Campbell

by C. S. Starr

  “We need to get you out of here.”

  “I think I’m going to die.”

  “You thought you were going to die when you got shanked in the leg with that broken hockey stick when we were sixteen. You didn’t die then, and you’re not going to die now.” Tears streamed down her face. “You are not allowed to die, you hear me?”

  “You’re not the boss of me.” He closed his eyes and gulped back a deep breath. “I was saving Connor for you.”

  “I don’t give a shit about Connor,” she whispered, clutching him tightly. “Stay with me, please.”

  Rika appeared a minute later with a black box clutched in her hands. “I sent one of the guys for the van. We’ll take him to my house. Here’s the first aid kit.”

  “What am I first-aiding?” Lucy stammered, showing Rika her friend’s injuries. “I don’t know where to start.”

  “You start by stopping the bleeding. That’s how you start,” she muttered, exasperated as she reached for a wad of gauze.

  ***

  A stone’s throw away, Tal punched Connor in the face, not feeling the slightest bit of guilt for hitting someone with a gunshot wound to the shoulder.

  “You’re a fucking asshole!” He screamed in his face. “After everything, you pull this shit? Do you have any idea how many lives you’ve fucked—”

  “Just kill me, man,” Connor taunted, even in his sorry state. “I know you want to.”

  “You have no idea how much I want to,” Tal muttered, pushing him to the ground. “But I won’t. Not me.”

  “Why?”

  “Because even after all the shit you’ve put me through these last couple of months, I’m not the most deserving.”

  Leah appeared by his side and tossed him a pair of handcuffs. “They had them in the control tower.”

  Tal pushed Connor’s face against the tarmac as Leah cuffed his hands. “Where’s everyone else?”

  “Steve and Ricardo are fine and everyone else is dead or they ran away. They went for the van. Bull,” Leah cringed. “He doesn’t look so good.”

  Tal had surmised that from the blood on Connor, which didn’t seem to be attached to any wounds. “Do you think….”

  “I don’t know,” she said, shaking her head. “I’m not a doctor, but…”

  Tal nodded as the van pulled up. He shoved Connor to the back and shackled him to the passenger side door. “Watch him,” he said, nodding at Leah, who climbed in beside him. “Can you drive over there so we can get Bull in?”

  Ricardo nodded, his brow creased with concern. “That dude is a tank. They shot him and he just kept on going, like some sort of speed freak.”

  “He’d do anything for Lucy,” Tal whispered. “Let’s get him somewhere comfortable.”

  Even Connor was quiet as they loaded Bull in and lay him on the bench seat, blood covering everyone as they moved him. Tal put his hand over his nose and caught a bit of the larger man’s breath.

  “He’s still breathing.”

  Lucy nodded, her eyes wet. “He was talking before, but now….”

  “We’ll get him somewhere so we can take a closer look,” Rika whispered, tears streaming down her cheeks. “He’s yours, Lucy.”

  “What?” she asked, clutching Bull’s hand.

  “Connor,” Rika nodded, glaring at him. “He’s yours, to do with what you want. Whatever you decide.”

  Chapter 25

  May 2003

  Los Angeles, West

  “What’s that?” Leah asked, peering into the hole Tal had just finished digging in their backyard. It was at least two feet deep and three wide.

  He stopped and wiped his forehead. “It’s our future.”

  “A hole in the ground is our future? Tal…” Leah frowned and sat in the dirt. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  He stomped into the house and returned a few minutes later lugging two pillowcases. She counted as thirty gold bars made a gleaming pile on the ground. “We’re going to start burying gold back here, under the garden.”

  “Hedge fund?” She smiled.

  “More like a seed fund.” He grinned back.

  “You’re such a dork.” She watched as he put the bars in plastic bags and buried them, planting five, and then dumping some dirt over them before burying the others. “You think gold’s the future?”

  Tal wiped some sweat from his brow. “I hope the garden’s the future, but I don’t see that happening.” He put the loose dirt back in the bed he’d created. “We’ll enjoy the garden. And someday, we’ll put these to good use.”

