No one knew if her face was black and blue when she hit the water

But it was when they dragged her out

Are the rumors true, did you see those empty bottles?

They had come to see what the fuss was all about

— Natalie Wood, TV Girl

April 1973

"Take it off," I urged as I swayed in front of our bed and flicked the lamp on— the shade had been advertised as imitation-rococo to me, but was really closer to baroque if you squinted, and the mislabeling got on my nerves whenever I saw it. I'd picked up all sorts of talents in the past few years, and interior design was just one of them. I twisted my torso in Curly's direction as I sprawled across the mattress and rolled over onto my side; through our open window and the light rain, the street lights gleamed blurry like gold ingots at the bottom of a stream. "God, this thing is killin' me."

"That the only reason you want it off?" Curly asked, a little low and dirty; he was a big man, but he was gentler than you'd expect with the zipper, pausing halfway down to yank some of the gauzy fabric out of the teeth. It pooled on the ground like a sinkhole, leaving me in my bra and black stockings that came halfway up my thighs, and I was already undoing the bra behind my back. "C'mon now."

"It ain't no small one," I said wryly, massaging the angry red indents it had left along my shoulders and hips; it was a gift from my aunt Rose, who thought she was providing helpful encouragement for me to drop the last of the baby weight. I would've crumpled it into a ball and thrown it into the back of my closet— I could afford any dress I wanted nowadays, and to cut it up afterwards— if badly-judged presents weren't the sole way the two of us communicated these days. Then I lunged for his pants, which had one complicated button arrangement. "Think you ought to finish what you started."

"You reckon anyone noticed?" Curly asked with a smirk starting to play around the edges of his mouth, banking on the answer being yes. I got a powerful sense of déjà vu remembering my senior year at Will Rogers— what little I had attended of it, anyway— and getting kicked out of the library for necking behind the shelves. "Shit, was that a close call, when Quique decided he wanted to talk shop—"

I could've wrung his head off his neck, the entire five minutes he was standing there and wasting product cutting messy lines with his credit card, sucking them up with a godawful snot-hocking sound like he had a bad case of hayfever. I didn't really snort, myself— not because I was worried about overdosing, it just wasn't my brand of kicks, got me too jumpy in my own skin rather than getting me in the partying mood— which made it all the more revolting to watch as he finished up and then proceeded to work the dust into his gums. While his world sped up, mine slowed to a terminal crawl.

"Poor fucker can't even take a hint when he ain't soused," Curly said with a rueful shake of his head, running his warm palms up and down my bare upper arms. The machinations of a gangbanger's inner circle, as Curly held court every Friday night, bore more resemblance to a high school girls' social club than you'd think— with even more crying and catfighting, after the third round of drinks. "Else I'd swear he wanted to get a look at the action."

"I was thinkin' about him, on the drive home."

He raised an eyebrow; fortunately, he was waiting for a punchline. "Darlin', you know I'd give you anything you want," he said with an exaggerated southernness to it, gesturing at the pearl necklace slung over the edge of my bedside table. "But I gotta draw the line somewhere, and I think sharin' you with the dumbest hood on my payroll is it." He started to tug the stockings down, careful to avoid tearing the nylon. "Or were you plannin' to run off together in his Chevy Impala?"

My response was both immediate and prissy— "that ain't what I meant, ugh, you think I want to provide a charity service for every hood in the crew that can't get laid?" I wasn't quite lit enough to let loose with the obvious joke, asking if that meant he'd be more willing to share me with one of the sharper ones, like Sergio. "You were fucking me, the whole time. He was just watching."

Curly shucked his shirt after he detached it from his elbow and started kissing at the side of my neck, along the juncture with my shoulder, mostly sweet and with a hint of teeth. I straddled his thigh as he stuck his hand between my legs again, and I sighed with relief. "Fuckin' you how?"

We didn't normally do it from behind; he was too sentimental, and I liked being able to open my eyes and see his face, remember that it was only him whenever I started to slip out of my body and leave a husk behind. It didn't happen so much, anymore, but I could never forget the time he'd brushed against my throat and I'd clawed at him to get loose, screaming, crying until I vomited, the way I didn't fight back in Graham's bed. I'd needed three glasses of whiskey and an emergency barbiturate to come down from that. The guilt from the scratch I'd left across his forehead lasted long after it healed.

