Cruz actually liked small humans. More than he liked most adults, anyway. Charlie called him “sir” and Mia “ma’am,” when he spoke, which was seldom, and so softly, one had to strain to hear him at all.
Cruz had watched the kid shuffling around near the water unsupervised, and had climbed down the ladder where he’d been about to start repairing the roof. The kid looked unhappy. Unfortunately he’d be a lot more unhappy if that gator slid up on the bank to grab some rays and found himself a small, slow kid to dine on.
He’d had as little to do with his own father as possible. In fact, when Cruz approached the kid, he flinched. A familiar and infuriating knee-jerk reaction to someone large and menacing looming over him.
Cruz had immediately crouched low, picked up a stone, and skimmed it over the scummy water, and kept it up as he made idle convo with the kid. Where’d he go to school? What grade? Did he know how to make a stone hop across the water?
He learned a lot in that half hour before Latour came around the house and demanded the kid come and help him.
Charlie’s father got angry a lot. His mom cried. He hated when she cried; it made his insides hurt. When he was big he’d get a job to help Daddy with all the bills, then everything would be okay, and Mom wouldn’t cry so much. And maybe his daddy would like him more, and not be mad at him all the time.
A familiar and painful mirror to Cruz’s own childhood.
He knew how fruitless it was for a child to try to fix the problems of his parents. Latour drank, couldn’t hold a job, and took it out on his wife and kid.
Cruz’s father had been a functioning alcoholic. Violent, mean, and vindictive. He’d killed Cruz’s mother, and Cruz was damned if he’d watch the same thing happen to this kid.
Unlike his own childhood, when his father’s powerful and influential friends had turned their collective blind eyes to the cycle of abuse until it was too late, he’d keep an eye on the Latour family, and if he felt the situation warranted action, he’d step in.
Cruz went back up the ladder to his roof patching as Charlie worked alongside his father, picking up bundles of weeds in his skinny arms while Latour took a Weedwacker to the thick undergrowth on the bayou side of the house.
Cruz looked down on father and son for a few minutes. He added Charlie and his mother to the things he’d have to tie up before he left Bayou Cheniere, Louisiana. I have your back, kid. Count on it.
Mia, he knew, didn’t give a tinker’s damn about kids and their shit-awful plights in the U.S. or in China. She’d lied straight-faced. She was good at it. If he didn’t have proof otherwise, he would’ve believed her.
The news reports he’d found had her in China, at the very plant where the children had died. But she claimed she’d never been there.
Son of a bitch. Cruz took out his frustration by pounding nails into slate shingles, skipping lunch, and feeling highly pissed off, without any mood improvement all day. He usually didn’t think this much about killing people. Once he decided they were worthy of killing, the act of killing didn’t fucking bother him. That he was bothered about killing Mia bothered the living shit out of him. The sun beat down. He scooped his hair back with a scrap of string, then tied his T-shirt around his head to catch the sweat. He enjoyed the sting of sun on his bare shoulders.
“You should at least drink something. It’s hot.”
Startled, Cruz whipped his head around to see Mia, eyes narrowed against the sun, only her head and shoulders visible above the eave.
He snatched the nails out of his mouth. “What the fuck are you doing up here? You’ll break your goddamn neck, woman.”
“Now see? I knew you’d be charming and happy to see me.” Her voice was filled with amusement. “I’ve never climbed such a high ladder before. It’s thrilling, in a terrifying way. Sort of like having sex with you when your hands are on my neck. Although now that I’m way up here, I’m not sure I can get down. I have cold lemonade in the kitchen—not fresh-squeezed; from concentrate—and a sandwich Daisy made, so it’s really good. Are you going to stay up here and pout, or come down and take a break and rehydrate?”
“I’m a man. I don’t pout. I have things on my mind.”
“I’m a good listener.”
“I don’t need therapy. Get down before you fall.”
“Will you come down and eat?”
“When I’m done with this section.”
“Okay. . . .” She let out a little shriek as the ladder slid sideways a few inches. Cruz’s heart slammed up into his throat, and he slid down the slope of the roof—to do God only knew what. She teetered almost forty feet above the ground, and he wasn’t close enough to catch her before she dropped like a stone.