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Something I’m looking to continue, regardless of the cost.
“Did you see the news?” Enzo asks as he gets up to make himself another cup of coffee.
“Make me one, too,” I say, nodding my head towards the espresso machine. “What news?” I ask, taking my phone out of my back pocket.
“Ricci’s hands showed up.” The rest of his sentence is lost beneath the sound of the coffee grinder.
My stomach tightens. I open my phone to search the local news station and find that we’ve made the headlines.
Or at least I did.
“Fuck,” I say.
“Yeah.”
Enzo sets my cup down. “It’s not great.” He takes a sip of his own and sits back down at the table.
“It’s not terrible though,” I say, maybe more to myself than to him. “No one gives a fuck about the Ricci’s.”
“Tell that to social media.” He holds out his phone.
I scoff and take his phone. “Social media doesn’t mean anything.”
But as I scroll through the posts, my stomach starts to tighten. There are hundreds of posts already.
Grieving.
Memorializing.
Calling for justice.
I stop on one and look at the baseball picture of Matt, smiling in his uniform.
An end to a light of the community, gone too soon is the caption. The most liked comment is from a cousin. We won’t rest until you get justice, Matty. We love you, cuz!
I slam my fist against the table and drop Enzo’s phone.
Fuck this. Matt wasn’t a light, he was a goddamn predator. His death is a fucking favor to the world. I’ll be damned if my first kill goes wrong. The fucker deserved it.
“Maybe it’ll die down.” Enzo takes his phone back. “As long as it stays on local news and social media, we’ll probably be able to wait it out. If it hits national news, we’ll need to bring Albert in to do damage control.”
I groan and he gives me a sympathetic shrug. If my father is awake, he’ll want to talk about this. I check the time. It’s nearly time to leave. I know he’ll be awake soon.
“Give it a few days,” he says. “It’ll become old news fast.”
It fucking better.
The Ricci name was inconsequential in this town until the moment Matt’s severed hands turned up on the shore. Enzo is probably right.
His family will grieve. His community will shout about him. But… it will all die away in a few weeks. Leave it to social media to magnify something that should never have seen the light of day.
I twist in my chair to turn on the TV, visible from the kitchen table.
Local news reporters are set up along the docks, nowhere near our property at least, the live stream cutting to a video tape of last night, when the discovery must have been made. The previously shot footage shows crime scene investigators lingering in the background.
I’ve seen enough. I click off the TV as their morning reporter narrates the recap of last night and I drain the last of my espresso.
No one who matters gives a fuck about the Ricci family. There’s no long-term damage here.