  “You sound like your dad.”

  Tal grinned. “Thanks, you.”

  “Where’d you get those from?”

  “I got into Granddad’s safety deposit box at the bank. His, and the ones next to it. Someone sold me the keys.”

  Leah worried that Tal was blowing through their money, trading it for things that seemed frivolous, but as she eyed the newly settled dirt, she had the feeling her concerns were unfounded. “For….”

  “Far less than this gold is worth.” He shook his head. “People don’t know the value of things.”

  Leah stretched her legs out in front of her, enjoying the warmth of the sun on them as Tal collapsed beside her. “The smart ones do.”

  November 2012

  Los Angeles, West

  “I need to go, but I don’t want to,” Lucy whispered, leaning into the hand that was miraculously stroking her cheek. “I don’t want to leave you here.”

  “I’ll be able to make it home soon,” Bull replied gravelly. “And they’re taking good care of me.”

  Lucy smiled over at Rika, who was puttering away in front of the stove in her bright, shiny-clean kitchen, making grilled cheese sandwiches for her girls for breakfast, at their request. It was a very domestic scene, in contrast with the one of the tiny, ferocious woman she’d watched choke out a kid on the bridge a week earlier.

  Though she hadn’t known her long, Lucy knew if anyone could handle a wounded Bull, it was Rika.

  He’d almost died, and despite his improvements over the last few days, she still wasn’t entirely sure he wouldn’t. He’d lost a lot of blood, but both wounds had stayed close to the surface. The healer Rika knew, Lupa, said they would have been fatal if they’d been an inch the other way. The wound in his thigh had cleared a lot of muscle and missed the femoral artery, and the hole in his gut was going to leave a hell of a scar, but the bullets hadn’t hit any organs as far as anyone could tell. The healer had been by a few times a day to check in, and do lots of things that Lucy didn’t understand. The girl was about her age, and while her methods made Lucy uncomfortable because they caused Bull a great deal of pain, they seemed to be effective.

  She curled up beside him on the mattress they’d hauled into the living room and did her best to memorize everything about him; his smell, the way his heartbeat, on the chance that she’d never seem him again. She’d lost enough lately to become jaded about everyone’s mortality.

  “Lupa will be over around four,” Rika whispered to her after Bull fell asleep. “So you can feel good about him being okay before you leave.”

  “I think she’d have to tell me he’ll be up doing jumping jacks tomorrow before I’d be okay to go,” she replied, untucking herself from his good side. “There’s a few things I have to do then before I go.”

  Rika nodded. “Don’t be too hard on him.”

  “Connor?” Lucy laughed. “You’re the last person I thought I’d hear say—”

  “I meant Tal.”

  “He might not even be there,” she said, her eyes searching her new friend’s. She’d been avoiding Tal for days now and it seemed he’d been doing the same thing with her. “And I’m not being hard—”

  “You are being hard, but that’s how we protect ourselves.” She reached over and tapped Lucy’s forehead. “Change doesn’t come easy sometimes.”

  “And sometimes it comes too late.”

  “There’s no suc
h thing as too late,” Rika tisked. “Go on then.”

  “Is he there?”

  Rika shrugged and batted her eyelashes, her eyes gleaming. “Now how would I know that?”

  When Lucy went back into the guest room, Zoey was still asleep, passed out on the bed Lucy had shared with Tal a few days earlier. She crawled in beside her, and for a split second imagined that everything between them was like it had been before, when they fought about stupid things like boys, who loved who more, and whose turn it was to do the laundry.

  She opened her eyes and blinked a couple of times before focusing on Lucy.

  “What time is it?”

  “Around ten,” she replied. “I’m going to go over to Bauman’s to see Connor. I need to figure out what to do….”

  Zoey’s hand wrapped tightly around hers and she gave a reassuring squeeze, her eyes sad. “Don’t kill him,” she whispered, stroking her cheek. “That’s not what you really want. It’s not what Cole would want either. You’re more civilized than that.”

