“I wasn’t anybody’s son, Candace.” He shakes the gun in his fist. “I couldn’t take a fucking paternity test. Have everyone see a second X chromosome when they were expecting a Y. They’d never accept me as Don if they knew. Hell, in this organization, they’d probably tear me limb from limb.
“I had plans to get rid of Angela, but she must have gotten wind of it.” He looks accusingly at Anya. “She disappeared. And then you showed up. We thought she might come back for you. But I guess your mother really doesn’t give a damn about you, just like everybody says.”
He thinks he can hurt me with this, but he can’t. I got past that hurt a long time ago.
“Listen, Alex, I don’t care about your goddamn chromosomes.” And I don’t. I couldn’t care less how Alex Scarpello wants to live his life, or what gender he has on his birth certificate. I care what he’s become, and that’s a sick fuck who’s getting ready to kill me.
“But don’t you want to hear the whole sordid tale, Candace? After you’ve spent all this time and energy poking your nose into my private business, you’d think you’d want at least that.” He gestures with his gun hand to Anya. “Tell her.”
Anya doesn’t say anything, just holds the Derringer shakily at my sister’s side and looks down at the glossy arm of the wingback chair. Alex strides over and lifts her delicate chin with the barrel of his gun so she has to face him.
“I said, tell her what you fucking did.” Each word is cold and calculated, like everything this guy does.
“I took the child,” Anya blurts out. “But it was my father-in-law’s decision to kill the nurse who’d helped with the birth of the twins. I never asked him to do that. I didn’t know I was pregnant at the time, or I never would have taken Angela’s baby. You must believe me, Candace.”
“The doctor was too valuable an asset to the family to be eliminated,” Alex continues the story, glancing over his shoulder at me. “Grandfather trusted him to keep quiet. And Razinski ended up being helpful to us in the end, didn’t he, Mother? Getting me those shots I needed when I hit puberty. Old man Scarpello never knew about that part.” He lowers the gun from beneath Anya’s chin and steps away, a look of disgust on his face. “He’s the one who told Angela they’d taken her baby, a deathbed confession that makes me wish the bastard were still alive so I could kill him myself. Angela must have phoned the police with the anonymous tip about the nurse in the freezer, to see if he was telling the truth.”
“How did you know about that?” All these revelations are making my head spin, but I’d been right about the baby snatch. I’m looking forward to rubbing that in with Deep if Bruno hasn’t killed him yet.
“I have my own contacts in the police department, Candace. That’s how I knew they’d started digging into the birth records. It was only a matter of time before they contacted Dr. Razinski to follow up. I couldn’t take the chance he’d remain silent on the real secret he’d helped my mother to conceal all these years. That your useless twin brother got sick and died, that soon afterward she gave birth to a child of her own, a girl, not a boy. My father was dead by then. She knew there was no chance for another child, so she …”
“I was only trying to do what was best, Alex. I was only trying to —”
“Oh, for God’s sake, Mother, save us your little sob story about how the world is run by men, especially in our family. About how you had no choice.”
“But I didn’t, Alex. I didn’t.” With every protest, she thrusts the gun farther into Janet’s ribs, and I watch my sister silently wince from behind the duct tape.
“It was me who had no fucking choice,” Alex roars at Anya. “You made sure of that.”
“I did it for you,” she says weakly.
“You did it for yourself.”
He turns to me. “She knew that a girl child wouldn’t be enough to solidify the alliance between her precious Russian family and the Scarpellos. When I was born, she had to make do with what she had. So she made me into a boy.”
“Jesus,” I say. “That’s some fucked up shit, Alex.” I don’t know what I was expecting, but I wasn’t expecting this.
“Oh, come now, Candace. Are you feeling sorry for me? You want to hear what it was like? How hard it was for me? How I cried when my mother cut my hair and forced me to wear boy’s clothes, begging me to keep her secret? I’ll spare you those violins. The hormone injections hurt like hell at first. But that’s all water under the bridge now, isn’t it, Mother?” He stares down Anya with a look that betrays how much that water still rages.
