by Paula Cox
Then I get the idea that’s it’s probably not smart to just show up on big man’s porch with his daughter and explain there and then, especially when he’s been having problems the way I’ve heard. So I give him a call, and decide to just come out with it straight and easy.
“Mr. Tolliver,” his crusty, powerful voice slips through the receiver. “It’s late. What can I do for you?”
“Mr. Butler—” I bite my tongue, wondering how I’m going to phrase this delicately, and then just decide to say it however I can. “I’ve had a situation with the Stitches. I’m bringing Maya home to you for a few days.”
“A situation, Mr. Tolliver? Are you in any trouble?”
“Not personally.”
“No legal trouble? Is your life in danger? Are you with Maya now? Answer me truthfully, Mr. Tolliver.”
“Everything’s fine. We’ve had an attack on another brother, and we need to make sure our territory is clear. It won’t take much time.” I pause. “I can’t bring your daughter into this, of course. I’m going to drop her off at the mansion.”
“On what grounds are you making your assumptions?”
Christ, the old man was asking a lot of questions. He’s making me feel nervous, and I hate feeling nervous when I have no reason to be.
“We’ve dealt with these guys before. There’s no real trouble. Just a bunch of upstarts.” I work the lie out easy and smooth. One of the more valuable things I’ve picked up.
Theo’s silent for a long moment. There are crunching noises in the background, like feet stepping on gravel. Someone asks for a damp cloth. Someone else asks if the pliers were still in the kitchen. I don’t even want to think about what that might imply, but my thoughts run automatically to Kit.
“Is my daughter there with you right now?” Theo finally asks.
“She’s in the bathroom—in the hotel. I’ll put you on when she comes out.” I pause and look at the hotel entrance. “Just don’t know how long that’ll be.”
“Call me back when my daughter’s with you.” Theo sighs. “I’m afraid you know you’ve chosen an extremely uncomfortable time for your problems. We’re very tied up here. The whole business is unsavory. Nothing can help it of course. I just want you to know.”
“Sorry about that.”
“Tell Maya to call.” The line goes dead.
Maya’s back a minute later, of course. “Your father wants you to call,” I say like a scolding mother. She looks at me like I’m some kind of idiot, and doesn’t make a move to get her phone. I don’t say anything else. It’ll only be twenty minutes, anyway. Twenty of the most damned uncomfortable minutes I’ve ever driven. The last thing Maya wants, or I want, is to be even more on her case.
There’s snow everywhere. Damp, fat, gray, ugly snow. It’s on the side of the highway in sluggish piles, and drips out of the clouds and falls like bird shit, and we go on in silence until we’re three minutes from Theo’s mansion when Maya says what I’ve been expecting her to say the whole night.
“I’m not abandoning you.”
“Kirill’t try that with me, Quinn. Please, just don’t even try that. You sound so damn condescending when you talk like that. And don’t tell me that this is for my protection, either. That’s what Daddy says, and it’s such bullshit, so just don’t.”
“Okay.”
“When are you going to come back?”
“When the job’s done.”
“Jesus Christ you sound just like him. You’re not going off to whack anyone, are you? Should I be expecting to read about some guy found eaten by fishes over at the pier?”
“No. Nothing like that.” The lie isn’t as easy this time.
“Where are you going?”
“Around. To keep the bad guys away from the good guys and to keep the good guys from living in fear.”
“When are you gonna be back?”
“Give me a week,” I say. “One week should be plenty. But I can’t write you, and I can’t tell you what’s going on. If the bad guys get hold of my phone, I don’t want them knowing anything about you. I don’t want them to know you exist. You okay with that?”
“No.” She stares hard at the ugly static of snow. “But you’re going to do it anyway, so I don’t have a choice, do I?”
I don’t answer that one. Swinging the Mercedes around, I pull up to the mansion, behind the short, black car in the visitor’s lot. “I hope you know how shitty this makes me feel. To have sex with me and then to go hang out with your boys and then to dump me back off at my daddy’s house. I just really hope you know how much of an asshole you are.”
She doesn’t wait for the butler to open her door. I can’t say why but I’m even kind of expecting her to stay an extra few seconds and say something like, “See you in a week” or “I’ll write you,” but no. She slams the door behind her and glides up the stairs into the house, and disappears. Not one look back.
Suddenly, there are a ton of things I want to say to her last words. That she doesn’t know what she’s talking about or what I’m involved in, or what loyalty means to me. That one week isn’t anything to ask at all, especially if I’m trying to keep her safe. I run through all the different things I could have said and practice trying to say them.
