KOP Killer by Warren Hammond

Author:Warren Hammond [Hammond, Warren]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Macmillan
Published: 2012-06-05T06:00:00+00:00

seventeen

MORNING. The traffic—both foot and wheel—told me so. I’d been sitting on these steps for hours, waiting for her to come out. Didn’t want to wake her up. She was plenty pissed at me as it was.

Rain came down in a constant patter. Water streamed out from a pipe under my feet and ran down a cement gutter before disappearing into an underground pipe. The courtyard was secluded, trees and vines trimmed and shaped, the jungle tamed into a garden. Damp moss filled the air with mustiness.

The door opened behind me. She came halfway down the steps and turned to face me. “What are you doing here?” A porch light lit her face, but her voice was anything but bright.

“We need to talk.”

She looked down at me, at my rumpled clothes, my up-all-night eyes. “No, we don’t. I can’t talk to you when you’re like this.”

“Like what?”

“Don’t play stupid. You know exactly what I’m talking about. And take off those damn sunglasses.”

I semi-complied by pushing the glasses up to the top of my head. My scalp hurt like hell.

“What were you thinking?” Her voice was amped with impatience.

“I fucked up.”

“You think?”

“I didn’t know Mota would fight me. I thought he’d crumble.”

“You are unbelievable.” She shook her head. “You really don’t get it, do you?”

“Get what?”

She kept her voice low. “You still think this is a problem of execution. You think you picked the wrong protection racket to take over. Christ. It ever occur to you that taking dirty money is illegal?”

“What do you want me to say? I’m sorry?”

“An apology isn’t going to do it. Good-bye.” She rushed down the stairs, took the first step into the rain.

I couldn’t let her go. “I did it for you,” I called before she got far.

She spun on me, her face flushed, brows stabbing downward.

I stayed seated but forged ahead, undaunted. “I was trying to build a power base. You can’t be chief without—”

“Stop!” She jumped on my words and stomped them into the ground. “Don’t you dare put this on me. You fucked up. You.”

“I was trying to—”

“Shut up! Just shut the hell up.”

I shut up. My insides hung heavy. I couldn’t stand to see her angry, couldn’t stand that I’d brought that ugliness to her face. The creases marring her forehead, the squint-wrinkles spoiling her eyes, the thorny little lines surrounding crimped lips, they were all my work, all of them strokes from my black paintbrush.

She was so angry I saw myself in her face, my ugly side reflecting back at me. I wanted to crawl into a hole.

Fix it, Juno. You have to fix it. I told myself I could, that it wasn’t too late. She hadn’t left. She hadn’t given up on me. Not yet. “One question.”

She stayed silent, glaring.

“What did you see in me?”

Her brows quirked as if to ask, What the hell are you talking about?

“When we first met, when we first partnered up, what did you see in me?”

She stepped out of the rain, up onto the bottom stair, droplets in her hair, water dotting her face.

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