Page 93 of Darcy
“Not anymore,” I promise. “I’ll find other ways now that we’re together.” The tension visibly fades from their shoulders. “It was never really my preferred method. Too close and personal. Some of my sisters go that route, but I find it safer to keep some distance between me and my marks.”
Which is why my cameras and drones are so important. Visual confirmation of my targets prevents accidents. It helps that I always come prepared, and I’ve had years to master my technique.
El Paso was the biggest fuck up I’ve had in recent memory, and even that was arguably outside of my control.
I shake off my own self-criticism and move on to the next portrait.
“Wait, you painted your gaming rig?” It has adorable little frogs all over it in bright green.
Arlo murmurs something under his breath that sounds like “artist’s block,” and I laugh. Yeah, I’m sure that can make a person do all sorts of crazy things.
Fortunately, I don’t have a creative bone in my body, so I’m at no risk of finding out.
“This is an old one,” Slate whistles, drawing my attention away from the frogs and to a smaller canvas in the corner.
“Oh, it’s you guys!” In the flesh rather than their avatars.
“Based on a photo of one of our first gigs after juvie.” Dodger grins. “I remember that. I think I still have it somewhere.”
Arlo’s version is far better than a photograph. He’s captured his band mates’ souls in charcoal and paint. Everything from Prophet’s dimpled, exuberant grin, to Dodger’s sweat-slicked hair, and then Arlo himself, held in a headlock by one of Slate’s tattooed arms.
“There was this one seedy bar that let us play for twenty minutes on a Friday night,” Arlo explains. “We weren’t even technically old enough to be in a bar, but we looked older than we were. The owner, Joe, gave us a month to start bringing in a crowd.”
“Did you?” I ask, curious.
He shakes his head. “Nah. We were trying to play metal in a bar whose four regulars liked country and western. Of course we didn’t.”
“I still think that was down to his skunky beer,” Slate grumbles. “But yeah, there was a reason we ended up signing that contract. Sometimes all the talent and hard work in the world just doesn’t matter. At the end of the day, for most of the stars of this industry, it was all about who they knew, and we didn’t know anybody.”
And the only person they did know happened to be Miguel Rosales.
I move on to the next painting, only to find it’s Emma again. “Why is she crying?”
Try as hard as I might, I can’t picture Arlo’s tough as nails sister weeping and hugging her knees as she is in the painting. Then again, I had my share of emotional meltdowns as a teenager. Looking back, I almost pity Man.
I can’t help but be glad that no one decided to paint my first break up and put it up in a gallery for the world to see. Then again, these are old. Emma barely resembles this girl anymore, and Arlo’s style is abstract enough that you might not put the two versions of her together. His musical career seems also to have remarkably little crossover with his artistic one.
Arlo scratches the back of his neck, clearly uncomfortable. “It was our parents.”
When he doesn’t elaborate, Dodger tilts his head as if to say “want me to take over?”, and Arlo waves him on.
“Once Arlo had money, they tried to extort it out of him. Of course, by that point, the only thing he had to do with them was Emma, so they limited his contact with her until he gave them what they wanted. When Emma found out her brother was paying to see her on the weekends on top of the money he was sneaking her to make sure she had food, she didn’t take it well.”
Ouch. I can see how that would leave a scar. Arlo said his parents were addicts, so it’s a safe bet they were using that money to get high.
“I ended up applying for custody, which I got when she was sixteen,” Arlo adds, though I already knew that part. “Of course, then she had to deal with all the ‘friends’ who only wanted her for her money, and the ones who thought she could somehow introduce them to me and I’d make them into the next pop stars.”
No wonder she’s prickly. Looking through the lens of this new knowledge, so many of our previous interactions make sense. She didn’t back off and relax around me until I’d proved that I had nothing to gain by using her or her brother, unlike practically everyone else she knew.
A wordless understanding passes between Arlo and me until I break our stare off to move onto the next painting.
Only to stop dead.
I know it’s Dodger, but only because I recognise the way he holds himself, and because of the faint impression—more a shadow, really—of the crossed blades over his collarbones. Arlo left his face out of it, and it’s not hard to realise why.
“Yeah, I look hot upside down,” Dodger comments blithely.
As if a larger-than-lifesize painting of him, side on, hanging from a pole, nude, isn’t hanging right in front of us.
