11 Poison Promise (9 page)

“You’re not—you’re not just going to
leave
him there, are you?” Catalina croaked out.

She moved away from the car and headed in Troy’s direction.

“You don’t want to look at that,” I called out.

But it was already too late. Catalina’s face paled at the sight of her ex-boyfriend lying on the cold concrete and the horrible way he’d died. She clamped her hand to her mouth, staggered away a few feet, and threw up.

I sighed and leaned against the side of the car. When she finished, Catalina straightened up, pulled a tissue out of her jeans pocket, and used it to wipe off her mouth. I hoped that she would hurry over to the car and that would be the end of things, but instead, she went right back over to Troy’s body, with disgust, guilt, and grief tightening her pretty features as she stared down at him.

“We need to call somebody . . .” Her voice trailed off.

“And tell them what?” I asked, my voice more sarcastic than it should have been. “That we witnessed Beauregard Benson, one of the most dangerous men in Ashland, kill one of his own dealers? It’s not exactly a news flash. What we need to do is get out of here and forget this ever happened.”

Catalina whipped around, her hair flying around her shoulders, her hands balling into fists. “I’m not leaving him!” she screamed.

The concrete around her let out a single sharp wail that melted into low, gravelly mutters of determination. The sound matched the mulish expression on Catalina’s face. I thought about knocking her out, shoving her into her own car, and driving away with her. But I had the feeling that if I took so much as one step toward her, she would start screaming again—or, worse, bolt out of the garage.

If she did that, someone was sure to see her, and word would get out about Catalina running away from the scene of a gruesome murder with me chasing her. Then we’d both be in more trouble than we already were. Maybe I should have been more sympathetic to the trauma Catalina had witnessed, but I had enough problems already without attracting the attention of Beauregard Benson.

Since I couldn’t get Catalina to leave and I didn’t want Benson and his men to come back and find us, that left me with only one option.

“Okay, okay,” I said. “I’ll call someone. Look, I’m doing it right now, see?”

Catalina stared at me, still angry and suspicious, so I
pulled my phone out of my jeans pocket and hit a number in the speed dial. Three rings later, she picked up.

“Coolidge.”

“Hey, baby sister.”

“Hey, Gin.” Bria paused. “What’s up?”

“Why ever would you think that something’s up?” I said in my best, most innocent, I-haven’t-killed-anybody-in-hours voice.

“Because you never call me at work unless your work has somehow become
my
work,” she said, a teasing note creeping into her voice. “So who is it this time, and how many bodies are there?”

The fact that she could joke about it was something of a miracle. Detective Bria Coolidge was a good cop, and my being the Spider was something that didn’t exactly sit well with her at times. But we’d slowly come to an agreement ever since she’d returned to Ashland. Bria would never like my being an assassin, but she understood why I did it, the same way that I understood her being a cop and wanting to help people, even if the law was a running joke in our city and the only justice most folks got was what they made for themselves.

“Just one,” I said, answering her question about bodies. “And it isn’t even one of mine.”

“What?” she asked, her voice still light. “Did Finn kill someone instead? I bet he just
loved
getting his new Fiona Fine suit dirty.”

“No. It wasn’t Finn. It was Beauregard Benson.”

I expected another teasing comment, but Bria went immediately completely quiet, so quiet that I could hear the faint hum of her phone.

“Where are you?” she growled.

I frowned at the odd, intense tone in her voice, but I told her about the parking garage.

“I’ll be there in ten,” she snapped, every word sharper and louder than the last. “Don’t move, don’t let anyone see the body, and don’t touch anything.”

“What—”

I started to ask her what was going on, but she’d already hung up on me.

•  •  •

I stared at my phone, wondering at Bria’s unexpected angry reaction. My sister dealt with criminals on a daily basis, some of whom wore badges and called themselves cops. But the mere mention of Benson’s name had made her go from carefree to nuclear in five seconds flat. What could possibly be going on with Bria and Benson—

“Who was that?” Catalina asked, seeming a little calmer than before.

“Bria. My sister, the cop. You’ve seen her at the restaurant.”

She nodded. “She’s nice. Polite. A good tipper. Pretty too.”

“She’ll be here soon. Probably with Xavier,” I said, referring to Bria’s partner on the force.

Catalina nodded again and looked at Troy. She hesitated, then let out a breath and slowly sank down onto the floor next to his body, not caring about the dirt, oil, and other grime she was smearing all over her jeans. She reached out, as if to touch his withered hand, but thought better of it and ended up resting her palm on the concrete next to his.

“I don’t expect you to understand,” she said. “But I can’t leave him.”

“I know he was your ex, but he was trying to force you to deal drugs, and he followed you here tonight. He was going to hurt you bad, Catalina. Maybe even kill you.”

She sighed, her face suddenly decades older than her twenty-one years. “I know. But he was still my friend. From before my mom died.”

She looked at the back wall of the garage, but her gaze was even more distant. Jo-Jo sometimes got that same look, whenever she was peering into the future and hearing whispers about it. But Catalina wasn’t an Air elemental, so the only thing she was seeing was the memories of her own past with Troy.

I lowered myself to the floor on the other side of his body. “Your mom died last year, right? Killed by a drunk driver?”

“Yeah,” Catalina said, her tone flat. “In the spring. The drunk guy died too, so I didn’t even have anyone to be angry at, you know?”

