Tell No Lies Page 26

  He lifted his hands, palms out. “You’re right. You can.”

  Lil covered her mouth with a fist, surprised at herself and maybe a little scared.

  “Okay,” he said. “Good job.”

  “That’s it?”

  “That’s it. Now, next time you go to a social, your aim isn’t to meet a man.”

  “Then why…?”

  “Your only aim next time is to smile. Look people in the eye. Say hello. And pay a compliment to three people, men or women.”

  “What good’ll that do?” Lil asked.

  “Change don’t come overnight,” Big Mac said.

  Still lost in thought, Fang gave the faintest nod. His face stayed impassive. Was he thinking about the choice he made last night outside the club? Relating it to what Lil was facing now?

  “But if it goes bad?” Lil rubbed her arms against the draft. “The panic attack. When I got nervous at the church, when I couldn’t breathe … And then out in the parking lot, I thought I was gonna die. I’m not sure I can risk feeling that way again.”

  “What you felt was caused by heightened stress and arousal,” Daniel said. “Increased adrenaline made you hyperventilate. You got short of breath, which made you breathe even more and threw off your CO2 balance. You got dizzy and light-headed, verged on collapsing. That’s all.”

  “That wasn’t all. It was real.”

  “Stand up,” Daniel said.

  Her lips pressed wide and flat, an attempt to beat back her fear. After a pause she rose.

  “Breathe,” he told her. “As hard as you can. More. Faster. Faster.”

  She panted heavily, her face growing pale, keeping on until her chest bucked and she wobbled on her feet.

  “Stop!” he said. “Now breathe into your hands. Get carbon dioxide.”

  She leaned over, breathed into the bowl of her fingers. A few seconds later, she straightened back up. “I feel better. So quickly.”

  “You make it happen,” he said, “which means you can fix it, too.”

  She stepped back and collapsed into her chair, her face washed of color but exuberant, too, in the small triumph. She was crying again, but her tears were different; they signaled a release. She managed a nervous laugh, then shivered, wiping at her face. “It’s cold in here.”

  Fang got up, crossed the room, and closed the window for her.

  Chapter 53

  As the group members milled around during break, Daniel pulled his iPhone from his pocket to text Dooley, and a few coins fell to the ground. SND CSI AFTR SESSION, he tapped in. TIN OF SKOAL IN TRSH - MYBE PRINTS. After double-checking that her number was teed up to call in case of emergency, he reached for the fallen change.

  A quarter lay there on the cracked tile. Staring down, he was called back to the perfect, shiny coins found at the crime scenes.

  He stood abruptly. “Anyone have change? I want to grab a Coke.”

  The members dug in purses, pockets, and chain wallets, change spilling into palms to be appraised. Everyone else offered up normal, grubby coins, except Big Mac, who held his Velcro wallet at a tilt so he could peer inside the change pouch.

  Daniel collected a few quarters, stalling as long as seemed plausible, then headed for the door. Paused. “Big Mac, you have a quarter?”

  The blocks of Big Mac’s hands resealed the wallet. Clenched it. “You got enough.”

  “I think they raised the price,” Daniel said.

  Big Mac’s gaze didn’t falter. “They didn’t raise the price.”

  Daniel stopped partway to the door, frozen in the standoff.

  A-Dre said, “Man, you one cheap-ass motherfucker, you can’t give the man a quarter.”

  Big Mac stared a moment longer, then rooted in his wallet and flipped Daniel a coin. His heart still thudding, Daniel caught it in the air. He didn’t open his fist until he was alone in the hall.

  The coin was grimy and worn, just like all the others.

  * * *

  Sipping a Dr Pepper, Daniel reclaimed his chair. “Big Mac, you want to take the hot seat? Talk about the fight last session?”

  “No. X has been dodging her turn, and it’s bullshit.”

  “Fuck you I’m dodging.”

  “We all come in here and talk about our shit. Lay it all out. And she plays games every time she’s in that chair.”

  “I don’t play no games. Just because I don’t go all Weepy Oprah and shit.”

  Daniel put it to the room. “What do you think?”

