by Bower Lewis
“I’ve been with you every day of your life, Pax. Always will be, come what may.”
She smiled for the first time since he’d arrived. John noted the look and held a hand up.
“I’ve got your back, and I can even appreciate what you’re going for here, misguided though it may be. I can’t risk playing it your way though, kid. The stakes are just too high. I’m real sorry about that. I do promise to be around if you need somebody to talk to, though, and nobody’s getting near you with malicious intent without having a good look at his intestines from the inside. You can count on that.”
She turned away, exasperated by his gruesome pledge and irate with The Biz all over again. “I don’t understand you, Uncle John. If you know what His intentions are, here—”
“He gives me what He gives me, and I work with what I’ve got. But, at the end of the day, I serve Him with all the best that’s in me and I don’t hold nothing back. To do so would be to fail Him, and I won’t do that. Not even for the niece I love.”
She glared back at Rockwell’s untouched books, and they bothered her, suddenly, as much as her uncle. The phone had been too quiet, and Zane had been gone too long. Then she felt those omnipresent eyes again. They made her anxious and restless, like she was trapped in an aquarium. It was all too much to ignore.
“Just spit it out, Biz, for crying out loud!”
The BlackBerry squealed.
I TOLD U THE CHOICE WAS URS 2 MAKE & UV MADE IT
SO GET IT DONE & STOP GIVNG ME SUCH A HEDACHE
OTHERWISE, Y DONT U JUST GO HOME?
She spat out a laugh and tossed the phone at her uncle.
“Nice try, but You’re the one who loaded me up with the apocalyptic images and then loosed Kujo on the scene. Sorry, but You’re stuck with me for now. If You’re not enjoying the experience, then perhaps You’ll exercise a bit more caution the next time You tag a newbie for a job of this magnitude.”
There was a pause, and then another squeal. John raised an eyebrow at the screen and held it up to show her.
ATTA GIRL!
She dropped back onto the couch and they let silence take the room, waiting in fractured solidarity until a whine arose in the distance. It was buried by the engine’s roar as the Bugatti grew closer and then dropped to a rumble at the base of the driveway. John placed a hand on her arm as it revved and then cut out. A door clicked shut and Zane came in alone a few moments later. He looked spent.
“We’re good,” he said as Patience flew across the foyer and threw her arms around him. “I apologize for the delay. I had to take them each for a bit of a test drive before they’d forgive and forget. It’ll take some doing to get the gears back into fighting form and all four tires will certainly need to be replaced, but the APB is lifted and the troopers seemed cheerful enough when they left.”
She just stared at him, trying to wrap her mind around the fact that he hadn’t been hauled in or roughed up, and then she turned back to her uncle.
John winked and stood up, and then he smashed the liquor cabinet door with his elbow and broke for the basement with his rifle. Zane leapt after him as Patience grabbed a gun and fired a warning shot. The recoil knocked her back as he dove against the wall and then ducked Zane’s right hook. He pushed the smaller man aside and reached for the basement door.
“You’ve really gotta learn how to shoot, Pax. We’ll put that high on the list of things to work on later.”
Zane grabbed the gun from Patience, but John ignored it. He froze before the door for a moment as the BlackBerry squealed. Then he turned back and ran straight at them, grabbing each under a muscular biceps and the phone cried again.
DUCK!
Two shots blasted through the basement door as they rolled across the living room floor, lodging in the wall where John stood a moment before. Alexander Rockwell stepped into the hall carrying a Smith & Wesson .44 Magnum and dragging a quaking Joey Forsyth—who appeared uncertain about the Colt .38 in his hand—behind him. John rolled back and raised his rifle and Patience hollered at the ceiling.
Her uncle’s finger reached his trigger first.
The rifle jammed and John cursed. He shoved Patience and Zane behind the bookcase and dove for the couch. Rockwell’s shot exploded behind them and he stepped into the living room. A sniffling Forsyth tugged at his arm.
