“Hi, Daddy,” she said. “Long time, no see.”
40
Trevor Stone carried himself with as much composure as I’ve ever seen in any man who had a gun pointed at him.
He glanced at his daughter as if he’d seen her just yesterday, glanced at the gun as if it were a gift he didn’t much care for but wouldn’t refuse, and walked into the room and headed for his desk.
“Hello, Desiree. The suntan becomes you.”
She flipped her hair and tilted her head toward him. “You think?”
Trevor’s green eyes flicked across Julian’s face, then glanced my way. “And Mr. Kenzie,” he said. “I see you returned from Florida no worse for wear.”
“These sheets binding me to a chair notwithstanding,” I said, “I’m peachy, Trevor.”
He rested his hand on the desk as he came around behind it, then reached for the wheelchair by the windows and sat in it. Desiree pivoted on her knees, following him with the gun.
“So, Julian,” Trevor said, his rich baritone filling the large room, “you’ve chosen to side with youth, I see.”
Julian crossed his hands in front of his waist, tilted his head toward the floor. “It was the most pragmatic option, sir. I’m sure you understand.”
Trevor opened the ebony humidor on his desk and Desiree cocked the pistol.
“Just a cigar, my dear.” He withdrew a Cuban the length of my calf, snipped the end off, and lit it. Small circles of smoke puffed from the fat coal as he sucked in his ruined cheeks repeatedly and got it going, and then a rich, almost oak-leaf smell permeated my nostrils.
“Hands where I can see them, Daddy.”
“I wouldn’t dream of doing otherwise,” he said and leaned back in the chair, puffed a ring into the air above his head. “So, you’ve come to finish the job those three Bulgarians couldn’t manage on the bridge last year.”
“Something like that,” she said.
He tilted his head and looked at her out of the corner of his eye. “No, it’s exactly like that, Desiree. If your speech is nebulous, remember, your mind will appear to be so as well.”
“Trevor Stone’s Rules of Engagement,” she said to me.
“Mr. Kenzie,” he said, back to staring at the rings he exhaled, “have you sampled my daughter?”
“Daddy,” Desiree said. “Really.”
“No,” I said. “Haven’t had the pleasure. Which makes me unique in this room, I think.”
His ruined lips formed their imitation of a smile. “Ah, so Desiree’s fantasy of our having a sexual history persists.”
“You told me yourself, Daddy: If something works, stick with it.”
Trevor winked at me. “I’m not without sin, but I do draw the line at incest.” He turned his head. “And Julian, how did you find my daughter’s technique in the bedroom? Was it satisfactory?”
“Quite,” Julian said, and his face twitched.
“Better than her mother’s?”
Desiree’s head jerked around to look at Julian, then jerked back to Trevor.
“I wouldn’t know about her mother’s, sir.”
“Come now.” Trevor chuckled. “Don’t be modest, Julian. For all we know, you’re this child’s father, not me.”
Julian’s hands tightened, and his feet parted slightly. “You’re imagining things, sir.”
“Am I?” Trevor turned his head and winked at me.
I felt like I was locked in a Noël Coward play that had been rewritten by Sam Shepard.
“You think this is going to work?” Desiree said. She rose off her knees. “Daddy, I am so beyond normal concepts of proper and improper sexual behavior, it’s not even quantifiable.” She stepped past me and came around the desk behind him. She leaned over his shoulders. She placed the muzzle of her gun against the left side of his forehead then drew it across to the right so hard the target sight left a thin line of blood. “If Julian were my biological father, so what?”
Trevor watched as a drop of blood fell from his forehead and landed on his cigar.
“Now, Dad,” she said and nipped his left earlobe, “let’s push you out into the center of the room where we can all be together.”
Trevor puffed on his cigar as she pushed, trying to appear as casual as he had when he entered the room, but I could see that it was beginning to wear on him. Fear had found its way into his proud chest, into the cast of his eyes and the set of his ruined jaw.
Desiree pushed him around to the front of the desk until he was facing me, the two of us sitting in our chairs, wondering if we’d ever stand up again.
“How’s it feel, Mr. Kenzie?” Trevor said. “Bound there, helpless, wondering which breath will be your last?”
“You tell me, Trevor.”
Desiree left us and walked over to Julian and they whispered for a moment, her gun pointed straight at the back of her father’s head.
“You’re the wily type,” Trevor said, leaning forward, his voice lowered. “Any suggestions?”
“Far as I can see, Trevor, you’re fucked.”
He gestured with his cigar. “As are you, boy.”
“A little less so, though.”
He raised his eyebrows at my mummified body. “Really? I think you’re mistaken. But if the two of us put our heads together, why we might—”
“I knew a guy once,” I said, “he molested his son, had his wife killed, caused a gang war in Roxbury and Dorchester which killed sixteen children at least.”
“And?” Trevor said.
“And I liked him more than I like you,” I said. “Not by much, mind you. I mean, he was a scumbag, you’re a scumbag, it’s sort of like having to choose between two types of crotch rot. But still, he was poor, no education, society had shown him in a million different ways how little a fuck it gave about him. But you, Trevor, you’ve had everything a man could want. And it wasn’t enough. You still bought your wife like she was a sow at the county fair. You still took a baby you brought into the world and turned it into a monster. This guy I was talking about? He was responsible for the death of at least twenty people, that I know of. Probably a lot more. And I put him down like a dog. Because that’s what he deserved. But you? With a calculator, I bet you couldn’t add up all the people whose deaths you’ve been responsible for, whose lives you’ve destroyed or made unbearable over the years.”