I just didn't always like being treated like a bomb he was trying to defuse, either, which was why I slithered out of his grasp and got up on my hands and knees. "Like this," I said. "On the floor, in front of the bar—"

I had to give his willingness to humor this bizarre fantasy, where I'd transformed his shady saloon into the kind of sex club multiple laws prohibited in the state of Oklahoma, some credit— mostly because he refrained from mentioning the sheer amount of cigarette butts and chew-hocks splattered on that floor. He made a low noise like a motorcycle revving up, and cut off the end of the sentence by sliding into me. "So what's he doin' now?" He sounded more amused than anything, as he wrapped a hand around my hip and anchored himself with it, wanted to see how the story would go— he hadn't been fingering me underneath the bar to try to stake a public claim, it was all the thrill of getting caught that was doing it for him. The only man Curly was jealous of was dead. "With that front-row seat?"

"Jackin' himself," I said into the silk pillowcase, my breath coming more and more ragged with every stroke— I wanted to tell him to go faster, harder, but there was about a fifty percent chance he'd listen to me, and a fifty percent chance he'd start going slower to try to drag it out instead. I could picture Quique with perfect clarity now, his heavy-lidded eyes, the tip of his tongue darting out of his mouth, the quicker and quicker back-and-forth motion of his hand inside his unzipped jeans. Picture meeting his gaze the entire time, dead on, daring him to look away from me first. I wasn't ashamed of shit. "He wants it, he's so fuckin' desperate for it, but he knows he can't touch me. You'd never let him."

It didn't take Sigmund Freud to realize what I was acting out. Arousal struck me like a lightning bolt all the same, coursing dark and electric up through my stomach as I braced myself with one hand on the headboard, my self-disgust and humiliation so intense they looped right back around to fueling it. What the hell was wrong with me, that I was digging around in the most twisted corners of my psyche to get off, dredging up my worst memories like wet leaves from the bottom of a gutter? And why couldn't I stop myself?

"You're right. I wouldn't." He flipped me over, then, onto my back; I was already close, shifting beneath him for more friction with a mewl, but he'd stilled completely inside of me, his dark eyes flickering like he had candle flames burning in his pupils. He didn't frighten me, but he compelled my attention, all the same. "You ain't really thinkin' about—"

Maybe he was a little jealous, after all. Maybe we were both acting out our neuroses on each other— his grip on my breast had tightened enough that it went past erotic and was heading into painful. I still wasn't afraid, though. I felt completely rooted in place, like there was nowhere I could drift away to; he wouldn't let me. "No," I said, easy with my reassurances because I felt as vulnerable and split-open myself. Even in the deepest recesses of the fantasy, the only man I wanted was him. "Never. 'S just you, baby."

He released a breath and started moving again, kissing me all over, brushing the messy hair out of my face— he always touched me like I was something precious to him, something he was lucky to have. There was too much being projected onto the backs of my eyelids like a bad B movie, so I kept my eyes open, found and fixated on the tattoo scrawled across his bicep— JASMINE, in blocky capital letters. I was branded on him, too, for life.

"Michael Jesse, I want all those Cheerios in your mouth, you hear me? I know you know how to use a spoon right."

"I wanted Dino Pebbles," Mike said, his bottom lip trembling as he got his litany of complaints ready to go. His spoon dribbled milk all over the multicolor woven placemat I'd found in Town & Country; it was clearly not recommended for parents of toddlers, even precocious ones. "And the red bowl, not the blue one, Mama. This is the blue one."

The deprivation I put this child through. "You eat what's in front of you, how 'bout it?" I wiped his chin and the front of his shirt off with a napkin— table manners were still a work in progress for us. And if I didn't sound just like Mom, trying to shovel breakfast into all four of her ungrateful children's mouths; I reckoned I at least had a few years left before I started parroting all her bon mots, but here I was anyway. "Mama doesn't let you eat sugar cereal every day of the week so all your baby teeth don't rot out of your head."

"Awh, Jas, just let him have it, what's it gonna hurt?" Curly said easily as he loped into the kitchen, digging out both the red bowl and the dented box of Dino Pebbles. "Here, bub—"

I grimaced as he poured the milk with a flourish, then jammed another grapefruit slice into my mouth to keep from saying anything. Privately— as though this should've been my biggest problem with his upbringing— I was worried that our boy might be getting a little spoiled, between the piles of expensive toys he had heaped all over his room and his indulgent-beyond-belief daddy. Curly didn't see it that way, though— "I want him to have everything we didn't, growin' up, and I don't want to have a million damn rules, neither, like Tim was always tryna lay down." I could've kicked up a fuss, about his unique interpretation of New Age parenting or at least the undermining me, but I didn't feel like pointing out consistency is important in childrearing over a damn bowl of cereal just then. Mike wasn't leaking all over the furniture anymore, and Mama had a bit of a hangover.

