Silk - Caitlin R. Kiernan [79]
Outside, the snow was still coming down, half an inch or more on the ground already and falling so hard that she could see no farther out the plate-glass window than the first row of cars in the parking lot.
“We should just go back,” Walter said again.
“I’m fucking tired of hearing that shit, Walter, so can it, okay?” Byron folded and unfolded a paper napkin, making and unmaking a sloppy origami bat for the umpteenth time. His own coffee sat untouched, cold and black.
“I’m just saying it still might not be too late, not if we go back now.”
“Too late for what, Wally? Huh?” Byron said, loud enough that the waitress looked up from her pencil, pad, and scribbles.
“You mean it might not be too late to watch them loading that cracker’s corpse into a body bag? Might not be too late to catch the pretty lights on top of the ambulance? Or how about this one, Wally: it might not be too goddamn late to spend a little time in the Birmingham jail, getting fucked up the ass every time you bend over?”
Robin flinched, and Walter looked at them for the first time in ten or fifteen minutes, his eyes rimmed puffy red and irises seething with onionskin layers of hurt and fear and anger, palm-print impressions framing his face like the tailfeathers of kindergarten turkeys.
“You cold-hearted son of a bitch,” he said. “You don’t even care if she’s dead or not, do you? You’re just worried about yourself. You’re just worried about having to explain this mess to the cops.”
“Frankly, Walter, I think jail’s about the last thing I should be worrying about right now, don’t you?” and Byron pulled the wings off his napkin bat and let its torso flutter to the tabletop.
“What is that supposed to mean?”
“You know what he means, Walter,” she said and looked back out at the snow, the candyland world without sharp edges. “You can pretend all you want, but you’re still just as much a part of this as we are, as much as Spyder.”
“She lied to us,” Byron said. “She lied to us, and the whole thing is just a trap.”
“You two just don’t get it, do you?” Walter asked. “The game is fucking over, okay? This shit is for real.”
Robin closed her eyes, feeling the X still burning inside her, her stomach and muscles tight from the strychnine and everything that had gone wrong in the last hour.
“What did you see down there, Walter?” she asked without opening her eyes. “What did you see in the basement? What did you dream about before Spyder made the dream catcher?”
“Robin, we were just fucked up. We were tripping our fucking balls off. We didn’t see anything real, nothing that wasn’t in our heads all along.”
“That’s horseshit,” Byron said, rolling his dismembered bat into a wad and sinking it in his glass of ice water. “And you know it, and you’re just too big a pussy to admit it.”
“You never believed any of the story,” Robin said, not a question, a revelation, maybe, and she opened her eyes, turned slowly away from the window to face Walter; he winced and looked quickly back down at his hands.
“I know you guys aren’t this stupid,” he said. “It was just a bad trip, and all that other stuff was just something Spyder made up to try and make us sleep better.”
“You’re a liar,” said Robin, her voice more bitter than the coffee. “You think maybe it’ll all go away if you say it never happened. That you’ll stop seeing the shadows if you say they’re not there.”
“Robin, I haven’t seen jack shit, okay? I’m telling you the truth. I haven’t seen jack-fucking-shit.”
“I don’t believe you,” Robin said.
“That’s not my goddamn problem.”
Short silence then, and Byron tapping impatient black nails against Formica. “So, you’re not even going with us?” he asked, finally. “You won’t even do that much?”
“We’re in enough trouble already without breaking into Spyder’s house.”
“It wouldn’t be breaking in,” Byron said. “Robin has a key. You know she has a key, Walter,” and without asking permission,