A Righteous Kill (21 page)

Luca’s palms began to tingle and he realized he’d been holding his breath for a while. What had she observed? He squeezed his hands together and reminded himself to exhale slowly as she continued.

“Now I’ve had kind of a bad night and I want to talk. It’s not like I asked you to bare your darkest secret or anything, I just asked you a simple question and
now
I know it has a complicated answer. So let’s hear it. I’m in the mood for a confession.”

Luca blinked at her. He’d never thought of it quite like that before. His knowledge of her was about as intimate as it could get without being downright biblical. It wouldn’t hurt to give her something small. Something real.

He cleared his throat and looked down at his bare feet, smooth and brown and cared for, his big toe digging a little at the packed cellar floor.

“I grew up in El Paso, Texas, in a crime-ridden East Paisano neighborhood along the border of Mexico. My parents spent most of their money on alcohol and my mother had a pill addiction, so that meant my sister and I often went without shoes, especially when we were really little. I remember if I had a pair, the soles would be worn so thin that the pavement would still blister my feet in the summer.” He looked up from his feet for just a second. Hero’s eyes remained intently on her hands, but her fingers curled inward a little, centering the measurement of the vase. Her silence pressed him to continue.

“When I was ten, I saw a hundred dollar bill left in the cup holder of a car parked next to my school. I stared at that money for a full half an hour before I found some rebar and broke the passenger window. I used that hundred dollars to buy my first real pair of shoes.”

“What were they?” Hero asked, surprising him a little.

“Black and orange Reeboks with the air pump in the tongue,” he recalled with a nostalgic smile. He’d walked on them for miles. He’d gone to the cracked and weed-choked basketball court in his neighborhood to see if they really helped him to jump higher, and he’d sworn they’d blessed him with a half a foot. “Two days after I bought them, I was jumped by three Junior High kids who beat the shit out of me and took them. But they were mine for two days and those were the best two days of my fucking life.”

“Did you steal more money to buy other shoes?”

Luca listened for judgment in her voice, but found only concern. “Later on,” he admitted. “But first I realized, if I was going to take money or nice things, I needed to learn how to fight to keep them.”

Hero glanced up at him, her eyes round. “Did you?”

“My nickname growing up was
Peleón
. It roughly translates to scrapper or brawler.” He flashed his teeth. “Let’s just say, about a week later I used that rebar to get my shoes back.”

She blinked, but didn’t seem surprised.

“Problem was, my old man caught me with them and—” Luca cleared his throat against an unexpected intrusion. “Anyway those shoes caused me more trouble than they were worth. My mother ended up selling them to help pay for my broken arm.”

Hero made a soft sound in her throat and her eyes were liquid before she returned them to her wheel. She didn’t give him pity or bullshit platitudes. And he didn’t want them. Couldn’t even figure why he’d gone there.

“Was your family…?” She trailed off, seeming to change her mind from what she was about to say. “From Mexico?”

Luca shook his head. “My mother was an underage Puerto Rican stripper in a border club and my father was from Brazil, but worked in a custom auto body shop that laundered money for the drug trade. He married her to avoid a statutory rape charge when she became pregnant with me.”

She blinked a few times. “Do you have family in Brazil? Do you speak Portuguese?”

“Don’t know about my family. My father said if he ever went back to Brazil, he would be instantly killed. And no, I only speak Spanish. My mother never talked about her family.”

“Where are your parents now?” she asked gently.

Luca cleared his throat and made a dismissive gesture. “My mom took a deadly cocktail of pills and tequila ten years ago and, last I heard, my father was serving two consecutive ten to twenties in the maximum security New Mexico State Penitentiary after a shootout with the police.” It had been long enough that Luca could talk about it without flinching. “Son of a bitch was shot three times but, in the end, I think he’s just too mean to die.”

“How old were you when that happened?” she asked, sounding truly horrified.

Luca didn’t look up from his feet. “That was right before my mom—anyway it was a bad year.”

“I’d say,” she murmured, dipping her hands into a bowl of water and rewetting the clay in front of her, to keep it pliable, he suspected.

“So, your father was violent with you?”

