Saul

by Frances June

  Jerking awake isn't something that just happens in the movies but it is the only place that makes it painless. My left hand is encased in plaster cast. If the pain wasn't so searing I'd possibly laugh at how much it looks like a boxer's glove. There isn't a chance I could do any damage with it; I'd officially been declawed.

  As much as I couldn't stand to be lying here like an embarrassed kid after he'd has his ass kicked at school, I was happy about one thing; I hadn't been given any drugs for the pain. It might sound dumb but thank God for small miracles. Just the feeling of pain in my hands and neck reminded me I was still here; through luck or fate I'd survived those crazy sons of bitches.

  "Are you awake?" Morgan was curled up in the chair next to the bed under a big coat. She looked so small and fragile. I moved to touch her hand and winced. Right hand wasn't doing too good either it seemed.

  Those guys were gonna pay.

  "I'm awake, you're here, the world is right again." I smiled, there was no reason not to. Even in a hospital room in a bed that someone had probably died in I was happy so long as she was there.

  "I thought you were-" Tears brimmed in her eyes.

  "Hey, don't worry..." I motioned for her to join me in the bed and she did, curling up against me like a cat.

  "What if the last thing we said was in an argument?" She sobbed and buried her face in my shoulder. Her hair smelled fresh and alive, her body was warm, nothing else mattered.

  "Then I guess you would have felt really, really guilty so how about you make up for it and you take me home and look after me, maybe we'll get you a nurse's outfit?" I held onto her with as much intent as I could with two injured hands. Joking aside the idea that we almost lost each other again scared me more than anything else.

  "Am I interrupting?" Jack knocked on the door and leaned casually against the wall like this was an everyday occurrence. Maybe it was for him.

  "Yes."

  As much as I wanted to give the guy a hard time, he'd basically saved my life back there so now I owed him pretty big. From the look on his face I could see he knew it, too.

  "No, come in, I was going to grab a coffee anyway. You want anything baby?" Morgan unwound herself from me and floated to the door on a cloud of relief. The last coffee I'd drank had been before the attack and even though I was thirsty the thought of drinking anything right now made me sick to my stomach.

  "No, you go, this won't take long."

  When she'd left Jack pulled the chair up to the side of the bed and made himself comfortable. That was when I saw the uniforms outside the door, flanking it like they were protecting it, and in turn me, with their dipshit lives.

  "Those guys friends of yours?" I flicked my head towards the door as pointing was yet another thing I found I couldn't do.

  It wasn't that I hated all cops, I'd just not had great experiences. When Monroe liberated the seven of us from the orphanage we'd been forced into hiding for a long time whilst he got the papers together to show we were legitimately his kids rather than the state's property. Adoption papers were hard to come by, even more so when they were fake. From an early age we'd learned not only to avoid the police but to lie to them at every turn just to cover our tails.

  "They're gonna be friends of yours real soon, too, Saul. You've been appointed a protection detail whilst we stoke up the investigation. Consider them your guardian angels." Jack leaned back and quickly rectified his positioning like he'd been hit by lightning. "We're gonna get these guys, I swear it."

  I didn't know if I could take his word for it. He looked sincere but there was something old worldy about those guys that made me doubt his abilities. They were organised and I had no doubt they would have ripped my tongue out, or something. If Chastity hadn't shown up to wreck their party I would have been on a hard slab rather than a lumpy bed.

  "About that, did you find Chastity?" The look on Jack's face meant she'd got out unseen and, hopefully, unscathed. I wasn't sure how I'd turned this page into being worried about her, I guess it had something to do with her saving my life.

  "Chastity? Did I find- look, you've been hit pretty hard, at least one to the back of the skull, you're probably gonna be confused for a while." Jack looked towards the door like he was worried I needed to be put in a medically induced coma for being crazy or some shit like that.

  "Yeah, sure, let's pretend I've lost my mind whilst I was being held by the totally sane men in white masks who were literally going all cloak and dagger on my ass and praying to God for some shitty forgiveness they sure as hell won't be getting anytime soon," Jack hit a nerve and a familiar buzz thrummed in my chest, "Who called it in? Who told you where to go?"

  Trying to keep my cool was getting harder and harder. I could only pray that my normal life with Morgan might be on the horizon, that we could sink back into old routines of keeping our bad habits tied up in the closet. The sad thing was that I knew on some primal level that I was coming out of retirement and I didn't have the balls to admit I liked it.

  "Anonymous tip from a payphone a block down from the building. Some young thing called me direct on my cell and said you'd been taken by some, and I quote, 'psycho dumb-fucks' who were going to sacrifice you to...something, what?" Jack stopped and frowned at me like I'd really lost it.

  "That would be Chastity," I was smiling, maybe it was the concussion. "she saved my life."

  "Whoever-she-was didn't stay to make a statement so she's top of the list for leads, you got a last name...an address?" Jack got a pen and pad from his pocket and held it poised and ready.

  "No, man, I don't know her..." If this got back to Morgan I was dead in ways worse than today's events.