  “Hellz yeah,” A-Dre said. “Get her skinny ass in the chair.”

  “She’s been … ah, ah, getting away with doing nothing.”

  “Fine.” X stood up and sat so hard the chair clanked. “What?”

  “Let’s talk about Sophie,” Daniel said.

  “This shit again?”

  “Yes. Talk as if you’re her. Think how she’s feeling right now.”

  “She’s feeling—”

  “As if you’re her,” Daniel said.

  X shot a breath, crossed her arms, slid down a few inches in the chair. “I’m feeling happy ’cuz it’s been two years since that shit happened, and I don’t dwell on it every day like some people.”

  “Think of Sophie as a person,” Daniel said. “Think about how it affected her life.”

  “I’m Sophie.” X produced a shit-eating smile. “I get my feelings hurt when people call me Raped Girl. But most girls get raped, so I guess that makes me, I don’t know, a fucking baby.”

  As the others let her have it for being a pain in the ass, Daniel leaned back in his chair, the band of metal cool against his shoulder blades. It was the same shut-out feeling he’d experienced standing outside the closed door of his and Cris’s bedroom today.

  “What is the most important thing we ask for in here?” he said sharply. “Honesty and accountability.” The words boomeranged back and struck him hard. Physician, heal thyself.

  “I’m being honest,” X said. “Y’all just don’t like hard truths.”

  “BS,” Lil said. “After I sat up there and said what I went through—”

  “Boo-fucking-hoo, Lil. ‘Oh, no one talked to me at a church social—’”

  “—you’re scared to even take a look at—”

  “I’m not scared!” X had come to a crouch above her chair, her face flushed. She eased back down, bit her lower lip. “Fine. Fine. You wanna know how it affected her life?” Her nostrils flared, her chest rose and fell. “She wants to not think about it every fucking minute of the day. Reliving the pain. The concrete against her cheek. The expression on the girls’ faces—on my face—when I held her down. She tells herself it’s no big deal, girls get raped all the time. She toughens up. She never, ever wants to be helpless again. But she’s scared all the time. She can’t go into a room with other people without her heart rate going up. She has to … has to sit by the door. So she can get away if she needs to. It hurts when she has sex, like a knife going into her. That’s how she fucking feels. Okay? Okay?”

  Stunned silence. The room without air. A ceiling vent blew unevenly, and the pipes groaned in the walls.

  When X spoke again, her voice was as quiet and small as Lil’s. “She was so pretty. I wanted her to be wrecked like me.” Then her face broke, and she started keening. Arms crossed at her belly, rocking herself up and down, wailing.

  It took Daniel a moment to find his voice again. He was about to speak, but Lil rose first and crossed the circle. She crouched before X, set her hands on her shoulders, and X tilted forward into her arms.

  Chapter 54

  Daniel’s footsteps sounded off the walls of the garage. After session he’d waited in the room until a CSI inspector, disguised as a janitor, retrieved the tin of dipping tobacco from the trash can. The inspector had found only smudged partials; run through a mobile scanner, they’d brought up nothing in the system. Another tantalizing clue leading to another dead end.

  Daniel cut through the rows of vehicles, climbed into his car, and sat for a time
with his hands and forehead on the steering wheel. Utterly spent.

  Removing his iPhone, he texted Dooley: SAFE.

  A moment later, the phone buzzed in his lap. I KNOW. LOOK UP.

  It took his eyes a moment to adjust to the gloom, but then he spotted her in a sedan parked against the far wall. Through the windshield she gave a little wave. He waved back.

  She smiled. He smiled back. It was good to see her face.

  The phone vibrated with another message, but he could see her hands, could see it wasn’t her.

  DANIEL BRASHER.

  An unknown caller.

  The chill of the garage settled in around his neck. He stared at the screen, waiting for the next message.

  ADMIT WHAT YOUV DONE. OR YOU WILL BLEED FOR IT.

  YOU HAV TIL THANKGIVING AT MIDITE.

  He looked across at Dooley. Her expression had changed, a reflection no doubt of his own. As she got out and hustled toward his car, he looked down at the phone, clenched in his hand.

