Page 76 of The Twins

Charles

LOS ANGELES - PAST

Tara cameto work with a bruised neck, and I’m incapable of taking my eyes from the horrid sight. She threw on a scarf for camouflage, but she doesn’t fool me.

“Stop looking at me like that,” Tara hisses. She furiously types on her laptop, and I let her do as she pleases. Under any other circumstance, I’d hold her at gunpoint and pull the name of the bastard who hurt her out of her mouth.

“Tara’s kinky,” Vegas yawns into my ear. He’s got his feet on the table, right next to my pack of cigarettes. “No need to humiliate her like that.”

“There’s no fucking need to leave bruises like that on our friend, isn’t there?” I insist. Tara throws back her blue hair. She keeps it longer these days. Out of neglect? I’m not sure.

“Like you haven’t done it before,” Vegas teases me, but the smirk’s missing. He doesn’t smile much these days, and he can’t stop sounding like a bitter bitch. “You’ve done worse, old man.”

Tara shuts her laptop with viciousness. “Can’t I have a bad night for once without you being all over it? Please! Just let me live my life!”

She runs out of the task force’s office, cursing and throwing things as she goes. LA’s loud, but I still hear her rev up her engine to leave the police department we now work at. It’s a bigger office than the one in San Ricardo, and the fact that I hear her all the way from the parking lot means that she stunned the rest of the department into silence.

“What happened?” Remo asks, huffing out a breath. He just returned from his bathroom break. He joins us at the table as we sit at while I take a cigarette out.

I light it, and I anticipate for the alarm to start ringing.

Careless, I know.

“Tara was choked by one of her boy toys, and Charles went all Daddy on her,” Vegas spits. “There’s only one girl we need to daddy, but she isn’t here, isn’t she? She’s in the east, doing whatever the fuck because we’re not there.”

“That’s why she wore the scarf?” Remo asks, ignoring Vegas’s poison about Grey.

I nod.

“That explains it. Scarves are too posh for her,” Remo says, mimicking Received Pronunciation with his words. “Any leads on the guy from London?”

“Nope,” I announce. “Our main researcher just left the building, as you can see.”

I point at Tara’s unkempt desk.

“Which guy are you talking about? Maybe I can help,” Vegas suggests. He’s having a good day, but that doesn’t mean I’ll let him in on this investigation. His superiors have urged me to keep him out of it.

“A guy whose wife is drugged up in a psych ward in London while he’s purchasing half of California’s real estate and most of the pussy-for-purchase in Las Vegas,” Remo explains. He fidgets with his ironed shirt.

“That sounds like any other man,” Vegas replies. His tone is harsh just to be harsh. There’s no purpose in antagonizing his older brother, but he does it anyway.

“Not every man has shady accounts in the Cayman Islands. Not every man buys underage girls’ time,” Remo explains, and I sense the implosion coming.

So, I step in.

“Go home, Vegas,” I say.

“Whatever.” In a similar fashion to Tara, Vegas pulls back his chair, and he leaves the office. He doesn’t look back. He makes sure that we hear the loud bang of the door as he shuts it behind him.

I exhale the smoke of my cigarette like nothing happened.

It’s been four years already, but the twins still bicker and bite each other’s heads off.

For reasons unexplained.

I miss Grey, too. I keep it the fuck together, though, don’t I?

I roll my eyes.

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