Russell's Attic, Books 1 - 3

by SL Huang

  My skin began to tingle with anger. “You knew this.”

  “I knew their setup, not who had the real stones. I doubt even the couriers knew. But one of the other talented and unscrupulous people I hired brought me the correct package earlier today. So you have nothing to offer me, and frankly, I am unwilling to pay for nothing.”

  And nobody else would be, either. He was leaving me without even something I could fence. “We had an agreement,” I said again. “That agreement was for the retrieval of the jewels on that boat, and that’s exactly what I did. You wanted this to be contingent on what they were worth, you should have told me what the fuck I was looking for and given me all the information. I went and got what you commissioned me to get, and that means you’re still going to give me my fee.”

  “Or what?” He smiled.

  “Or I’ll make you,” I said evenly.

  The goon with the gun to my head raised it slightly. Another few put their hands on the butts of their own weapons.

  “Draw those and I’ll kill you,” I said.

  “I’ve heard about you,” said my client. “I’ve heard you make life very difficult for people you don’t like.”

  “That’s right.”

  “And knowing that, what would you have me do?” He gave me an elaborate shrug, grinning. “It was stupid of you to come here. Good-bye, dear.”

  Pilar had talked about guns giving people power. In this case, it’s what gave them a fighting chance.

  The man with the pistol on me tightened his finger on the trigger, but the moment it tripped I wasn’t in line with the muzzle anymore. The slipstream of the bullet whizzed by, tickling my skin as I dove in close to the shooter. Fear engulfed his eyes. My foot came up to my hand as I pivoted, my fingers diving into my boot, and I hesitated for the barest instant—four hundred fifty-one days, four hundred fifty-one days—but fuck it, I was just so tired, and there were seven people here who wanted to kill me and leaving any one of them with enough life to pull a trigger while I took care of the rest…it wasn’t fun, wasn’t moral, wasn’t an interesting challenge; it was just fucking stupid.

  I twisted my hand and buried my knife between my would-be killer’s ribs.

  Behind me, everyone else went for their weapons.

  Twelve seconds later, I stood in the midst of the blood and bodies, the floor a red slick around my feet, my face and hands smeared with it.

  Four hundred fifty-one days since I had killed someone.

  I’d been honest when talking to Pilar: I didn’t feel a thing.

  ♦

  My job at an abrupt and unexpected end, I made a beeline for the nearest bar and knocked back six tumblers of whiskey.

  I’d retrieved my Colt before leaving the scene. Its weight at the small of my back braced me.

  “Is that…blood?” the young bartender ventured as he served me the fifth drink. Brave of him. “You okay, man?”

  “It’s not mine,” I said, before I realized that probably wasn’t reassuring. “I was in a car accident,” I added.

  I winced after I said it, but he must have thought the fake over-loudness was because of the booze or shock or something. He gave me a sympathetic nod and a “that sucks, man” and poured me another whiskey. “On the house.”

  I hated it when people tried to talk to me. I finished the alcohol and left without tipping the bartender.

  ♦

  I walked for a while, letting the buzz simmer in my veins. What did it mean, that I’d just ended the lives of seven people after over a year of avoiding it and I didn’t feel anything about it at all? Except, maybe, relief—relief that I didn’t have to try anymore, that it was over, that I’d inevitably fallen back down where I belonged and no longer had to wait apprehensively for when that day would happen.

  I wrapped my jacket around myself tighter.

  Arthur would be pissed.

  He’d make me feel bad about the whole thing, wouldn’t he, in that indefinable way Arthur had that made me feel shitty about myself even when he hadn’t said anything.

  It all sounded so tiring. I was so tired. So tired of living up to someone else’s standards.

  My phone buzzed. It was a text message from Checker. UR JOB DONE? GAME NITE 2NITE U IN?

  Where did they get off, expecting me to be a normal fucking person? I wasn’t normal. Time to stop fucking pretending.

  I deleted the text message.

  Then, ignoring a BAC that made it very illegal to get behind a wheel at this moment, I stole a car and went to buy a crate full of cheap vodka. I drove to the apartment I’d been living out of and, having freed myself of Arthur’s challenge, set myself a new one: finish the entire box of vodka that night.

