Page 23 of Breakdown
Before she even got a chance to take a step, there was a rap on the glass door. Everyone in the shop started at once. It was hard to see the knocker; it was too bright in the garage compared to the falling evening outside, and the reflection distorted his view.
“Fuck off, we’re closed,” Peter barked, scowling, even as the door swung inwards. Jordan must’ve forgotten to lock it behind him when he came in.
“I will handle it,” Nik volunteered, leaving Peter with a brief, soothing pat on the shoulder.
The woman gracefully sidestepped him as he tried to intercept her, making a beeline for the bay and the Bauers. She was a slip of a thing, and as light on her feet as any thief Peter had ever met. There was a sense of purpose in her stride. She hadn’t wandered in here by mistake, looking for someone to fix a flat. She was a professional.
Then she removed her sunglasses and Peter’s heart stopped. “Hi, buttercup, hi, sweet-pea. Long time, no see, huh?”
It was his mother.
Interlude
Cynthia, Twenty-Three Years Ago
IT WAS THE WEIGHT OFit that she couldn’t stand. She was free once, gloriously free, when she boarded that greyhound to the west coast. She raised two middle fingers to Winterset, to her grifter father and his vodka stench, and his blunt, heavy fists, and all the useless whispers that came with the bruises. Glancing back as the gleaming silver bus crossed the Iowa state line, Cynthia thought right then and there that she’d put all her troubles behind her.
In the end, they caught up with her—not then at seventeen, cocksure and working reckless gigs for the most dangerous men and women in LA, not at twenty, strung-out and desperately clinging to the tightening web of affection from Erik Bauer, the worst of all of them, but today, now, in the wreck of her kitchen, thirty-three years old and as wrung out as the foul-smelling washcloth draped over the faucet.
Her fault. She should have rinsed it, should have done the dishes in the sink, should have wiped the crumbs from the counter and scrubbed down that burnt-on black shit from the stovetop, should have showered, should have changed out of her frayed, stinking robe at some point today, should have tucked the twins in. Should have done better,beenbetter, a better daughter, a better sister, a better mother, a better wife. Should have. Could have. Didn’t.
Cynthia rubbed—idly at first and then with a grim purpose—at a plum-colored stain encircling her forearm, grinding her thumb into the thin, freckled skin until it grew red as well as purple, and it was only then that she remembered that it was a fading bruise. Some minor or major infraction she’d committed that she couldn’t even recall. It didn’t really matter. Everything seemed to be fair game these days for him.
She needed a cigarette. She needed something stronger than a cigarette. Erik was due back any moment and the only thing that could make any of this bearable was shaving off the corners of her consciousness.
Erik had made it difficult to score coke but at least the benzos were easy to come by. She rotated between several walk-in clinics around the city where the doctors were all too eager to prescribe something for a polite, well-dressed woman’s ‘nervous disposition.’ It was the only con she could pull these days. The drugs were great, getting away with it was almost as good. As long as she acted the part, her medicine cabinet stayed stocked with neat little bottles of anything she wanted with her name right on it. Someone’s name, anyways. She was using a lot of aliases these days. She’d started to run out, to be honest, and had taken to resurrecting some of her old ones. Maybe it was sloppy, but after ten years, she didn’t think the LAPD would still be looking for Jane M. Cain or Jen Thompson. There was a nostalgia to it. They felt like old friends.
She smiled slowly, remembering that bright, shining, fearless woman she no longer was. It was the 80s, no better time for a grift and back when a cocaine addiction was seen as a fun personality quirk. LA’s underworld loved her then: whip-smart, morally flexible, and with a good ear for half-a-dozen languages. She traded in information and cash.
Erik had capitalized on that, plying her with more drugs and pumping her for every useful scrap of knowledge he could to grow his empire. Then, when he’d used her up, he had let them know she’d betrayed them. She had to stay with him. He’d alienated her from almost everyone else.
When Cynthia first stepped off the bus in LA, she wandered into the first pool hall she came across and started hustling. She didn’t know it was a front for the D’Abramo crime family, and she sure as shit didn’t know who Frank was when she chose him as her mark. She’d gotten lucky that night. Instead of killing her, he tasked her with odd jobs when he needed a honey pot, a distraction, or a runner who could keep their mouth shut. And she gained a friend in the process, as much as anyone could be friends with the Don-in-training of the south side. He felt like the only friend she still had left in this town. But even he brushed her off the last time she’d been looking to score.
“I’ll see what I can do, but no promises. You don’t want to see what this city looks like during a gang war,dolchezza, and your husband’s been making threats.” In the end, he’d sent her off with an eight ball and the implication not to ask him again. “But if there is anything else you need...”
What she needed was to get out of here.
