Free Watch Your Back by Karen Rose Page B

wash your face. I’ll finish mashing the potatoes and setting the table.’
    Steeling her shoulders, she turned for the powder room, her step even less steady than it had been, and once again Sam cursed his father to burn in hell. Even dead, the old man managed to break his mother’s heart.
    He widened the mouth of the envelope to slide the hat and the pictures back in, but paused. Stuck in the bottom of the envelope, snagged by the bubble wrap, was a matchbook. Carefully he worked it loose, pulled it out. Then froze. On the matchbook’s face was a drawing of a woman wearing nothing but bunny ears, with ‘The Rabbit Hole’ printed beneath.
    His heart was suddenly pounding so hard it was all he could hear. The Rabbit Hole . The powder room door was still closed. His mother hadn’t seen. Thank God .
    That the matchbook would be among his father’s things should have come as no surprise. It would have been the kind of sleazy place his father would have patronized, but it wasn’t the kind of place Sam frequented. His mom had brought him up better than that. Sam had never been to the place.
    Except that one time.
    That one night. The night he’d made himself forget.
    Oh my God . He thought about the timing of the arrival of the envelope in his hand and had to swallow back a wave of nausea.
    It’s not possible. It’s just not .
    The water stopped and he heard his mother’s shuffling steps in the hall. Guiltily, Sam shoved the matchbook into his pants pocket.
    Looking more worn than he’d seen her in weeks, his mother returned to the kitchen and lowered herself into a chair. She opened her clenched fist and stared at the ring on her palm. ‘I just don’t understand why today of all days,’ she said wearily. ‘Who could be so cruel? Who would even know?’ She didn’t look away from the ring. ‘When was that envelope mailed?’
    Sam’s hand trembled as he turned the envelope over to check the postmark. ‘Yesterday.’ Oh my God. This is not happening. Not possible . But it was happening. ‘From Baltimore.’
    ‘Yesterday,’ she repeated dully. ‘The day I threw him out was eight years ago yesterday.’
    Sam had to lock his knees to keep them from buckling. ‘I didn’t know that was the day you threw him out. I thought you threw him out months before.’
    ‘I did. But he came back that night, not wearing his ring. So I threw him out and told him to never come back. And he didn’t.’
    That night  . . . The night he’d gone to the Rabbit Hole had been eight years ago yesterday.
    The night that had come before the morning he’d woken alone in a dirty hotel room on the wrong side of town, hung over and smelling like a brewery.
    With a revolver on the floor beside him. A revolver that was not his Baltimore PD issued sidearm. A revolver that been fired recently.
    The morning he’d woken hadn’t been the very next day. He’d woken just before dawn, thirty hours later . Not a moment of which he had any recollection of whatsoever.
    He’d lost a day of his life. He’d lost this day of his life, eight years ago.
    Dad, what the fuck did you do? Sam carefully exhaled. And what the fuck did I do?
    Saturday, March 15, 6.05 P.M.
    Two women were dead, their faces etched in Stevie’s mind. The woman who’d done nothing more than show up for a wedding anniversary lunch with her husband had died in the ambulance on the way to the hospital. As had the waitress, who’d done nothing more than show up for work. Because of bullets meant for me .
    Stevie paused at the bottom of her front porch steps, looking up at her house with weary determination. Déjà vu. She’d stood just like this a few hours ago, looking up at the stairs leading up to Harbor House’s front door, cursing each step, her useless leg, and the crazy teenaged bitch who’d shot her three months ago.
    Now she was cursing the steps, her useless leg, her arm that throbbed and burned like hellfire, the crazy teenaged bitch who’d shot her three