by Paula Cox
“Do you know how long I’ve waited to hear you say that to me again?” Oren says weakly. His lips are trembling. He takes her hand, laces his fingers with hers, and looks her in the eyes and says, “My love, do you even realize?”
“I’ve been stupid. I’d forgotten about us, my heart. But I know you—you’re not capable of something like this.” She hardly recognizes the words coming out of her mouth. They’re just words to soothe, words detached from anything she’s actually feeling.
“Do you know how I’ve thought about you, my angel? Do you know what it’s done to me, to have to be separated from you?”
“I can only imagine.”
“I can’t go through it again, my love. My only one. It will tear me to shreds. I’ll cease to be. I won’t think. I won’t be anything.”
“I won’t do it again, my heart. Anything you want. What do you want me to do for you, my love?”
Without thinking about it, she begins to stroke his leg. Anything to relax him and work him out of his passion. Oren smiles gently like an old father. He places his hand on hers. Maya swallows and prepares herself, but he doesn’t do what she expected. He doesn’t move her hand over to the bulge in his pants but puts it back on the cover of the bed separating them.
“Not like this, my angel,” he almost coos. “I’m not going to have you like the others want to have you. You will be mine, but soul and body.”
Maya hardly hears any of this. To her, it’s just more words. She knows already what Oren wants. And at that moment if she can save someone else’s life and possibly her own, she’ll do whatever Oren wants her to.
“Did you hear me?” He puts three fingers at the bottom of her chin and tilts her head up so that he’s looking at her eye to eye. “Do you understand, my angel?”
“Of course I do.” Maya forces a crooked smile on her face.
“Forever and ever, my angel. We’ll never have to be parted again. We’ll never have to face the darkness alone. No one in this world will be able to tear us apart.”
“Yes,” Maya says. Her eyes flutter to the TV, to the frozen image of Mattias swamped in gasoline, a cloud of spewed liquid obscuring his face from where he was spitting out. “Never again.”
“Then you accept.” Oren beams and wraps her into a hug. His thin muscles wrap around Maya’s body like the bars to a cage. Oren is small and compact, but his embrace is the strongest she’s ever been trapped in. “Our new beginning starts now. Oh, my angel. You don’t know how happy I am!” He releases her. Maya catches her breath and forces her smile to stay in place. She’s just agreed to marry Oren Kroll. The realization is slow in coming. But she hardly thinks about it—all her attention is focused on the man she’s just saved.
“Everything will be done as soon as possible,” he says. “And then we’ll escape this place together. Put as much distance between these murderers and us as possible. You can’t stay here a second longer—but you know that as well as I do. We need a new life. It’ll all be done immediately. Nothing will hold us down. We’ll never have to see these terrible people, not ever again.”
He cradles her head, wrapping her into his embrace. “No more of this. No more. But wait—” he turns his excited eyes to hers. “What have I been thinking? You don’t even know it yet!”
“Kirill’t know what?”
“The best part!” He smiles and plants a dry kiss on her cheek, which saps her strength like he’d just stuck her with a knife.
The TV resumes at the click of a button.
No. No no no no. He couldn’t have. He can’t.
The shadow flicks open a Zippo lighter and reveals its dancing flame to the camera like he’s showing something indecent. Maya watches in horror as the man inches closer and closer to the broken, gasoline-soaked figure bent over in its chair. Closer and closer: the tiny flames gets smaller and smaller.
And then, an eruption. Piercing screams. Maya opens her mouth to make one herself, but her breath escapes in a soundless gape, and she falls, unconscious, onto the sheets of her hotel bed.
Chapter 26
I’m just sitting there, letting the seconds since Maya told me to off her father turn into minutes, and fold out into their first hour. The air is so cold it’s like freezing water in the car, but I can’t move a muscle. Not even to bend down and get the phone that dropped from my hand. I don’t need it anyway. Even I got a call—hell, even if it was Palmer himself who was doing the calling—I doubt I could so much as breathe out a word. Not in this cold. Not now—not when I’m still sitting there in Maya’s Maserati running through the last thing she told me.
Kill Theo Butler.
No—not Theo Butler. Maya’s dad, if she still saw him that way.
Christ. Why the hell can’t I move? It’s like someone’s dropped the universe down on my head and it still keeps pushing me down, down through the car seat and floor, then asphalt and ground, straight to the core of the world which, for some reason, is rotating with a face that glows the way Maya’s face glows when the light catches it in the right way. Turning her hair into gold. Making her skin seem like something silkier than skin, making it like wine.
I snap back into focus and focus snaps me back to looking at her room. At her silhouette through the curtains. But I’ve made hits before. Dozens: a dozen at least. I don’t know how many exactly. More than twenty, less than fifty. But I never keep count. That’s for the braggers, the careers. The guys who think the only reason humans ever developed thumbs in the first place was to steady your grip when you’re pointing the barrel of an Item into someone’s face, your fingers flexing on the trigger like tiny dancers.
