Page 36 of Tank
“He called me Angel,” I said in a dead tone.
“Angel of death, maybe.” She snorted as she said it. I let out a huffed laugh. Her words were true. Before all of this, it wouldn’t have bothered me and I might have even found some sort of pride in it. But right then it made me feel small, wrong, and a little bit angry.
“I don’t think I can do it,” I mumbled then chewed the inside of my cheek.
There was a long intake of breath on her end. She let it out slowly and I could tell she was trying to put her words together. I wanted her to let go and tell me everything she knew. Like I needed another fucking reason to hate myself.
“Walk away, then,” she said like it was that simple.
“I can’t,” I said automatically. But it wasn’t for the reasons she was probably thinking. “Yeah, my name is already fucked, I get that, so I could just ride off into the sunset and hang up my holster. I could. That doesn’t bother me…at least not as much as it would have three months ago.” I let that hang in the air because I couldn’t bring myself to speak the words that I felt in my heart.
“But you can’t leave him,” she whispered with a slight romantic sigh in her voice. This time it was me who snorted. “Go to him.” Her pitch was high. She was having one of those squealing girly moments and I was not about to indulge in her fantasy.
“Um, no. You’re fucking nuts if you think I’m going to do that. I don’t even know why I called you.” I laughed, but it was tight. My throat fought against the lump I tried to swallow down. Because for a split second, I contemplated it. Fuck, I needed to stop reading those damn novels.
And then I found myself smiling at the memory of him telling me that romance novels were also his guilty pleasure. I wanted to know how it was that he started reading them. Was it because of a girlfriend? Wife? The thoughts sent a surge of jealousy through me. A weird fucking feeling. Something I was not used to and I definitely didn’t like.
“Holy shit! You’re thinking about it,” she screeched in my ear.
How was it that I found myself forgetting I was on the phone with her? I never had before I came to this damn town. This job had me off my game. Staying in one place for too long had really messed me up. Yeah, even as I thought that, I wasn’t convinced it was either of those things.
It wasn’t the job necessarily. It was the person.
“No,” I barked and she had the damn nerve to laugh at me. I was too pissy to say anything else. After her laughter died, the air got seriously silent. I could hear her brain going across the line.
“I think you should let this one go. He’s a good person and he’s been through a lot.” There was a pause, the tension spreading thick in the air as I waited for her to say something else. “Your employer is the reason his son is dead,” she whispered. Then the line went dead.
And fuck me, her words were like an arrow through the heart.
