Stephanie Feagan - Show Her The Money

Before I could say anything, Mrs. Colder gave him the blow-by-blow, her voice rising and falling with her odd, shouting cadence. I noticed the rest of the shop was staring, eyes wide, mouths hanging open in stupefied shock. No doubt, Mrs. Colder’s showdown with the bad guy was destined to become a legend at Mabel’s House of Beauty.

Ed insisted on taking me to lunch, so after the police came, asked a lot of questions, took some of the blood off the floor, and Dot finished my haircut, we took off in his old 4-Runner.

He turned to look at me when he stopped at a red light. “I talked to Santorelli this morning and advised him I’m now your counsel.” His voice was low and solemn. “He told me the Marvel legal team filed a request for injunction to keep your disk from being admitted as evidence. They’re claiming it’s inadmissible because you obtained it illegally.”

“What will happen if they get the injunction?”

Ed stared at me for a moment before answering. “Santorelli says he’d have no choice but to withdraw your immunity because it’s based on you turning over the disk.”

“If there’s an injunction, that’s not my fault. Besides, I was the one who went to the SEC. Doesn’t that mean anything?”

He shook his head, sending my heart into my shoes. “It might be a mitigating factor if they prosecute, but just like a crook who turns himself in, your honesty after the fact doesn’t alter your involvement.”

How stupid I’d been to naively believe I could do the right thing, that I could be open and honest, and the bad guys would pay. I read the writing on the wall, and it told me I was going down. Lowell and the Marvel guys could afford enough legal muscle to weasel out of any charges the government could lay on.

I, on the other hand, had Ed. He was bright and good-looking, and probably enough of a shark to make the big time. But he was inexperienced and unconnected to anyone in Washington. Looking across at him, I swallowed hard. What choice did I have? No way I could afford a lawyer like Mr. Dryer. I’d have to take my chances with Ed.

“Cheer up,” he said as he reached out and rubbed a tear from my cheek with the pad of his thumb. “I’m gonna help you.”

I know it’s awful, but that only made me cry harder.

Midland is known for oil and rich white men and Baby Jessica, but it should also be known for Mexican food. There are forty-seven Mexican food restaurants in Midland, and the population is right about ninety-five thousand. That’s a Mexican restaurant for every two thousand people. That’s a lotta enchiladas and tamales and tacos. That’s a Mexican food lover’s wet dream.

I have personally eaten at all forty-seven, and do have a few favorites. Bettina’s House of Enchiladas is one. So is El Corazon, which means The Heart, and makes no sense, because they don’t serve any kind of heart, and nothing in the place is a heart, or resembles a heart, but a white guy who spoke no Spanish opened it in the fifties and I guess he thought El Corazon sounded cool.

Ed took me to Bettina’s and I nearly had an orgasm right there in the corner booth, beneath a piñata shaped like SpongeBob SquarePants, because the hot sauce was so good. That’s another thing. In Midland, in all of west Texas, nobody calls hot sauce, salsa. That’s a foreign, sissy word. It’s hot sauce, and we have chips and hot sauce. Not chips and salsa.

Bettina outdid herself and I practically ignored Ed while I dived into the awesome food. There are undoubtedly a lot of women who’d have lost their appetite after what happened at Mabel’s, but I wasn’t one of them. It was almost as though I enjoyed it more, could fully appreciate being alive.

That’s not to say the guy planned to kill me. The part of my mind that keeps the fires of hope burning wanted to believe he’d only intended to rough me up a little, to convince me to lose the disk.

Ed talked while he worked through the Plato Grande, which means Big Huge Plate of Everything in the Kitchen. “Is there any way at all to get your hands on that disk before Mrs. Bohannon gets back home?”

“Not unless I break into her house, and even if I did, I can’t be sure the box is there.”

He shook his head as he polished off his taco. “I really thought the guy was just bluffing, but now I think he’s serious about hurting you. Your mom has a good security system, doesn’t she?”

“The best, but it’s not going to do me much good while I’m living in an apartment.”

“Pink, you can’t move to an apartment. It’s too dangerous.”

“Maybe so, but I’m moving anyway. Besides, I already rented one.” Seeing an argument forming in his expression, I said quickly, “Living with Mom is not an option. After what happened this morning, she’ll follow me everywhere I go and fret about it and keep harping on me to blow off the disk. It’ll be bad enough at the office all day, but listening to her around the clock will make me a raving maniac.”

He conceded the point, but he still didn’t look too happy about it. Then he asked, “What’s it like to work for your mom?”

“I can’t say for sure since this is technically my first day, but based on how I grew up and the relationship we have, I’d say it’s going to be great sometimes, difficult sometimes and absolutely awful the rest of the time. I love Mom and I’m so proud of what she’s done with her life, but she’s very different from most moms. When I was four, she wanted to teach me to swim, and because she’s a big believer in just doing it, she tossed me in the deep end and shouted, ‘Swim!’”

“And you swam, I bet.”

Looking across the table at him, I realized he was a member of Mom’s Fan Club. Not that I thought that was a bad thing. It just made it harder for him to see, well, certain realities about my mother. “No, Ed, I didn’t swim. The lifeguard pulled me out and did mouth-to-mouth, then threatened to call the cops on Mom for child endangerment. I know you wanted me to say, yes, I swam, and all was well and Mom did the right thing by shoving her four-year-old into the deep end of the Midland Country Club pool. But all was not well, and I was too afraid of the water to go swimming again until I was twelve, when Brandy Hernandez had a pool party and invited Lucky Barnes. I was hot for him and didn’t want to embarrass myself, so I took lessons, but even now, I’m not real hip on bodies of water any bigger than my bathtub if I don’t have a flotation device.”

“You were hot for Lucky Barnes? The guy’s a loser.”

“Maybe now he’s a loser. In sixth grade, he was hot. Besides, he had a cool bike and listened to Def Leppard.”

“Did you go out with him?”

“Not a chance. He went with Brandy because she jumped in the pool and lost her top and he was wowed by her boobs.”

“He wasn’t wowed with yours, I take it.”

“Well, no, because I didn’t jump in and lose my top like Brandy did. That’s not to say he would’ve been wowed if I had lost it, because I was only twelve.”

“So was Brandy.”

“True. But she was obviously a wild child, losing her top like that, and Lucky being Lucky, he went for the wild thing.”

“You weren’t a wild child?”

“I had my moments, and I probably would have jumped in and lost my top and given old Brandy a run for the money, but I was too afraid of the water, so I just stood there and watched Lucky take her around the side of her house to make out where her parents wouldn’t see.”

“You wanna know what I think? I think Lucky was probably a lousy kisser and you’d have been disappointed.”

“Why would you think that?”

“I’ve seen the guy eat and it’s not pretty. He’s probably one of those wet kissers. You know, the slobbery kind.”