  "Right so some girl, who you don't know, calls me up on my personal cell phone and tells me you, by name, is in trouble and needs help from the guys who killed Billy... your brother?" Jack scribbled her name down anyway. "You do remember I'm a detective, right?"

  There was a commotion outside the door, shouting and the usual sounds of rough housing that came with the arrival of my brothers.

  Jack got up and clapped me on the shoulder harder than he meant. I bit back the urge to scream and punch him and he quickly moved out of arms-length like he knew my thoughts.

  "You want me to let them in?" He lingered between me and the doorway, teetering on the edge of a decision that I was supposed to make.

  Apt, really. Tell my brothers to take a hike; pretend everything is normal and go on with my life despite the fact that someone had just tried to kill me after killing my brother or let my brothers into this room and then my life, again, to get revenge or whatever it was they were looking for.

  "Don't you need to ask me some questions?" I knew the drill. You were questioned, even when you were the victim, until you felt that you were actually the one on trial. OK, maybe I had a chip on my shoulder about cops still.

  "We can do that later, you're not going anywhere and I know you won't be coerced into a false statement by them so we're good." He rested his hand on his belt, his fingers brushed the grip of his police standard gun. "You know I never had a problem with you, man. After the fire and you guys took off it was never about you..."

  It looked like he wanted to say more but things were getting too close to actual emotional interaction so I saved him the embarrassment.

  "Yeah, man, I know, I know." I'd learnt a while ago that if you wanted to put an end to a conversation or argument you just repeated the other person's sentiment. Sometimes it would save your ass and other times it would have the total opposite reaction and result in a broken nose.

  Jack took the high road and nodded his silent thanks. He walked past the cops stationed outside my room and whispered something to them. The next thing I knew there were five angry looking guys stood around my bed, vying for blood.

  *

  Luke was scarily quiet whilst I relayed all the gory details. He only chipped in when I attempted to gloss over Chastity. There was a reason I was trying to protect her from everyone, there had to be. I
t wasn't that I was doing it on purpose but like there was a deep cavity in my brain where it was trying to hide her.

  "So this girl you've never met before broke into the building, took on a room full of crazy religious nut jobs, called Jack and then took off?" He glared at me, his usual way of seeing if someone was telling the truth. Intimidation went a long way for him.

  It wasn't a great story, I knew that and I knew if my brothers could pick a hole Jack would dig a fucking trench but it felt like the right thing to do.

  "She looked like a stoner so she was probably using the building as a crack den."

  "A junkie who called the cops-" Matt typically backed Luke up, like the little lap dog he was.

  "Not just the cops but Jack. Something doesn't add up," Liev countered. He was stood at the barred window, looking down on the miserable winter's day. "She must have been following you."

  I breathed a sigh of relief that they didn't automatically think I'd lied to them, stupid brother trust. It was great they still had it but the part of my brain that was the old me and missed the family unit died a little bit.

  "You can't stay on the sidelines anymore, Saul, this is too important and too dangerous." Benji had that gleam in his eye which told me he thought he had me over a barrel.

  Each one of them glared at me with their own level of intensity but none shit on my parade of useless neutrality than Ash, whose look of indecisiveness mirrored my own in a way I couldn't comprehend.

  "I think it's time you came back into the fold." He drew a card from his pocket and flung it at me. "Starting with this."

  I looked down and found something I'd been holding onto for a while now but hadn't had the guts to really look at.

  "Where'd you find this?" Anger swelled, betrayal burned, all of the other negative emotions I'd spent years trying to bind down with pathetic rituals and mental training were closer to the surface than they had been in a while. This is what my brothers did to me, this is what my old life did to me. The threat of becoming the man I'd begun to loathe was enough to make me sick.

  "I found it in one of those gloves you gave me." Liev lied. I knew exactly where I'd hidden it, from myself and from Morgan, and it wasn't tucked in a glove in my closet. It was no good calling him on it, though, here was the truth and the old life crashing in like the tide.

  "I haven't called him. I haven't seen him. Christ, it might be a prank for all I know." I threw the card into the air, Luke snatched it from flight and glared at it like the card itself had caused him personal insult.

  "So where did it come from?" Luke passed it to Matt who slid it into his jacket pocket like the secretary he was. Fucking whipped.

  Truth was I didn't know where it came from. Someone had slid it under my door one night whilst I was sleeping. I'd woken to find it face up with the name and number glaring up at me, as threatening as a knife to the throat.

  "I found one at my apartment and then another at the bar, left next to an empty glass I found when I was clearing up... I don't know who left them and I don't want to know." It was easier to fight against the tide when that's what you were used to doing. It was muscle memory.

  "He might know what's going on," Benji, ever the optimist, said. "To think, all these years I'd assumed Father Monroe had kicked it"

  I was doubtful it was really him. Sure, Monroe had left; a true Irish Exit, without so much as a goodbye, but after recent events I was even less inclined to call the number that was scrawled on the card in bold black italics.