“Thank you for handling the troopers, Zane. Cops are always messy.”
Forsyth broke then, dissolving into tears. “I don’t want to be senator anymore. Come on, Alex. Let’s just go to Palm Beach. It’s safe there.”
“Shut up, Joey.”
John raised his rifle’s sights to the senator. “I can take care of that for you right now, champ. One shot and you’ll be out of politics forever. What do you say we solve this, once and for all?”
“Uncle John, no!”
Rockwell laughed and pointed his candidate toward the door. “Go get in the car, Joey.”
Forsyth just stood where he was, staring down at the weapons in everybody’s hands and shrinking further behind his handler. “But I told you, I don’t want to be senator. I want to get drunk, and then I want to go to Palm Beach. Come on, Alex, the weather in D.C. sucks.”
“I told you to get in the car.”
Patience watched as her uncle’s face hardened, and she knew then what it looked like to prepare to kill a man. She also knew then what it was she had to do. She felt some interest in what would happen next as she slipped from behind Zane and placed herself between them, but not much beyond a detached curiosity about what it was going to feel like.
From nowhere, an old Peggy Lee song floated through her mind.
Is that all there is to a circus?
Zane shouted as he and John both leapt and Rockwell grabbed her arm. There was a crack and a flash, and then nothing.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Patience opened her eyes, but they fell closed again despite her best efforts. The lights were searing, and the headache was more searing than the lights. She tried once more, curious about the tears that blurred her strange surroundings as she attempted to sort out how she’d landed in the eye of a tornado with a hippopotamus on her chest. Tornadoes were rare beasts in Boston, and hippopotami were rarer still. She breathed in too suddenly and choked on the air as a hand came down on her shoulder. The roaring registered then as a strangeness that wasn’t completely unfamiliar. She was back in the Bugatti.
“What’s happened?”
Zane glanced over and she knew that something wasn’t right. Some elusive, yet charged, change had come over him, and a trace of something that didn’t belong hung in the air between them. It tasted like the Fourth of July.
“Who’s been shot?”
He didn’t respond; he just pulled her hair back and looked down into her face before returning his attention to the road. The lights in her eyes were relentless. She repeated her question.
“No one’s been shot,” he said. “Well, no one of consequence. Alex took a bit of lead to the arm, but I’m not counting that.”
“What?”
The twister touched back down in her head and pulled her straight up in her seat. Her eyes burned as she tried to focus through the blur of oncoming headlights, and then she noticed the streaks of reddish-brown emblazoned across his shirtfront and the streak of do not fuck with me emblazoned across his face.
“Oh God, Zane. What happened back there?”
“Stop it, Patience. Everything’s okay.”
“It’s not okay. You’ve got blood on your shirt.”
He glanced down at his Oxford, then shrugged and changed lanes. “It’s nothing you need to worry about now. You’ve been hit on the head, and I’m more concerned about that than anything else.”
She grabbed his arm and he pulled their speed back to eighty-five. He untangled himself from her grasp with a look of warning against further driving interference.
“I was an idiot not to have checked that basement for weapons before leaving them alone down ther
e,” he said. “I mean, what is Alex, besides a sociopath with a weapons fetish? He hit you with his gun and then he reached for you again after you hit the ground. The look in his eyes wasn’t good, Patience. He was lucky to only get shot in the arm, believe me. He’s fine, but I’m not sure he’ll stay that way if your uncle gets to him before we do.”
Her head fell back against the seat and Zane stopped talking. She touched her fingers to the blood-snarled mess matted behind her hairline and he nodded.
“I really am concerned about that. You’ve likely got a concussion. You need to be seen by someone.”
“Would you forget about my head, Zane? All I want is to know what’s happened.”