  ♦

  I woke up to the smell of my own vomit and Pilar holding a glass of water to my lips.

  “Here, drink,” her voice said.

  “Go away,” I slurred.

  Her hands moved, wiping my face with a wet towel. I meant to shove her away, but I didn’t.

  “You’re not breathing too slow and your temperature’s normal,” she said matter-of-factly, “and now you’re responsive, so I don’t think you’re in any danger. Did you take anything other than alcohol?”

  “What, are you a doctor now?” I asked snidely.

  She hesitated for a beat. “No. My mom was an alcoholic. Is. Is an alcoholic. But she manages it now.”

  “I’m not an alcoholic,” I said.

  “Oh, trust me, I know,” she answered. “You’re just a mess.” She pressed the water on me again. I took it this time.

  “What are you doing here, anyway?” I demanded, when I’d managed as many sips as my rioting stomach would allow. My head was starting to clang, a lot, and the light in the flat was way too bright, even though the blinds were shut.

  “You’re welcome,” Pilar said, taking the water glass back from me. “We were supposed to go out shooting today, remember? It’s not like you to miss without letting me know, and nobody’d heard from you. I figured I should check.”

  “So you broke into my apartment.”

  “Well, you weren’t answering. And Tabitha’s been teaching me to pick locks.”

  “Who’s Tabitha?”

  “Oh! Um. Just a friend.”

  I wasn’t interested anyway. “Don’t do that shit. If I’d been awake I would’ve shot you.”

  “I knocked and called out first, obviously,” Pilar said. “Besides, come on. You wouldn’t risk breaking your streak.”

  My streak.

  I let my head fall back. I was on the floor. Next to my couch. I didn’t remember falling off the couch.

  Whatever.

  “Oh,” Pilar said, once again proving I had no poker face. “Oh, Cas. I’m sorry.”

  “I’m not,” I said.

  I was pretty sure the ensuing silence was awkward, but I wanted Pilar to go away too badly to notice it much. Instead I tried to focus on breathing through the clanging in my head without throwing up.

  Fuck. The familiar weight at my belt was missing. I wondered how I hadn’t noticed right away. Something like that almost always would have woken me instantly and with great prejudice, but then, the same went for someone breaking into my apartment.

  I’d knocked myself out pretty good this time.

  “You took my gun,” I said. I meant it to be accusing, but I wasn’t sure I managed.

  “Of course I did,” Pilar said. “I didn’t want you to wake up and shoot me accidentally. Or, like, fall on it and shoot yourself. You should really keep the safety on.”

  “Fuck you,” I said. “I’m the one who taught you what a safety is. Where is it?”

  “On the table. Unloaded.”

  “Fuck you,” I said again.

  “Have some more water,” she answered.

  “No.” I said it just to be childish. I was definitely dehydrated.

  “Can I help you back up on the couch?”

  “Don’t need help.” And now I was just being petty.


  “Please have some more water.” Pilar curled one of my hands around the glass.

  I lay there limp. Pilar stayed kneeling beside me for another few minutes, then got up and started moving around my apartment. Cleaning, by the sound of it. Empty bottles clinked into piles, and the faucet ran intermittently between her footsteps.

  The floor was, in fact, terribly uncomfortable, and I wanted my Colt back, but moving sounded like a ridiculous idea. I managed to sit up a little and drink a few more sips of water before my stomach revolted and bucked and I vomited into the glass. It didn’t make me feel better.

  Pilar came and took the glass and then brought me a fresh cup of water, along with a damp towel. “Want me to hold your hair and rub your back?” she asked.

  She wasn’t very good at mocking me; it was too obvious she was trying not to be amused. I shot her as poisonous a look as I could muster and winced when it hurt my head. “You haven’t known me long enough for that,” I said.

  “Oh, I think cleaning up your puke skips me ahead.”

  Goddammit.

