The Comfort of Black (31 page)

The pain seared white-hot through her fingers, shooting up her arm, filling her chest with heat.

“Almost didn't recognize you with the black hair, Hannie. Can't say it suits you, if you don't mind me sayin'.” He looked down at the hand under his boot. “Whatcha got there?”

Billy kicked her arm away, the hard rubber toe of his boot driving into her forearm. In a flash, he bent down and picked up the key, put it in his pocket, then stepped back from her.

In that moment Hannah remembered the gun. Since the moment the bullet had struck Black, Hannah's own gun—the one still concealed beneath the radiator—had disappeared from her mind. The only thing she had thought about was getting away, but the gun was still there. She was sure Billy hadn't seen it, but Hannah didn't know if she could even fire it. Her one free hand burned in pain. She slowly tried to bend her fingers but the agony was so intense her fingers might as well have been bending backwards. Broken, for sure. One, maybe two of them. As she watched her free hand swell, she knew she couldn't grab and hold the gun, much less
pull the trigger. She could try, but she would fail. And Billy would then kill her.

“Well,” he said, looking at her on the floor. “I figured about as much.” He turned, aimed the rifle at Black, but didn't pull the trigger. There was no need to, Hannah could tell. If Black wasn't dead, he was unconscious. She wondered if she would live long enough to mourn him.

For everything Black had been, for all the comfort and assurances he'd given, for all his knowledge and his strength, he was human, and his life had just been nullified by a small piece of lead traveling at a high velocity. Black had lived his life minimizing mistakes, calculating and recalculating, planning every move. But he had underestimated Billy, and he paid with his life. Now Black no longer protected Hannah, but perhaps he never really did anyway. Hannah could only truly protect herself, and in this moment, her ability to do even that was gone.

“I figured you and him was workin' together.” Billy walked up to her and leveled the barrel of the rifle at her head. “You did have the key to the cuffs, so I ain't buying that he was going to turn you over. What else you got?” Her father set the rifle on the floor and put both hands on her ankles. The touch of his hands flooded her with memories of Thanksgiving night. Of his open palm against her face. Then, his closed fist.

His hands squeezed her ankles and slowly made their way up to her knees, and then snaked up her thighs.

She spit at him with what she could gather in her paper-dry mouth. Most of it landed on his forehead. Billy didn't say a word. His expression didn't change. He didn't even wipe it off.

His hands reached her hips, and his right hand pushed between her legs, which she tried to keep squeezed together. She felt the warmth of his fingers through her jeans.

“Fuck you,” she whispered. Then she lifted her free arm and swung it at him, but the attempt was impotent and painful. Her
useless fingers slapped his shoulder, and a fresh burst of blinding pain rocked her.

Billy said, “Now you just calm down. If I wanted to fuck ya, I'd have done it a million times when you were a kid. But you're not my type, Hannie.”

His hands reached up her waist, under her sweatshirt, but rather than groping he patted her, checking for weapons. Seconds later he was done, and Billy pulled his hands back and rested them on his knees as he crouched in front of her.

Hannah glanced at the bottom of the radiator, something she must have done unconsciously because it was the exact thing Billy needed from her.

“That's where it is, huh?” He leaned over and reached his arm across and felt under the radiator. Hannah badly wanted to do something. To hit him. Bite him. Anything. But her hand felt as useless as a piece of steak at the end of a fork, just dead meat. Bringing her hand against him would only hurt her and anger him more.

Billy pointed the gun at her face. “Planning on an ambush, were you?”

Hannah noticed the smell of him for the first time, and that same shit cologne—she couldn't remember the name but it came in a red-and-white-striped box, making her always think of a barber shop—mixed with sweat and cigarette breath. The smell suddenly flooded her nostrils, bringing her twenty years and a thousand miles away.

