Borderline (The Arcadia Project, #1)(82)

“I’m injured,” I said. “And as you can see, I am also an amputee. I am trying to get up, but I’m in a lot of pain.”

“Do not try to play the victim, lady. You might as well take a blowtorch to the Liberty Bell. If you think you’re going to file a lawsuit, by the way, you had better think again.”

“I would never—”

“I don’t care how many limbs you’re missing; this is David Berenbaum you’re f*cking with. Do you know how much money he and his wife gave to battered women’s shelters last year? He didn’t touch you, and no lawyer in the world could convince anyone otherwise.”

This is the problem with security guards sometimes. Some of them have frustrated ideals and a tendency to editorialize when they have a bad guy in their sights. Thing is, though, he was right. Berenbaum hadn’t assaulted me. But the guard’s diatribe sounded so much like some of the stuff I was told about Professor Scott that my brain short-circuited. Suddenly I felt as though Berenbaum were responsible for my injuries. I gave up on standing and just started to sob.

“Stop that,” said the guard. “That doesn’t work on me. Get up. Now.”

I forced myself to my feet and bit my tongue. Rent-a-Cop was looking for a reason to throw me on the mercy of the LAPD, and I was close enough to a complete mental breakdown without having a slumber party behind bars in Lynwood.

I painfully lurched my way over to the Prius and crawled into the backseat, still crying. I didn’t have a tissue, and so I took great pleasure in wiping the snotty back of my hand against the seat when he wasn’t looking.

“Where is your vehicle?” he asked me.

I resisted the urge to reply, Probably in an impound lot in Westwood somewhere, and instead just said, “I don’t have one.”

“Where do you live?”

“Near USC,” I said.

“Do you have enough for bus fare?”

I did not say, I have enough for a cab, jerk-off; I am not a bag lady. I just said, “Yes.”

He dropped me off at the nearest bus stop, and a heavily outnumbered faction of my brain cells noticed that this was more courtesy than he really owed me. The rest of my mind was fully occupied with imagining humiliating ways for him to die.

I called a cab, generating paranoid fantasies about the various people who were there waiting for the bus. I didn’t breathe quite normally until I was safe in the backseat of a private vehicular bubble. A fresh wave of sobs caught up to me, but I had plenty of time to dry my eyes before the cab pulled up at Residence Four. I looked up to the turret and could see my windows at the base of it. I had never been happier to see the shabby old place.

When I limped wearily through the front door, I was greeted with the sight of my suitcase, zipped and standing in the entranceway. Song and Gloria were both sitting in the -living room, giving me the same sad look, but I was pretty sure Gloria’s was an upended grin.

“Caryl called me,” Song said, her sorrow mixed with the look women get when they know they’re about to get a beating. “I’m sorry, but she said that she’s decided you and the Arcadia Project are not a good fit for each other.”





38


I really should have been reporting news about prisoners and fey-on-fey violence, but when I found out I’d been fired, everything in my damaged brain scrambled like a credit card on a junkyard magnet.

“No,” I finally managed to say.

“I’ll need your fey glasses,” Song continued gently, “and I’ll need your phone back as well.”

“I can’t leave here without calling a cab,” I said stiffly, even as I took the glasses and phone out of my pockets and handed them to Song.

“I’ll call you a cab,” Song said.

“Oh, honey,” said Gloria, shaking her head. “Why did you have to go and bust up Mr. Berenbaum’s car?”

I turned to Gloria, my guts hollow. “Don’t pretend you’re sorry,” I said, “and don’t pretend you’ve never lost control. At least I didn’t stab anyone.”

“Millie!” Gloria scolded. At least she finally got my name right.

I saw Tjuan and Phil appear from the dining room, looming, watching. But my anger felt good; I clung to it like a shotgun in a room full of zombies.

“I’m so sorry,” I said acidly. “Is it unseemly for me to bring up the fact that Gloria stabbed two people to death? That she was elbow-deep in some guy’s blood, watched the light go out of his eyes, and still felt mad enough to do it again?” I turned to Gloria, who had gone pale and still. “Who was the second person? Someone else who pissed you off? Or just someone unfortunate enough to catch you holding the knife?”

Now Teo and Stevie were leaning on the upstairs balustrade. I must have been loud. I couldn’t even tell.

“I don’t remember it,” Gloria said, her voice pitched lower than usual. “And that isn’t—”

“Bullshit,” I said. “I’ll bet you and your lawyers rehearsed the hell out of that. You sleep easy because you think those bastards deserved to die. And maybe they did, but tell that to some seven-year-old who loved one of them, or some father who never got to apologize. It was not your right to take those people out of the world. You do not get to decide.”