  Eventually I heaved myself up onto the couch with a Herculean effort and lay there watching the ceiling spin. I was both craptastically hungover and still slightly drunk. The latter was a good thing; it kept my senses dulled.

  “Hey,” I said to Pilar, without opening my eyes, which now had the damp towel across them. “You better not be throwing out the rest of the vodka. I’m gonna need that. And give me back my gun.”

  She stopped moving. Then her footsteps came closer and the couch dipped beneath me as she sat on the edge.

  I cracked one eye open to peer at her. She was gazing at me seriously, not saying anything. Her hands were empty in her lap.

  “What?” I snapped. If she was going to give me some bullshit line about drinking and carrying, I’d never do her another favor again.

  “I just…” Pilar waved her hands vaguely. “It makes me unhappy, to see you this way.”

  “You don’t have to care,” I said. “Leave if you want to.”

  She didn’t go anywhere, only twined her fingers together and dropped her eyes to them. “Have you tried anything else?” she asked after a moment.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  She didn’t react to the hostility in my tone. “I mean, um—I get that it’s some sort of—self-medicating thing, that you’re doing, and I just wondered if—I mean, it’s such a destructive solution. I just…I wondered if you’d tried anything else, is all,” she repeated.

  “If you’re trying to rehabilitate me, you can get the fuck out,” I said.

  “I don’t—um, that’s not what I meant.” She flapped her hands unhappily. “I just want to understand.”

  “Why?”

  “Because we’re friends, or at least, we’re the weird sort of friends where you volunteer to shoot someone for me and I break into your apartment to clean up your vomit, which, okay, possibly does not sound healthy when I put it like that. But I just…I’ve got a lot of people in my family struggling with a lot of different things, and I want to understand. And I’d say you don’t have to tell me, except then I know you won’t. And I know from what you’ve said that when you’re hired for something, or if, like, you’re about to be, then you don’t drink at all, and I just wondered if in between it’s that you get depressed, or it’s panic attacks or—”

  “Velasquez.”

  “Yeah?”

  “It’s none of your business.”

  Silence for a moment, then she said, “Okay.”

  She got up and went back to straightening up, and I gave up on being conscious.

  When my eyes fuzzed back open, Pilar was curled on one of the kitchen chairs reading a book, and the apartment smelled like soap and lemons.

  My head still wanted to split open—now it felt like I had a rambunctious chimpanzee inside kicking the walls of my skull—but at least I was less nauseated. More importantly, I was almost sober. I rolled up to sitting, located the remainder of the alcohol where Pilar had lined it up neatly on the kitchen counter, and pushed myself to my feet to hobble over.

  I stopped at the table to reload my Colt and stick it back in my belt. Pilar’s eyes followed me.

  “I can’t help you with whatever moral crisis you’re having,” I said.

  “Oh—yeah. I know.” She cleared her throat. “I’m, um. I decided. I want…I want to keep learning.”

  “You do?”

  “I still have to think about—everything. But when I…I mean, I knew how to take your gun and unload it without killing myself, and I was glad I knew how to do that. And I got to thinking. I should at least know how to use them, if I’m going to be around people who do, and as for the rest of it…I don’t know if I’ll ever know what’s right. But I’ll keep trying to figure it out. And meanwhile, I think it’s good for me to—you know. Know things. Just in case.”

  I grunted.

  The corner of her mouth twitched up. “And I like doing it with you, I really do. I’m not sure if I ever said, but thank you.”

  I grunted again and lurched against the counter, where I picked up the half-full bottle to drink back a few gulps. My hangover was so against the idea of more alcohol that it turned the taste metallic and acrid. I swallowed anyway.

  Jesus Christ. Fucking Pilar. Her and her questions, and her prying, and her thank-yous.

  I thunked the bottle back down, hard, and said, “It’s not axiomatic.”

  “Sorry?”

  I studied the grain of the wood molding on the wall, the curves whorling lazily into polar equations. “What you asked before. My brain. It’s not axiomatic; I can’t always tell what it’s going to do.” The one constant, at least so far, was exactly what Pilar had already mentioned: work, or the promise of it, somehow always gave me enough focus to keep me sane. Outside of work, all bets were off. Sometimes I was fine. Sometimes I wasn’t.

