The Comfort of Black (23 page)

Then it made sense to Hannah. “He was saving up for something. He needed you.”

Black nodded. “As it turns out.”

“When did he contact you?”

“When he got out. Few years ago.”

Hannah thought about her father being out of prison. Just…loose. She had assumed he was out by now, but now she finally had confirmation. She pictured him as a feral dog, roaming the land, looking for scraps. Fighting. Surviving.

“He wanted to get back in business with me,” Black continued. “It was never my plan to partner up with him. We escaped together, and we had a plan to stay on the run together for a little while. But I didn't want it to be that way for too long. The business was my idea, and I know I talked to Smooth about it before he was recaptured. But I never wanted him as a part of it. Smooth was bad news. I knew he'd be a repeat offender. He'd had his sentence extended many times for fights. Smuggling things in. Being bad is just in his blood, and it didn't take an ex-cop to see that.”

Hannah felt herself nodding. Remembering.

“Your dad—sorry,
Smooth
—found me through Peter. I didn't want anything to do with him, but…”

“But you didn't want to piss him off,” Hannah said.

“No, I didn't. I was pissed off at Peter for bringing him to me, but what was done was done. Fact was, Smooth was back in my life, and if I told him to fuck off, I'd have to go and change my identity all over again, which is a major operation. I trust Peter. Smooth, not so much. But I was stupid. I should have just bolted the second he came back into my life.”

“But you didn't.”

“I didn't. I got lazy. I didn't think I was, but I was. You let
your guard down for an instant, and the people looking for you will find you. Trust me.”

“So Billy works for you?”

“
Worked
. He did a few jobs. Some minor contract work that I overpaid him for. Setting up safe houses for clients. Helping with IDs. That kind of thing.”

The jukebox shifted to Guns N' Roses.
Sweet Child o' Mine
.

“I have to say,” Black said. “He was good at it. Had a knack for helping people disappear. I mean, he only did some of the smaller things, but he was good. I just didn't trust him. Just knew one day he'd be a problem. Guy is so wound up. Just always waiting to explode. No sense of the world around him, you know?”

“Yes,” Hannah replied. “I know. It was like…like he was surrounded by ghosts all the time. Tormenting him. All he could do was lash out blindly, and his fists always found something to connect with.”

Black swallowed the rest of his drink and set the glass down. “Did he hit you?”

Hannah was so shocked she nearly laughed. “You don't know?”

“No.”

“You were with him two years in prison, together for a month when you escaped, and then you worked together. He never mentioned me?”

Black shook his head. “Never. Yapping all day long and never said one word about you. He talked about his wife and one daughter. Justine.”

One daughter
.

That pissed Hannah off, as if somehow the idea of Billy disowning Hannah should matter. But it did. It mattered like the way in a dream where your lover cheated on you,
in front of you
, and wondered why you were so upset. He was
not
allowed to disregard her existence. She could be hated, but she would not be ignored. After all, Billy went to prison because of what he did to Hannah. Not Justine.

She took a long sip of her drink that she wished she could freeze in time.

She asked, “Did he tell you why he was sent to prison in the first place?”

“He only just said he was innocent. That's the battle cry of the guilty, of course. But no. He never told me the initial charge. I assumed it was a domestic.”

Hannah gulped the rest of her drink and slammed the glass against the lacquered wood of the table. The noise was loud enough to stop the mumbled conversation of the bar's remaining soldiers. The ensuing silence let them all hear Hannah's declaration.

“I tried to set him on fire,” she said.

Black held up his hand. “Keep it down,” he told her.

Hannah turned and saw Jill standing by the bar, frozen in place like a mannequin, looking at both of them. Hannah raised her glass and shook it between her fingers.
Bring me another, bitch
.

Hannah no longer cared who heard her, but she lowered her voice anyway. Now was not the time to make things difficult.