This is when it dawns on me. Alex is not a trans man. No matter what he appears to be, or who he portrays himself as now. Anya ramming a male identity down his throat from babyhood would be no different than ordering Majd’s eight-year-old niece, Rima, to be the boy she was born as but knew she wasn’t. In Alex’s case, that cruel act of force-feeding had poisoned his mind. Gender can be a straightjacket if other people are allowed to wrestle you into the one they decide fits you. That’s what that sicko conversion therapy is all about.
“You’re not a kid anymore, Alex,” I say. “You can be whoever you want to be.”
He shakes his head. “What’s done is done,” he says. “I am who I am now. What I’m expected to be. The leader and the power behind the Scarpello crime family. That much my mother did do for me. And I’m not about to lose what I have because of the likes of you, Candace. I won’t let you and your sister jeopardize that.” He levels the gun at me again. Any sympathy I had for him evaporates under the heat of that lethal threat.
“You going to kill us right here?” I say, getting ready with a bluff. “I wouldn’t recommend it. Deep told me on the phone that he’d already sent those records to the cops.” He hadn’t, but Alex doesn’t know that. “They’re probably already loading the SWAT team into the van to take you and your fucked-up prostitution ring down. You leave a couple of dead bodies lying around, and they’ll know who’s behind it.”
“You think I didn’t have a contingency plan, Candace? I’m not stupid.” Alex pulls out a phone from his pocket, holds it up for me to see. “One text from me, and those women will be loaded into the next set of shipping containers headed for Mexico. The cartels will take over, use them in their own brothels, or sell their bodies for parts. I don’t care. I’ll get a fair price for my investors. I always do. Your evidence is just some numbers on a screen. Without the girls, it won’t mean anything.”
“What are you saying, Alex?” Anya asks him, her voice trembling as much as the hand that holds her petite gun. She takes a timid step toward Scarpello and away from my sister. “You told me you would never sell women. You promised, after what happened to my Karine —”
“Shut up, Mother!” Alex barks at her from across the room. “This is no concern of yours. Your sister was a whore who didn’t know her place. She deserved what happened to her.”
“How can you say this, how can you —”
“I am the one who gets to decide what happens to these women, to anyone,” he shouts at Anya. “You, my dear mother, were the one to make sure I had the power to do that. You’re the one who taught me how much a woman is worth.”
Alex looks down at his phone, swipes the screen with his thumb, still holding his gun out with his other hand.
“I’m glad I let you live long enough to see this, Candace,” he says, his eyes fixed on the phone. “It’s your fault what will happen to these girls. If you thought they suffered being trafficked by me, that is nothing compared to what the cartels will subject them to. Your sister will be among them.” He starts entering whatever code he needs to generate the fate of at least a hundred human beings. His own personal malware.
“No, Alex! You can’t!” Anya lunges for the phone. When the gun goes off, I’d say nobody is as surprised as me. That is, with the exception of Anya, who drops to her knees, her mouth in a silent widening O. Anya moves one hand to the blood blossoming at the front of her white silk blouse, still clutching the tiny Derringer, befor
e she collapses beside the two teeth I spit out on the rug. She lets out an interrupted gasp before she goes down, as if she had something left to say.
Alex hadn’t meant to shoot her. You can take that as the gospel truth from this hitwoman prophet. He’d been focused on the phone, saw the movement out of the corner of his eye, and reacted. It happens. Sometimes in our business you don’t have the luxury to make sure the target’s the right one.
“Mother!” Alex screams, dropping the gun to his side. The phone slips from his hand and falls soundlessly onto the soft Persian rug. My sister stands frozen beside the wingback chair, her eyes wide, the duct tape smothering her own scream. I know that this will be my one opportunity, and I have to take it.
I rush at Alex and knock him to the ground. A burst of air erupts from his startled lungs, but he manages to hold on to the Glock. I’ve got him by both wrists, struggling for control. We roll across the room and hit an antique end table. A vase falls and smashes next to my head on the floor. Later, I’ll find pale-blue porcelain scattered in my hair.
