Cutting Teeth Emma Carro wiped the mascara stains off her cheeks. "Thank you," she said, and gave her new friend a watery smile. "I'm sorry about this." She meant the make-up smudges on his clean, white handkerchief. She folded it as neatly as she could and laid it on the table. There was a glass of water in front of her. She took a few jittery sips and tried to calm down.
Going out in public wasn't wise, not in her condition. She was 90% sure her husband, Bryan Carro, was sleeping with another woman. There was a paralegal at the law firm where Bryan worked, Lisette, who had red hair and unnatural tits and freckles on her knees. Lately it seemed like Bryan was working long hours on purpose. He hadn't touched her in weeks, or made love to her in over a month, and the expectant looks Lisette gave Bryan at the firm dinner just added weight to Emma's speculation.
Tonight was what ground the painful truth into her, like a cigarette smashing into an open palm.
After watching their uneaten dinner grow cold, Emma grabbed her keys and her purse and headed out the door. She pulled her gray station wagon alongside Mutter and Kent, Attorneys at Law, around eight p.m. There she rap-tapped her fingers against the wheel and watched the building for ten minutes, just letting the car idle. How crazy would she look, bursting into his office unannounced, hair unbrushed and eyes wild. There was a meatloaf stain on her pants. She looked like such a housewife.
Lisette was sexy and smart. She drank bourbon with the men, and spoke their legaleeze in husky tones. Her red hair was real, a fact Emma had on good authority, after overhearing Bruce Mutter detail the color of her pubic hair to one of the partners at the firm dinner. They laughed crudely, and Emma's face flushed pink with humiliation and panic.
That panic rose a second time when the doors of Mutter and Kent swung open, and out stepped Lisette with her husband. Emma put the wagon in gear and attempted to follow their cab in traffic, but she lost them after a couple of blocks.
She ended up in a bar on Riviera. She never drank, but now, after three Bloody Mary's she hadn't paid for, a not-unpleasant lethargy spread into Emma's limbs. It wasn't that she didn't care. It just got a little easier not to cry. "I just wish I knew for sure," she whispered. "Maybe I should hire a private investigator. Someone who wouldn't get lost in traffic," she added, hating herself. She was unsophisticated, incapable of the simple task of following a yellow car.
"What would you do if you knew?" The man with the handkerchief looked sympathetic. He stirred the ice in his drink, but his eyes were on Emma. She wasn't bad looking. Warm brown hair, blue eyes, an upturned nose. A girl next door.
"I don't know... shoot her, I guess." Emma's voice warbled with uncertainty, and she laughed a nervous laugh. The way it came out underlined how vulnerable she was, and how helpless if Bryan's affair was true. She was the town girl Bryan picked up in law school, and proposed to when he knocked her up. The pregnancy didn't last, but the engagement had. After they married, she moved across the country with him, to a city that fit her like a too-big shoe. She plodded around in it, staying mostly upright, but tripping at every bump along the way.
"You don't need a private investigator, Emma." The Dealmaker tucked the handkerchief in his coat pocket. "I can tell you if Bryan's been unfaithful." He put his arm on the bar. Resting it like that, Darian turned his palm up to the air, as if holding something no one else could see. He waited.
"I don't understand..." The brunette looked at him worriedly, fully expecting that she was caught in a practical joke.
"Shh." Darian's reprimand was abrupt. "Just watch."
In the demon's hand, a sphere formed, luminous and translucent blue. Within that ball of light, a scene played out for Emma's eyes. Details only she would recognize, like the interior of her bedroom, with its country blue bed linens and skirted tables. The miniature movie played on, and there were two actors. Lisette wearing one of Emma's nightgowns with the lace collar, modeling and mocking it before tugging it up. She was naked from the waist down then, naked and being screwed on the middle of Emma's bed by Emma's husband.
The brunette's face turned white and then red. "Stop... stop, stop!" She clutched at Darian's hand to make it close. "Stop, why are you doing this?!"
"Because the world could use a few less Lisette's, don't you think." Darian snatched his hand back. His entire demeanor had changed, going from attentive to cold in mere moments. "Your husband's not the first one she's fucked, Emma, and he won't be the last. They line up at her desk. On second thought... shoot him instead. It'll send a louder message."
She couldn't believe what he did next. He took a handgun out of his waistband and laid it on her thighs. Emma was so startled, her legs spread out, and it almost fell between.
"Easy." Darian caught the gun and nudged it into her hand. "Hide this under your clothes."
Emma's body kept shuddering. She was going into some kind of shock, she just didn't know what kind. "When... when did he do that?" she asked, testing the Dealmaker, to see if he was making it up.
With little effort, Darian reached into her brain and found a feasible answer. "March 18th," he said. "When you were in Pennsylvania visiting family."
A scream began to form in Emma's throat. Not that day. Any day but that one. Three years after the fact, she was still reeling from the loss of her child. Seven months along, very nearly a mother. Brian wouldn't do that, be so filthy and selfish and unkind, and let that redheaded whore make fun of her, on top of it all. And yet he had.
Emma wrapped her sweaty fingers around the gun.
"Do it tonight, when he comes home," Darian suggested. He mapped out a plan for her, a way to exonerate herself from seeming like she inflicted intentional harm. Emma simply sat there, looking stricken and wounded and drunk. As time and his proposal dragged onward, she began to look sick, too. But she took the gun when she left the bar. She stuck it in the console of her wagon and drove a weaving path home. On the middle cushion of the couch, she sat with her gun for Bryan to come home.
Darian heard the bullet discharge from ten miles away.
This wasn't a deal. He had promised Emma nothing, and received nothing in return. This was pure malice, uncaring of its victims. It was a test to see if he could create an illusion, a lie so complete an innocent woman would kill for it.
Lisette McAllister was a lesbian. She hadn't screwed a lawyer all her life. Bryan Carro had been giving her legal advice. But the truth didn't make him any less dead, or his wife Emma any less guilty of murder.
It simply made for an interesting revelation at the funeral, when Lisette introduced her lover to the widow.