The lock rattled, and I knew it was Luis before he even came into my line of vision; he was the only other person who had a spare key, and only he wouldn't have the good sense to knock before busting into somebody else's house like a fed. "Hey," he said without any preamble, slinging his gun onto the couch like it was his jacket, "y'all hear about that body that washed up in Tiber Street territory?"

I clapped my hands over Mike's ears a second too late; his eyes were already bright with excitement, like Luis had been talking about Santa Claus's latest sighting. "Little pitchers, Luis, Jesus fuckin' Christ. He ain't even finished his damn breakfast yet."

He rolled his eyes, but he was in the mood to humor me, or just had bigger problems; he crouched down to Mike's level with his palms flat on his thighs. "Mijo, you want a junior drum set for your birthday?" Mike eagerly nodded again. His birthday was a month ago, and Luis still wasn't done handing out presents— and he liked the kind he could really torment me with, kazoos and craft kits with glitter, the herpes of art supplies. "Then go to your room for a second, we gotta have grown folks' talk."

Mike loved getting in on grown folks' talk, but he hero-worshipped his Tío Luis even more, and he shot off without a trace of an argument— I commandeered his abandoned cereal bowl, once he was out of sight. It was kind of gross, but hell, everything about raising toddlers was gross, and not wasting food had been drilled into me too much as a kid to be unlearned now. "Tiber Street don't usually have no bodies washin' up on it," Curly remarked, and he was right— they just didn't get involved in kicks that messy, most of the time, stuck to ripping car radios out and fencing stolen hubcaps more than late-night shootouts or the bustling narcotics business. "Hate to sound insensitive and all, I dunno if you want us to put in an appearance at the funeral or what, but what's that got to do with us?"

"A couple Tiber boys found her on the corner of 315th, needle still stickin' out of her arm— it wasn't pretty." Luis pulled himself out a seat at the head of the table, like Don Corleone surveying his family, and leaned forward on his elbows. Twin Nike swooshes ran dark underneath his eyes, like he'd been losing sleep over this. "They recognized her. She wasn't nobody's steady girl or nothin', but she'd been crashing on their couches, hanging around the parties, you know the type. A groupie."

"You ever give up gangbanging, you could get into politics, do interviews on CBS and everything." I pointed my spoon at him from the underside of my chin; I was the only person, just about, who could still talk to him like this. "Takes you so long to get to the damn point."

Luis scowled, which made me grateful that he'd left his damn capuchin monkey at home, while he was bursting into mine. Bananas could be real cute and was always a hoot with guests, but he also had a nasty habit of slinging his shit around when he got agitated, just like his daddy. "Word around the campfire is, the Tigers been tryin' to get their hands on that world's purest H flowin' in from Nam— they're cautious, not dumb enough to let an opportunity like this slip. Been slinging a little close to some of our streets, too, while they're at it."

Curly reached the right conclusion several seconds before I did. I thought about Soda every time someone mentioned the war, which in turn made my bad wrist ache like a barometer. "They don't think…"

"It's a… delicate situation," Luis finished with a grimace, like he was discussing a scheduling mishap at a Junior League meeting. "Tiber seems to think that we might've arranged a little something with product a little stronger than she expected, you know, to send a warning shot. Same way Woltz woke up next to his favorite horse's head."

Whatever message Francis Ford Coppola had intended to send about the dangers of crime with The Godfather, rest assured, Luis had not absorbed it.

"That's more believable to them than a Tiber girl bein' a junkie?" Curly stabbed the tip of his knife into a slice of bacon, bit into it with a crackle. "The fuck are they smokin' over on that side of town, and are they willin' to share?"

If life came with stage directions, Luis's silence would've been labeled 'meaningful'. "Think Jasmine ought to go talk to him, smooth things over. Eli likes her."