I’ve got to get him to drop the gun. I take his wrist in both hands and hammer it on the hardwood until the joint makes a sickening pop and the Glock skitters across the floor to rest next to a standing bookcase. The desired outcome, but I shouldn’t have left his other hand free.
“You fucking bitch!” he yells from on top of me. He snatches a jagged dagger of broken vase up from the floor. It’s got to be nine inches long, and sharp as a straight-back razor in search of a shave. Thick blood oozes through his fingers and runs down his wrist as he clutches it. I’m holding him back from plunging it into my throat but can’t maintain my grip for long. My own fingers are sliding down his forearm in the slippery blood that spouts from his palm.
Lifting my shoulders off the floor, my cheek dangerously close to the makeshift blade, I ready myself for a Hail Mary head butt, mentally willing Janet to fetch the Glock and use it. My sister’s hands had been tied in front of her, free enough that she could still pull a trigger. And I figure that’s just what she’s done, when I feel the swift breeze of the bullet speed past my neck to pierce Alex’s right temple. The ceramic dagger clatters to the floor.
Damn, she’s a good shot, I think as I slither out from underneath the dead weight of my cousin. If I’d known, I would have given my Ruger to Janet instead of Deep for safekeeping. But when I look up, my sister stands beside the wingback chair empty-handed. Alex’s Glock remains where it landed by the bookcase. And it is Anya Scarpello who holds her Derringer weakly up from the floor, her eyes rolling up into the back of her head.
“Run,” I shout out to Janet. But I have to go get her, have to drag my sister out of the living room, and down the hall to the foyer. I catch our fleeting reflections in the marred glass of the hall mirror before we burst out the front door together and Janet finally finds her feet.
I’ll never know if Anya was aiming for me or for Alex with her Derringer. She and I won’t get to have that conversation, or debate what she did to her own flesh and blood and to mine. But those Russian babes are notoriously good markswomen. Even if my sister isn’t.
As Janet and I stumble down the front steps of Alex’s mansion, I hear the sharp retort of a final gunshot ring out. Whatever her intentions or justifications, Anya Scarpello had saved her last parting shot for herself.
EPILOGUE
DEEP AND I ARE SITTING ON A PARK bench watching the little girl in the playground. Majd’s niece, Rima, waves at us from the top turret of a wooden climber made to look like a castle. She’s wearing a bright-pink snowsuit, which I appreciate because the neon colour makes it easier to keep track of her. Deep gives her a thumbs up, knocking over his crutches. He’d taken a bullet to the foot from Bruno’s gun, and it’s still healing.
“I still can’t believe you managed to garrotte that guy with an HDMI cable,” I say, helping him pick the crutches up from the pavement that’s dusted with light snow.
“It was an ethernet cable. And I didn’t garrotte him. I strangled him until he passed out.”
“Still, I continue to be impressed.”
“I told you I came from a long line of warriors.”
“Was that the Brits or the Sikhs?”
“Both, I reckon.”
I zip up the collar on the heavily lined leather jacket Deep bought me for Christmas. It makes me look a bit bulky, but it sure keeps the cold out. We’d exchanged presents early, since he’ll be leaving next week for California. He got a job at Google, where I’m told they have slides for the employees much like the ones in this playground. I gave him a Black+Decker Dustbuster, to replace the one I shot to pieces with my Ruger.
After he’d subdued Bruno with the ethernet cable, Deep had managed to send the records we’d lifted from Scarpello’s brothel bank to Malone. He’d also sent the details of the backdoor he’d created so the department’s own hackers could enter it as they pleased. They’d gotten their warrant and raided all the locations where the girls were being held. That part was easy, she said, because of the GPS trackers. They put most of the women in halfway houses, although many have been deported now. It’s a fucked-up world when you don’t have enough room in your country for people who’ve been victimized by your own citizens. But I’ve never really understood politics.
