my tears ricochet

Chapter Sixty One

He toed his boots off as he came in, scanning the apartment for his daughter. It had been a few days and it was getting easier, melting into the loose shape of routine. Daryl and Glenn had started their first shift at the garage which had mostly turned into rolling around the chairs and rifling through the tool chests, largely left to their own devices.

It was better knowing that Ivy had a habit of sticking with Beth, the pair of girls migrating between apartments together. He would have liked keeping her in his sights but at least she wasn't alone.

Daryl could hear the pair laughing from down the hall, a bit of light from her bedroom softening the shadows. He followed the noise to the door left ajar and he stuck his hand through, catching the light switch and flipping it back and forth in lieu of knocking. "Yeah?" She called, letting him in. She and Beth were sitting crosslegged on her bed, hunched over three pistols that they had taken apart and were cleaning. "I thought you were with Glenn tonight?"

"Finished up early. The hell you doing with those?"

"Got 'em. There's one for you."

Daryl wasn't sure if he should be shocked. It had only been five days and apparently his daughter had broken into the gun supply, beating Rick and Carol's scheme. "They gonna catch you for that?"

Beth clicked a piece back into place before she looked up at him. "We forged Ron's name on the check-out sheet. Carl stole us some of his homework for the writing. They can look in his direction if they notice them missing."

"Who's Ron?"

Ivy and Beth looked at each other, sharing some kind of silent conversation that he couldn't quite decipher. His daughter set her pistol down and dug a key from her shirt pocket, passing it over. "Here. It's the master key for the apartment. Now nobody but us has access."

Clearly she expected that the key was enough to bypass the conversation about Ron. Daryl would have to chase after that tangent of conversation later when there wasn't a pair of girls working circles around everybody else. "You break into Deanna's?"

"No. I did. She was just the look out," Beth said, leaning back with her hands bracing her. "Deanna was out at the garden with Maggie for a bit so I went in through the window. She had all the keys in the study so I grabbed the one for you guys and also for us."

Daryl breathed deep, considering the scene before him. "Thought we were working on trying this place out." Not breaking and entering, committing theft, forgery, and burying the evidence beneath a scapegoat. Maybe, he thought dimly, Ivy really was his blood. It was the kind of stunt he and Merle would have pulled half a dozen times themselves, checking out of a place laughing over the chaos they had caused.

"We are," Ivy shrugged. "That's why we took the small guns. Nothing big."

"Well, knock it off. No more of that shit. You hear me?"

"So you don't want one?"

"I didn't say that, did I?"

Despite the annoyance of his kid committing a couple crimes in a single day, it was a relief knowing he held the master key for their apartment. They had taken to wedging one of the kitchen chairs beneath the doorknob at night to help settle their unease of possible intruders coming through. And the gun was something that he could tuck away behind the bedside table for an emergency.

"Gabriel was by earlier," Ivy suddenly remembered. "Said Michonne was doing some dinner for everyone."

"Did the priest come by before or after you two started Alexandria's first crime wave?"

"Before."

He sighed, shoving his hands in his pockets. "We'll walk over in a bit. Finish up and put 'em away somewhere. You ain't carrying loaded weapons around this place." They had enough attention on them from Rick's paranoid antics. So far people were acting friendly but he wasn't taking chances on what would happen if they caught a glimpse of his daughter carrying a stolen gun around. "This somethin' Maggie needs to know about?"