“One Thanksgiving night he beat my mom for the millionth time, and I couldn't sit and watch any more. He fell asleep in his favorite chair, and I poured gasoline on his feet. I had the lighter in my hand.” She looked up at Black, whose face remained unmoved but his eyes had grown just the slightest bit wider. “I was going to set him on fire,” she continued. “The whole house. I would have done it, and I would have watched him burn to death. Then I would have run away with my mom and sister and we never would have looked back.”

Black's expression was one of sudden clarity, as if he just understood why it was important to her that she be the one to light Grizzly on fire.

“But you didn't do it,” Black said. “Smooth didn't have any burns on him, least none I ever saw.”

“He woke up. Woke up and smiled at me. Told me, ‘Better
finish what you started, Hannie. You light me up, or I'm gonna come and kill you.'”

“Jesus.”

Hannah was silent as Jill approached and set another drink in front of her. And she was silent as she walked away, suddenly not wanting to jump right back into a story she had rarely talked about with anyone. But since there was little left to tell, she took a gulp of her drink—more Jack and less Coke this time, as if the bartender just
knew
—and finished.

“I tried to do it,” she said. “I brought the flame to the gas, but he was too fast. He stomped on my hand, and the flame went out. And that was it for me.”

This time Black was silent as she paused.

“It was the first time he had laid his hands on me. It had only ever been my mother, though with her he'd always used an open hand. Not with me. I got his fists. I was fifteen. My mother finally called the police, something she never did when she'd been the victim. When they arrived, I was on the floor near his feet, unconscious. He was sitting back in his favorite chair. Smoking a cigarette, so I'm told. Watching TV.” Another swallow, and then she began to feel the dulling of her brain, the glorious dampening of her senses that a second drink offered when it was made strong enough. “
That's
why Billy went to jail. Because he liked to beat up women and girls.”

Black stared at her awhile longer, then dropped his gaze when she kept staring back.

“How bad?” he asked.

“Bad enough.”

“You healed well.”

“I was lucky.” But there was nothing truly lucky about five stitches above her eye, or multiple contusions to the chest, shoulders, and left cheek. She hadn't been killed, and hadn't had any permanent damage. So, yeah, if that was lucky, so be it.

“No wonder he never said anything,” Black said. “He did
have a temper. Got into a lot of fights. He was usually on the losing side of them.”

“He wasn't used to people hitting back.” Seconds later she swallowed the contents of her glass, the second drink disappearing so much faster than her first.

Black pointed at her empty glass.

“Want another?” he asked.

“I'm getting drunk tonight, so, yes.”

He nodded in somber acceptance of this, not seeming to endorse her idea, nor dissuading her from it. Black held up two fingers for Jill.

“Where did you go after that? Did you stay in the house?”

“That's the best part of the story,” Hannah said. She tilted her glass and one last syrupy drop slid along her tongue, teasing her. “My mother became a wreck without Billy. She was so fucking dependent on him—and his beatings—that she didn't know how to survive without him. Much less take care of two girls. She claimed disability, though her only real disability was coping with life. For three years after Billy went to prison Justine and I took care of everything, taking the government checks and adding it to the income from the minimum-wage jobs I rotated through each afternoon after school. We barely scraped by, and there was no other family member willing to help us out. By the time my mom killed herself three years later, it was almost a relief. Drank herself to death.” Hannah looked at the empty glass on the table and offered a short, bitter laugh at it.

“There was a little insurance money, and that's when Justine and I moved out to Seattle. She was still a minor, but the courts gave me guardianship of my sister. I feel like I saved her, but sometimes I think Justine blames me for everything. As if that fucked-up life we had in Kansas gave her some kind of comfort. Structure.”

“Did he ever hit your sister?”

“No, never. He treated her the best of all of us. Though that means he just basically ignored her.”

He saved the verbal abuse for me and the physical abuse for Mom
, Hannah thought.
Justine always just watched. Watched and then hid. Billy never even seemed to notice her, yet she's the one he mentioned in prison. His one daughter Justine. I suppose his other daughter was dead to him at that point. Well, fine by me
.

