Chapter Text
Gamblers are trouble. Never forget that.
He knew that lesson. He'd learned it well, and he'd learned it again, painfully, when he was older and should have known better. Gamblers were always going to be a problem. They were addicts, and he knew addicts well. The trouble with a gambler's addiction was that it wasn't the same, not as personal and inward when it became destructive, as addiction inevitably did. He had watched addicts destroy their own bodies and felt less anger than he did watching a gambler throw away his family's means of living on yet another bet.
People might consider that screwed up, but he was screwed up, and he didn't deny that to himself. Maybe years ago, he'd tried, thinking he could cover over the defects in his mind and his morality by believing himself sane, the only sane person left in an insane world, but these days he was not so easily fooled.
Very few people fooled him at all, not even for a second.
Like the man at the end of the counter, dressed like a seemingly stereotypical truck driver, with the ball cap, the checkered shirt, and the jeans just a bit too small and showing too much around the waist. He was making crude jokes with the others around him at the diner's bar, but every bit of his outfit was deliberate, as though he somehow thought no one would peg him for an undercover cop if he showed a bit of crack.
Or his waitress. Faking a smile, chatting up everyone like she enjoyed being sociable, like she had no cares at all, and she would pass by each group, talking like she enjoyed it all. Only he could tell she was in it for the tips and hated every second of this job, her uniform, and the smell of the food. The only thing she hated more were her customers.
JD declined a refill and eyed the ashtray again, remembering those days of chain smoking with a bit of nostalgia, as though they were somehow better than this. He knew it wasn't. Those days were full of pain and fear, of self-delusion and manipulation by others.
These days he had a clear head, if not a sane one, and he knew what he was doing. No one manipulated him but him. He chose his path, and he did it for his own reasons, no one else's.
That was why he was in Reno, not Vegas, where his former assistant was living, faced with the unpleasant task of keeping her mother sober.
Or Ohio, where the one woman with the singular ability to wreck his life was rebuilding hers.
Why Reno?
It had seemed as good a place as any. Going to Reno was synonymous at least once before with divorce, and he could consider his current limbo a sort of slow divorce from what he had been doing, something that should be allowing him to move forward into a new part of his life.
He was effectively dead again, and it was time to decide what to do with his life.
And that brought him back to the gamblers.
And trouble.
“How is that even remotely entertaining for you?” Enid asked, frowning yet again at her mother's choice of entertainment. “You live in Vegas. The movie has Vegas all wrong. You hate movies like that. Why even bother turning it on?”
Her mother didn't even look up at her, and Enid sighed. She couldn't watch that again, and she knew if she went out, her mother would find money hidden somewhere—Enid was starting to suspect it was somewhere on her body that no daughter ever wanted to think about—and use it at the closest liquor store.
Even though she'd offered the jerks there a nice bonus if they refused to sell to her mother again.
Assholes. Seriously, her money would still have been more than the bottle her mother bought now and then, and they should just have taken the money. It really irritated her that they wouldn't.
She considered using their computers to make their lives miserable. A quick hack could ruin their credit card machine without compromising customer data. She could adjust their coolers so all of their chilled product would overheat. She liked that, too, damaging the merchandise. She could wreck so much havoc in their lives, and yet she'd tried to be diplomatic about things, to be nice.
Nice was done. Next time those bastards sold to her mother, she was making sure at least one bottle exploded when she rigged their computerized cooling units. Oh, yes, she was.
“You're thinking about him again, aren't you?”
“What?”
“That look on your face. You get it when you're thinking about your father. It's an evil look, Enid. You need to let it go. He's dead. He can't hurt anyone.”
“Yeah? So why are you drunk again?” Enid demanded, shaking her head as she went back into her bedroom. She should have listened to Jay when he said just to check her mom into a facility. They could deal with this kind of crap. She was at her wit's end, and something was going to give if she didn't find a way out of this soon.
She picked up her tablet. Maybe it was time to send Veronica some suggestions for the bridesmaids' dresses. Her reaction to the last ones had been perfect, as had those of her friends, all of whom were questioning Enid's taste and sanity to a degree that had her cackling with delight.
Enid pulled up a few that would make Veronica's wedding seem like an eighties throwback, complete with linebacker shoulder pads and sent off the links, waiting for the fallout to come.
And then she checked her email again. She already knew she didn't have any texts, but she didn't figure on him using texts or calls. He wouldn't leave her a number; he'd told her that.
Nothing from Jay. Again.
It had been almost two weeks now.
Enid would say she wasn't worried, but judging by how she'd managed to squeeze the stuffing out of her quaggan, she knew that was a lie.
“Aren't you going to answer that?” Heather McNamara asked, sipping from her iced coffee as she scrolled through pictures on her tablet. She seemed to think Veronica needed to see every detail of her kids' lives that she'd missed, and while Veronica understood her pride as a mother, she hated every minute of it.
