CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

Shannon crossed her arms and watched her brother mow down targets with clockwork precision. Huge earphones covered Ryan’s head, muffling out sound as he fired with one hand. A sure shot. She knew how to fire, too, though she rarely did. She owned a sub-compact Glock 42 that Ryan had bought her when she moved back to Vegas.

“It’s your housewarming present,” he’d remarked when he took her to the gun store.

“You afraid the Royal Sinners are coming for me?” she asked, joking but not joking.

He’d squeezed her shoulders reassuringly. “They’re not coming for you. But you never know who is.” He’d filled out the paperwork, plunked down his credit card, then handed her the weapon and said, “Welcome home.”

Then he’d taught her how to handle a gun.

Sometimes she joined him at Reiss, sharing his intensity of focus, his cold concentration. Other times, she wished she’d never learned to shoot, never imagined that she might need to. Even if you were skilled in how to shoot, a gun couldn’t always save you. In fact, it probably wouldn’t save you. If her father had carried a gun, he’d still be dead. He’d been shot in the back, and never saw it coming.

Guns were useless when someone put a price tag on your head.

Ryan took aim at another black and white cardboard cutout. Shannon counted off in her head with each bullet.

One target. Two targets. Three targets. Now, four. Now, five. Absently, she crossed her fingers, hoping for a perfect six. Random, but that was the number she picked.

He landed the last one. Straight down the middle. He lowered his arm, his revolver solidly in his right palm. After he tugged off the earphones and goggles, he turned around, and flashed her a bright smile. He blew on the end of the gun, and winked.

Show off, she mouthed, watching him from just outside.

He waved her into his lane, gesturing for her to join him. “You hit half of what I did, I’ll buy you lunch,” he said.

She rolled her eyes, but accepted the challenge. He positioned the earphones over her head, placed the goggles on her eyes, and set the Smith & Wesson in her palm. She planted her feet wide, peered down the lane, and raised both hands, keeping the weapon steady, solid against her flesh. She peered at the target at the end of the range, a black and white sketch of a body with a bulls-eye on his chest.

She tried not to think of Stefano ending her father’s life. But that trick never worked. She always pictured that man, that street thug, that fucking scum who took a job from her mother.

That killer.

If she didn’t see Stefano at the end of the barrel she’d imagine her mom. She couldn’t go there. She couldn’t live in that land of hate for the woman who’d raised her, taken care of her, kissed her goodnight. If she pictured her mom, she’d be just the same as her.

Her hate was reserved for the triggerman. For the man who had shed her father’s blood. Her jaw tightened, and she watched the reel. Each unlived moment played before her eyes. Her father would never know where she’d gone to college, what she did for a living, if she was happy, if she was in love. He’d never walk her down the aisle, and he’d never tuck his grandchildren into bed or take them to the park.

He’d never enjoy a day of fishing as a retired man—his dream.

He’d never celebrate his fiftieth birthday. He was eternally thirty-six, and always would be.

He’d never grow old.

They took that all away from him.

From her.

From her grandparents.

From her brothers.

Her teeth were clenched, her lips were a tightrope, and her hands belonged to a surgeon. Steady, practiced, perfect.

She fired three shots to the heart.

Adrenaline surged through her, lighting up her bloodstream with wild energy. She could lift a car, fight a man twice her size, or run down any enemy. Her chest rose and fell; her fingertips tingled. Then those endorphins were chased with a dose of red-hot anger, with the madness that comes from the black hole of loss.

She pressed her fingertip to the trigger, wanting, wishing, eager. Itching to fire again.

Before the anger consumed her, she lowered the gun. She handed it to Ryan. “I’m not hungry.”

Minutes later, they sat in his car in the parking lot. The engine was off. The radio was on. The National, Ryan’s favorite band, crooned about missing the one you love. Such a moody song. Fitting, too.

“What’s the story?” she asked, cutting to the chase. “Is Stefano facing more charges?”

Ryan shot her a quizzical look. “No. Or not that I know of.”

She rolled her hands, as if to jog his memory. “You told me your friend in the DA’s office said he visited Stefano in prison about other crimes or something.”

“Right, but even so, that won’t change his sentence.”

“I know that,” she said, but then she realized—Ryan hadn’t called her to discuss the latest news about the shooter. “So this,” she said gesturing from him to her, “isn’t about Stefano?”

“No,” he said, forming an O with his mouth. “Not at all. It’s about someone else. I talked to Mom.”

* * *

His sister’s jaw dropped. Ryan hadn’t intended to shock her, but the evidence was on her face.

“She called you?” she whispered, as if she couldn’t quite wrap her mind around the concept of the phone, and how people used it to stay in touch.

He nodded and scanned the parking lot through the window to make sure they were alone. No one was wandering around. He turned up the music a little more, just in case. Ryan had always believed it was best to have these kinds of conversations in person, with plenty of background noise. He’d learned to keep certain aspects of his life completely untraceable. “She called me collect the other night. She told me her lawyer came to see her.”

Her eyes widened. “The same one who represented her at trial?”

He shook his head. “Nope. That guy is long gone. He went into private practice. But, the guy who came to see her is also a public defender. She said she contacted him and he went to Hawthorne.”