  Before Billy was killed, before I'd been attacked, I was hesitant to know where Monroe had been all these years because the truth had never been a friend to me. I'd thought long and hard about it when his name reappeared like a letter bomb. There was nothing he could say that would make his disappearance OK, leaving us like drowning rats in a city of dirt, death and despair. We'd just about held on with him acting as our moral Fagan, trying to keep us on the straight and narrow, but with him gone the family fell to shit and for what? Nothing he could say would make it alright.

  "I don't want to know if it's him. I don't need to know it's him, I just want to go back to my life." It was through gritted teeth I said it. The pain of the beating I took was only getting worse as I became more aggravated. My head throbbed as much as my hands did. I knew I'd pass out but right now it wasn't soon enough.

  "We need to know. We need to understand this... this insanity. This isn't normal - I saw Billy's end, are you telling me what happened to you was unrelated?" Ash was barely holding it together. He was either really protective of me all of a sudden or else he was starting to worry about his own hide. After the past few hours of my life I'd say it was pretty fair if it was the latter.

  I hesitated, I'd told them what happened but I'd glossed over two pretty important factors. One of them was Chastity and the other was the symbols. I wasn't sure what to make of it, my brain was trying to block them out but I saw them every time I blinked. It was a tie between me and Billy that lingered like his ghost. It was like he was here, trying to show me something, trying to point me in the right direction but I couldn't understand him.

  "The symbols were the same but there was something different... I'm too tired to think about it. Can't I just get some fucking sleep?" There must have been a look in my eye which told them I wasn't kidding because they all kept their mouths shut.

  My eyes started to close without my permission, like I was being dragged away from the room.

  "Let's go, come on guys." Ash herded everyone out and one by one the room felt calmer, the air cleaner. "We'll be back when you're feeling better, brother. You have to take this seriously, you can't sit on the sidelines... what if they go after Morgan?"

  If there was one thing about Ash it was that he was great at seducing you with words and ideas. He could say just the right thing at just the right time and he'd have you caught in a bear trap without even realising it.

  By the time I drifted to sleep my dreams were filled with scenes of Morgan's death. Each time the blade sliced her skin it felt like physical punishment. A couple of times her wounds shone like bright white sunlight was hiding under her skin. Sometimes she was an angel, with wings as pure as her soul. When they cut them off her with shears she bled the brightest red I'd ever seen and the blood pooled into ancient symbols like the ones they'd painted around Billy and me.

  Chapter 9

  "D o you really think it's a good idea?" Morgan asked. She helped me shrug my coat on in preparation for the winter air. It was known to bite at this time of year but I welcomed it right now. I'd been cooped up in the hospital room for three days and fresh air, no matter how frigid, was a blessing.

  "No." That was the long and short of it. Morgan yanked my sleeve a little too hard and my arm exploded in pain.

  Both of my hands were pretty useless but only the left was broken. Fractured, actually. In many, many places. I cursed but counted myself lucky. At least it was only my hand and not my face.

  "Saul!" She opened the door for me and pushed me into the hallway. She wasn't the most gentle of carers.

  "You know I don't think it is so why are you asking?" I felt like a terrible human being for taking my temper out on her. The hospital told me in the morning that my bill would be posted to me and I was pissed off I'd been forced into their care in the first place so paying $15,000 for someone to fix a hand was insanity. They might as well have reset my hand into a permanent flip of the bird so that I was reminded of them every time I looked at it.

  "I'm sorry, I didn't mean it," I wrapped my arm over her shoulders as we left without a backwards glance. I knew without looking back that the cops were still on my ass, even when we got outside a patrol car idled at the sidewalk behind the cab Morgan had called for us. Ash said he'd send a car for us but I’d told him to back off. "I'm still not sure. I don't want what happened to me to happen to anyone else, especially you."

  Morgan nodded but kept quiet as she helped me crouch into the back of the taxi. It was harder than you'd thi
nk when you couldn't use your hands.

  "What does Jack say?" She asked when we were in motion. I watched her face as she gazed out of the window, watching the buildings go by. The snow had begun to fall and threatened to smother everything it touched like a disease.

  "The usual," I laughed, thinking about his warning after he'd taken my statement. "He dropped by this morning to check up on my discharge and reminded me that the investigation was being dealt with by the police and he could really use my help to keep the others out of it."

  Jack looked at me this morning like we were on the same side but the truth was I still didn't know if we were. I didn't know if it was still a case of me against them like Jack seemed to think it was. There was more to it now. Way more.

  "So, you're going to stay out of it?" Morgan tilted her face towards me but kept her eyes on the streets like she was looking for someone; a shadow that might appear to kill us both.

  "No. It's gotten too dangerous, whoever they are, they're out to get us. Maybe all of us, I don't understand why..." I checked the driver wasn't listening. When he honked and gestured to the guy in the rusty old pickup truck who'd cut us up I continued. "It's up to us to find them. If we have to kill them we will, Jack can't be involved, it's not his fight."

  Growing up we'd always had the mentality that when it came to our family you fought until you couldn't fight anymore. When Benji had been locked in juvie for a string of arrests regarding whores and the potential pimping of said whores we fought it, knowing he'd done wrong.

  In the end it didn't matter that he'd made the mistake, it was up to all of us to fix it and we did through a string of favours and fallouts. This was the same.