Yeah, I knew all about the anger that came with losing a loved one, especially so suddenly, so senselessly.

She drew in a breath. “My dad split when I was a kid. I never knew him. But my mom was great. Before she died and I . . . moved, we lived in Southtown. On Undertow Avenue.”

I let out a low whistle. Undertow Avenue was one of the roughest streets in all of Southtown, the kind of place the cops wouldn’t even go, unless there were at least a dozen of them and it was broad daylight. Even then, they’d still be outnumbered by the gangbangers, dealers,
and other violent folks. Undertow Avenue also happened to be in the heart of Benson’s territory. No wonder Catalina had known who he was. She’d spent her life living in his shadow.

“Troy lived in the house next door to ours,” Catalina said. “His dad was a mean drunk who beat him and his mom, so he would always come over to my house to hide out. My mom would feed him cookies. Troy loved her chocolate-chip cookies so much.”

She smiled, but tears streaked down her face. “Troy watched out for me, you know? Even when we were little, he’d walk me to school and keep the other kids from hassling me. When we got older, we were more than friends. I loved him. At least until . . .” Her voice trailed off.

“Until he started dealing drugs for Benson,” I finished.

She shrugged. “I can’t really blame him for it. In our neighborhood, that’s what a lot of people did to make money. It was just another job to them, and him too.”

“So what happened?”

Instead of looking at me, she traced her fingers over a black skid mark next to Troy’s hand. “Being part of Benson’s crew, there was always pressure to meet his weekly quotas. Troy was always stressing and scrambling to keep up. One day, we were arguing. He wanted me to start selling to help him out, but I didn’t want to. He hit me.”

Her hand rose to her left cheek, as if she could still feel the sting of that long-ago blow. Maybe she could, deep down in her heart.

“He said it would never happen again, but I’d seen that story too many times before, so I broke up with him. A month later, my mom died, and I . . . had the chance to
get away, from the neighborhood, from Troy, from all the memories of my mom, so I took it. Maybe that was weak of me, but I took it, and I haven’t looked back since.”

I wondered what she wasn’t saying, like exactly where she had gotten the money to escape from all the haints that haunted her in Southtown. But I stayed quiet, wanting to hear the rest of her story.

Catalina’s hand fell back down to the concrete. “Everything was fine until the fall term started a few weeks ago. That’s when I saw Troy again. He’d started dealing on campus, and I ran into him on one of the quads. He begged me to give him a second chance. I told him the only way I’d do that was if he quit working for Benson and got a regular job.”

She shook her head. “He didn’t like that at all. He said that I was a traitor, that I’d moved away and didn’t remember what life was like in our neighborhood. I told him that there were lots of good, honest, decent, hardworking folks where we came from. I told him that my mom had never dealt drugs to make money. He said that I didn’t have any loyalty to him, to everything we’d been through together, to how he’d protected me all those years.”

Her gaze flicked to his bald head and sunken features. She shuddered and looked away. “I told him to leave me alone, but he kept following me around campus, trying to get me to go out with him. I could tell he was getting angrier and angrier, but I never thought that he’d actually hurt me. Last night, when he had those two vamps with him . . . that’s the first time he ever really scared me. And now he’s dead,” she finished in a faint, tired tone.

“It’s not your fault. The choices Troy made, the path he followed, he did all of that himself. And you are certainly not responsible for his death.”

“Well, it feels like I’m responsible,” Catalina whispered. “For everything. Maybe if I’d been more understanding, maybe if I hadn’t demanded that he quit dealing, maybe if I’d just given him another chance, I wouldn’t be sitting next to his body right now.”

“Maybe,” I replied. “Or maybe he’d be sitting next to yours if you had made him angry again.”

She finally raised her gaze to mine, with guilt, grief, and memories swimming in her teary hazel eyes. “I know that he wasn’t the same guy I grew up with, but I still cared about him, you know? He didn’t deserve what Benson did to him.”

“No,” I replied. “The Troy you knew didn’t deserve this.”

Catalina fell silent, lost in her memories, her hand finally creeping over to touch Troy’s. We sat like that, lost in our own thoughts, each of us haunted by the dead man between us.

7

Ten minutes later, I heard the distant rumble of an engine, growing louder and louder as it spiraled up to this level of the garage. I recognized the sound.

I finished my text to Sophia, telling her that I was fine and to go on home for the night, and hit send. Then I looked at Catalina.

“The cops are here,” I said, getting to my feet.

Catalina nodded, but she stayed where she was on the floor by Troy’s side.

A large, anonymous sedan rounded the corner, catching me in its headlights. The vehicle slowed, then stopped, and the doors opened, revealing two familiar figures. The driver was a woman with shaggy blond hair and bright blue eyes, beautiful enough to be a model, despite the no-nonsense black boots, dark jeans, and dark blue button-up shirt she wore. A gold badge glimmered on her black leather belt, next to her holstered gun. A giant with a
shaved head, ebony skin, and dark eyes maneuvered his tall, muscled frame out of the passenger’s side. Despite the late hour, a pair of aviator sunglasses were hooked into the neck of his white polo shirt.

Detective Bria Coolidge and Xavier headed in my direction. Xavier stopped by my side. I opened my mouth to call out a greeting to Bria, but she didn’t even look at me as she stalked by. Power walkers didn’t move that fast.

I frowned. Did my sister just blow me off for a dead body?