She couldn’t bear knowing Catalina would get cremated then thrown into a trash can when no one claimed her ashes. Sparrow couldn’t chance the slight unlikely scenario in which I’d ever want to go visit her grave.
I spent the next couple days in my hotel room in Atlanta, ignoring phone calls, taking discreet meetings with local gang leaders and drug lords, and plotting my revenge on Gerald. On day three, I checked out and went to Catalina’s tombstone. Mrs. Masterson called to let me know they already put the stone up and asked if I wanted to go see it with her. I declined politely—there was only so much shitty apple pie and idle conversation a man could tolerate—but I still decided to make a pit stop at the cemetery before heading to the airport and back to Boston, mostly to ensure the bitch was six feet under and very much dead.
The mossy earth sank beneath my loafers as I buried my fists inside the pockets of my black pea coat, strolling toward the tombstone—smooth, fresh, and shiny, a memorial to my broken childhood.
I stopped when I reached it, smirking grimly when I noticed Sparrow had omitted the word ‘mother’ from Cat’s short list of titles. Guess it was petty o’clock when she placed the order for it.
The air was bitingly cold, unusually so for Georgia, the wind lashing against my face. I lit a cigarette between numb fingers, smirking around it as I used the tip of my loafer to smear a smudge of mud over the glossy stone, dirtying it up a little.
“Good riddance, sweetheart.”
I crouched down, touching the gravestone with the hand that held my cigarette, marveling at how brief human life was. One century at best was hardly enough time to enjoy what this planet had to offer.
“You know, Cat, I thought about killing you often enough. Every other month, maybe. There is something poetic in taking a life from the person who gave you one,” I tsked, surprised to discover I wasn’t as happy as I thought I’d be about her finally being gone. “But then it all boiled down to the same thing: killing a person is taking a risk. You were never worth the risk. That’s your life story in a nutshell, isn’t it, Catalina? Never more than an afterthought. So many lovers, and fake friends, and fiancés, and even a husband, yet no one has ever visited your grave. Only an eighty-five-year-old neighbor who would find Stalin lovable. I guess it’s goodbye.” I stood up, taking one last drag from my cigarette, flicking it over the tombstone then spitting on the lit ember to snuff it out.
I turned around without looking back.
Another one bites the dust.
“Do not let this spin out of control,” Troy warned the following day while we were sitting in my office in Badlands, enjoying a hot toddy—heavy on the whiskey—and the blissful sound of my workers running around in the hallway, fulfilling my orders.
He rifled through the stack of call logs between Catalina and Gerald from decades ago that I handed him a few minutes before. His fingers were still tinted blue from the outdoor cold, his pale face tinged pink by Boston’s winter’s bite.
“How did you even find this prehistoric piece of evidence?”
“I’m a very resourceful man,” I drawled.
“No shit.”
The first thing I did when I got to Boston was dig deeper into the Cat/Gerald affair and find out more about their relationship. From the calls they’d made to each other, the two had begun bumping uglies when I was four years old and ended on the cusp of her leaving when I was nine.
It was unbelievable and yet completely logical that the first and only time Catalina had said the truth was also the time she confessed to something as appalling as an affair with the man who paid me thirty million dollars annually to make his problems go away—and to never touch his daughter.
Catalina was a fucking headache, even after her death, but Gerald was the real villain of the story because his drug wasn’t crack cocaine. It was pussy, and he should have known better.
“Remember your sister is married to Gerald’s son. We’re family.” Troy smoothed a hand over his blazer, his expression loaded with hostility. Everything about him was cocked and ready to detonate like a loaded pistol.
We sat across from each other, me and my adoptive father, looking like a mirror image of one another. Same black Armani slacks, tailor-made for our gigantic size. Same Sicilian handmade loafers. Same black dress shirt—or navy blue, or dark gray, but never white; pale colors were highly impractical when part of your job description was drawing blood by the gallons.
Even our mannerism was comparable. He had an oral fixation he soothed with a toothpick that he stuck to the side of his mouth, and I used cigarettes.