Your momma's just learning a little lesson, that's all, Hannie. Nothin' to be afraid of. See, if she'd done what she was supposed to, everything would be fine. Fact is, she don't listen so well sometimes, so she's gotta be reminded. Like a dog, see? Some hounds learn easy, some learn hard. Your momma, she's a hard-learnin' hound. Can't say whether it's stubborn or stupid, but in the end I don't suppose it matters
.

“You killed her,” Hannah said. “She should have left a long time before you did.”

He smiled and waved the gun under her nose, as if it was a
bouquet of freshly cut flowers. “Oh no no no, darlin'. You are so wrong about that. See, she needed me. Once I was gone, she was gone. You see? I was her
direction
. Once I went to prison, she lost her way. So actually,
you
killed her. You fucked it all up, Hannie. Thought you were being a hero, but you destroyed our way of life. Broke up the
family unit
.”

On the last words Billy reached out with his free hand and squeezed her cheek, pinching it hard between thumb and index finger, like an overly zealous aunt coming to visit. It stung, but there was something amounting to affection in the gesture. Hannah would rather he had outright struck her.

“Now,” he said, suddenly bounding to his feet. “You're going to tell me where that husband of yours is, aren't you? Because he has
my
money.”

Hannah then remembered the camera. All this was being recorded. Hell, she didn't even need Billy to say anything incriminating. Black's murder was there in vivid detail.

She turned her head toward Black one more time, promising herself she wouldn't look at him again, because the scene was too awful. Except the one outstretched arm, his body was crumpled, not peacefully as if in sleep, but constricted into a tight ball, as if every muscle shrunk in the moment of death, pulling him into himself. Blood painted the floor, but it had finally stopped growing into a wider circle. There simply hadn't been any more left to come out of him.

Don't cry. Don't you fucking cry. Not even for Black. He'll think you're scared, and even if you are, you don't cry. Not for fear, nor for sadness. Not for anything
.

“We killed Dallin,” Hannah said. “We took him to a motel room, taped him to a chair, and he told us everything. Including the account number to your eight million dollars.” Hannah was going to die. She knew that now as clear as she had ever known anything. The past thirty days were full of nothing but lies, but this was one truth that slapped her full force across the jaw. She had maybe thirty minutes. An hour at best. Hell, maybe less than a minute. But she would die this morning, in this cabin. But that didn't mean she had to be silent.

“He pleaded for his life,” she said. “He told us everything. About
Justine
.” Her sister's name rolled off her tongue like she was naming a newly discovered virus.
Justine
. “And Connor. All about your plan to make me so scared I had to run. But I'm
not
scared.”

“Oh, you're scared all right.” Billy no longer smiled.

Hannah ignored him. “Black took the account number and transferred the money to his own account, and you just killed the only person in the world who had that information. So I guess you're kinda fucked now, aren't you, Billy?”

Billy kept his gaze fixed on her but his eyes—wolf's eyes, they'd once been called—narrowed just enough for her to know he believed her.

“Bullshit,” he said. “Either you know that account number or your husband's alive. Maybe both. Either way, you know something I need to know, and you're in a tight spot right now. I figure I can find a way to make you talk.”

Hannah felt something bordering on calm. She became detached, as if seeing this moment for what it was. Her last one.

She took a deep breath and let the air slip slowly from her lungs before speaking again. “Once he told us everything, I made Black leave the room. Told him I needed a few more minutes with my husband, just to tell him a few things. Private, husband-and-wife-only kind of things. Then the plan was to let him go. Just take the money and disappear for good. Eight million, that was enough, we figured. I convinced Black I could do that. Just disappear, let you all get everything you wanted except that money. There was more money, I knew. But I convinced Black I was okay with letting you all win. I was okay starting over. I could let it all go.” She looked to the side, feeling the need to break eye contact with her father, even if for a moment. “And when Black left the room, I told Dallin I was pregnant.”

“Well, isn't that good news?” Billy said.

“It's true.” Hannah shifted her gaze back to her father. “You would have been a grandfather.” She deliberately said
would have
,
wondering what kind of reaction that would create. What was she hoping for? For him to say,
oh, darlin', I'm not going to kill you
?

