Page 17 of Devil in Disguise
Sure, they’d been that support team, and that had been good. They went grocery shopping for the sad little group gathered in the hotel, so Harlan wouldn’t have to face a restaurant full of autograph-seekers. They went clothes shopping, too, to buy Harlan and Jennifer outfits for the funeral. Jennifer had somehow not anticipated the need for those, proving, Owen would bet, how shaken up she’d been. He doubted Jennifer failed to anticipate much.
Dyma proved herself to be surprisingly practical on all of it. “Almost like I was raised by a single mom or something, huh?” she said when he commented, as she flipped through a rack of maternity dresses. “Everybody worked. My mom, but you’ve probably already figured that out. People say things about how I work hard, and I think, ‘Me? I’m lazy. I have actual unproductive hours. I play video games. You should see my mom.’ My grandma, too, until she got too sick. I mean all thewaytoo sick. My great-grandpa, even, until he was almost eighty. Walmart cashier, at the end. He always said it wasn’t too bad, except that he had to be nice to fools.” When Owen laughed, she added, “Kinda sucked to know that I was the main reason everybody had to work that hard at jobs they didn’t enjoy much, but there you go. Not my fault, right? I couldn’t help showing up. I can’t exactly let them down now, though.” She held up a navy-blue dress that looked a little like a sack, made a face, and said, “Exactly how she used to dress. TheMword. Matronly. I hate to buy it for her, and Harlan’s going to hate it, too, but it’s the closest thing to appropriate for a funeral. You can’t exactly wear a sundress.”
And then there was the press, who got wind of the guilty plea halfway through the weekend. Too juicy a story to pass up, which meant there was always a photographer or two lurking around. It was Owen’s idea to talk to the hotel manager about that, but Dyma helped him do it.
“Of course we’ll ask them to leave, sir,” the manager said, “if we see them taking pictures. Before that, though? We can hardly approach every person in the lobby and question them, and we can’t do anything at all if they’re on the sidewalk.”
Dyma said, “There’s got to be another way into this place. In the movies, there’s always another way. Usually through the kitchen. We could park the cars in the employee area.” And when the manager demurred, she said fiercely, “Or Owen can talk to them about how the hotel won’t give Harlan any privacy, because you just want your hotel in the papers, how you’re letting people harass him when he’s just trying to bury his murderedmom.I bet that would be great for business. Harlan’s a big deal here. Peoplelovehim. He donates all kinds of money. You see Owen, too? See how convincing he looks? They’ll believe whatever he says. He’s acenter.He’s arancher.He’s, like, thedefinitionof convincing in North Dakota. He has a cowboy hat!”
“We can certainly make the service entrance available,” the manager said, and Dyma said, “I thought you could.”
So that worked, although Owen told Dyma, when they were in the truck, “Funny how I’m so convincing, but you’re the one doing all the talking.”
“I’m convincing talking,” she said. “The power of my passion. But you’re more convincing standing there.” Which made him laugh, and was also true. When the family left for the funeral, he screened them from the press, and when they came back, he was waiting outside to do it again. That was the advantage of being the size of a bus.
That was about it. They ran errands. They bought food. And on the evening before the funeral, they delivered bags of takeout to the family in Harlan and Jennifer’s suite, then ate their own in Owen’s room, sitting together with their backs against the headboard and watching a movie.
“I should’ve taken you out,” he told Dyma. “Not going to get another chance. I need to leave tomorrow afternoon, pretty much as soon as the funeral’s over. But …”
“Of course you shouldn’t have,” she said. With conviction, the way she said most things. “We have to be here, in case. We’re the backups, and that’s what backups do, right? They sit on the bench. Well, this is our bench. Here, try this tofu. Isn’t it great?”
She offered him a bite on her chopsticks, and he dutifully ate it and said, “Not too bad. Be better if it were chewier, though. More like meat.”
She sighed. “You’re kind of hopeless, you know?”
“Yep,” he said. “I know.”
They held hands, later, watching the rest of that movie, a futuristic action thing. At one point, during an extended fight scene, she asked, “So do you like watching violent movies, because that’s what you’re used to, or do you want to get away from it? Is it like a doctor watching a medical show?”
He pondered that. It was an interesting question, like so many of Dyma’s. “I don’t mind it,” he finally said. “It’s so unrealistic, it’s more like fantasy.”
“How?” she asked.
“In real life? Sure, bad guys miss more when they shoot, because they don’t practice their shooting enough, got no discipline, but they don’t missthatmuch. You don’t get away by zigzagging. Evade a tackler, sure. Evade a hail of bullets from a long gun? Nope. And if a normal person takes a hard punch to the face—onepunch—they’re down. Anything happens to you like is happening in this movie, you’re dead. In the movies, they hardly even have a bruise afterwards, and they’re walking fine, not like they just ruptured their spleen. So I guess itislike a doctor watching a medical show. You can either sit there and scream, ‘That’s not the way this works!’ or just suspend disbelief.”
“So what happens when somebody likeyouhits somebody?” she asked.
“Don’t know,” he said. “I’ve never done it.”
“Seriously?” She sat up straighter, the movie forgotten.
“Well, Dane, I have, when we were kids. But since then? Nope. My dad told me, something like first grade, when I had some kind of scuffle, ‘A fight’s not always wrong. Sometimes, fighting’s the only option. But it’s gotta be a fair fight. Before you punch a man, make sure that’s your only option.’ When you’re my size, it’s almost never your only option.”
“Wow,” she said. “I’ve hit somanypeople.”
He laughed, feeling better than he had since Jennifer had shown up at the camp and all this had started. “Yeah? Was it your only option?”
“Well, itfeltlike it,” she said, and he laughed again. “You know,” she went on, “if somebody was getting beaten up. Or this one time, when I beat up a guy for myself. He was trying to rape me at the time, though, so …”
He didn’t feel like laughing anymore. “What?”
“If you’re little and blonde,” she said, “it’s basically the opposite of being you. You have to learn how to punch people in the kidneys.”
“Want to give me his name?” he asked. The whole idea made his blood run hot, and then cold, but there it was. Shewaslittle and blonde. Fierce? Yeah. Tough? Yeah. But still. Little and blonde.
He wanted that guy’s name.
“Nope,” she said, seeming totally unaware of what she’d started. “I took care of him. Besides, it was more than a year ago. Shh. This is the good part. Maybe I’ll get some tips. If I could actually maim somebody this way, I mean. Good to know.”