“You could say that.” And so could the ER doctors and x-ray techs that’d stitched him up and set his bones over the years. In fact, he was pretty sure he invited the radiologist to his high school graduation. “My father taught me to be violent. It was about the only thing he taught me, and I was for the longest time. Violent and angry. Still can be. My father relied on us all being afraid of him. He hadn’t counted on creating someone as vicious as he was. I reached over six feet tall the summer I turned seventeen. I caught him hurting my pregnant fourteen-year-old sister and I threw him through our sliding glass door onto the pavement in the back yard.”

“Good.” Hero shocked him with the approval in her voice. “I would expect the same from my brothers.”

Luca remembered her alpha-male siblings and smirked. “Your brothers probably wouldn’t have left you there. I disappeared before my old man woke up, but couldn’t convince my mom or sister to come with me though, God knows, I tried. But I knew that if I was still there when he came around, I was a dead man… or he was.”

“Where did you go?”

“When I was a sophomore, I almost got expelled for fighting. At the underfunded school that I attended, our counselor was also our football coach. Coach Peck said if I trained with the varsity team, he’d help me stay in school. Maybe make something of myself. He was the only adult I trusted, so I showed up on his doorstep that night. He let me stay with him my whole senior year. He got me a job, trained me day and night, rode my ass about homework and damn near filled out my college applications.”

“He sounds wonderful,” Hero said warmly.

“He was,” Luca cleared his throat.

“Was?”

“We stayed in constant contact until he died of a heart attack four years ago.” Funny, out of everything he’d said tonight, that had been the hardest. Luca stunned even himself as he delved into a childhood he rarely visited in front of someone. In front of a victim of more extreme violence, no less. Hell, he’d just told Hero more than he’d told the psychologist. Maybe because she wasn’t looking at him, or trying to use his past to explain his present. She didn’t scrutinize his motives or ask him how he felt, which was good, because most of the time he still didn’t know. She just listened as it all spilled out of him, reminding him of the hot, melted black tar of the desert roads he used to wander as a kid. Dirty and sticky, melding into whatever it came in contact with, filling any surface with a rank, grimy substance that was impossible to be rid of.

But it made him tough. It made him hard. It made him dangerous, and not just to criminals, but to himself and those who were close to him.

“What about your sister?” she asked. “Are the two of you close?”

Luca shook his head, a familiar pang of guilt clenching his gut. “She showed up at Coach Peck’s once to tell me she’d lost the baby that day. I didn’t see her again until she showed up at my dorm room in college demanding money. I gave it to her and she just… disappeared.” Years later, Luca had traced her trail to the border of Tijuana, where it had gone cold. She’d likely slipped the country and the many drug-related warrants she’d had against her.

“You must get very lonely.” Hero took her hands off the spinning vase and flipped a switch to cut the engine.

“I get very busy,” he hedged. “I don’t have time to be lonely.”

Hero stood and went to the worktable in the corner, stacked neatly with stamps, tools, brushes, and other instruments. She selected a wire tool that looked like a very efficient garrote, then returned to the wheel and used it to separate the vase from the wheel by sliding it beneath the base of the object.

“You may not have time to be lonely, but you spend much of your time angry.”

Didn’t take a genius to figure that out. “I’m not angry right now.”

“Yes, you are.” She gingerly picked up her vase and turned to set it on a stone slab with other pieces in various stages of drying. “Anger is your constant companion, you’re just better at burying it some days than others, but I always feel it like a vibration or a wave of heat rolling off of you. I think it builds inside of you. It threatens to overtake you sometimes.”

She wasn’t wrong. And didn’t that just piss him off? Luca stood abruptly, no longer relaxed, hackles raised.

“Can I ask you what you do to relieve that stress? What is your emotional outlet? Other than shoe shopping, which is totally effective.” She turned to him with another disarming smile.

She was so goddamned beautiful. Luca stood there, digging his toes in the ground, almost like he was gripping it to keep them planted where they were. Where they should be. He searched his memory for an answer. “Working out. A lot of meaningless sex.” Taking a stab at self-analysis he tried one better. “I don’t know, maybe—meting out justice to violent criminals that I never got as a kid?”

