Page 77 of Ballistic

“We got time.”

“Dax … you don’t want to know. Trust me.”

“It’s easier, right? You see something you can’t unsee.”

His stare burned in my periphery, yet I still kept my attention on the cards, as his words brought to mind the faces of the women during my captivity, and Eden.

“Something that just keeps spinning and spinning inside your head, and when you try to make sense of it, you feel your instincts kick in. To reject it, but you can’t. So you pop a pill, and then you don’t have to think anymore. The pill thinks for you. Tells you everything is going to be okay. All you gotta do, is make sure there’s another pill waiting for you.”

Only another addict would understand. Only someone who’d been through some insurmountable shit would know that fragile line between morals and goals, and just trying to cope and survive. Every moment with Dax felt like another thread unspooling inside of me and latching onto him. It felt good to be tethered to something, yet I knew, at some point, those strings would snap and I’d find myself drifting again.

“Is that how it was for you?” I asked, in a desperate attempt to reel in the loose threads.

“You’re lying if you say it wasn’t that way for you. I didn’t tell you a personal experience. It’s every addict’s story. Only difference between all of us is the single thing that pushes us over the edge. So, what was yours?” He brushed his finger across my neck, where the scar of Villam’s knife answered for me. “What made a determined woman fall into that empty space?”

A shadow moved in my periphery and I lifted my gaze past Dax, to where a fat, bald man stumbled toward the Astro van. “Leaving.”

“What?”

“Kenny. He’s leaving the bar.”

Dax snapped his head back, and when the van pulled forward onto the main road, he fired up the ‘Cuda. “Must’ve cut the game early.”

“Did you tell him anything?”

“Who? Frank? Hell, no. Kenny would’ve been dead and buried the moment he set foot inside that bar, if I had.”

Which would’ve been the sweetest justice, if not for the fact that I wouldn’t have had the pleasure of watching his face strain against agonizing pain.

As Dax trailed after the gray van, my heart hammered inside my chest.

My next act of vengeance would be my worst yet.

29

Dax

Keeping two car lengths behind, I stalked the Astro van through the city and down a dark side street, where the houses bore the telling decay of slowly declining economics. Most neighborhoods in Detroit looked that way—as if they’d stood through war and its depressing aftermath.

I slowed the ‘Cuda to a crawl and rolled to a stop half a block from where the van idled along, veering toward the curb on occasion.

Kenny turned the vehicle into the driveway of a weathered white house, the width of which was smaller than its length. He’d clearly gotten drunk, evident in his stumbling and swaying as he struggled to make it up the porch steps. The screen door sat cockeyed on its hinges, which he threw back carelessly, tripping forward with the effort, before disappearing inside the dark house.

Lights in the lower level flicked on.

From the corner of my eye, I caught Nicoleta reaching for the passenger door, and I set my hand on her arm.

“Give it a minute. He might pass out.”

“I don’t want him to pass out. I want him to see what’s coming for him.”

I squeezed harder, and she lowered her hand with a disappointed huff.

Through the naked picture window at the front of the house, Kenny fell into a recliner, the shiny crown of his head peeking over the top of the chair, as he flicked on the TV.

“Must’ve gotten too drunk and blew through his cash early.”

Arms crossed, Nicoleta glanced over at me and shrugged a shoulder. “Must be shitty at poker.”