  Through a shell-shocked haze, he realized that he was the first target who actually knew what he was supposed to admit. Which of course raised a question that the others hadn’t had to consider.

  His thumbs were shaking, so it took several tries and two autocorrects to input his reply. ADMIT TO WHO? WHEN? WHERE?

  As expected, the error message popped up in its cheery little thought bubble. Invalid number.

  Dooley tapped the window. He unlocked, and she slid into the passenger seat. He handed her the phone. Heard her lips make a slight popping sound. She was on the radio right away, but her words were a blur beneath the hum in his head.

  Thanksgiving.

  Two days.

  Chapter 55

  “Cris? You there? Look, I’m sorry to tell you through the door, but the next death threat? It’s directed at me. The deadline’s Thanksgiving at midnight. Leo is safing the entire house now with SFPD—they want to check everything because of how it went down with Molly Clarke. They’re starting on the ground floor. But you’ll have to open up soon.”

  “Still here. Look … I realized something today. In session. I yammer on about honesty and accountability all the time, but I wasn’t being fully honest with myself. Or with you. And if we can’t do that with each other, then what’s the point, right? If we can’t share everything. Including the ugliest, most shameful truths. So.”

  “Okay. Here goes.”

  “When I thought I was gonna lose you, I felt utterly helpless. And terrified. I couldn’t imagine what the next fifty years would look like without you in them. Or maybe I could and I didn’t think they would be fifty years worth getting through. But more than that, with everything you were going to go through and you being scared and in pain and I couldn’t do anything—I couldn’t do a fucking thing to lessen your … your … Sorry. Hang on. Give me a…”

  “No matter what I think I think about rules and choices—all the sanctimonious bullshit—I would’ve done anything. To spare you that. To make you well. And you’re right. I didn’t care how it got done. I just wanted you to be alive. I always thought—hoped—that I was different from my mom and, yeah, the people I see in group. But I’m not. Because for your life? I wasn’t thinking about morals and fairness and laws. I would have done whatever I could. And I would again.”

  At last the knob turned and Cris filled the slice at the jamb, her face flushed. Then the door pushed open with a creak, and her arms were out and she was pressed tight to him, squeezing his neck, her body warm. He dipped his face into the scent of her.

  She squeezed him tighter. “The next death threat? It really came in against you?”

  He nodded, their cheeks slick against each other.

  “Our situation, it’s reversed now,” she said. “Your life at stake. And while you were talking, it hit me…” She swallowed hard. “I took a favor from your mom, too, with Leo. I didn’t ask any questions. I just said yes. Because you were at risk.” Her breath came hot against his ear, a low whisper. “I realized that I would, too. I’d do anything to keep you safe.”

  Chapter 56

  They made love in the morning, streamers of hay-colored light escaping the lowered blinds and texturing the rumpled sheets. Cris rose and fell through blocks of semi-shadow, her swollen mouth, her breasts, her arched shoulders sunlit and then lost to vagueness. She leaned on him, palms pressing his shoulders, the fringe of her hair sweeping his throat, every sensation new and heightened as they discovered each other all over again. Her hands left red marks at his chest, his on the slope of her waist. And then they slowed, him looking down at her now, and then slowed more and more, eyes locked, mouths parted, until they were barely moving at all.

  They showered together, Cris leaning against his back, arms wrapping him. After they dressed, she said, “I need to see the water.”

  Leo agreed to tail them at a safe distance, and they strolled downslope for the marina, holding hands, just another couple out for another stroll on the first blindingly spectacular day in months. Tomorrow was Thanksgiving.

  Admit what you’ve done. Or you will bleed for it.

  But admit it where? Was he supposed to announce it to the city? A press conference seemed ridiculous. Dooley kept the idea on the table, reminding him that they had until midnight tomorrow to weigh options. “Don’t worry,” she’d said with a smirk. “He hasn’t killed anyone early yet.” Cris had halfheartedly raised the idea of leaving town, hopping on a plane for somewhere, though they both knew that wouldn’t happen. Dooley needed his help, they had Leo at the house, and besides, fleeing the investigation and his group seemed so craven. Plus at some point, he’d have to come home and face what needed to be faced.