“Well, hell, there are too many fucking brats in this world anyhow.”

It had been many years since Hannah had hoped she wasn't pregnant, but this was one of them. She wanted to be wrong. Wanted to think it was the stress on her body making her late. And this was a perfectly reasonable explanation, probably the most logical, except for the fact she simply knew and it crushed her, because her baby would die with her.

Hannah resisted being baited by him. She wanted Billy to react to her words, not the other way around.

“Dallin didn't have the same opinion,” she said. “He was happy, actually, until I told him the baby wasn't his.”

Billy barked a short laugh. “Well, there's a whorey twist for you. Such a slut that you're running for your life but you still can't keep those skinny legs closed.” He shook his head and smiled, but it wasn't a malevolent or even dismissive smile. There was a look of discomfort, like an athlete grinning through pain. “You fucked the man who arranged every part of your demise.” Billy nodded to Black's body.

Again, Hannah ignored the hate in his words. It wasn't very hard to do—she had built up armor for such things many years ago.

“Dallin was very upset when I told him,” Hannah said. “He actually cried, and for a moment, the briefest of moments, I felt sorry for him. Sorry that he was too weak to have faced responsibility. Sorry that you were able to force him into doing what he did.”

“He coulda done many things to change the course of all this,” her father said. “But he didn't. He
wanted
you gone.”

“And that's why my moment of pity for him didn't last. I knew he was little more than a pawn in your and Justine's plan, but you can't win a chess game without any pawns, can you?”

“He served a purpose.”

She kept her gaze locked on him. “You should have seen the
look on his face when I put the duct tape over his mouth. All…confused. Like a dog being beaten for no reason at all.”

“Oh, yeah? Why, you torture him and didn't want him screaming?” Another smile, this one barely masking insecurity. Uncertainty. Billy shifted his footing, and his forearm veins pulsed as he gripped the gun more tightly.

“No, I didn't torture him,” she said. “No point in that. There was nothing I needed from him. I knew the story behind what happened to me—he told me everything. Black had the account information from him. There was nothing we needed from Dallin. I put the tape on his mouth so he couldn't breathe through it. Then I took a much longer piece and wrapped it twice around his head and face. Covering his nose.”

“Bullshit,” Billy said.

Hannah didn't want to stop her momentum. “Then you
really
should have seen his face. Eyes bulging at me. Head thrashing back and forth. Skin turning red, then purple. It was awful, to be honest. I almost couldn't take it. I came real close to removing the tape.” Hannah studied her father's face, his washed-blue eyes that now seemed clouded. Old. “But then I remembered everything he had done to me,” Hannah continued. “And I forced myself to watch. I watched him plead with his eyes, because that was all he could do. Wide-open eyes, to the point I thought they'd burst. I watched those eyes roll up and then finally look at nothing.”

For the first time, Billy seemed to have nothing to say. Then he crouched down in front of her, and the smell of sweat and grime filled her nostrils. With his right hand he ran his fingers slowly through her long black hair, causing Hannah to shudder.

“Hannie, darling,” he said, his voice little more than a coarse whisper. “You just don't have it in you. You think you do, but when it comes time to pull the trigger, you just can't. Trust me, honey. That's a
good
thing. You don't want to be like me. Always fightin' the rage. Suffering the ball of pain in the stomach that just makes me so fuckin' angry at the world. You think you're like me, but you ain't. I know you didn't kill Dallin, so tell me where he is.”

“I'm more like you than you know,” she said. “And I've hated you every day of my life for it.”

“You didn't kill me when you had the chance,” he said.

“I tried. God, I wanted to see you burn.”

“Killing is just not in your nature.”

“Then give me the gun and let me make up for past mistakes,” she said.

That elicited a brief smile. “Aw, that's just self-defense for you and your little one. Anyone could do that.” He leaned closer. “Now tell me where Dallin is or
you're
gonna burn.”

The word
burn
jolted Hannah, and Billy noticed.