I choked on a mouthful of sugary milk; Curly's arm shot out to slap me on the back as I wheezed. Eli didn't like anybody— he was the least charismatic gang leader I'd ever met (maybe with the exception of Tim). He especially didn't like me, considering that the last time we'd spoken face-to-face, he'd threatened to shoot me point blank if I brought the fuzz around his streets. "Really sendin' Daniel into the lions' den here, huh?"

"I need you to make it clear that we had nothin' to do with this, and express our condolences, of course," Luis continued with a slight wave of his hand, as though I hadn't said anything at all. "But we always could, if they don't keep their asses in their own territory and hands off any coke passed around this city. Kind of a subtle implication."

"You want to write me a little script, too, just so that I don't miss anything?" I asked at the same time as Curly said, his mouth settling into a flat line, "I don't like this."

Of course he didn't, and my muscles tensed, as I prepared to spring back into the familiar argument. I had more brains than eighty percent of the Ramirez outfit, Luis included, plenty of hands-on experience with the business, and a keen sixth sense for when a deal was fixing to go under. I was also a woman, which was why I stayed at home and looked after the baby, and decorated the apartment, and kept account books with meticulous calculations instead of ever doing anything useful. We ain't exactly pushin' pot and loose barbs outside the Dingo here, Curly had said, when I'd pointed out, a little caustically, that I'd been held up multiple times before I had a driver's license, and more than knew how to handle myself. I could take you with one hand, and I wouldn't break a sweat, even if you had a knife or a gun on you, he'd insisted as the fight blazed on. Go ahead, Jasmine, come at me. Let's try it out.

What he demonstrated after that made me stalk off to Sylvia's for the next three days— not that he'd hurt more than my pride, but because between episodes of The Price is Right and helping change her daughter Tara's diaper blowouts, I realized I would have to admit he was right. I was reckless and overconfident, rushed where angels feared to tread, and, if I was really being honest with myself, lucky I'd made it to adulthood at all; I shouldn't have needed Curly, of all people, to tell me how much potential men had to hurt me. I just wasn't cut out to play the role of socialite or wife or mother— wasn't good at being any man's helpmeet, the neck that turned the head. Bored and restless and hungry for trouble, I vibrated with nervous energy like that broad in The Yellow Wallpaper all day, and after my boy went down for his nap between his Felix the Cat sheets, was when I unscrewed the cap on one of the whiskey bottles I kept in the back of the cupboard.

"Look, I'm considerin' the ethnic angle here," Luis said to Curly and got up to stand behind me, idly playing with the loose strands of hair at the base of my neck; I forced myself to sit still, not twist around and show him throat. I was his glorified secretary, and like any secretary, getting my ass grabbed was an occupational hazard. "She's one of his kind, it's a good gesture— and besides, sendin' a woman, that'll knock him off his guard. He has no idea what he's really dealin' with here."

"I'll do it, Tío," I said as I picked up my coffee mug, the way I always eventually did whenever Luis asked me to do something. The 'Tío' was just the razorblade I'd slipped into the Halloween candy, reminding him of what, by marriage and the boundaries of good taste, he was to me. "But this is a one-time thing," I added, like any adventure didn't thrill me a lot more than the thought of another day spent rinsing out sippy cups and rereading The Poky Little Puppy.

"Somewhere public," Curly interjected, his eyes flickering towards the two of us like a house with faulty wiring. Setting conditions allowed him the illusion of control, while Luis gave his wife marching orders in his own house. "And not that late, neither, he might get the wrong idea. Maybe somebody can come around, keep a look out—"

"Just tell me one thing, before I show up there, so I know what I'm workin' with." The cold coffee left a lingering bitter aftertaste on the surface of my tongue, made my heart jerk inside my chest. "Luis, you tryna cover up that you killed this girl?"

"Like I told you, when you was a kid." He grinned at me, hard enough to show the dimple in his left cheek. "I ain't never killed no woman— no matter how tempted I've gotten."

Eli hadn't improved his hairdressing routine any; it still hung choppy and uneven around his collar, like he cut it himself when it got in his eyes, and I suspected that was exactly the case. "Long time, no see," he said with a dry chuckle, and leaned in to kiss me on each cheek, like we were sitting in a Parisian café and not a shady cowboy dive in neutral territory, close to the South side. "Just wish it could be under better circumstances."