A device in the Bugatti’s console blipped twice and he eased off the accelerator. He slid onto the ramp at a rest stop and maintained an easy pace as he circumnavigated the parking lot, cruising past a drive-through into the relative darkness of the dumpster slalom behind the food court, then emerged again into the brighter light of the filling station at the far end of the plaza. A couple of state troopers sped past on the highway above as Zane came back up in their wake and resumed a quieter traveling speed.
He touched a button on the radar detector and eased the car back to ninety, having uttered not a word. Finally, he glanced over and nodded.
“There’s not much more to tell. It was all very fast and very loud, and it was clear that discussion wasn’t an option as far as Alex was concerned. He should have left you on the floor and made his getaway while we were looking after you, but he didn’t. Something had to be done. Do you understand what I’m saying?”
“Yes.”
She dropped her forehead into her hand, trying to resign herself to this turn of events she’d set in motion but hadn’t witnessed. She looked up again as the lights of an overpass appeared in the distance and disappeared just as quickly into the discarded world behind them.
“So, that’s when John shot him.” She couldn’t imagine why her uncle hadn’t killed them both while he’d had the chance.
“No,” Zane said. “It isn’t.”
“I don’t understand.”
“John’s rifle jammed again.”
The world slammed on its brakes inside a head already engulfed by pain and confusion and the life drained from Patience’s face. All she could see now were those stains on Zane’s shirt—the incontrovertible proof that he’d defied The Biz’s command not to spill a drop of blood—and her world increased from a hundred to a thousand times too loud.
“Take that off.”
The stains appeared to be glowing now, larger and brighter than before. She grabbed his shirttails and yanked them back, snapping the buttons across the interior of the car. The Bugatti swerved as Zane pushed her hands away.
“Are you insane, Patience? My God!”
“Get it off!”
“Jesus Christ.”
He muttered a selection of accompanying explicatives as the last button popped from his Oxford and he pulled it back over his arms. She yanked at the cuff as it caught on his watch and tossed it from her window. The shirt floated aloft over the highway and tumbled a few times in the rear view mirror. Then it rose on a torrent of exhaust and disappeared from view.
Zane was still for a mile or two, silent except for his breathing. Finally, he ran a hand through his hair and looked over.
“Well, now I’m convinced you’ve got a concussion. Don’t ever do anything like that while I’m driving, Patience. You could have killed us both.”
She kept her eyes forward and he glanced down to ensure that he wasn’t in immediate danger of losing his T-shirt as well. Then he turned his focus toward finding a place to pull over. A clearing appeared in the distance, and he drove like it was the mothership sent to save them from a hellish planet where gods waged wars against boy band singers.
He killed the engine and turned to face her, but she wouldn’t return the look. “Listen, Patience, I’m not going to apologize for what happened back there. It was Alex or you, and I believe The Biz understands that. Even if He doesn’t, you’re not going to hide my crime by destroying one of my favorite shirts and nearly killing us both in the process.”
“I wanted his blood out of this car.”
“Well, it’s gone now.”
She touched the lump on her head again as she stared at an errant button on the floor.
“I had a hard choice to make,” he continued. “I’m satisfied with the result. If He’s upset with me, then I’ll just do whatever it takes to make things right.”
“Can you unshoot a man?”
“No.”
She pulled the BlackBerry from her pocket and dropped it onto the console between them. “Has He spoken to you at all since you did shoot a man?”
“No.”
She picked it up again and its silence felt ominous. There wasn’t a thing in the world that didn’t scare the hell out of her. She looked at Zane, finally, and noticed that he appeared more determined than scared. She wondered how he did that.
She closed her eyes for a moment and took a breath. “Do we know where we’re going?”
He nodded. “Brockton. Joey’s scheduled to swing by a Boys and Girls Club in the morning, and then it’s over to Milton for one of those Town Hall meetings he’s so crazy about. They won’t alter the schedule again after missing the North Shore this morning, especially with Brockton and Milton still very much in play. Your uncle mentioned something about Alex berating Joey about their schedule in the basement today, so I’m certain he’s headed there as well.”