Hero shook her head. “Your brand of justice has a body count comparable to that of a serial killer.” She held her hand up at his dark look. “I’m not judging you, I’m just saying that kind of thing adds to the rage, and though the kills maybe have been, for all intents and purposes, ‘righteous’, they felt to you like vengeance rather than justice, am I wrong?”

Luca’s nostrils flared. His fists clenched. His heart pounded. He
wanted
her to be wrong. Needed her to be wrong. How did they get here? Weren’t they just talking about shoes? He glanced over his shoulder at the door, wondering how he could extricate himself from the situation without being a total douchebag. One thing stopped him from giving in to his initial impulse and telling her where to go.

She
was
absolutely right. And she was telling him, in her own way, that she saw through his bullshit good guy façade. She knew him for what he really was. And the way she looked at him now, with her fine brow wrinkled and her eyes pinched with worry rather than pity told him that, in some way, she feared him.

He should have kept his damned mouth shut.

“I’m good at what I do. The best, actually.” He moved toward her, and she stood her ground. “I don’t want you thinking that I’m somehow damaged goods or dangerous to you. I
handle
my
shit
. Which means, I’ll keep you alive. What happened in my youth was a long time ago. I
refuse
to be the monster my father tried to create, so I don’t have a wife, I don’t have kids. I have a purpose, and that’s why I’m the best.”

Her eyes widened as he came to a stop in front of her, his body filling her space, his breath teasing the few wisps of baby-fine hair that curled at her temples. He reached out and wiped at the smear on her cheek, which only made it worse. “I don’t want you to be afraid of me,” he admitted. He spent enough time being afraid of himself.

Hero stared up at him for a long moment, her lips parted.

Luca wanted her to say something.
Needed
her to break the silence before he did something stupid.

“I want to show you something.” She stepped away from him and it took all his self-discipline to let her. She turned to the shelf behind her, reaching for a bowl with an odd orange coating and some intricate engravings. Handling it gingerly, she held it out to Luca and he took it, looking to her for an explanation.

“This bowl has some serious imperfections,” she explained. “And they’re
my
fault. The shape is too thick in some places, and I used the wrong type of glaze for the clay, which in the eyes of most potters is a waste and an abuse of my clay and my equipment.” Her lip quirked sadly, then she reached back behind her, bending down to drag a very large box from the bottom shelf. “Chances are, when I put it in the kiln and stress it with a fire hot enough to melt your DNA, it’ll crack or explode under the pressure, like all of these did.” She pointed to discarded pieces of sharp and colorful shards of broken pottery.

“
But
…” Her eyes twinkled mischievously and she returned to her shelves with a lighter step, reaching to the back and pulling out what looked like a small urn. “Maybe one time in fifty, if I’m
lucky
, the piece survives the fire and the cooling aftermath. What I’m left with is a masterpiece like this.”

She held up the urn. The distressed cracks in the cobalt glaze gave it an ancient look, as though it had been pulled out of a dig site and displayed in a museum. Inside the fissures, a bold earthy bronze peeked through the vibrant blue and the effect was absolutely stunning.

“This piece will sell for more than any on that shelf, maybe all of them combined, even though it will require more upkeep, and more careful handling.”

She set it down and Luca handed the bowl back to her, uncomfortable now with the pressure of holding it, maybe a little anxious for its future.

“In my opinion, people, especially children, are a lot like my pottery. They’re shaped and molded. Sometimes by a gentle hand, sometimes not. Their chinks and imperfections can create volatile and unpredictable outcomes. Once they’re fired, those imperfections become permanent one way or the other. But who’s to say, that sometimes it doesn’t make them all the more… valuable?”

Luca appreciated the metaphor. He looked down at the box of garbage, then to the priceless urn displayed on the shelf. “Which one are you saying I am, the broken shards or the masterpiece?”

“I think you’re still in the kiln. I think you walk through the fire every day.” Hero reached up to touch her cheek where his fingers had lingered a moment ago. Her eyes roamed him, suddenly flaring when they touched on the bare skin of his torso. Smoldering with dangerous intent, she sashayed toward him. Reaching a finger out to hook into the loose waistband of his sleep pants, she lifted her face and offered her ripe lips to him. “
I
say, we turn up the heat and see what happens.”