  Sometimes I was fine until I wasn’t.

  I tried to stay inebriated enough between times that it wouldn’t matter. I leaned against the countertop, playing with the label on the vodka bottle. My fingers folded a random angle in the peeling corner of the label and then did a neusis construction to trisect it. I’d have some more alcohol in a minute.

  “It’s been happening more lately, hasn’t it?” Pilar asked gently.

  “What?” I jerked, almost knocking over the bottle.

  How did she know? How did she know fear had started nibbling at me now as soon as a gig ended, that I didn’t know how far I was going to unravel this time? How did she know my brain had begun sliding around in its unconscious state even when I was under contract, the nightmares encroaching even when I had the focus of a job?

  “I’ve had a bit less work this year. That’s all,” I insisted.

  I knew for a fact Checker had told Pilar about Pithica, but either she didn’t make the connection to what Dawna had done to me or she just didn’t want to push it. “Maybe you should get a steady job,” she said instead.

  “You mean, work for someone else? Yeah, that’d turn out real well.” I snorted a laugh. “Besides, what would I be remotely qualified to do?”

  Her eyes bugged out. “Other than everything? I mean, you could make a fortune on Wall Street, for one, or you could go professional on literally any sport you wanted. Or heck, you could work as a freakin’ bouncer. There are thousands of careers you could effortlessly do! And most of them would probably pay better and be a lot safer than what you’re doing now.”

  “And be more boring,” I shot back.

  She frowned as if she were trying to puzzle me out. “Is that what you need from work, then? That it’s always something different to concentrate on?”

  I balled up a bit of torn-off vodka label and threw it at her. “Hey. I’ve said all I’m going to say. Stop psychoanalyzing me or next time I won’t offer to come shoot people for you.”

  Her mouth twitched up again at that. “Just let me know, yeah? If there’s anything I can do. To help.”
/>
  “I’ve been dealing with this a long time. I’ve got it figured out.” Mostly.

  “Well, just because you don’t need help doesn’t mean it wouldn’t be, you know, helpful. Just, you know. Let me know.” She got up and tucked her book into a handbag. “And don’t shoot me if I break into your apartment to check on you.”

  “You know, Checker and Arthur don’t pry like this,” I said.

  She gave me one of her exaggerated shrugs. “Well, it’s one thing I’ve learned with my folks. Some people need a little prying sometimes.” Her full-watted smile lit her face. “I’ll text you tomorrow, okay?”

  ♦

  The next day I called a semi-legitimate gun dealer I happened to know. (The legit side was most of his business. He’d met me through the illegit side.)

  “Tom. Still got that FFL?”

  “Still got every license the government makes me have. What do you need?”

  “I want to give someone a gun. Legal-style.”

  “Legal-style? You?” He guffawed.

  “Shut up.” I brought Pilar’s shooting stance up in my mind, extrapolating the error margins for the different handguns and optimizing with the muzzle drop as she tired. “I’m looking for something like a CZ-75 or an FNX-9. Can you make it happen?”

  “I’ve got a CZ in the shop right now. Consignment, but the old owner did some nice customization and then hardly ever fired it. The compact version, though.”

  “Even better,” I said.

  “Five hundred including a couple spare mags for that one. Got some Glock nines in too if you want cheaper.”

  “Buy a Glock? On purpose?” I said. “I’ll take the CZ.”

  He laughed again. “You’re one of those, huh? All right, you got it. Send your person over for paperwork. Ten-day waiting period.”

  “Done. I’ll stop by the shop in the next few days with cash.”

  I hung up, grabbed the last bottle of vodka, and headed for Arthur’s office.

  ♦

  I sat in the car and waited for Arthur to leave. I wasn’t ready to see him or tell him…anything. In fact, I was fully intending on dodging his calls for—well, for as long as I felt like it.

  Once I watched him head down to his car and drive off, I climbed the outside staircase, barged in, and dropped the address for Tom’s shop on Pilar’s desk in the middle of her paperwork. “Here.”