“That’s super,” Patience said. “A rogue SCUD with a military assault rifle facing off against the architects of the Apocalypse in a packed Boys and Girls Club gymnasium. What more could the world possibly ask for? My God, Zane, what if you’d missed that shot at Rockwell? He could have killed you.”
“I wasn’t concerned about missing.”
She stared down at the lifeless phone, and then she was done. She jumped from the car and slammed the door. Zane followed, picking up the pace as she spun toward the traffic and started her windup. He caught her wrist in the midst of what looked to be a half-decent slider and took the BlackBerry from her hand. She stalked up the shoulder, pouring what was left of her strength into her fury and he let her go, catching up with her as she was at the brink of collapse.
“This is a joke, Zane. I can’t control these people. I can’t stop them from doing what they’re hell-bent on doing, and I certainly can’t anticipate what they’ll do next, because I’m not a fucking psychopath!”
“Patience.”
“You were set up today. Do you get that? He let us run right into a situation where you’d have no choice but disobey Him, so now you have. He’s the omniscient one, Zane. He must have known this was likely to happen. Do you understand that you’re screwed? You were set up.”
“Patience!”
He held up the glowing screen, but she just shook her head.
“I’m sorry, Zane, but I’m out. I can’t work this way. I’ll do what I can to stop SolarTech and the senator, but I’m working solo from now on.”
“I’m not.”
He touched the button and then swallowed a cough. Patience grabbed it from his hand.
I TOLD U UR WAY WULD NOT B EASY
FAR B IT FROM ME 2 SAY I TOLD U SO…
She clenched her fists and Zane recognized his error. He took it back and held it above her reach.
“His way was the grenade launcher! His way was to say no blood and then throw my uncle into the mix. If we wind up caught in my dear Uncle John’s crossfire tomorrow or torched in some massive SolarTech flame out, that’s on Him as far as I’m concerned. That’s smiting by proxy.”
The phone squealed and she pulled Zane’s hand down before her face.
I SED NO SMITING, I MEANT NO SMITING!
WHY MUST U QUESTION EVERYTHNG I SAY?
I M THE LORD UR GOD!
“Oh, for crying out loud! Are we back to that again?”
/> There was a zapping sound and a whiff of alkaline in the air. Zane dropped the phone as its screen turned to black and he shook out his hand. Patience grabbed his wrist and looked down, but he closed his fingers over his palm and pulled back.
“It’s fine,” he said. “It felt as though I was holding a lit charcoal briquette for a moment, but the sensation’s gone now. Perhaps you might consider cooling it with the recriminations, though, so close on the heels of my crime against God and Rockwell? Would you do that for me, Patience? Please?”
He retrieved the BlackBerry from the dirt and turned toward the car. It lit up almost immediately and she caught a glimpse of the message before he turned it from her view.
I CANT TALK 2 HER
Zane sighed and shook his head without breaking his stride.
“Please try to remember that she’s been unconscious twice today. She’s really not herself at the moment. Anyway, her concerns about what happened this afternoon aren’t entirely baseless—”
He was cut off mid-sentence and Patience stepped closer as he bent over the message. He flinched toward the delete button as she took the phone from his hand.
“What did He say about that?”
The text dissolved and she looked up. There was something in Zane’s expression she’d never seen there before.
“It was nothing important.”
She kept an eye on him until the phone squealed again.
I M THE LORD UR GOD!
She thrust it back at him and turned toward the car.
“He’s like a broken record with that. Let’s go.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Zane pulled her beside him on the bed and leaned close. He looked down into her eyes and Patience caught her breath. She felt shy suddenly, and a little flushed under the intensity of his gaze. A tingling sensation ran up her spine as he brushed a lock of her hair back and turned her face to his. She was starting to feel lightheaded.
“What are you doing?”
“I’m not entirely sure,” he said. “Looking for some sort of weirdness, I think. I don’t know much about concussions, but I believe there’s supposed to be something odd about the pupils.”