"I'm sorry for your loss." I cringed at the platitude even as it was coming out of my mouth; like I'd wanted to hear that kind of horseshit right after Mom and Dad had died, after Dally and Johnny, a cliché from somebody who was just angling to get the conversation over with. "You know her well, or—"

"I never met the broad in my life, you want me to be honest." He waved the bartender over, ordered himself a straight whiskey on the rocks and me a cosmopolitan; I was tempted to grab the first drink, just to see what he'd do, but managed to restrain myself. It came overly sweet and sticky, too much cranberry juice and not enough vodka. "It's more what she represents that's buggin' me, if you'll let me be even more honest."

He slid a tribal ID across the bar at me, that he must've recovered off the body, and I scanned it from top to bottom. Issued by the Navajo nation. Laura Sandoval. 3/12/1950; she'd just turned twenty-three, the same age as me. She had an abrupt look to her, her hair untidy and her mouth half-open, like she was about to answer a question before the camera flashed. She was very pretty, in spite of it— a good thing for a dead girl to be. "She was from Arizona?"

"Yeah, outside Yuma— no idea what brought her here, but that's relocation for you. Bureau probably threw a dart at a US map and called it a day."

"What?"

"Relocation," he said, more slowly and more impatiently at the same time. "Government policy that's been gettin' Indians one-way bus tickets off the rez and into the big city— like anybody was waitin' around here for this little gal to show up. Solve our question once and for all." It was not ringing a bell. "Jesus Christ, y'all ever turn the TV on, give Walter Cronkite a listen? You know about what happened at Wounded Knee, right? Hell, that Nixon wiretapped the Watergate Hotel?"

It'd been years since anyone had dared speak to me like that— Curly would've pistol-whipped him, if he'd heard it. "I got a kid at home, we've been watchin' a lot of The Electric Company lately," I said, readjusting my dignity like a crown he'd knocked askew. "Besides, I don't have to pay attention to politics. I feed the front end of the horse."

I played with the gold bracelet around my wrist all the same, dodging his gaze, pressed down flat by embarrassment; what I said sounded stupid and cheap, taking pride in my own ignorance like the dumbest kind of redneck. The truth was, my life was so far removed from the daily detritus of everybody else's, gas prices and Nixon and Wounded Knee and the rest of it, I felt like a cult member on a trip to the outside world. "You had any trouble with the fuzz, about her?"

"Think we both know five-o don't exactly bust ass looking for missing Indian girls." He gave me the faintest shadow of a smile, condescending and thin; I was really batting a thousand, tonight. "Ain't convinced the state ever had a record she existed here, to begin with."

"We can front the funeral costs." I should've cultivated more appreciation for subtlety, since I was fifteen, and instead had only learned the value of the direct approach. Sometimes it was the only play worth making. "Call it an olive branch, whatever you want. We've got the money to spare."

"I know, you're a regular Marie Antoinette in furs now." Something serrated had crept into that smile, like the edge of a saw. "You can spare me the fake noblesse oblige, okay? I got plenty of my own cash, believe it or not, without going into debt by the Ramirez outfit."

"Not so much that you don't want to start diversifyin' them business ventures, though?"

He stared down at my half-finished drink, the way another man would let his gaze drop to a woman's cleavage. "Guess the rumors ain't so true after all. You're sharper than I expected."

A chill settled over my diaphragm, like frost coming down on wet grass, and stayed there. "Rumors?"

"That you're a ragin' lush."

In 1973, I was nowhere near hitting rock bottom, the mystical point of no return Soda's addiction counselors were always banging on about, or paying the price I would eventually have to pay— none of the consequences were serious enough they couldn't, taken individually, be dismissed as a one-off. A teensy fender bender that anybody could've gotten into, and one that could've been avoided, if anybody in this damn state would remember to use their turn signal; of course Mike wasn't in the car. Almost always the drunkest girl at the party, which wasn't saying much, considering what got passed around our parties on a regular basis. Some (many) regrettable mornings spent prostrate over a toilet, during which I'd make all sorts of promises I had no intention of keeping, and had already forgotten by the time the afternoon shakes rolled around. I wasn't dumb enough to mix it with pills, and a lot of moms needed a nip or two to get through the day. The way you shoved more and more trash into an overflowing garbage bin, I was keeping a lid on it.

Besides, you wanted to see a raging lush, you could always come over to visit my mother-in-law. The last time I'd seen her sober, she was in the hospital for pancreatitis, and trying to drink hand sanitizer out of the dispensers in the walls.

