Strong Cold Dead (Caitlin Strong, #8)(23)

“That’s it,” he said down to her. “Be scared, be helpless, be a worthless sack of shit, just like my mother and all the rest of them.”

Candy held the bruised side of her face protectively, back-crawling until the wall stopped her motion.

“You said you could be anybody, so I took you at your word. And goddammit if you didn’t deliver.”

“Pleas-s-sh,” Candy said, through the side of her mouth that still worked.

“Please what? Come on, tell me, because I really want to know. I really want to know what my mother was feeling, the nights she came back home the way you’re going home tonight. See, I was still too young to understand all that, when she died, and this is as close as I can come to knowing. So tell me.”

Rawls drew the soap-stuffed sock back overhead when Candy kept whimpering, tightening herself into a protective ball. He felt the rage over her refusal to respond simmering inside him, the sock in motion again before he even realized what he was doing.

Whop!

It impacted with a sound like a shovel digging deep into a hard-packed pile of dirt. Cray Rawls smelled lavender from the broken pieces of the stale soap, his mind taking him back to the sweet scent of pecan trees in the summer, when he’d spend the night outside while his mother’s “regulars” paid a visit.

“I grew up not far from here,” Rawls heard himself tell Candy. “I did my best to erase it from my memory, did my best to make some good of it. But now I’m back, my life in the hands of some pissant jury. And you know what, Candy?”

Whop!

He struck her again when she refused to acknowledge him, the broken soap bars splintering into smaller chunks.

“I don’t care if they find me guilty. Let the system take its best shot, throw everything it’s got at me. ’Cause you know the ultimate power in the universe? Not giving a shit. When you don’t give a shit, nobody can scare you, nobody can hurt you. Do you give a shit, Candy?”

When she failed to answer him, Rawls hit her again, twice. Her breathing had gone shallow and raspy, coming so fast it mostly swallowed her whimpers and sobs.

“What’s it feel like?” he demanded, glowering over her. “Tell me, so I know. Tell me, so I can know my mother.”

Whop!

Rawls’s thin sock exploded on impact this time, shedding soap fragments that clacked against the nearest wall. He almost told Candy how he’d taken up boxing, only to find he had no talent for the sport other than to be everyone else’s punching bag. Which suited him just fine. He liked getting hurt, battered, pummeled into oblivion until he hit the mat and surrendered to the world, the same way sleep had come to him as a little boy, to spare him the grunts and groans coming from his mother’s bedroom. And when he couldn’t sleep, he’d scratch at his skin with a fingernail, and later a roofing nail, to make himself hurt, because somehow that deadened the real pain.

Rawls reached down to grab hold of Candy, but he found himself crouching over her and then lowering his knees to the cheap, mite-infested rug before he could find purchase. Felt himself yanking her pants down past her hips, just enough, and then pushing himself inside her.

Candy gasped, something that started as a scream blowing hot, moist breath up onto Rawls as he thrust himself in and out, in and out, in and out … knowing the muffled sounds that came out of her, all too well.

The sounds of his mother, coming from the next room.

But beneath him now.

“What does it feel like?” Rawls heard himself demand. “Tell me what it feels like!”

Candy didn’t, so he kept up with his thrusting, her head ping-ponging lightly against the wall with each entry. She’d gone slack, limp, resignation and shock claiming her features, making Rawls think she really was a department store mannequin that his mind had turned real. He imagined she smelled like plastic instead of musty clothes and stale perfume. Imagined taking a match to her and smelling burning plastic as she melted beneath him.

Then Candy’s face morphed into his mother’s, and Cray Rawls kept thrusting anyway, hurting her as all those men had, the two of them sharing all that pain.

“How does it feel?” he heard himself ask. “How does it feel?”

Tomorrow a jury thought it would be deciding Rawls’s fate, with no idea what he had going a thousand miles away. What he’d lucked into that would make him richer than all the sons of bitches whose asses he’d had to kiss, who had left him with the same feeling that getting pummeled in the ring did. Leaving their offices or private dining rooms as dazed as he was when somebody had to help him up from the mat. He welcomed that direct form of combat, as opposed to the more subtle brand practiced in the boardroom, even though he’d never left a conference table with his nose busted.

But all that was about to change, regardless of the verdict that came down tomorrow. He was about to be the force doing the pummeling, shooting the bird to his wretched past, his mother, and everything else.

“How does it feel?” he asked Candy again, pulling out of her for the last time.

Rawls stood up, yanking up his pants and peeling hundred-dollar bills from the wad in his pocket.

“Because it feels great to me.”





18

SAN ANTONIO, TEXAS

“That all you have to say, Cort Wesley?” Caitlin asked him.

Cort Wesley pressed the phone against his ear, his truck’s headlights digging through the first of the night. “No, besides thanks for keeping me out of jail.”