Sure I’ve done this before. Hits. Kills. Murders—whatever you want to call them. Cheaters, scoundrels, rapists, and criminals, and also poor bastards with the bad luck to have had a run-in with a psychopath and the worse luck of getting on that person’s bad side.
This was no different than all those times. Hell, it would be easier. This wasn’t some twenty-something kid or an ex-husband or anything like that. Butler was an old guy with a hell of a lot more blood on his hands than he could get rid of saying rosaries or making donations. I’d probably be doing a lot of poor bastards in the future a favor by plugging him now. Guys who’d have targets on their back from loans gone wrong. Guys who’ve probably got targets on their backs right now, who walk out of their offices and check for bombs in their mail, or who memorize the numbers of license plates, or who can’t help adjusting their side mirror every three seconds when they’re on the road.
And Butler—that guy sure as hell has his share of people who want him dead. He’d probably be the one I’d help the most. A single shot in the head would probably be a whole lot nicer than most of the ways the other guys would off him. Simple. Easy. Quick.
So then why the fuck couldn’t I move?
I slide my hand across the leather, feeling its surface. Smooth, hard, and cold like marble. This goddamn car was becoming a prison every second longer I sat there. Another hour of this and I’d lose my mind. I needed to go—that’s what I needed to do. Back to the Clubhouse or on to the hospital. Scratch the hospital. Maybe I should just duck into a cheap hotel of my own. Put myself into a little box with walls thick enough so that the neighbors can’t hear me beating holes into the mattress with my fists. Find a pillow and roar into it like a fucking high school girl dumped the night of prom. Unleash. Find some bottles and squeeze off a few rounds just to feel powerful again and not so low and paralyzed.
I needed to get Maya Butler out of my head. Some way or another. Because if she doesn’t leave, I’m done for.
I stretch my fingers out nice and easy, one at a time. They’ve gotten clamped and clawed, like nails grown too long. I swear I can hear the cracks from frozen sweat breaking. I crank my neck—left, right, forward, back. Thing hurts like hell, but at least I’m moving again. It must have been four hours since I was parked there. Almost midnight.
I lean down and shove the phone into my pocket without lookin
g at it, and start the engine. The Maserati gives a bear’s roar and thrums into life. The shake of the engine makes the seat rattle; makes my whole body shiver back into life, and only then do I realize how fucking cold I am. Blast the heaters. Defrost the windshield. Accumulated snow drips down and off the screen like viscera.
When I feel there’s enough life thrumming through the pipes I clean off the shields and put the thing in drive and spin two fast circles on the icy lot. The tires squeal like little creatures. The wheel yanks left and right. The whole metal shell is protesting, but I keep on going, spinning up snow and ice, wheeling myself and my extra two thousand pounds towards the mouth of the highway. I don’t look twice, even when I know that if I just glanced at my side mirror, I’d see the light from Maya’s room winking back at me.
Kirill’t look, I force myself to chew the thought. On the highway now. I’m the only car, go figure. Plows haven’t gotten onto the roads yet, and I can only imagine what a brawl it would be with someone else sharing lanes with me: just pulling onto the road, I skid three lanes and almost smash into the metal rail separating road from ocean. Kirill’t look back. I kick the car into gear for no apparent reason—this road’s got me going fifteen no matter how far I shove the pedal down. Kirill’t look back. Kirill’t look back. Kirill’t look back. The words are an anthem, a creed, a promise, a last grip on sanity: the only thing separating me from going over to Theo Butler’s this very second to put as many holes in his heart as I can, if only to get one last kiss from his daughter.
Kirill’t look back. Kirill’t look back. Kirill’t look—
Fuck.
Five minutes I must have spent spinning and hydroplaning on this road before the fact hits me. I can tell myself what to do as much as I want. I can tell myself you’ve got a boy who’s possibly bleeding to death in the hospital and who needs to see his brothers there for him. I can try to convince myself what the most important thing in the world to me is: it doesn’t make an inch of difference. I knew it the second I pulled out of the lot. I’m going back for Maya.
Highway rules would probably frown at making a U-turn across three lanes of an interstate, but I don’t exactly see state troopers marshaling out of the ocean, so I make the spin and watch my fronts kick up chunks while my backs go flying.
Back up the road we go. I haven’t got a thought in my head about what I’m going to say to Maya—I’m still not sure I’m even capable of making words. Her phone call did something to me. Set me off. Clammed me up. Put me in fight or flight or some equivalent that forced me into auto-response and sent my brain scanners flying with the single order to kill, kill whoever you had to kill and kill like your life depended on it because, without Maya, you’d have no life worth living.
The snow’s falling thick, like a curtain. The car’s getting a hell of a wash out of it but my lights don’t show much of anything except for a few outlines. Two minutes, I count in my head. Then the half, the quarter. Three. Motel Six creeps back into view, with its dozens of glowing room lights. My eyes shoot immediately up to Maya’s room like they’re being drawn there by heat-seekers.
