Page 31 of Devious Lies (Cruel Crown)
Fika patted his pockets as if searching for the cancer sticks that had fucked up his lungs in the first place. When he didn’t find them, he snapped at the litany of rubber bands that formed a colony up and down the length of his forearms.
“I didn’t invite you inside my home at four in the morning for your opinion of me. I hired you for a job.” Tracing my fingers along the stack of hundreds in front of me, I watched Fika’s eyes follow their path across Benjamin Franklin’s pasty, sunken-eyed face. “I tell you what to do. You get paid. That’s how this works.”
Thumbing the currency strap, I lifted the bills and fanned them, my fingers brushing against each hundred (and there were many). I should have shown mercy, but all I could feel at the mention of a Winthrop was rage.
The medical examiner had ruled my dad’s death a heart attack, but he’d left out the three jobs he’d taken that led to it. If he and Ma hadn’t lost their home, jobs, and savings, Dad would be alive and I wouldn’t catch Ma staring at an empty dinner setting with misty eyes every time I visited.
As far as I was concerned, the Winthrops killed Hank Prescott.
Case closed.
Vengeance pending.
Fika’s jaw ticked when I pulled out my desk’s drawer, dropped the bills inside, and slammed it shut with an audible thud.
I believed in power over mercy. People possessed needs, and when you determined someone’s needs, you ruled him.
Fika’s need was money. His second cancer diagnosis arrived eighteen months ago. It sucked away the fat on his cheeks until he resembled something more like a ghoul than a man. Since his remission, he’d gained back some of his weight, along with medical debt that could fund a third-world coup d’état.
To be fair, I’d never had to pull the money card in the past. I’d done some less-than-legal things to become the C.E.O. and founder of a company Forbes valued at over a billion dollars last year, and Fika had done a stellar job of covering my tracks for me.
I’d stayed out of jail this long, a phenomenon in itself.
I asked him to do something. He did it. That was how transactions worked.
Until now.
“Did you swallow a bad batch of chemo?” I lifted a second stack of hundreds and tore at the edges of one bill because I could—and it left Fika on edge, a near miracle with the hippy bullshit he’d turned to after he’d beaten cancer the first time. “Have you forgotten the English dictionary? Transactions require an exchange, and for you to get this”—I rattled the stack of bills—“you have to give me what I asked for.”
“Look, man…” He eyed the money before shaking his head. “I get it. You’ve got a thing against the Winthrops, for good reason, but nothin’ good will come out of finding Gideon Winthrop. Trust me.”
I trusted no one, another reason Gideon needed to go. I didn’t mean die. Death was an easy route; long, drawn-out suffering pleased me more.
Movies like Taken and John Wick skewed the general public’s conceptions of revenge. It didn’t happen in a day. Like all things worth doing, revenge—true revenge, the type meant to annihilate its target—took time.
The Space Race, for instance, began in 1955. The Apollo 11 didn’t reach the moon until 1969. It took over fourteen years to land on the moon. Fourteen years. More than the average lifespan of a dog.
My revenge, on the other hand, had been in the making for a mere four years.
“I’m not looking for an ethics lecture, Fika.” His hands shook as I spoke, but I spared him no mercy. “You found Gideon.”
“I did.” He worried his bottom lip and swiped at the Jonas Brothers wig again until it sat slightly crooked on his head. “Sometimes people do bad things for good reasons.”
The argument of someone who’d taken bribes during his tenure as sheriff to pay for his cancer treatments.
How much evidence had he stolen? How many wealthy Eastridgers had he given a free pass? If Gideon had approached him, would he have brushed those crimes under a rug, too?
Unbuttoning my cuff plackets, I rolled up my sleeves on both sides until the tattoo on my left forearm peeked out.
penance
My bold, unapologetic truth.
Fika had misconstrued its meaning in the past, and I allowed him to do so again as his eyes dipped to the word then back to my face.
“I won’t bullshit you,” he began, his hands clasped together in the shape of a church steeple.
“Then don’t.”
