“Nothing specific. I’m not fucking stupid.” I squint at him. “You’re the one who told her we tortured Suggs.”
“She was in the hospital. I wanted her to know we had her back and she was safe.” A quick hint of a smirk flashes over his face. “You know what bothers me more?”
“Something bothers you?” I widen my eyes in dickish surprise.
“Shocking, right?” He smacks my shoulder and turns serious. “Cuttin’ a finger off Suggs didn’t bother me one bit. He touched your girl, we shoulda taken his whole hand. Carved out his insides.”
“Can’t disagree with you there.”
“What bothers me more are the ones we didn’t disembowel for touching something they shouldn’t have.”
“I hear you.”
“You think that’s fucked up?”
“After the shit we’ve seen? No.”
“You ever think about Shadow?” he asks.
“Not if I can help it.” Our last VP was a piece of shit and not worth wasting the mental energy. We haven’t had a reason to talk about him. “He’s rotting in the ground where he belongs.”
“Wish we’d done it sooner. The shit his wife told me…” he shakes his head.
“You saw the way he treated Serena. The way he challenged Z. What he tried to do to Lilly that night. Nothing about that shitstain surprises me.”
“He really came unglued at the end,” Jiggy agrees. “But from what Myra said, he was always a monster. How come none of us saw it sooner?”
I’d be lying if I said I hadn’t asked myself the same question many times since the night I walked up on Shadow attacking Z’s wife. “I don’t know, brother.”
“I wish I’d gotten more info from Serena before she disappeared.” He glances over at me. “No one’s heard from her in months.”
“Better to leave it alone.” I stare out at the lake. “He won’t be hurting anyone again.”
“What makes someone turn out that way?”
Isn’t that a million-dollar question? “I don’t know, brother. You plannin’ to go back to college and study psychology or something?”
He snorts and flicks another pebble in the water. “Couldn’t if I wanted to. Jezzie just hit me up for tuition money.”
“She all right?”
The first hint of a smile tugs at the corner of his mouth. “Yeah, she’s good.” He peers over at me, all serious again. “I miss Boone too, you know. He should be out on the road with us.”
“Hell yeah. He woulda gotten a kick out of Shelby’s shows.”
Jiggy slaps my leg and cackles like a demon. “You think he woulda been proud of us patching-in or scared shitless?”
“Probably a little of both.” I can’t believe I’m going to ask this but, my curiosity won’t go away. “You talk to Ashley after we left yesterday?”
Yup, that wiped the smile off his face. His hands curl into fists again. “Talk really isn’t the right word.”
“Jesus,” I grumble.
He shoots a glare at me like a bullet. “I didn’t fuck her, asshole. I meant, she yelled and I responded with snarls and threats. I wouldn’t call it talking.”
“Sorry I left you there to deal with that.”
He shrugs. “Shelby needed to hear the truth from you. Not a half-assed story from that stupid cunt.”
“Why’d she show up anyway?”
“Why do you think?”
“I don’t know. That’s why I asked.”
“She’s a jealous twat living the exact monotonous existence I always predicted.”
I stare at him. “That’s it?”
“Maybe back then you were too enamored of her pussy to notice, but she always thought she was better than you.”
“So?”
“You need a connect the dots diagram, brother? Here, let me help you out.” He pokes his finger in the air and slows his speech like he’s talking to a five-year-old who was kicked in the head by a mule. “She married some boring, trust fund loser who fucks her twice a year and only with the lights out.” He stabs his other finger in the air between us. “You’re on the cover of a magazine, dating a celebrity.”
“I’m not ‘dating a celebrity.’”
He taps the side of his head. “She saw it and flipped her shit. You’re really surprised?”
“What’d she think was going to come of it?”
“She’d get even with you for bankrupting her family? She’d turn Shelby against you? How the fuck would I know what crazy reasoning she had?” He stops and stares out at the water. “Her dad passed away a couple weeks ago.”
Shit, I can’t muster up any sympathy for that old fuck. It’s just another piece of information to file away and examine later or never at all. “Still, to go all that way to track Shelby down. Telling her I’m, what, Jack the fucking Ripper? That’s nuts.”
“She’s nuts.” He shakes his head. “She lives in L.A. now, I guess. So she didn’t travel that far.”
“Oh, good. I’m so relieved.” I cock my head. “You sure got a lot of information out of her for just a snarling, screaming conversation.”
“It’s what I do best.”