Gathering Dark, Candice Fox [inspirational books for students .TXT] 📗

solid minutes with a doubled-up leather belt over the mispronunciation of a type of pasta.

No, I mean why is she coming? Sneak asked.

Just get your ass here, I texted.

JESSICA

The noise around them had become nothing. Jessica gripped her drink and waited, like a rider on a roller coaster slowly ticking its way up the biggest hill. The plunge was coming. There was nothing she could do to stop it.

“Adrian and his brother, Brosh, were part of this … organization.” Zea opened her hands. “The mob, I guess. I don’t know. I’d seen other Armenian men at the house, and I’d overheard phone calls. But I don’t know if it was like you see in the movies, with the meetings and the structure and all that stuff. I think they were just edging their way in, relying on their family connections to get work. Adrian came home really happy one night. He said they’d been given an amazing job by their cousins. He put this big duffel bag full of coke on the bed in front of me. When it hit the bed it was so heavy it made the whole mattress sink in the middle.”

“When was this?” Jessica asked.

“A week before the murder. Adrian said we were going to sell the coke, distribute it and make a lot of money, and then his cousins were going to make it a regular thing. I was just so excited that he was telling me all this, you know? He’d always been so cagey about what he did, about his brother. I felt as though I was being let in. It was a new step for us in our relationship.”

“How romantic.” Jessica caught the eye of the bartender who had wiped their table earlier. The crowd was thinning. He seemed to have decided the no-table-service rule was up and nodded to indicate that he’d fetch Jessica another drink.

“I thought when Adrian said ‘we’ that he meant, like, we,” Kristi said, pointing to Jessica, then herself. “So I wanted to help. Adrian wouldn’t let me work. I was stuck in the house all day. I had no friends. But I knew these guys who could move junk like that real quick, so I took one of the bricks from the bag while Adrian was out and gave it to them. They were supposed to get the money back that afternoon. It was going to be a surprise, you know? It was supposed to show Adrian how useful I could be. I mean, it was New Year’s Eve. Who has trouble moving drugs on New Year’s Eve?”

“Your guys, evidently,” Jessica said, feeling the roller coaster crest the hill.

“When I told Adrian, he was livid,” Kristi said. “He started shouting, so we put on the music, but after a while he started beating on me. He’d smacked me a few times before, but nothing close to this. He said the drugs weren’t supposed to be sold off like that. There were already buyers. Now they were down a whole brick, and my guys weren’t coming through. I tried to hide in the laundry but he came through the door, and I guess that’s when Harbour saw us through the window.”

“Did she go right for the gun?” Jessica asked.

“No, she…” Kristi stared at the table, remembering. She gave a small, sad laugh. “She tried talking to us first. But I couldn’t hear her. I was getting my ass wailed on. And he didn’t even know she was there. When he got into those rages he would just zero in on you and nothing could stop him.”

The two women sat together, one remembering, one visualizing. They held their drinks, staring into them. Jessica could see the house in Brentwood. Blair Harbour walking through the door, stopping dead in the foyer at the sight of small, lean Kristi Zea flopping around in Adrian Orlov’s hands. Blood on the floor. The smack of flesh on flesh. It was something totally outside Harbour’s world, her circle of existence filled with beautiful rooms in beautiful houses, stark, white, clean surgery rooms, the occasional upmarket restaurant with friends. People didn’t fight in Harbour’s world. They didn’t put their hands on each other except to caress, comfort, embrace, heal. All blood was expected. Jessica imagined her shouting and pleading and not being listened to, trying to get into the fray, coming up against the hard muscles of a rage-filled man and never having felt something so impossibly immoveable before.

Jessica could see Orlov turning at the sound of the hammer on the gun. Outrage, panic, both he and Harbour moving, two steps in a dance that was over before the music began—him coming at her, her blasting him away.

“She picked up the gun as a warning, I think,” Kristi said. “He went for her, got within a few feet and bang. She shot him. Just like that. I could see he was dead before he hit the ground, even from where I was. She was right to do it. He was going to kill me. There’s never been any doubt in my mind about that.”

Jessica held the table with both hands. The second drink came, and she didn’t move. She knew what happened next, but needed to hear it. Needed to feel it rushing by her. Moments she could never recover, never correct.

“You called nine-one-one,” Jessica said.

“Not right away,” Kristi said. “I told Harbour that I would. I told her to go wait outside. There was no helping Adrian. She wanted to stay, help me, but I shouted at her. I told her to flag down the ambulance when it came, because our house number was real hard to see with all the palms out front. I knew the police would look at my phone, so I took one of Adrian’s burners and called his brother. The bag of coke was still upstairs in the fucking bedroom, sitting out there in plain sight, and I didn’t have time to hide it. I don’t think