Then I frown because I notice the light is off. Weird. It was on just a half-second before. I’d swear to it. I knew that glow—that one specifically. So I swing the Maserati over to the right, into the first spot I find which may or may not be a spot, but a bit of extra road for navigating around the motel, and put the car in park. There’s no way I can go up now. What if she’s just gone to sleep? If I come storming up and bang on her door demanding to see her to say I don’t even know what yet, then I’ll have no way in hell. Better move out now. Better put a bullet in my brain now.
The words send impulses spiraling through my brain. My hand goes out unconsciously, feels in the passenger’s seat for a handle and—
The light flickers back on, bright as a halo. I whip back to see it, almost cracking my neck. Not asleep. The hand that was finding the handle of the Item now finds the handle of the door but doesn’t open it more than an inch because the light is already off again. I slam the door shut, right as it goes back on. And off. And back on again. Almost like she was trying to send a signal.
That didn’t make any sense whatsoever. If Maya still hasn’t called me about the Maserati, then she probably doesn’t know I’m still out here. And if she did know where I was, she’d just text.
My suspicion drops into the pit of my stomach like a pebble. I’ve got a feeling—no, stronger than a feeling—an instinct, and a pretty damn accurate one, that something’s wrong with this situation. Those flickering lights are sure as hell a signal to someone, and I’m sure as hell certain they’re not from Maya.
And with this thought swimming in my head, I catch the receiving end of the signal. Two flashes, lightning-quick, from a small car, parked near where I was parked. They’re so quick and so small I’d have missed them if I hadn’t been looking for them. Christ. I hate it when I’m right.
I don’t dare move the car an inch. I hardly move an inch, just sitting there, waiting to see what happens, scrunching up my eyes so hard I see all these bright patterns through my eyelids. I do it for about thirty seconds, and slowly I begin to build a crude kind of night vision. It’s not much—nothing at all against the curtain of snow—but it’s enough to provide some reference if nothing else. Patterns and shapes.
Shapes, like the four moving out of the motel entrance. The light is bad, but not bad enough that I mistake what I see. Four figures, one with something draped in his arms. Big guys—bodybuilder, guardsmen types like me, and one guy skinny as a pixie. I try to look closer, turn my eyes into adjustable lenses. They obey. The thing draped in his arms has two legs, a head, and is wearing a dress. Not in this cold. Why would she do that unless she’s either passed out or—
Kirill’t even think it. Kirill’t you dare chase that thought to the end. My left hand has a hold of my right arm so tight the nails are drawing blood I don’t notice. Those men have Maya.
My hand snaps to the Item like a magnet, and I kick the door open. Snow and wind flood the car. I take a step out and sink four inches
The men are already to the car. Two of the big guys open the door to the skinny fellow, and he feeds Maya into the backseat as gently as he can.
I take another step and almost fall. My upper body swings and lunges for balance. I get a grip on the Maserati, but my Item-hand goes flying, slamming into the side of the car. I lose my grip: the Item falls.
Hopeless. The whole thing is goddam hopeless. The men are already back in the car. The headlights shoot on, and the engine revs, kicking up tracks of snow. I stand there and watch them curve out, move past, and slip out onto the deserted highway.
No second thoughts for the Item. I get into the car and slam the door shut and put the thing in high gear and slush my way out of my puddle
“She’s not dead,” I repeat to myself. Calm. Stay calm. There’d be no need to be gentle if she were dead. No need to lay her down in the back seat. No need to do any of the stuff they’ve done. Not dead. She can’t be dead.
My lights spray the tracks of the retreating car, which is nothing but two misty red lights fast-retreating up the highway. I pop into third gear and slip into the tracks, but the engine gives a whine and the wheel jars sharp to the right. All of a sudden, we’re ice-skating. The damn thing can’t get a hold of the road.
I tug the wheel the other way and when that doesn’t slow the hydroplane, slam on the brakes. None of it’s any use. I’ve already taken the corner too quick and now I’m sliding, twenty miles an hour, across three lanes of traffic, into the steel barrier which must have seen better days because the Maserati tears through it like Red Rover. If my brakes were useless on the ice, they’re even more so on the sand. The tires dig and the wheel goes flimsy. Then I hit the ocean.
Chapter 27
After about nine feet into the water, I hit the gap and plunge six feet. Icy water leaks in through the roof like the thing was made of paper. Everything goes black.
There’s no Item to smash through the window. That’s the first thing they tell you to do when your car’s underwater: wait until the car’s hit the bottom of wherever it is you’re swimming to, then smash the windows. No going through the door—too much pressure or something like that.
The car’s still sinking down and there’s water up to my ankles cold as hell. I bunch my knees up to my chest—the longer I stay out of the cold water, the more energy I’ll have. Looking over near the passenger’s seat I try to find something to work with—hammer, metal bar, something strong and sharp I can use to smash my way through.
Nothing. Not on the floor, and not in the glove compartment. Shit. You’d think Theo would have armored these things up in case of emergencies, although he probably wasn’t expecting that his $200,000 car would be taking a swim like this.