have that old piece-of-shit BMW?”

Did the expression on his face change? She thought she saw something like fear, and then it was gone.

He cracked his neck, and there it was: Rainy could see it. A cataract of anger dropped over his eyes again. All traces of his earlier amusement were gone. He was getting with the program, seeing his rival for the first time.

“I think you wanted to kill me yourself, didn’t you? That’s why you’re here today. I got away back then and you saw my call for help as a way to help yourself...to me?”

“You’ve drugged me. How?”

She reached behind her back and began to braid her hair. The steaks were really cooking now, probably past well-done. The meat smelled good, wild. Or maybe she felt wild.

“Anger, as it turns out, is an even greater medium to work with than metal. My anger bends the material as much as the heat does.” She flipped the half-braided hair over her shoulder, her fingers moving rhythmically as she finished. “Can you hand me that, please?” She pointed to a rubber band on the table in front of him.

Taured’s face was slack. He picked up the rubber band, looked at it, then held it across the table toward her. He wasn’t as sloppy as she needed him. The drug was present, but hadn’t taken full effect yet. The band was a little thing, pinched between his fingers. She reached across casually and took it from him, holding his eyes. He had hunted her for years. Well, this was hunting, too.

“You took my glass,” she said, lightly turning her back to him. “I softened some quaaludes for you in my mouth and spat them in.” She stopped, looked over at him with her face scrunched up. “I promise you I’m not the first person to spit in your drink.”

She finished tying off her braid and looked at him like a woman who was ready for a drink.

“I met your son, you know, while I was posturing over in Friendship, trying to get you to notice me. Marvin, I assume, let you know I was in town...”

The steaks were smoking now. The air smelled charred.

Taured stood up.

In New York, Rainy had taken a self-defense class once a week called Fighter Flow in a former storefront with blacked-out windows. She did a lot of stuff like that back then: photography classes, a wilderness survival class. Once, she’d taken up archery, only to give it up for fencing. But Fighter Flow was different. She’d heard someone talking about it on the train. Snippets of conversation, a woman whose sister had been mugged in her driveway was taking the class to feel safe.

“I don’t know what the instructor did, but it worked, because she’s a different person. He made her—” They’d stepped off the train, their conversation lost to her forever.

When Rainy got back to her studio, she’d looked the place up online. The only things on the website were testimonials and a phone number. When she called, a woman answered.

“How did you hear about us?”

“On the train... I was eavesdropping.”

The woman laughed a little and then asked for her email. “I’m going to send you a questionnaire. Answer it and shoot it back to me tonight if you can. I can see if you’re a good fit and we can go from there.”

Rainy had agreed and hung up. She was intrigued; the woman on the phone had given her no information, but she filled out the questionnaire, anyway, and sent it back. She was making herself a sandwich for dinner a week later when she got the call back; she’d forgotten about Fighter Flow. Licking mustard off her finger, she’d carried her plate to the table, balancing the phone against her shoulder.

“We have two available time slots for you—Mondays at seven a.m. or Saturdays eleven p.m. Your choice, but you’re going to have to give me an answer right now because there are other people who want to fill these slots.”

“Mondays,” she said quickly. And she jotted down the address the woman gave her.

It was taught by a retired marine corp veteran who asked her to call him Tito.

She’d dropped her chin and asked, “Tito like the tequila...?”

And he’d lifted his chin and said, “Yup.”

At six feet even, Tito looked like the guy you should be running from. His scars had scars and three of his teeth had been knocked out in fights and replaced with gold. “Street fighting made me this beautiful,” he told her. “I light up the whole airport when I go through security. I have enough metal in my body to make me the tin man.”