She cleared her throat and swallowed, then spoke in a clipped, controlled voice. “What does she have to talk to a lawyer about? Is she trying again to get them to re-open the case? Is she rehashing the details over and over like the last time we saw her? The evidence against her? The phone records showing she repeatedly called Jerry Stefano for two months before the murder?” Shannon said, smacking the side of one hand against the other for emphasis. “The lies she told about those calls were ludicrous. The prosecution saw right through them. She couldn’t even come up with a decent reason for all the calls.”

He knew why his mom had lied about her calls with Stefano. The truth would have made her look guiltier. She’d gambled and lost. The lies she’d told to the prosecution didn’t do the trick, but honesty would have tethered her more closely to Stefano and his Royal Sinners.

Rock and a hard place.

He knew some of those truths. She’d shared them with him, begged for his help, and he’d kept them locked up in his head. He’d never uttered a word of them. He’d learned that the best way to protect a secret was to never tell it. Seal your mouth, zip it shut, and don’t breathe a word. That was the one guaranteed method, and Ryan Sloan kept secrets like a champion.

But he hadn’t asked his sister to meet him so they could revisit the chain of evidence that had landed their mother behind bars. He’d called Shannon because she was the only one of his siblings who hadn’t closed the door on their mom. He needed strength in numbers even if that number was two.

“Mom and I didn’t talk about the phone calls with Stefano,” Ryan said.

“So why did she see a lawyer?”

“She said she’ll tell us in person when we come see her.”

Shannon held out her hands in frustration. “See? She can’t even tell you why she’s talking to a lawyer. She’s manipulating us into seeing her.”

“She’s our goddamn mother!”

“I know,” Shannon hissed, and pointed two fingers back at her eyes. “I damn well know. I look in the mirror every day and see her eyes. I have her eyes. I have her goddamn cheekbones and chin, too.”

“And you have nice eyes, so just focus on that. And besides, maybe it’s the kind of thing she needs to tell us in person. Maybe it’s important,” he said softly, but in a firm voice that brooked no argument. “We need to find out what’s up. End of the month. Her hours were cut, but she gets her final two hours the last day of June. We need to plan for it. Take the day, because it’s an all-day thing to get to Hawthorne in the middle of god-knows-nowhere. No excuses.”

She shoved her hand through her hair, yanking it back into a ponytail. “Why are you so determined to believe she might be innocent?”

His lips parted, but he took his time. His mother wasn’t an innocent woman, not by any stretch of the law. She might not even be a good person. But he believed that there was a difference between the things she’d done, and the things the district attorney had said she’d done.

“Because we need to be certain.”

She closed her eyes, as if the conversation pained her. Hell, it pained him. When she opened them, the look in them was one of defeat. Even so, she nodded. “I’ll go with you.”

“Good. I need you there,” he said, and flashed a small smile.

“Now there’s something I need to tell you, and if you so much as pull a big brother act, you will go alone. Is that clear?”

“Crystal.”

Then, she told him she was seeing her ex again, and even though he wanted to slug the guy for having hurt her, he understood what it was like to be unable to let go of something.

* * *

She cranked up the volume on “You’re the One That I Want” on the radio in her cherry red BMW as she drove home. She needed the upbeat, dancey number to reset her mind. Belting out the celebratory tune as she turned onto her street, she let the lyrics fill the hollow and angry space between the conversation with Ryan and the rest of her day.

The music was her buffer, and as she sang, she choreographed the number in her head, the dance and the movement ushering the hard kernel out of her heart. Dance had always been a way through tough times for her. Today she would lean on it even more. She had a plan for the rest of the afternoon. She’d review the video from the Edge rehearsal, take notes and tweak here and there, then that evening she’d work with her dancers.

Tomorrow, she was off to San Francisco.

Tuesday Brent would join her briefly.

Wednesday afternoon she had to fly to L.A. with Colin to meet with the reality show producers.

The busy week would keep her focus off her mom.

As she flipped her right blinker to descend into the condo’s parking lot, she spotted a car she’d never seen before parked outside the gate. A Buick. She was used to Audis, BMWs, SUVs, hybrids, Mini Coopers, and plenty of electric cars at her building. This vehicle was the answer in a which one of these things doesn’t belong game. Buicks weren’t common cars. They were old. They were hand-me-downs. Though she hadn’t memorized the rides of all her condo mates, she was sure she’d have remembered this earthy brown vehicle that hailed from days gone by.

She didn’t remember it.

A young guy in jeans, boots and a worn black T-shirt leaned against the trunk of the car, his elbows resting on the metal, smoking a cigarette.

He was doing nothing wrong. Technically.

But cars didn’t park by the gate. Young guys didn’t smoke and wait by her building. He didn’t look familiar at all. But Stefano probably hadn’t looked familiar to her dad either. Her spine crawled.

Better safe than sorry.

She heeded the warning bell. The automatic gate rose for her as it picked up on the transponder in her car that gave her access. Rather than slide into her regular parking spot in the garage—a garage that someone could easily enter by foot—she made a loop around the cars on the first level and exited on the other side.

The guy was still there. She couldn’t tell if he was watching her, or just waiting.

But that was precisely why she left.

By the time she slowed to a stop at a red light, her heart was hammering in her chest, and her hands were clammy.

Soon, she found herself at her studio, and she locked the door behind her, then bolted it. She spent the next few hours working before she tried again to go home.

When she reached the gate to her building, the Buick and the guy were gone.