Under the Knife(93)

He climbed back in the car and started the engine.

“Okay, boss?”

Finney’s window was down, through which the kid’s muffled sobs floated from behind the bushes.

“Yes.”

About half a mile along, at the bottom of the hill, the kid’s three friends were standing at the side of the road, staring back up the hill wearing varying expressions of pissed off. One was holding his phone to his ear.

Sebastian gripped the wheel tightly.

There were bad people in the world. He knew that. Bad people who did bad things for no good reason.

So when exactly had he become one?

Thick drops of rain were beginning to splatter across the windshield. He turned on the wipers, and in his head again ran through the plans he’d made for tonight.

Including the ones Finney did not know about.





RITA


“Rita?”

She knew the voice. She followed the sound of it out of the blackness and opened her eyes.

She was lying in a hospital bed, a different one, so she knew she wasn’t in the ER anymore. Darcy was in a chair next to the bed.

“Darcy. Hi.” Rita swiveled her head to meet her kid sister’s gaze. She was, she realized, feeling better. Marginally. Her head seemed heavy but didn’t hurt; her tongue felt thick but moist. Little things. She felt grateful for both. She would take whatever she could get.

Even though the room was dark (Was it night already? Same day, or the next?), Rita could tell Darcy had been crying. The light slipping under the closed door, and radiating from the control panel of the IV pump next to her bed, was enough for her to make out the streaks of tearstains on Darcy’s cheeks, like silvery trails on a sidewalk in the wake of a snail’s passage.

“Oh my God, Rita.” Darcy sniffled liquidly and rubbed her nose with the back of her hand. The large gold ring perforating her right nostril wiggled from side to side and flashed in the anemic light. “Oh my God. Oh my God.” Her eyes welled with tears, and she flapped her hands in front of her face. “Oh. My. God.”

Rita heaved a mental sigh.

Here we go.

Darcy had barely opened her mouth and already Rita was experiencing a familiar irritation that made her want to roll over and go back to sleep. Darcy was upset, and scared. Rita got that. But please. The drama.

Rita hid her exasperation under a blanket of self-control. It was misplaced, even selfish. What more could she expect? Darcy had never been a pillar of emotional support, or a safe harbor for weathering one of life’s storms. She wasn’t equipped for it, had in fact caused more than her share of nasty storms in Rita’s life and her own. Which was why she was now crashed in Rita’s spare room, without any plans other than to remain there until something better came along.

Still. The last thing Rita needed now was to deal both with her own problems and her infantile sister’s reaction to them. What she wanted most was someone who would listen to her crazy story, and believe her, and tell her everything was going to be okay, someone to help her find a way the hell out of this, preferably with her career and sanity intact. Or at least someone to pretend that these goals were achievable. But that wasn’t going to happen with Darcy.

Darcy sniffled again. Her plump lower lip quivered, and she pulled at it. Her fingernail polish, electric pink, was chipped, and her nails looked gnawed on.

The two of them, Rita mused, were a study in contrasts, their appearances and personalities so opposite that the two left people scratching their heads when they were introduced as sisters. Where Rita was willowy and firm, with coils of muscle, Darcy was compact and voluptuous; where Rita’s features were hard, Darcy’s were soft: all blurred lines and hazy borders, as if Darcy’s face was a picture, and she’d been moving when it was taken. Pudgy cheeks. Wide-set, wide-open eyes that made her appear perpetually surprised, or, when listening to someone speak, like she was hanging on their every word.

Dad’s eyes.

Dad.

It was because of him that she was named Darcy. Not because her father had come up with the name. He’d had nothing to do with it. Their parents hadn’t settled on a name before she was born; and then everything had happened so fast with Mom that she and Dad had never had a chance to confer on it.

Afterward, when her baby sister, pink and healthy, was lying in a crib in the newborn nursery, and Mom was laid out on a steel slab in the hospital morgue, their father, in a fit of grief, had delegated the naming task to thirteen-year-old Rita, for reasons he never made clear.

Once she had gotten over her surprise, Rita had approached it quite seriously. Even before her mom’s death, Rita had been an intense kid. Born old, her parents and teachers would say; reading grown-up books during lunch in middle school rather than gossiping with friends. During those miserable days, she’d welcomed the distraction of coming up with a name. It filled some of the void. Meanwhile, Dad had numbly attended to the funeral arrangements, and Gram fussed over the baby; and the two, preoccupied with their own grief, ignored Rita.

Darcy.

As in Mr. Darcy.

Since reading Pride and Prejudice (the first time) when she was twelve, Rita had been a rabid Jane Austen fan. The name had slipped into her mind one morning when sitting and staring out the window, trying not to be sad. She’d at first favored Emma, but then rejected it, along with a bunch of other choices. Her opinion at the time was that the world was already too full of Emmas, Elizabeths, and Janes.