The Grimrose Path (Trickster, #2)(31)

It was a long moment before someone spoke up, but someone did. It only takes one push to get the ball rolling . . . only one person to get the mob ready to run.

“Girly, you know what you’re playing at?” a voice of gravel rolling in tobacco juice spoke at hip level. I looked down to see eyes neither cautious nor confused. They were hard, dark, and knew exactly how to play, if I could convince him that I could too. “They’re big men, did what they did. Steroid-popping, raisin-balled bastards who never did an honest day’s work, but they know how to hurt people. And they’re good at it. They ain’t had to dig for their last meal out of the Dumpster behind a 7-Eleven and been happy to have it. Not many of us can say the same.” He was about sixty-five with one leg ended in a stump at his knee. It could’ve been from war or diabetes. He had a beard, iron gray streaked with snow and half the teeth he’d once had at eighteen. But for tonight, he was a baseball player through and through.

I handed him the bat and then pulled my Smith as I sat beside him. “Sergeant, this girly knows how to level the playing field.”

“How’d you know I was a sergeant?” He looked at the gun with approval. “And why not just shoot the bastards dead if you’re carrying that in your panties?”

My panties were not where I was carrying it, but I let it go. “Because you, unlike the ones who are hurting you and yours, do know the value of an honest day’s work. As for shooting them dead, why should they get to go that easily? Your friend didn’t.”

“Jimmy Whitmore.” That was the name of the man the news said had been beaten to death. “The Whit. Always cutting up about foolish shit. He weren’t no friend.” A big hand clenched tightly on the wood. “Full of himself and I’ve seen brighter, but you’re right. He didn’t go easy.”

“And neither will the ones who did that to him.” I waved my free hand at Griffin and Zeke. “Go on, guys. Pass them out. Then find a spot while I sit a spell with the Sarge and talk a little trash.”

“You from the South, girly? Tennessee? Alabama?” The eyes softened a fraction. “You have a way about you.”

I smiled as I rested the gun on my knee. “Sugar, I’m from everywhere. There’s no place in this world big enough to hold me.” No yard with enough toys. No playground with enough swings. No amusement park with enough rides. No place I hadn’t been. No place I wouldn’t go. But that was the past and the future, intriguing physics theories aside. And right now the present was good enough for me.

An hour passed and I was telling the sarge about my favorite memory of Tennessee. “Honeysuckle,” I said in dreamy remembrance, propping my chin in my hand. “On those humid summer nights where you can stand outside and there’s no air, only honeysuckle. You can smell it; you can even taste it.” The last time I’d been there, it had been so strong and thick everywhere that I was surprised even now people didn’t smell it on my breath when I exhaled. No one could smell honeysuckle and not instantly become a kid again, tasting the nectar. There was nothing in the world that tasted quite like that. Not the best of wine or the sweetest fruit heavy on an orchard tree.

“That’s home, through and through.” He nodded. “Too damn cold in the winter and a tornado every day in the summer, but the honeysuckle nights I miss. I rightly do.”

Zeke interrupted the nostalgia, calling from farther down the street, sitting to blend in as I was doing. Waiting for those three bastards to come play. Griffin had taken the other side of the street, buried in the homeless and street noise. “Trixa,” Zeke snapped, “some guy is exposing himself to me. Only Griffin gets to do that.”

Maybe we were lucky Griffin was on the other side of the street. He considered their personal life to be just that and not shouted down the street over people’s heads. I choked back a laugh, because Zeke was trying to be good since this was my show. Most times he wouldn’t mention the little annoyances of life and take care of them himself, which was rarely a pretty picture. “Did you tell him to stop?” I asked.

“Twice. Which are two more warnings than I normally give,” came the exasperated reply.

I shrugged to myself. Sometimes the Zeke way was the right way—once again, not pretty, but still occasionally right. “Sounds like someone needs a lesson. You can be a trickster intern for the night.”

After that I heard a grunt, a loud one to make it as far down as I was sitting. I didn’t hear a silencer’s muffled cough though, which was good, but better safe than sorry. . . . “You didn’t shoot him, did you?”

“No, I hit it with the butt of my gun.” Considering the size Zeke’s guns tended toward, that was one unfortunate flasher. “He’s curled up and I can’t see his dick anymore, but I heard a crunch. A nice, loud crunch. Is that enough of a lesson or should I go ahead and shoot him?”

He didn’t know, truly didn’t, and I could see why Griffin still tutored him in walking the line between the stark black and white of decision making. Who knew how long it would be before Zeke could actually see the gray instead of only guessing at it?

“What do you think?” I called back.

“That I should shoot him,” he said promptly.

“No,” I said with a loud sigh, and he heard it.

“Just a little?” he wheedled.