Page 14 of Three
My fingers go to the black beaded bracelet around my wrist. Caressing each little stone delicately, I let out a sigh.
“I received an anonymous letter three days ago. The writing was messy, I couldn’t understand much. But they know the truth and…and have new information I should be interested in.” I swallow the ball that has formed inside my throat. “Why now, Loretta? Why me?”
I pause, letting silence fall on the graves surrounding me once again.
“You know why I keep coming here. I just can’t let go. Eight fucking years. It doesn’t matter what I do, who I help, who I make suffer. Doesn’t change anything.”
I place my elbows on top of my knees and let my head drop in the cradle of my hands. It will never go away, the stain on my soul is a permanent one. A reminder of how blind I’ve been. I deserved everything that happened to me.
She didn’t.
I look up at her grave again. I can still see her so clearly, her blond ponytail, floral jean jacket and red shorts. Her trembling lower lip and big brown eyes filled with repulsionand so much fear.
“Fuck!” I cuss, wiping a solitary tear from my cheek. I jump up, and that’s when the back of the bench where I was sitting explodes, sending splinters and shards of wood over the grass. I leap to the ground, hearing two more bullets hitting wood. Keeping myself low, I crawl behind a group of old tombstones as the shots keep following me. One scrapes my calf, making it sting like a bitch.
“You’re dead, motherfucker,” I growl while sliding my gun out of the holster and slowly leaning left from behind one of the headstones shielding me. I quickly shift back when a bullet embeds in the gray slate a couple of inches from my head. It came from the west, near the cemetery wall, so that’s where I aim my gun, keeping myself shielded and shooting blindly.
When I’m out of bullets, I retract my hand, and after changing the magazine, I wait. And listen. The silence is broken by a car door slamming and the screeching of tires.
I jump up, and grabbing the flashlight from the ground, I run toward the wall. I climb up and over it, aiming my gun left as soon as my feet touch the ground. I exhale and shoot two bullets at the car leaving the parking lot. One hits the trunk. I’m able to memorize half of the plate before it disappears into the night.
I let my arms fall down as I reach the large tire tracks left on the ground. It was dark, but the car looked suspiciously like the Ford Explorer I saw when I almost hit those planks of wood.
“What the fuck is going on?” I ask out loud.
My phone starts vibrating in my pocket, and when I grab it, I realize the screen is cracked. What a motherfucking day!
“I’m on my way,” I say.
My cousin, Opal, sighs on the other side of the line. “Did you change your mind?”
“No,” I awkwardly tell her. “Be there soon.” I hang up.
Fifteen minutes later, I halt my Harley next to her white Corolla in a deserted Costco parking lot. I dismount my bike and open the passenger door to her car before getting in.
“Do you have it?” I ask her.
“Hey, Opal, how are you? We haven’t seen each other in a while. You look fabulous!” she retorts condescendingly, crossing her arms and giving me her stern cop stare. Because she is a cop. And my half-cousin. My uncle had fun with Opal’s mom out of wedlock, and she was the result. He already had two older sons with his wife, but he didn’t reject Opal. She came visiting from time to time, and since I lived with my mom a block away from my uncle’s house, I spent a lot of time with her—in opposition to my cousins, who were never really interested in her. I grit my teeth thinking about my old life.
“Really? The silent treatment? Get out of my car, butthead!” Her sassiness always makes me smile. She was like a sister to me; we were…close. But that was before everything turned to shit.
“Opal, you look…” I glance at her. Her mother’s Hispanic heritage is in her short, soft curly brown hair and big brown eyes, while my uncle’s traits are in her large, pouting red lips and dark caramel skin. She’s lost weight. Don’t like that.
“What are you wearing?” I ask her, looking puzzlingly at the red dress she is wearing. She is a tomboy. Always has been. She even went to her school prom in pants and a white shirt.
“It’s called a sheath dress. Why? Is there something wrong with it?” She nervously strokes invisible wrinkles on the wool fabric.
“No,” I hurriedly say, don’t want her to hurt me. She has a mean pinch…or she used to. “But why are you wearing it?” Not to meet me, that’s for sure.
“I have a date,” she mumbles before throwing a file on my lap.
“A date? At eleven p.m.?” She goes on dates?
“With a colleague.” She clears her throat and opens the file on my legs with a flick of her fingers, shooting down any other questions I might have had about her date. “The man you asked me to look into is Ramiel Masters, twenty-five years old, two hundred pounds, six-foot-two. Wowza! For a white dude, he’s got a lick-a-licious bod.”Fuck, yeah he does.“He’s a game developer, a very successful one. He was raised in a foster home and kept contact with some of the other kids he grew up with. A couple of tickets for speeding, paid both the very same day. He’s clean as a whistle.”
Nobody is. Everybody has secrets. Including Ramiel Masters. The guy staring at me from the picture, though, doesn’t look like the one in the alley. His red hair is short, no beard in sight, and a serious expression veils his gold-brown eyes even though he’s smiling, showing dimples. It almost feels wrong, like this is not the same guy. There’s no trace of that impishness he openly showed me the other night or the deep interest toward me.
But it’s him. Ramiel. Those three sexy dimples on his freckled cheeks are building a strange, warm anticipation in the pit of my stomach.