  “Am I?” she questioned, as she closed her eyes, soothed by Zoey’s familiar touch. “I don’t know, Zoey.”

  “There are worse things than dying. You know that.”

  Lucy nodded against her hand. “What happens when we go home?”

  Zoey smiled knowingly. “We’ll figure it out. One way or another.”

  A tear threatened to spill over, but Lucy blinked it away. “You’re so zen about everything.”

  “I’ve already lost you in every possible way over the last few months,” her voice cracked. “I wouldn’t say I’m zen. Maybe jaded.”

  “I just keep coming back though, don’t I?” Lucy laughed. “I’m like a cockroach.”

  Zoey smiled knowingly. “I don’t know who I am any more than you do. You know that.”

  “Maybe that’s what’s next. Maybe we try and figure that out.” Lucy squeezed her hand, remembering that she wasn’t the only one that was confused.

  “I’m not sure anyone figures that out.” Zoey continued to stroke her cheek with her thumb. “Maybe you just narrow it down from what you aren’t.”

  “I should probably start a checklist.” Lucy sighed. “It would be a long one.”

  Mussing her hair, Zoey leaned in and kissed her forehead affectionately. “First thing I’m doing when we get home is cutting your hair. It’s…not good. You…don’t want to keep it like that, do you?”

  She shook her head. It was hard looking at herself in the mirror, resembling Cole like she did. “No, I miss my hair.”

  “It’ll grow,” Zoey whispered, running her hands through it. “Have you seen him…since Bull?”

  Lucy tried to play down what she knew Zoey was curious about. “Bauman?” Lucy shook her head as she climbed off the bed. “Nope.”

  “He hasn’t been there, when you’ve gone over?”

  She shook her head again and did her best to fix her hair in the mirror, avoiding her eyes. “No.”

  “Ce?”

  She leaned in the doorway. “Yeah?”

  “Don’t call him Bauman. Call him Tal. I don’t…I don’t mind.”

  ***

  Lucy took Juan’s bike, teetering along at a painfully slow pace. She’d decided that since she had a week with nothing to do but wait for her friend to live or die it was probably the perfect time to learn and she’d spent hours each day out with Rika’s girls, Penny and Ana, playing around in the driveway. She wasn’t very good, but she hadn’t fallen in a couple of days, which she took as encouraging.

  The shades were still drawn at Tal’s house and when Lucy knocked on the door, Leah answered, as she had every day that week.

  “You’re here to see your prisoner?” she said, screwing her face up. “He’s still here.”

  “I’m going home tomorrow, so I guess I have to decide what to do with him.”

  She nodded. “He can’t stay here. I…I can’t….No.”

  Lucy smiled supportively. “I know, and I appreciate you keeping him until I could decide.”

  “Have you decided?”

  A shrug was the only response Lucy could come up with.

  Connor had spent the last week cuffed to a large piece of machinery in the pool pump-house, which seemed to keep the water circulating. It was a damp, constricting place and with every passing day, Connor looked more and more uncomfortable, which gave Lucy a great deal of satisfaction. It was time for that to end, though.

  She threw him a sandwich that Rika had sent over. He stuffed it in his face greedily. “That’s all you have?” he whined. “I’m fucking starving.”

  “Did you feed my brother?” she asked, sitting down just out of his reach in the sunlight, as she’d done every day that week.

  “Just enough to keep him alive,” he grumbled. “Did your friend die yet?”

  “I don’t think he’s going to,” she said brightly, thinking hard about how she could punish Connor most effectively. “But thanks for asking.”

  “You should just kill me,” he suggested for what had to be the fiftieth time.

  “The thing is, it’s up to me, and you know? I’m not sure how I want to do it yet. It’s a big decision.”

  “No, it’s not,” he said coolly. “Gun or knife. If you were going to bludgeon me to death it would have happened when you were angrier.”

  “What if I’d agreed to work with you, all those months ago when you came to my house. Would any of this have happened?”