“How’s your sister doing?” Deep asks, handing me a thermos of hot chocolate. I take a swig and let it warm my insides. He’d made it from scratch on the hotplate at my place, using a battered pie plate and a bent spoon he found in a drawer. I’ve never been much for utensils.
“She sent me a text the other day,” I tell him. “Said Manitoba was boring as hell, but her aunt and uncle are good people.”
Malone had found relatives on Janet’s father’s side who were happy to take her in when they heard what happened. They hadn’t even known Janet’s dad had died. Families can lose touch like that. Even ones that aren’t as screwed up as mine.
“She also sent me one of her sketches via snail mail.” I pull the folded piece of textured paper from the pocket of my jacket, opening it before I pass it to Deep. It’s a full-colour depiction of Janet and me standing on top of a mountain of poutine.
“I’m not sure what it means,” I say.
“Maybe that’s the point,” Deep says, handing the paper back. I fold it up again carefully and slip it back into my pocket.
“Has she heard from your mother?”
“Not yet.”
“Do you think she will?”
“It’s hard to say. Alex put a price on Angela’s head after she ratted to the cops about the body in the freezer. Roberto tells me that even with Alex gone, the hit’s still active.” The Mob doesn’t take kindly to having their skeletons exposed, even when they’re covered in frost. The case remains open according to Malone, as does the murder of the doctor and his bed buddy. But nobody’s really pursuing either, having written both off to Mob violence. You lie down with organized crime, you wake up with a cap in your ass. Nobody expects much more than that or works too hard to find out why. They’d found Deep’s car at the retreat, but Ink at the motel backed up his story about it being stolen. No one knows that Deep and I are linked. Or that he managed to delete my DNA profile from the department’s database. Another early Christmas present.
“I heard a new Don took over for Alex Scarpello. Some bloke out of Sicily, but he was educated at Oxford.”
“What did he take there?”
“International Business.”
“That makes sense.”
Unlike the other cases, the one concerning Anya and Alex is closed, as it was a clear murder-suicide. Malone managed to keep Janet and me out of the investigation. More to protect us from the Scarpellos than from the cops. As Alex had said, the family have their own sources in the department, and it wouldn’t fly well if they were to learn of my sister and my involvement in the final shoot-out. I’m still hoping it never comes out that I blew the cyber-whistle on the Scarpello prostitution ring. Then I’d have a pric
e tag affixed to my own forehead, with my sister thrown in as blowback. Bruno might have snitched on us, but he’d caught a shiv to the groin in the prison shower line-up before his trial. Word is he was looking for witness protection, which is something no one can protect you from.
“It must be tough on Janet,” Deep says as I pass him the thermos back. When he takes a sip, it leaves a chocolate moustache on his upper lip. I don’t tell him. I kind of like the way it looks.
“She’s a tough kid. She can handle it,” I tell him.
“Like you.”
“Nothing like me.”
“Oh, I don’t know, Candace. I can see the similarities.”
I tongue the two empty sockets in my mouth where the teeth were knocked out. I can’t get them fixed until after the holidays.
“I’m more like Alex Scarpello than I’m like Janet, Deep.”
“That’s not true, and you know it.”
I look at him, this nice guy who seems to have forgotten the slick individual he’s talking to. “You know I’ve killed a lot of people, right?”
“Yes,” he says, wiping the frothy moustache away. “But I don’t know how much of that is down to what was expected of you.”
“Because of who my dad was? I get tired of that comparison, Deep.”
“Because of a lot of things, Candace.”
“Alex Scarpello did what was expected of him,” I remind him.
“He did,” Deep says. “And I reckon that’s what twisted him.”
I look back at the playground. Locate Majd’s niece as she makes her way across the monkey bars, grinning madly in her pink snowsuit. She tags another girl when she gets to the other side, and they run off together toward the swings, pigtails flying beneath their wool hats. Deep is right, I suppose. People are better off when they’re allowed to define their own expectations.
“Maybe I’m twisted, too,” I say.
“Maybe,” he admits. “A tad. But there’s more to you than that, Candace.”
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