The Kingmaker

10 - Hindsight

 "You f*****g psycho -"

"Whoa, careful." Eden leaned her weight upon the foot pressing down into Nate's lower left ribs, drawing out a screaming groan from the man. "You're inebriated. If you keep moving around like that, you'll hurt yourself."

"Get off me!"

Eden shook her head and gave him a winning smile. "I didn't make all this effort just to break a leg or two. No, Nathan, I'm sticking around for the long haul. Hey, what are your thoughts on arms, by the way?"

He was too busy scrabbling away at Eden's ankle with his one good hand to answer her at first, but he quickly gave up when she tipped his chin back with a prod of the steel rebar in her hand.

"Listen, I'm only asking because I don't really know if you want to hang onto them. One's already thoroughly busted, and this one looks bad, too. Wrist might be shot, I'd guess. Do you want me to make you symmetrical and trash it all the way, too?"

"Why are you doing this?" he demanded. "If you want money -"

"Then I can grab the ten large in cash that you keep around in your apartment," Eden interrupted. "And who doesn't want money, you're right. It's definitely convenient, but that's not why you fell thirty-some feet for me. I'd like something a little more personalized, a little more intimate."

He stared up at her with wild eyes, every ragged breath sending forth a small plume of warm fog from between his lips.

"What do you want," he croaked. "Whatever it is, you can have it."

Did he even know what he was promising? Of course he didn't. Otherwise, he would have known he could never provide it - that he was useless beyond what she was about to get from him right now anyway, with or without his voluntary cooperation. What a guy, what a trooper, ready to say whatever he needed to say in order to make a desperate bid for life. Eden hefted the metal rod in her hand slightly and watched his Adam's apple bob in nervous rhythm. Funny, she thought. He was so afraid.

"How old are you again, Nathan?"

When he didn't answer right away, she dug the end of the steel rebar into his throat hard enough to make him gag.

"Twenty eight!" he howled, nearly choking. "twenty eight, f**k!"

"See, that's the part I didn't understand when I was younger. You were definitely the kind of guy who didn't like dating older women, more mature women. It's the same now - you like the innocent kind, the ones you think you can teach something to. Younger women. Now why would a twenty year old kid go after a woman so far out of his league - four years older, only back in school for her second bachelor's, financially sound? She didn't even want a boyfriend to begin with. She just thought your persistence was adorable, and she felt sorry for you. That's why she dated you at all."

With a thoughtful pucker of the mouth, she leaned forward a little more on the rod, making him curse and flounder around a little more. She ignored it.

"I didn't like you from the start. When you crawled up to our table and started talking to her about some class you took together - you might remember that night, my family had a seven o' clock reservation at the Bowington - I knew you were up to something. Now, my mistake was that I thought Brook was your only objective. I really should have spared you more than a single thought and maybe I would have figured it out in time, but hindsight is twenty-twenty. Easy for me to say that now."

She saw his eyes widen at the mention of her sister's name. Good, good. He was starting to understand why he was here now, then, and at long last he finally knew who Eden really was. And if the look on his face was any indication, he also knew that she wasn't going to leave without a few answers to pocket on the way out.

"The most curious part is that the night Brook finally convinced our parents to let you come over, you bailed last minute. I was relieved at the time, you know. It meant that I could stay out and not hurry home from evening seminar on campus to meet some disappointing boyfriend - and actually, I ended up stopping by the Slum Belt, too, for good measure -  but that's neither here nor there. The point is, I came back late and - well. You should know what happened. Don't you?"

Eden prodded him a little harder with the rebar and ground her foot against his broken rib. He howled aloud again, but all she did was wait for his shouts to die down. "Wow, you've got a set of lungs on you."

"Please, I didn't have anything to do with -" he began to wheeze, but all she did was wave her other hand down at him.

"Save it. My point was that after observing you closely for the last month, you're not the kind of person who would have attracted Brook at all. Nor would you have gone after her with such chivalrous vigor. My God, I remember when you actually got down on your knee and kissed her hand once that time I went to go visit her on campus. I thought I was going to gag - a-ha-ha. But as I was saying...you had your reasons for going after her. For putting on that act so religiously. People change, and it's been a long time, but it hasn't been that long. And people like you don't change at all."

"Please," he pleaded. "I had nothing to do with it."

"You canceling the dinner last minute when you'd been hopping up and down to come over for three months? Since the day you met Brook? And that night just happened to be the night that..."

"Please!"

"I sincerely hope the rest don't turn out like you," she told him. "You beg way too much. A little is fine, it sets the mood and everything. But this is a little excessive. All I want are answers, and you're saying a lot of unnecessary and useless things. Ah-ah, no, shut up. I'm going to give you a quick summary of what's going to happen here. Do that, and I may or may not find you useful enough to keep alive."