"Oh, c'mon now, don't give me that offended little look. Heard you had to be hauled out of y'all's New Year's party over Curly's shoulder, after you started cussin' the chief of police."

"He was the goddamned deputy chief, first of all." I picked at a sore spot on my cuticle I never let heal. "Second of all, he smashed up the bathroom mirror and got blood into the grout. He's lucky all I did was cuss."

A hometown journo from the World would end up getting nominated for a Pulitzer for their exposé on this— we made national news for a hot minute when everything got busted up, one of the most high profile cases of police corruption the still-new DEA had ever prosecuted. And yeah, they were so obvious about wanting a slice of our profits, we were partying with them (the article came with photographic evidence attached). This one had been snorting lines off the top of Luis's baby grand all night, stumbled into that mirror trying to do another one off the sink handle, and just howled with laughter as he stumbled around in the broken glass and cut his feet into ribbons. He was too loaded to feel pain anymore.

I think it's understandable that surrounded by these jokers all day, I had a hard time figuring I had any kind of problem.

"I shouldn't be needlin' you," he said, shaking his head slowly, with something I knew better than to assume was remorse.

"You're right, 'cause if you blow your way through my patience, you can enjoy ironin' the finer details out with Luis—"

"If Luis was fuckin' me, I reckon I would've drunk myself blind by now, too."

I grabbed my purse and swung my legs off the bar stool, propelled upwards by the force of my own rage. I wanted to claw up his face, sock him in the stomach, knock a couple of teeth loose from that half-amused, half-concerned smirk he wore— and I would've, if I were even a couple years younger— but that would just confirm every last one of his worst suspicions. Instead, I tried to mimic Tim and Angela's half-sister Valeria, whose presence I'd had the misfortune of being in once, and the crisp, offended snootiness of her tone when she'd discovered the tap water at Jay's wasn't filtered. "I don't have to listen to this kind of shit about my uncle." I tilted my ring at him— after the first year we were married, Curly replaced the diamond with one so large, it looked fake— and only succeeded at underlining how downright dirty this little farce was. Luis was not only my uncle by marriage, he was also my mother's sloppy seconds. "Or my fidelity, for that matter."

"Who do you think you're foolin', exactly?" For someone who hadn't stumbled over a syllable calling me a 'raging lush', whiskey sure was making him run his mouth; the ice cubes in his glass clattered noisily as he tilted it for the last few drops. "That man puts you up in that apartment of yours like he's keepin' a tiger as a pet. Showin' off how he's caged you."

My scalp and the back of my neck prickled, as I reached for my drink for the same comfort my son got from his pacifier; my hands were sweating with the cold clamminess of a recently-broken fever. Luis had been playing a little grab-ass and trying to steal a stray kiss since I was fifteen years old; my outrage at it had long since faded into the background of my life, the same way you didn't notice the hum of the icebox. "I can't possibly be the only person who's cottoned on, at this point," he said, with a hint of pity I hated more than any of his previous mockery. "I know Curly was never famed for his brains, but—"

"I don't really want to have to mop up Luis's, if he finds out." Curly had no idea what was going on right under his nose, despite the uncanny ability to read people that had kept him alive in a business as volatile as a meth lab; his income depended on him not understanding it, and God knew we'd both grown accustomed to paying selective attention over the past few years, ignoring what we didn't want to see. I didn't doubt he'd believe me, if I made him face the truth. It was just that I figured my husband putting a bullet through his head in the middle of my kitchen, and the succession crisis it'd trigger, would create much bigger problems than I was wrestling with now.

"Your brother, he don't check in on you none?"

My peeled-back cuticle started to bleed as I gave it another savage pick, a bright red crescent moon seeping into the nail bed. "Darry and I ain't really on speaking terms no more, much less those kinds of speaking terms." As he'd so lovingly put it, like he was leaving me to be sacrificed to Moloch's jaws: you dug your own grave, lil' girl, even though I was a married woman with a child of my own. I wasn't the perfect parent— God fuckin' knows nobody ever gave me a manual— but I tried to put y'all on the right path. What you do with yourselves now, that's on you.

He'd walked me down the aisle in Dad's place, three months pregnant and already starting to show through my dress, but I wasn't even at his second wedding. I'd made my bed. Now I was lying in it.

"I was talking about Soda."