None of them fit. None of them get past the truth that I feel in what she’d said. That I was selfish. That I was abandoning her. And that after a week, I might discover that I didn’t need a spoiled princess like Maya Butler hanging around my neck anymore, as good as the money was. Two months ago and that’d have absolutely been true. But not now. Not now when I knew that she wasn’t a spoiled little princess, but someone just trying to escape the prison-like life her father enforces on her. She hated her father, but she hated me more. Because I was the one with the keys. I was the one who’d opened the doors for her, and now I was the one shutting her back inside.
Chapter 19
It’s a long drive back to the Clubhouse. The snow comes mushier and thicker like TV static, and the wind comes colder and more biting like there are needles resting inside it waiting to worm down under my skin.
Over the next few days, the needles only pile up more and more to the point that I don’t know if the needling sensation I feel is on account of the cold or if maybe I’m getting nervous too. Nervous waiting and planning with Kirill, Crash, Nail, and Palmer about what we’re going to do with the lousy sons-of-bitches who attacked our boy. Nervous sitting on the streets or in the car, watching the place and keeping our eyes out for any big guys who wanna come around and mess with us. It all makes you feel like a fisherman, except instead of trout and marlin or whatever the hell it is you’re after, it’s a couple dangerous mean motherfuckers stacked like bodybuilders.
So on and so on for four, five, six days. Then the first week passes. I call Theo and explain the situation. Nothing yet but we need more time. The guy sounds cool on the phone and tells me to take as much time as I need, but I don’t like the way he says it one bit for the same reason I wouldn’t like Palmer acting calm and collected right before a fight.
I don’t ask about Maya. I couldn’t stand it, anyway.
Another week crawls by, then another. The weeks start to get harder and harder to bear. It’s on everyone’s mind in the clubhouse that this pressure is going to get released sooner or later—we’re ready to pop. And as the third week slips into the fourth and mid-December creeps up, the snow falls thick and fast. It’s so damn cold that you’re a popsicle if you spend any more than thirty minutes out on the street. Palmer and I are sitting in the front seat of his Chevy near the docks, where one of our guys reported seeing ‘two really fucking big foreign-looking motherfuckers’ not too long before, warming our hands over the McDonald’s coffee I shelled out for. Palmer points through the frosted-up windshield and nudges me in the side.
“What do you think?” he whispers.
“Call Kirill. He’s over in Westside.”
“We’ll have lost them by the time Kirill gets here.”
“We’re not going to wait for Kirill.”
Palmer looks at me like I’m crazy. Maybe I am. Trapped in the car with the snow coming down like that waiting to get attacked, and still not a word from Maya, and going crazy doesn’t sound all that farfetched.
I’ve seen the way the two guys are walking. They’re shuffling unnaturally, their right arms clasped rigidly to their side like half tin soldiers, while the left side lopes along a little behind the rest. Add to that the big coats, and you can more than bet they’ve got some pretty mean Items underneath it all. My breathing comes out heavy and labored. The only thing I’ve got on me is my glock. Palmer ought to have something bigger in the trunk, but I don’t know if he’ll wanna risk trying to reach it and escape the eyes of these two big bastards lumbering nearer and nearer.
“Q, you’re not saying what I think you’re saying. Look at the size of those cats. They’ll eat us alive.”
“Not if we put the jump on them first.”
“You mean put the tag on them?”
“I mean doing the whole Chinese fire drill. Out and attack, forty seconds max. Bring the left one down and engage the right after. If it’s a shotgun he’s got beneath his coat, he’ll need a few seconds to take it out. We can bring one of them down before either has the chance. We might even be able to bring them both.”
“And if we don’t?”
“Then the usual. Run like hell.”
The guys are getting closer. They’re wearing face masks because of the cold, so it’s impossible to get a good look at who they are. We’ve formed our judgments pretty much solely on their walk. But sometimes that’s enough. You don’t have to know a guys’ whole history before you make a move on him. Personally, I like it that way. Makes the whole thing that much easier.
Palmer’s got time for a sigh but that’s all. I tuck the collar of my undershirt up and over my nose, and then start loading the glock.
“You got the shotgun in the back?”
Palmer nods. “Think you need more than ten seconds?”
“I can get it in seven.”
“Alright.”
“Quinn—we never even saw the guys who tore up Miles. How do you know these are the ones we’re looking for?”
“I don’t. I’m going on instinct.”
Palmer doesn’t like that at all, but it’s the best I can do.
“Would you rather wait for them to start shooting at you first? That’s the only way you’re gonna be sure. I don’t know about you, but I’d rather take my chances getting a guy in the leg on accident than getting a bullet in my head and probably yours too because I was too cautious.”
He chews over this for about a second. The big guys and their big coats lumber even closer. Seventeen rounds loaded. This thing’s ready to sing.
