Shine - Lauren Myracle [82]
“Don’t bother?” she huffed. “I thought you liked Beef. I thought you cared, even though you work so hard to pretend you don’t.”
“Thanks for the guilt trip,” I said. “But I’m pretty sure cheating on him’s a worse offense, Bailee-Ann.”
Pain filled her eyes. She spun on her heel and headed for her truck.
“Ah, crap,” I muttered. I rose awkwardly to my feet and went after her. “So what do you want to tell me? Why’d you give me the matches?”
Her hand stilled on the door handle. Her lower lip quivered in a way I remembered.
“I do care about Beef,” I said. “I just said that to pay you back.”
“Pay me back? For what?”
“I don’t know, because I feel bad for him,” I said, exasperated. “I mean, when you’re in the dark, and then you find out you’ve been in the dark . . .”
I came to the end of that line of reasoning. Sighing, I said, “Or maybe I’m just a crappy friend and wanted to make you feel bad.”
She twisted her bowed head so that she was gazing at me sideways. “Are we even friends?”
I felt strange in my own skin. A breeze lifted my hair, whispering against my neck. “We used to be.”
One tear, shiny as a dewdrop, rolled down her cheek and plopped onto her foot, washing the dust of the day from that one spot. Her flip-flops were pink with white polka dots, and now one of the polka dots was brighter than the others.
She turned around, resting her weight against her truck. Sounding worn-out, she said, “You should know that your brother was never a user. Tommy and I were, but we quit. We wanted Beef to quit, too.” She hugged her ribs. “That’s why Beef got so mad that night at Suicide Rock.”
“Oh,” I said. Finally, the missing piece. It clicked into place, and it fit. “That’s what the guys ‘discussed’ with him? His meth use?”
“It was an intervention,” she said heavily. “He didn’t take it so well.”
“You think?” He’d called Patrick a fucking pansy, and he’d told Tommy and my brother to go play with their vaginas, though as Bailee-Ann said, he didn’t use that word.
“Was it Patrick’s idea, the intervention?” I asked. That would explain why Patrick didn’t want Robert along. Maybe he knew it would get ugly.
“Patrick was all for it, but no. It was Tommy’s idea.”
My eyebrows shot up. “Tommy set up an intervention for Beef? No way. No frickin’ way.”
She looked at me from under a swoop of hair as if she were so, so tired. “Tommy knew firsthand how messed up meth made you. Like with the cow?”
“Wait,” I said, remembering what she’d said at her house about how running meth was easy money, and how certain folks found themselves new jobs when the local meth cookers sprang up. “Did Tommy get Beef into all that in the first place?”
She didn’t answer. Well, that’s not true. She did, by saying stiffly, “That’s why he wanted to get him out. He wanted to make up for his sins.”
“Fine,” I said. “So Tommy, Patrick, and Christian talked to Beef. Beef got pissed. Where was Dupree during all this?”
“Dupree is Dupree,” she said.
I nodded. True enough.
“Back to these,” I said, lifting the pack of matches. “Do you think Beef knows something about Patrick getting hurt? Do you think this place is somehow connected?”
“What I think is that Patrick has a boyfriend,” Bailee-Ann said.
I straightened my spine. “He does! Yes!”
My reaction startled her. I tried to tone it down. “Do you know who he is?”
“No, Patrick never would tell me.”
I wiggled the matches. “And Billy the Kid’s?”
“I think he works there. The boyfriend.” She cleared her throat. “I think it’s, um, a gay place.”
Wow, really? I thought.
“They were in Beef’s jacket,” I said. “So has Beef been there? Does he know Patrick’s boyfriend?” I said.
“I’m pretty sure,” Bailee-Ann said. “I’m pretty sure he doesn’t like him, either.”
“What makes you say that?”
“That’s just kind of the impression I get.” She twined her foot around her opposite leg, hooking it behind her calf. “Like, I heard Beef and Patrick arguing one time. Beef was saying how Patrick was an idiot if he thought people could change, and that a rotten egg is a rotten egg. That kind of thing.”
She