She moved the rod up to his face and tapped his cheek with it several times, horrifically close to his eye. How scared must be he, she wondered, to hold his breath like that? Expanding his chest had to hurt, what with his multiple broken ribs. And yet his fear gave her no pleasure at all, just cool impatience.

"I came back to find everyone who had anything to do with the night the old police commissioner, her husband, and one of her daughters were killed," she said. "It annoys me that you all got away with it for this long, but I'm back now. I know I've been missed."

He made a gurgling sound, one that she tacitly ignored.

"Maybe you weren't personally responsible, Nate, but you must have known something was going to happen. Coincidences are rarely so generous. And that's why you're here now, so that I can find out what you knew and how you knew it. Easy, right? This could be over as soon as you tell me everything I want to hear, and you could be crawling back home and whimpering all the way in just a few minutes."

Oh, how nice it would be to crush his skull right now, she thought. The dumb disbelief in his eyes as he stared up at her made her want to beat him into a bloody pulp with the steel in her hand. Now was not the time for him to wonder how things could have possibly ended up this way. She could see the question on his face, the sheer astonishment. In his drunken haze, no doubt he was wondering if maybe this was all just a bad dream and nothing more.

Oh, no. This was no dream. Eden pressed the tip of the rebar into his face and turned it this way and that a few times, with all the air of someone inspecting a product for any deformities and imperfections. Well, she saw plenty, but when she broke open the piggy bank she was sure he could make all this trouble worth it.

"There are things I already know, too. I'm not going to tell you what, because while that might save time, that would mean you'd be free to try to fill in the blanks with bad info. That just won't do. So you're going to tell me, and you're going to tell me now, and what I hear better match what I already know."

Hm. That didn't feel persuasive enough. If it were her lying on the ground instead of him, she wasn't so sure she would be properly terrified. There would still be a part of her thinking of how to manipulate the situation, and she absolutely couldn't have Nate thinking the same thing now. No. She had to make sure he understood.

"Just so you know, I'm fully prepared to kill you and save myself all the frustration if I even remotely think you're wasting my time. Your life hinges on how important I think you are to me. And seeing as how I think you're close to worthless already, you have a lot of ground to make up for. There's a wheelbarrow not too far from us, and I have no problem at all smashing this bar into your brain before I cart you off to dump you in the river, so -"

"I didn't know they were making the hit," he pleaded with a hitched sob. "All they told me was that I needed to stay away from now on. I only wanted to get access to the commissioner, that was it! I was supposed to plant a listening device in her office at home. But I never got to. I was going to do it the night I was supposed to come over, but it was too late!"

Well, sure. A small fish like Nate would hardly know all the vital goings-on of the underground. A simple drug dealer, even one as successful as him, would scarcely amount to much more than a drop in the pond. He was replaceable, a mass-produced screw in the works. The difference was that he had been in the right place at the right time, and he had been lucky enough to be within proximity of the larger picture being painted right above his head. Location, location, location - he had to know something the others didn't.

"When did they tell you that you needed to stay away?"

"That night. It was - it was like half past six, I was already on my way since I was on the other side of the city," he babbled. "And then I got a call from DiAngelo telling me to keep my ass out of the place, that he got tipped off about a hit. I didn't believe it at first, I told him no one's stupid enough to hit the commissioner's home. But he said it's not about stupid anymore. That whoever was doing it didn't have anything to be afraid of."

Ah, yes. That made sense. With District Attorney Beauchamp in their pockets, who else did they have to be afraid of? Only someone like the DA would ever be brave enough to try to prosecute with the shadow of higher powers at their back, but if even the DA fell to dirty money...

"Tell me about DiAngelo."

His face blanched, but Eden's smile remained as serene as ever.

"Hey," she said. "You're the one who brought him up. To be fair, we were going to talk about him anyway, but this way we can cut to the chase. So...DiAngelo, Nate. Quickly."

"He - he moved up," he stammered. "That was the last time we ever talked."

Thwack!

He howled aloud, clutching weakly at the side of his face where she had just struck him with the metal rod. She gave him only a few more seconds to rock side to side before nudging away his hand again.

"Stop moving that. You're only going to make the break worse." Eden placed the end of the rebar against his dirty cheek again, making him still. Under the moonlight, she could see the glint of tears streaking down his face. "Let's be clear. Again. Since maybe you need me to spell these things out for you. When I say tell me what you know, I mean everything. I don't want half the truth, I want the whole. If you keep holding things back, I have no choice but to consider it the same as lying to me, which is going to end so badly for you."

"Wait!" he cried out when she drew the steel back to prepare for another swing. "Wait, I'll tell you - please, just wait!"

She twirled the rebar in the air with a radiant smile. "Well, how could I say no to that face? Alright, then. Let's hear it."