“So you fired him?” Hannah asked. “You said he didn't work for you anymore.”

Black patted the welt on his forehead as if checking it was still there.

“We were about to part company,” he said. “He kept asking for more and more responsibility, more pay. I just didn't trust him. I knew I made a mistake in hiring him, despite his work. Peter and I were planning on moving on, taking what money we'd saved up and going somewhere else, establishing new identities, rebuilding our business.”

“But something happened,” Hannah said. She knew the answer before he responded.

“Yeah,” he said. “
You
happened.”

Black ordered food and waited until Jill walked away before he told Hannah anything else.

“It was the first I heard of you,” he said. “I hadn't seen Smooth in over a month. Didn't have any new work for him, and was starting to roll up my operation, getting ready to relocate. Peter was setting up new accounts for us. Truth was, I had a nice amount of cash saved up by that point, but not enough to be without work for an extended period of time. I wanted enough to retire, disappear forever. Europe. There's a little town on a lake in Italy I've had my eye on.”

“How much did you need to retire?” Hannah asked.

“A lot more than I had, and my lack of patience made me vulnerable. Smooth was a liability to me, but the money was coming in. Stupid. I should have disappeared the moment he came back in my life.”

“So it was his idea,” Hannah said. “He's the one who approached you about me?”

Black nodded. “Called me one day and said he had a job. A big one. I asked who the client was and he told me he was.”

“Not Dallin?”

“As far as I could tell, Dallin was just the bankroll for the job. But he wasn't the brains behind it.”

“So, why would Dallin do it?”

“I can't answer that for you.”

“You never asked?”

Black folded his arms on top of the table. “Hannah, I'm not noble. I'm a criminal. I murdered someone, then escaped from
prison. I didn't ask questions because Smooth, through your husband, offered me a fee that I couldn't turn down.”

“How much?”

“A half-million up front. Another half-million once the plan worked, meaning you disappeared. I agreed once they proved to me they had that kind of money, and once I was assured you weren't going to be hurt. But they didn't want you dead.” A fluorescent light above them buzzed and then finally died, dropping a shadow over half of his face. “They wanted you scared badly enough to want to disappear. Why? I don't know. They never told me. I figured it was something to do with wanting to avoid a costly divorce, and your husband was going to pay off Smooth as part of the plan. Now, based on what you told me, it seems part of the motivation was based on Smooth getting revenge.”

A million bucks, Hannah thought. Dallin was willing to pay a million dollars to make me disappear. But what was the point of any of it?

“But…but why not just kill me from the outset?”

“Hard to say for sure. But murder isn't an easy thing to pull off,” he said. “Especially the murder of a pretty white woman, particularly a rich one. The police would be all over it. If your marriage was bad, Dallin would be a suspect. The plan was for me to stay with you for at least six months, and then to always know where you were. That way, if Dallin or Billy were ever implicated in your murder, we could always produce you. Show you were actually alive. The plan would have failed by that point, but there wouldn't be a murder charge.”

Hannah fell back against the hard, cracked vinyl of the booth. “This is so fucked up.” She crossed her arms. “So everything about me being in danger was faked?”

“Yes. My job was to orchestrate everything.”

“Dallin speaking in his sleep was an acting job? Him shoving me against a wall and choking me?”

“Yes.”

Hannah stole a glance over to the bar where Jill leaned on the countertop and chatted with the bartender.

“Yes,” Black said. “Her, too. All an act.”

“And our chance meeting at the coffee shop?”

“Arranged,” Black said. “I was pretty certain you would stop there before meeting with Dallin. If not, I would have ‘bumped' into you in the street, just so you might remember me later.”

“And the guy shooting at us at your cabin?”

“Real bullets, but purposefully bad aim. If that shooter was for real, we'd have been killed instantly.”