The Last Flight(52)
Dex shrugged. “A regular guy, I guess. Nothing special. Scary as fuck if you make him mad.” A shiver passed through him, and he turned to look at Eva, his expression sad. “Don’t start asking questions now.”
Eva took a sip of her wine, the sharp tang biting the back of her throat. “Don’t worry. I know you can’t tell me anything. But I’ve been thinking about what happens after I give you the pills. I never considered until now whether any of it could somehow be traced back to me. They can do some crazy shit with forensics.”
“It doesn’t stay local, if that’s what you’re worried about.”
“I guess my worry hinges on what you consider local. Sacramento? Los Angeles? Farther?”
Dex took another sip of wine before dumping the rest into a nearby trash can. “Let’s finish this and get out of here.”
They walked down a small side hallway toward a restroom with a gender-neutral icon on the door, where they fell in line behind a mother and small child. An older man exited and the mother and child entered, locking the door behind them. A server passed them in the hallway and said, “If you guys want, there are bigger bathrooms around the corner. No wait.”
Dex and Eva smiled and assured her they were fine. After another five minutes and some muffled crying behind the closed door, it was finally her turn. She locked the door and checked the recorder in her purse, frustrated Dex hadn’t told her more. She leaned against the wall, the cool tile seeping through her shirtsleeve, trying to figure out what she could ask, what she could do, to get Dex to tell her something more specific. Where they sent the drugs, and who bought them. Details about Fish she could trade. Finally, she flushed the toilet, only pulling out the brightly wrapped package of pills after she’d washed and dried her hands.
She placed it on top of the towel dispenser and exited, letting Dex slip in after her. When he came out, he patted his coat and said, “Hope you don’t mind, but I’d rather not stick around for the second half.”
“I get it,” she said. They made their way out of the club and back down the stairs, exiting the stadium.
They paused outside. “Look,” he said. “We’re both a little wound up, and you’re right to want to be cautious.” He gestured toward the stadium behind them, where the game had resumed. “We’ll do this your way until we’re both comfortable again.”
She looked at him, his expression softer now that he’d gotten what he wanted from her. He was both comrade and captor. Protector and prison guard. Regardless of how he behaved, Dex was not her friend. She had to remind herself he wasn’t worried about her comfort; he was worried about himself.
She gave him a grateful smile and said, “Thanks, Dex.” As long as he believed he was handling her, he wouldn’t notice how she was handling him.
*
Later that night, instead of working, Eva sat in front of her computer, staring at a blank search field. Being at the stadium today, remembering how it felt to sit there alone, with no one to fight for her, to say Eva is a good person. She deserves a second chance made her wonder if a second chance would have even been possible. Liz’s words floated back to her. Information is power. Liz had poked through the boundaries she’d constructed for herself, and she wasn’t sure if this would help resurrect them or destroy them completely.
Eva tried to prepare herself for the most painful outcome—her mother, recovered, living a happy life with a family and friends—and entered her mother’s full name into the search field, the only light in the room the glowing of the screen, illuminating her face. Outside a car glided by, quiet tires humming on the pavement, then silence filled with the relentless chirp of crickets.
She pressed return.
A long list of hits popped up. Rachel Ann James on Facebook. Images. Twitter. A Rachel Ann James at a college in Nebraska. She scrolled down and clicked on a free people-finder link, which brought up eighteen potential matches. But none of the ages matched. Her mother would be in her early fifties, and these people were either too young or too old.
Her body vibrated with anxiety, more than her most stressful drug deals, and she was tempted to stop. To close her computer, get back to work, and forget about all of it. But she navigated back to a new search and entered Rachel Ann James obituary, California.
This time, it was the first link in her results. It was a short paragraph from a local paper in Richmond just a few miles north of Berkeley. No details were given about how she’d died, just the year and her age, twenty-seven. Rachel is survived by her parents, Nancy and Ervin James of Richmond, California, and brother, Maxwell (35). No mention of her, the granddaughter they didn’t want.
Eva stared at the screen, listening to the blood pump in her ears. Eva had been eight. She tried to match up the childhood she remembered with this new information. Her time with Carmen and Mark. The return to the convent, when the nuns had reached out to her family again. Somewhere in there, her mother had died. And yet, her grandparents, Nancy and Ervin, finally freed from the nightmare of having an addict daughter, had still said no.
She thought about printing the obituary, taking it downstairs and knocking on Liz’s door. Asking her how any of this gave her power. As far as she was concerned, it felt like a thousand tiny cuts piercing her skin, a pain with no center, just a radiating fire that consumed her.
But instead, she cleared her search and closed her computer, settling herself into the darkness, and got to work fitting this new rejection, this new heartbreak alongside all the rest.