A flare of pain shot up through my bad wrist again, the slight protrusion in the bone where it hadn't healed right. Smashed door, cutting through mattresses with a knife, shaking the pillows upside down to see if any coins would fall out of them. Human wrecking ball. You owe me, Jasmine. You fuckin' know what you owe me for. Five years later and I still couldn't forgive, couldn't forget. Whoever he was now, there was nothing left of my brother in him.

"If Soda had died in Nam," and I polished off the drink, "it would've been a lot easier for everyone." I let him choke on that and try to figure out how to swallow it. Soda had been the linchpin of our family— we'd had to discover the hard way just how tenuous the bonds between the rest of us were, in his absence. Flung out into separate orbits altogether. "And I don't love that you're still this fixated on him, neither, after eight years. He's nothin' to you."

Not that he was much use to anyone, anymore, in his current state. The US army had chewed him up and spit him right back out.

"I want you to do me a favor," he said, steepling his hands together and showing off a deep cut on one of his knuckles. It would've been a non sequitur, if it wasn't for the word 'favor', prickling my ears upwards like a dog that'd been whistled at. "I want you to figure out what happened to Laura."

My response was both immediate and breathtakingly rude: "Do I look like Nancy fuckin' Drew to you?" I had an extensive skillset, if I dared say so myself; the budding field of forensic science was not one of them. "Look, I'm sorry, but I ain't part of your crew, and I never so much as saw the woman alive. I got no leads to go on." Curly was right, that this was at best a waste of my time, at worst dangerous trouble— when I got home from all this mess, he was getting a damn blowjob, for at least trying to object to me being roped into this scheme like a rodeo calf. "I came down here to—"

"Try to threaten me off your drug scene, I know." His eyeroll was subtle enough he could've played it off as a tic, but I could tell otherwise. "Listen, I don't love holdin' this over your head, but I let your brother take a stroll off my gang out of the kindness of my heart. I don't think it'd kill you to knock on a couple doors for me."

I wanted to point out that I'd helped wipe his biggest rivals off the map entirely, but it would've been pointless— his brain just didn't operate like that. He'd done me a personal favor, not a professional one, and he wanted the same kind of boon. "I'm not fixin' to slip you any trade secrets from my outfit, play the double agent," I said, which was already giving him far too much leverage to work with. "That's a hard limit."

Like it or lump it, that band of coke addicts, gangbangers, murderers, and thieves was my only real family, at this point; I'd thrown my lot in with them for good at fifteen, at seventeen, at nineteen and throwing up in the morning, when I would've shot Curly in the foot myself to keep him out of Nam. And Luis might've been a creep, a grab-assing perv with two baby mamas and two daughters he refused to give the time of day, but I knew the limits to the kind of bad man he was, and they didn't extend to being a rapist or real danger to me— he'd saved me from Graham, once, had pity for me when he found out, with the tiniest flicker of human compassion as we'd locked eyes. Sometimes I even let myself believe that he loved me, even if the way he expressed that emotion was as twisted as a corkscrew. I could never betray him.

(Had I met so many terrible men in my life, that I was willing to accept any scrap of goodness from one?)

"I still remember the way you walked up into my bar, when you was fifteen," he said. "Covered in blood and puke like you just came from a crime scene, face made up like you was grown, askin' me for money and guns and trying to negotiate though you didn't have the first clue what you was doin'. It wasn't no sex appeal that got to me, it was how tough you talked, without even hesitating for a second— I'd never respected no little girl in my life before then. Don't tell me you're afraid of some adventure."

"I ought to warn you, I'm even less easy to threaten anymore." I ached for that little girl, who thought she was already so jaded and had so much further to fall. I wanted to protect her, the way she would've spit in my face for trying to do. More than anything, I wanted to slap her across both cheeks and tell her to go home, to listen to her big brother, that no punishment he had in store for her was as bad as what was coming down the pike. "Or push around."

The look in his eyes said that he was well-aware I'd never been easier to push around; hell, he was pushing me around right this second. Maybe, like pregnancy had leached half the calcium from my bones, years of drug abuse, various unspeakable tragedies, and hard living had finally succeeded at beating me down into an uncaring numbness; at fifteen, I thought I would never die, at twenty-three, I already felt like I'd outlived myself. He didn't point it out, though. "You are, beyond a doubt, the most valuable asset that man has," Eli said, as he gestured the bartender over for another round. "I'm sorry 'bout that, for your sake."