“Kirill’t shoot to kill, Q. Take their weapons away, right? I don’t care if you’re afraid for your life—I’m not executing innocents.”
“Neither am I.”
***
I’d be running this whole scene through my head months afterward, to the point of me memorizing every tiny detail, including the ones that just seemed accidental then, looking at them through hundreds of different perspectives and what ifs. But saying this is getting ahead of myself. This whole situation of the last four weeks leading up to Palmer and I sitting in his Chevy drinking coffee, and trying to decide whether or not to make the hit, is getting ahead of myself and missing half the story.
I haven’t breathed a word about Maya, and there are a few things that need saying to keep the story in order. Of course, she hadn’t been talking to me during any of this time. I got all of this later, some of it from Theo but most of it from her later in bits and pieces scattered here and there.
So go back four weeks, when Palmer pulled up outside Theo’s mansion (I wasn’t getting loaned the Mercedes when I wasn’t watching Maya) and Maya goes clattering up the steps, convinced she’s had everything she’s going to have with me. If I thought the days went by slowly when I was with the Stitches setting plans for our hit, I could only imagine how slow they were for her.
Theo had always looked after her like a prized pig—doting on her and spoiling her and never letting her out of his sight because he was afraid someone would just pick her up and take her away. Ever since the whole Kit situation, which was still being cleaned up and which was still a point of, what’s the word… contention between the Family and the Cuchullain’s, the mansion had been barricaded for war. Double the guards in the hallways and on the lawn. Guys with submachine guns slung over their shoulders even watched the swans on the lake and the gardeners watering the potted plants. No one was going for drives alone, and everyone was checking their mufflers for bombs before going anywhere. The list goes on. Days and days of SWAT team like surveillance for a threat that probably wasn’t ever coming.
It wasn’t so much that the guys were afraid of someone else snapping and going to town on the place with an automatic Item. The fact is that while Theo and Mattias Kroll had agreed and shaken hands on what was to be done about Kit Holcomb, everyone expected retaliation. You don’t just go and kill another mob boss’s man like you don’t just go and beat the living daylights out of a rival crew member, no matter how much you may hate the guys.
Lots of guys were expecting Mattias to call in from the outside—Sicilians or Venetians or other Irish from New York to put the hit on one of Theo’s guys to get even. Maybe even on Theo himself to put the Family down once and for all. But Mattias didn’t have any reason to get rid of the Family when after all these years they’d carved out a kind of peace for each other. More than that, having two cooperative mobs in the same city—the only in the state—was twice the threat to outside invaders than one. Mattias would be shooting himself in the foot, and he knew it.
From the sounds of it, Theo already knew how dangerous his situation was. All it took was for one of Mattias’s hot-blooded men to get on the wrong side of one of his guards, and they would draw the risk of violence. It didn’t help that Kit had his share of sympathizers from both sides. Some of the guys saw him as a kind of damaged little brother who’d needed more counseling than what he was getting. Other guys thought it was a bullying thing and that since the guy had very clearly been experiencing problems for a long time, everyone had been in the wrong just to ignore it. The guys were surprisingly sensitive, according to Maya. But that wasn’t a good thing. It made justice that much more difficult to hash out.
Unfortunately for Theo, the choice came down to reputation versus mercy. From the beginning, it must have been apparent that reputation would win out. All of the appeals were for nothing. Kit Holcomb was a damaged young man who’d messed with a mob boss, then tried and failed to take the easy way out of what he knew would come.
They’d already been at it for almost an hour by the time I called her father, Maya told me. She hadn’t seen it happen, but she heard about it from others. The rule was that if you touch anything belonging to the boss without his permission, he gets to take the fingers that touched it. Medieval law with modern instruments.
Kit was being plied apart piece by piece, finger by finger. Whenever he lost consciousness, they gave him twenty minutes, then sprayed his face full of water and continued clipping. Once the whole job was done, they packaged the fingers in a little box and gave it solemnly to Mattias. No one knows why this tradition is still around, except for maybe Mattias and Theo. Then, two of the guys roped a gunmetal bag over the kid’s head while another pressed a pistol up against it and did what Kit hadn’t been able to do himself, and that was the end of it. Three-four hours tops, not counting the drive to deliver the body and the remains of the head to the pier.
Maya stayed in her room while all of this was going on. The chef brought her dinner up, but she didn’t touch it. The worst part, she said, wasn’t when the guards told her what had happened. It was when her father came up to try and make her feel better.
He’d changed his shirt and washed his hands, but Maya cou
ld still see the stains of Kit’s blood in his leathery brown skin. She called them his ‘little nebulae.’
“My dear,” Theo had said, taking his seat next to her on the bed, stroking her hair. “If things could have been handled differently they would have been. You know that, don’t you?”
No response.