Veronica clearly wasn't mother material, for one thing, but she also couldn't help thinking of another Heather who never got a chance to decide if she wanted to be a mother and what another mother had twisted her son into.
If Veronica lifted her sleeve, she'd see the marks left there by that same son, but she wasn't about to look at them again. They'd fade into scars soon enough, but they were still angry welts and she hated seeing them, going around covered most of the time even though it was hardly the weather for long sleeves and high necks.
“No, I'm not going to answer it,” Veronica said, not looking at her phone. “Enid really isn't helping with this whole wedding nonsense.”
“Are you still mad at him for not getting you the ring properly sized?”
Veronica winced. That story, told as a part of the vicious cover Enid had concocted naming her brother as Veronica's fiancé refused to die, and any time she expressed frustration with it, her friends assumed it was because her fiancé had gotten her ring sized wrong—more than once—and not because there was no wedding, she hadn't been asked again, hadn't really even dated since her divorce, and the man she was supposedly marrying was legally dead. All her friends thought he was.
Up until a month ago, Veronica had thought he was, too, until he'd broken into her apartment to tell her he hadn't killed anyone. She still found that hard to believe, her mind wanting to go back to its patterns of doubts and guilt, to believe him nothing more than a figment of her overtired mind, the same one someone else was deliberately trying to drive over the edge.
She shivered.
“Does thinking about getting married again bring up... him?” Heather asked, wincing. “I mean, that guy thought he owned you, right? So I guess marrying anyone would be scary and frightening after something like that.”
“It's not—”
“You can admit to being scared,” Heather said, reaching over to put her hand on Veronica's. “I know I would have been. And you know Heather was. She was terrified when she heard her daughter was a target. She only pretends she's calm, but as soon as she's not talking about someone from her business, she goes back to it, and she's not okay until she texts Helena and hears back again.”
Veronica nodded. She had seen Heather Duke doing that over and over again, her fear visible on her face until she got the reply from her daughter. Helena Duke had been slated to die that night, but the killer had taken Veronica instead, almost killing Enid in the process.
Maybe he would have done her a favor.
Her phone buzzed again, and Veronica sighed, intending to tell Enid off and get her to stop for maybe an hour this time, but after two hideous pictures of dresses, there was just one line of text.
Have you heard anything yet?
No, Veronica texted back. And no more dresses.
He should have said something by now.
Knowing your brother, he's delaying to piss you off, Veronica typed back with more confidence than she felt. Truth was, without JD to look at or talk to, she found herself doubting if he was real. Enid might not even seem real if not for the constant texts and annoying links. Years of lies and guilt and emotional abuse from a stalker had Veronica distrusting her own mind, and while she was trying to get over that, getting back in touch with old friends and her roots—and God help her, her mother—she was still a mess.
You better be right about that.
Veronica guiltily lowered the phone. She didn't think she was, but she wasn't about to tell Enid that now. Or ever, really.
“Something wrong?”
“Same as it was before,” Veronica answered. She drew in a breath and let it out. “Now, where were we? Something about a soccer practice when they were six?”
Heather smiled. “That's right. Veronica, if you don't mind me asking—”
“I kind of do, actually,” Veronica said, having no desire to discuss why she remained childless with people that still didn't know about her part in the Westerburg suicides. “Please, don't ask. I don't mind you telling me all about yours, and I am so glad you're happy, but when it comes to discussing my kids or lack thereof... No.”
Heather nodded. “You know that Heather Duke has a theory about that.”
“Oh?”
“Well, the first time she heard you were getting married again, she figured the only reason was you being pregnant.”
“Seriously? This isn't high school, and I don't need a man to take care of me, and even if I did, I wouldn't have to marry him and only a fool would marry—”
“I knew it was for love.”
Veronica bit back a sigh, refusing to bang her head against the table, though she swore she was going to kill Enid before this was all over.
He sat down with his back to the counter, eyes on the undercover cop.
“The men you're looking for are over in the gift shop, reading off the bumper stickers to each other,” he told him. He'd spotted them as soon as they came in the door, noting the way they dressed, moved, and their chosen source of entertainment.
“Excuse me?”
“And their customer has been sitting behind me in that booth for the last hour. He keeps shifting against the vinyl, and the sounds that makes were amusing in high school, maybe, but these days they remind me of dead football players without brains, and while I figure you really want the man behind Flotsam and Jetsam in there, their respective IQ suggests they don't know enough to even lead you back to him, so I'm not sure why you're bothering to wait on them. If it were me, I'd grab Fidget over there and get him to tell you how he knows about them because he's too clean cut for this place and yet badly in need of a fix.”
“Look, I don't know who you think you are—”
“And the attention to detail on your end is admirable, but no one wants to see that, okay?” JD said, patting him on the back before rising.
He'd considered speeding the whole thing up by pointing out Fidget to Flotsam and Jetsam, but then that cop would think he was involved in it, and he wasn't.
The cop caught his arm. “Who the hell are you?”
“Good question. I have no idea.”