  He tried to force himself into the present. After all, this stroll could be his last. He and Cris didn’t speak; they just walked beneath the cloudless sky and felt the sun doing its best against the biting breeze. All was right with the rest of the world. Labradoodles pranced by on designer leashes. Boy-men zipped past on scooters and mountain bikes, messenger bags slung over their shoulders. The Palace of Fine Arts made Cris beam every time it appeared, so unexpected and anachronistic across from the overpriced homes of Baker Street. It was young for a Roman ruin, the last man standing from the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exhibit, San Francisco’s post-earthquake, “We’re still standing” bash. The mirror surface of the fronting lagoon doubled the frieze-intensive octagonal dome, the effect breathtaking beneath the canopy of flawless blue.

  They picked their way up a narrow spit of land past the Golden Gate Yacht Club right to the water’s edge, where in a stroke of quirky genius, a master stonemason had installed a wave-activated acoustic organ sculpture. Dr. Seuss tubes, wound through Lego blocks of granite from a demolished gold-rush cemetery, gave off an intestinal gurgling that was nothing short of hypnotic. Daniel and Cris sat on an icy slab, looked out at the choppy gray, and listened as the world’s largest seashell sounded off.

  Kite surfers were out in force, skipping across the water like evolved life-forms. Beyond rose the craggy outline of the Rock, where the Birdman kept no birds, Machine Gun Kelly did perfect time, and Al Capone languished, his brain a syphilitic stew. To the west, at the base of that lionized suspension bridge, jutted Fort Point, where dripping-wet Kim Novak had lolled weakly in Jimmy Stewart’s rescuing arms, faking it.

  Everyone’s got a con, a pinch of deceit, a green light at the end of the dock. And a dream, however grand or modest. A way they want it to be and an angle to get there.

  Daniel thought of Francisca Olvera’s heart giving out, of a positive pregnancy test resting on a silver platter, of a death threat rendered on the screen of his cell phone. All the terror and loss and vulnerability of the past week rose up, threatening to overwhelm him. He closed his eyes and listened to the pipes and water, a horn section in the round. The whale song vibrated through him, and for a moment he felt without limits, without boundaries, held in the vast belly of the sea itself.

  Cris’s hand loosened
in his, letting go for the first time since they’d stepped out into the city together. She gently grasped his wrist, repositioned his fingers. Tugging up her shirt, she placed his spread palm over her navel.

  Feeling the heat rising through his wife’s body, he realized just how modest his own dreams had become.

  Chapter 57

  Later in the day, Daniel was eating a sandwich over the sink when Cris flew down the stairs from the bedroom, flipping her cell phone closed against her chin. “We have to go. Can you— Leo? Can you come with us?” She was grabbing keys, a sweater, swinging the shot put of her purse over an arm. “I need you both to—”

  Daniel caught her at the shoulders as she rounded the kitchen island. “What happened?”

  She stopped, lips trembling. “The planning commission vote came in. They’re taking the building.”

  * * *

  With clapboard siding and fresh yellow-and-brown paint, the projects in Western Addition look surprisingly upscale, like dormitories or military housing. Three stories, town-house-connected. Residents out on the stoops and curbs, talking and pointing across the street where moving vans and beater trucks had assembled before the much larger apartment complex Cris had spent the past eighteen months fighting to protect. For once, rival gangs were present within eyeshot of each other, though they kept to opposite sides of the street. The Knock Out Posse, who owned these blocks, moved freely, but the few Sureños who’d made their way up from South Van Ness with their blue kerchiefs, do-rags, and Dallas Cowboys jerseys, minded their curb. Maybe they had relatives getting kicked out, or maybe they were just here for the street theater—the trail of tears leading out the laid-back double doors of the lobby. Families with hastily packed cardboard boxes, an elderly black man gesticulating angrily with a cane, arguments in various languages, and a few universal sobs. A scattering of bored cops were out, along with a few men in suits bearing important-looking papers on clipboards. Not a single reporter.