Lassiter

8 The Taste of Wet Steel

Amy Larkin had been sitting on the motel room bed, cleaning a pistol when Lassiter called. Now she hung up the phone and pushed the brush through the barrel of the gun, scrubbing out wet streaks of lead.

Her father’s gun. A Sig Sauer.380 that fit her hand comfortably. She’d never known he owned a weapon until he ended his life just six weeks earlier. One shot to the temple, with this very gun.

It was the beginning of this whirlwind. When she found the photo with her father’s angry scribble on the back. “The Whore of Babylon.”

How Amy hated the self-righteous bastard. He had been so much happier believing sin-not the dysfunctional Larkin family-destroyed Krista. God, how Amy missed her sister. There had been an emptiness inside her from the day Krista left.

Oh, the damage our parents can inflict. When she was still a teenager, Amy’s father had berated her.

“Your sister is Satan’s mistress, and you’re her handmaiden!”

“All I did was kiss the boy, Dad.”

“Why don’t you run away the way Krista did?”

No, she wouldn’t do that. There was a better way to put distance between herself and her screwed-up family. As a child, she kept her parents hidden from her friends. Mom praying in tongues, Dad withdrawn into his silent world. Amy threw herself into schoolwork. She studied hard, paid her own way through Ohio State, and became a solid citizen with a 9-to-5 job and a 401k.

Whatever neuroses had been implanted at home, she’d buried inside. The anxiety, the sense of dread, all sealed tight beneath her polished exterior.

Why, then, was she unable to shake her mother’s teachings? Why, when all logic told her that her mother’s faith stemmed from ancient superstitions-not the word of God-did she still pray for the divine healing promised by the Holy Ghost? The contradictions chiseled away at her.

She jammed the brush through the barrel of the Sig Sauer, her thoughts turning to Lassiter. In just a few hours, he claimed to have found a lead.

“A guy Krista was involved with,” was the way he put it.

Was he telling the truth? Or was he just coming up with a sideshow, some distraction to protect himself or someone else? An old teammate, maybe.

At first, she had thought Lassiter was just another man-beast, like so many she had known. Hiding their fangs behind toothy grins, oiling their way into women’s beds.

Losers.

Users.

Abusers.

She had no proof that he had harmed Krista. But her instincts told her he had lied about that night at the strip club. He knew more about Krista than he was telling. Could he have killed her?

She squeezed her eyes shut, imagined herself pistol-whipping Lassiter, demanding the truth, threatening to blow his brains out. Would he talk? Revenge fantasies, her shrink had told her, were unhealthy. Yeah, well so is losing your sister.

Amy placed a white patch on the end of the push rod, dipped it in solvent, and cleaned the barrel of powder residue. She imagined it was the very residue of the bullet that entered her father’s brain. Next, she dripped oil on a clean cloth and wiped down the gun, inhaling the wet steel smell that somehow reminded her of the taste of gin.

She would meet with Lassiter. Could he really get the State Attorney to help? And if he did, would that be proof that Lassiter wasn’t involved in Krista’s disappearance?

“The State Attorney is a friend of mine.”

A cover-up. A conspiracy. Not out of the question. A network of old pals who looked out for one another, covered one anothers’ asses.

An official investigation was something she hadn’t expected. She doubted, after all this time, that the authorities would be interested. She considered for a moment the implications if Lassiter was on the up-and-up. If the State Attorney opened an honest inquiry, could he discover what happened to Krista? Could he gather enough evidence for a prosecution?

A trial was not what she had been planning. That was a secret she would have to keep from Lassiter. She had not come to Miami to prosecute the man who murdered her sister. She had come here to kill him.