Marilyn Pappano - Criminal Deception

“Living with him didn’t make you uncomfortable?”

He snorted. “I’d lived with Josh for eighteen years. That was a hell of a lot more uncomfortable. God only knew what he might do.”

“Like cause you to lose touch with your roommate and the rest of your friends.”

Finally the dog began moving again, and within a minute or two of silence, they reached the bank. He dropped the locked bag into the night slot, then gazed around. Home was to the northeast. Nearer, only a block to the west, was the SnoCap Drive-In, a fifties-era joint with greasy burgers, crispy fries and home-brewed root beer. “Have you had dinner?”

“I have, but I’d like something cold to drink.”

He gestured, and they headed toward the corner. Halfway there, he responded to her last real comment. “When I got out of the hospital, I followed Josh’s lead. I ran away. I left Chicago as soon as I was able, I didn’t tell anyone but Mom and Dad where I was going, and I haven’t had any contact with anyone from there since. People here know where I came from, but they don’t know why. In the beginning it was easier not to tell them, and now…” Now it was easier to just go with the status quo.

“You don’t want them to know that you were the victim of a violent crime? Because it’s not that uncommon.”

“I know. It happens even here.”

“So the victim of violence part doesn’t bother you. Is it because your brother was involved? Or because…” Liz shortened the leash to pull Elizabeth back from the street, and her voice turned thoughtful. “You said you ran away. You think leaving Chicago was cowardly? That you should have stayed as if nothing had happened?”

They turned onto Carolina Avenue. The lights were brighter there, with the only traffic Joe had seen since leaving the shop. It was mostly kids in this part of town at night, cruising between the SnoCap, Charlie’s Custom Rods next door and Taquito Taco on the west side of the river. A group of boys gathered around the raised hoods of cars older than they were in Charlie’s parking lot, comparing one rumbling engine to the other, while newer cars filled most of the spaces at the SnoCap.

“I never got the car thing,” Joe said as they cut through Charlie’s lot and headed for the lone outside table at the drive-in. “Even when I was their age, a car was just transportation. As long as it got me where I was going, I didn’t care about the rest.”

“Oh, I don’t know. I think that car you had in Chicago was more a status symbol than just transportation. You were successful and everything-the car, the clothes, the condo-showed it.”

Joe grinned. “I do miss the suits sometimes. I looked damn good in Armani.”

She tied Elizabeth ’s leash to a post a few feet away. “You look pretty damn good in jeans and T-shirts.”

He stared at her. Her tone had been casual, but there was nothing casual about the heat that burned through him. She thought he looked good in his clothes, huh? Was she interested in seeing how he looked without them? Scars aside, that was good, too, and he was real damn interested in seeing her without her clothes.

Or he would be, if she hadn’t been Josh’s first.

If he knew for absolute certain that she wasn’t still Josh’s.

He parked his bike out of the dog’s range before asking what she wanted.

“My pockets are empty except for keys. Buy me a diet cherry limeade, and it’ll be my treat next time.”

He went to the window, where one of his after-school regulars greeted him with a smile too warm and friendly for a girl half his age. “Hey, Joe. You want your usual?”

“Yeah, plus a large diet cherry limeade.”

The girl-he remembered she ordered a tall caramel-drizzle frappucino every time but couldn’t recall her name-looked past him to the table, and her glossy pink mouth settled into a pout. “I’ve never seen her before. Who is she?”

“Her name is Liz. She’s…” His brother’s ex-girlfriend? Maybe current? The woman he would have gladly gotten hot and dirty with if she hadn’t said the magic words-Remember Josh. How the hell could he forget him? “She’s new in town.”

Caramel-drizzle-Carmie, that was her name-tossed her blond ponytail over her shoulder. “I hadn’t heard you were seeing anyone.”

“I hadn’t either.”

“So are you guys, what? Like, friends?”

He glanced over his shoulder at Liz, sitting now, with Elizabeth bracing her paws on her thigh. She was scratching the dog behind the ears, and the pup was quivering from the tip of her nose all the way down to her tail.

Joe imagined he might do the same if Liz got physical with him.

Tapping nails drew his attention back to Carmie, who was still pouting. “Yeah,” he replied. Friends was as good a description as any.

With a disgruntled sound, Carmie turned away to fix their drinks, then set the cups in front of him and made change. “The food will be out in a minute.”

He stifled the urge to offer to wait and returned to the table. Elizabeth immediately tried to climb into his lap, stopping only when Liz gave her a stern No.

“Teach me to do that,” he said. “She’s lived with me forty-eight hours and so far ‘dinner’ is the only word she’s acknowledged.”

“It’s all a matter of attitude.”

“Yeah. She’s got it and I don’t.” He settled into the plastic chair, crossed one ankle over the other knee and gazed into the distance. If he’d shown up at Ellie’s, Tia Maria’s or Chantal’s with Liz, the gossip would have spread across town by the time they got home. But none of these kids besides Carmie even noticed them, and she would have forgotten by the time she got home.

That was good. If people were going to gossip about him, he’d rather have them wondering if he was gay than what was between him and Liz.

Besides, of course, Josh.

“You never answered me.” With one elegantly slender hand, Liz gestured toward Charlie’s. “On the way here, you called leaving Chicago ‘running away.’ Is that how you see it? How you see yourself? As a coward?”

He had hoped she would forget the question or at least give him the courtesy of pretending to forget. He’d never talked about this with anyone-not that he had many people to talk to. It wasn’t exactly a topic he could bring up with his parents. Even the slightest reminder, and his dad teared up and his mom’s behavior bordered on frantic: cleaning, blathering, even spontaneous bursts of prayer.

His muscles were so tense that it felt as if shrugging might make them crackle. “Thousands of people are victimized every year, and they don’t pack up and run off to find someplace safer to live. They don’t break with their past and start all over someplace new. They don’t hide.”

She took a long suck on her drink before giving her own more convincing shrug. “You didn’t change your name or your appearance. You haven’t isolated yourself in the back of beyond. You don’t carry a gun or view everyone with suspicion. You have a business. You have friends and neighbors, and you’ve taken on new obligations. You go out at night. You talk to strangers. You’re not in hiding.”

“I’m not in Chicago either.”

Another delicate wave of those fingers, this time dismissing his argument. “Staying in Chicago wouldn’t have made you any stronger or braver. People there wanted your brother dead. Since you happen to look exactly like him, getting out was the smart thing to do, at least until those people are put in jail.”

“Josh isn’t going to make any effort to help with that, is he?” The bitterness was heavier in his voice than he’d intended. God knew, he felt a lot of resentment toward Josh, but he owed him at least a little fairness. If leaving town and staying away was the smart thing for Joe, then wasn’t it doubly smart for Josh since he’d been the Mulroneys’ target in the first place?