  “Hard to say,” he answered honestly. “You didn’t though, did you?”

  “Nope,” she sighed. “And you know, after this, after everything, I’m not sorry I didn’t, if this is any indication of how you conduct yourself.”

  “Even if your brother was alive?”

  “You killed my brother, not me,” she said, wishing she could say the words with conviction. “And I’m responsible for what happens to you. Where’s his body?”

  “You can keep asking, but it doesn’t mean I’ll tell you,” he replied in an irritating sing-songy voice.

  Glancing down at his fly, Lucy cracked her knuckles. “I could torture you, force you to give it up. I did castrate my grandfather.”

  “At the tender age of ten with a steak knife,” Connor said, shaking his head unfazed. “I’m not telling you.”

  “Do you think that’ll keep you alive?”

  Chuckling, the small man leaned as close to Lucy as he could get. “I just don’t want to give you the satisfaction, you dyke bitch. You may have been able to convince Tal of whatever you convinced him of, but I could give a rat’s ass about helping you get closure. Here’s some closure for you. I didn’t even kidnap him. He wanted to come with me. He wanted to get away from you!”

  Lucy wasn’t sure if he was lying about her twin, but for her own sanity, she decided to tell herself he was. His eyes were dark, hard, as he looked at her in the sunshine. There, sitting by the nicest pool she’d ever seen, on a beautiful sunny day, Lucy Campbell figured out Connor Wilde. He was afraid to grow up; afraid of what would happen in a world where everyone else was changing.

  Cole had been right. He was afraid of being left behind.

  Lucy stood, locked the pump door, and went inside. Leah was painting her nails a vibrant shade of green at the kitchen table.

  “Why aren’t you back at work?” she asked, sitting beside her.

  “I’m stuck watching your prisoner.” She raised her eyebrows as Lucy sat across from her. “And the movie thing is kind of on hold until some stuff gets straightened out.”

  “Like a new government?”

  She shook her head. “Just some high level transition stuff to start. Reporting structures. We need to do the movies for revenue. That’ll start up again soon. They’re doing some closing shots for a few things today.”

  “I’m going home tomorrow.” Lucy raised her eyebrows.

  “Good,” Leah replied evenly. “Let things get back to normal around here. A new normal.”

  “Is he mad at you?”

&
nbsp; She shrugged. “About your brother? I don’t think so. He hasn’t mentioned it, but he’s got a lot on his mind right now. I think getting to this point was probably the easy part.”

  “I should see him—”

  “He’s in his office,” she nodded down the hall. “I guess I probably should have told you that in case you decided to spill your guts about anything.”

  “I’d never spill my guts to you,” Lucy replied snidely as she stood and slowly started down the hall. Her face grew hot as she approached Tal’s office. She had a lot to say to him, but wasn’t sure how to make the words come out right, in a way that explained anything, or would make it easy for her to leave.

  He was sitting behind his desk, laptop open when she walked in.

  “You weren’t going to come out and say goodbye?”

  He gave a half shrug and closed his laptop. “I don’t really know what to say to you.”

  She took a seat on the couch in his office, her hands folded tightly in her lap. “I’m going—”

  “Tomorrow,” he nodded, “I heard. I’ll be in touch with logistical information once you’re back—”

  “Of course,” she muttered. “I can’t let Andrew continue on with the war against East like he is. We need a better plan than blowing up the shit out of everything because we’re angry.”

  “That isn’t the best plan,” Tal agreed. “I’m meeting with Vegas next week to come up with some terms for a ceasefire and an arrangement for peace. They’re willing to talk.”

  “Good,” Lucy nodded. “Listen, I know I said a lot of things….”

  “And you had all the right in the world to say them.” He looked at her sadly. “And I can’t say anything but I wish things had been different.”

  “You could say you’re sorry.”

  Tal shook his head. “I’m not sorry. If I said I was sorry, it would undermine everything that’s happened, everything that needed to happen over the last few months and I won’t do that. We don’t get to choose our lynchpins.”