Wicked Break

Thirty-eight

“My brother’s really dead?” Linc asked.

“Yeah. You want the details?”

He thought about that for a moment, indecision lingering in his eyes before he finally nodded.

I told him about Peter hiring me, then finding the skinheads at his house, and how they’d killed him. I left out the specifics of what they did to me.

Linc leaned back in the sofa, his face heavy with something between sadness and anger. “It all blew up on me. And now I’m totally screwed.”

I had a million questions I wanted to ask Linc. But his body language indicated that he seemed on the verge of unloading his story-where he’d been, what he’d been doing-and I didn’t want to get in the way. Sometimes, the best way to get answers is to shut up and listen.

“Maybe that’s what I deserve.” He shifted his eyes toward me. “You know about our parents?”

“I know they’re dead.”

“My mom died of cancer.” He looked out the window. “It sucked.”

“I’m sure.”

He studied the window for a moment. “I need help. I don’t know how to get out of this on my own.”

I wasn’t willing to commit to anything yet. “Then you better keep talking.”

He drummed his fingers on his thigh, his anxiety trying to work itself out. The anger was now removed from his expression, replaced entirely with a look of desolation and dejection.

“My dad died in a fight,” he said with a twisted smile. “He was a skinhead. But he hated that term. He liked Aryan Warrior or Caucasian Centrist.” He shook his head. “So fucking stupid.”

“You don’t believe in that stuff?”

He raised an eyebrow. “That’s what you’ve heard, right? That I followed in his footsteps?”

“Yeah.”

“You have to be really fucked up to believe in that shit,” he said. “I’m not.”

I resisted the urge to point out that non-fucked-up college students didn’t usually sell guns.

“Then why did your aunt tell me you were involved?” I asked.

He ran a hand through his hair and took a deep breath. “I wanted to know my dad. After my mom died…I needed to know him. It was the only way I could figure out how to get close to him.” He paused. “I thought if I understood it better, I could find a way to pull him out of it.” He paused again. “Peter wanted no part of him. He had just written our dad off, but I couldn’t do it. I thought maybe he could still end up being a regular dad. Or at the very least, a dad who was pretty much normal.”

Peter had told me about the rift between him and his brother. Peter had probably taken Linc’s ideas as lunacy and Linc had obviously taken Peter’s resistance as cowardice. Both of them had been half right and all wrong.

“You can’t fake it,” Linc continued. “To really be accepted, I had to act the part. To everyone, even my family.” His eyes shifted away from me again. “And I thought it was the only way for me to really understand what he thought was so great about hating people.”

He rubbed his hands together like he was cold.

“But it was…awful,” he said. “And I didn’t understand why my dad believed in it.” He leaned forward. “And it just hurt that my dad was such a piece of crap.” He looked up, embarrassment and sorrow shaping his face. “Because he really was. Peter was right all along.”

I thought about my own parents. I knew next to nothing about my own father, something I had learned to conveniently compartmentalize out of my life. I wasn’t close to my mother and I still didn’t understand why she couldn’t pull herself out from the boozy haze that had become her life.

He was telling me a story I knew pretty well.

“I was trying to figure out how to leave National Nation when my dad was stabbed outside a bar,” he said, his voice cracking. “A couple of black guys gave him what he deserved.” He paused and cleared his throat, tears clinging to the corners of his eyes. “Only he was my dad, you know? He was an asshole, but he was still my dad.”

I stayed quiet, giving him time to compose himself.

He wiped the tears away. “And then I just got pissed at the world. Peter for not trying to help, my friends for not really understanding. My dad got me involved in some hateful shit, but I didn’t tell anyone because I was sick of everyone telling me what an asshole he was. I learned that the hard way. I didn’t need to be reminded.”

He sat up a little straighter. “My dad used my place to stash and sell guns.”

“Why your place?”

“He lived out in Bonita and he was worried that his neighbors would get suspicious if they saw too many people coming and going,” he answered. “Anyway, after he died, I wanted to get rid of the guns. All these gang-looking guys were hanging around my apartment. It didn’t take much to figure out who they were. I knew Lonnie from the group and he told me what to charge and to give the money to him after they were sold. It wasn’t hard to hook up and before long I was dealing with them. What the fuck else was I going to do with a dresser full of guns?”

I thought of a lot of things but said nothing.

“I figured I’d just get rid of them and be done with it,” he said. “But Moreno and those guys bought a lot. When I turned the money over to Lonnie the first time I sold, he freaked because it was so much. So instead of only selling what I had, Lonnie kept giving me more. I didn’t know how to say no. That guy scared the shit out of me.”

I knew the feeling.

Linc shuffled his feet on the floor and the soles squeaked on the wood.

“Then I got sort of comfortable with it,” he said, shaking his head. “I was friendly with the gang guys. Lonnie acted like I was his best friend. It was easy. Easier than telling the truth, anyway.”

Linc had jumped into something that had overwhelmed him. He’d forced himself into believing that going along was better than getting out. It may have been easier, but it wasn’t better.

“But then it changed,” Linc said, his eyes moving away from me. “It all completely changed and I had to get out of it.”

“What happened?”

He sat still, his eyes focused on the window. “I knew it was wrong, you know? I really did. I knew I was being a coward, and for a while I thought I could live with that. But then…I realized I couldn’t.”

“How were you planning on getting out of this, Linc?” I asked.

“I was just gonna go down to Mexico or to Arizona and lay low for a while,” he said. “I figured I’d sort it out when I got out of San Diego.”

“So what changed?” I repeated. “It just hit you that it was wrong?”

His gaze on the window was so intent I wasn’t sure if he’d heard me.

“Linc?” I said.

“She changed it,” he finally answered, his voice catching.

On my initial visit to his apartment, the girls had explained Rachel’s relationship with Linc. He wrote her papers and she slept with him in return. Maybe it had turned into more than that for Linc.

“How did Rachel change things?” I asked.

He moved his eyes back to me, confusion on his face. “Rachel?”

“You said, ‘She changed it.’ How did Rachel change things?”

He shook his head. “Rachel didn’t change anything.”

Now I was the confused one. “Then who are we talking about?”

Linc Pluto turned back to the window and the tears reappeared in his eyes. “Malia. Malia changed everything.”