by Paula Cox
“Just tell me one thing.” She stops at the stairs.
“I’ll tell you anything you want to hear. Anything at all.”
“That’s not worth anything to me anymore. Not after I know what you do.” She breathes in deep, cold winter air, and coughs lightly. “Your brothers. Your gang. The ones I saw earlier. The ones you do all this with. You’d do anything for them? Kill and torture and all that?”
“Yes.” I don’t hesitate.
“And you’d give me up that quickly?”
Her eyes burn holes in me. I’ve never seen brown look so cruel. But I don’t hesitate here either. Not when it comes to my brothers. Not my family.
Maya nods like she’s expected it all along, wheels her bag through the blanket of snow, and disappears through the revolving doors. I stand outside, ignoring the cold and the other drivers pulling into the parking lot, watching her at the front counter. I watch her until she’s got her room card. I’m even watching her while she goes upstairs, lugging that damn suitcase with her, keeping her eyes as far away from the parking lot as possible. And I’m still standing there when I see the light go on in one of the upper rooms.
The wind bites. It gets underneath my coat and through my jeans and I start to realize how cold and unforgiving the temperature is when I don’t have adrenaline keeping me warm. But even when I get back inside the car I just sit there, doing nothing, waiting for nothing. It’s not like I’m thinking she’s gonna suddenly just change her mind about how she feels and come running back out into the lot. She doesn’t ever want to see me again, and I believe it. It doesn’t change the fact I’m still sitting here, wanting something else to happen. Because right now it feels like everything inside my body has been carved out and dumped away like the insides of a Jack-o’-lantern, and everything that told me to move, to breathe, to eat, to sleep, to fight, was lost when I lost that.
I let the inside get cold. It’d be easy to flip the switch and start the engine, but I don’t. The cold is nice. The cold keeps me awake. The cold keeps me focused on the nothing that aches so bad in the pit of my stomach.
The wind pummels the side of the car. The sky spits out flaky wads of snow like chewed-up gum. Night has fallen. Darker than the nights before. A disgusting night, filled with the sounds of the rocking waves from the beach and the slap of snow and the fists of the wind. The afternoon had seemed pretty bad, but it wasn’t like this. Like the city’s being punished for something.
My brain’s all scattered like it’s been blasted to pieces, and my thoughts are all trying to crawl back together and combine into wholes. Soon enough, though, I start thinking. I’m thinking of Palmer laid up in the hospital with his knees shattered and that bullet lodged in his thigh. And I wonder how Miles is pulling along and that maybe they’re in the same unit with one another, but that wouldn’t make sense. If they had any smarts at all on them, they’d have taken my boy straight to intensive.
Why am I not there with him? What’s keeping me from putting the car in gear and driving out to the hospital to see how my boy’s coming along? Why can’t I leave Maya?
None of the thoughts crawling around have any idea. But I can’t go. It’s like my arms have been chopped off or my legs removed. I just can’t.
Hours pass sitting in that goddam car, doing nothing. Not even waiting, just sitting. I try to guess the time judging by how dark it is near the water, but I get bored so soon that I can’t keep my eyes on it any more than five minutes or thereabouts. It’s around eleven at night when my phone starts to buzz.
I think it’s the boys calling to tell me what’s up. My fingers are so stiff with the cold it’s a struggle just working the phone out of my pocket. But I do, and put it up clumsily to my ear.
“It’s me,” Maya’s voice radiates through, cold and clear. My heart rises up to my throat so fast I think I’m gonna choke on it. “Honestly, I don’t know why I’m calling you. I mean, I know why, but I still don’t want to.”
“Okay.” My hand holding onto the phone is trembling so bad I’m sure I’m gonna drop it at any minute, but I don’t.
“To tell you the truth, what you do disgusts me. It’s the sickest and degrading work I can imagine. But that’s what you do, and I’ve been sitting here for the last four hours telling myself to get as far away as possible. To put as much distance as I physically can between you and me.”
The line goes quiet. I wait, holding my breath.
“But I’m still here,” she finally croaks. “I don’t know what you’ve done to me, but I’m still here. I don’t know if I believe what you said about protecting your friends or if I’m just crazy or if I have a death wish, or what’s happened. You’ve fucking spun me on my head, and I don’t know what to do about it. You know, if you didn’t make me hate you so much, I think I might actually love you.”
Another pause. I can hear the blood working its cycles through my brain. I can hear each pump of my heart, slowed down to super-slow motion. I can feel my whole body moving with what Maya tells me.
“It doesn’t change anything,” she cuts in at last. “It doesn’t change what you are or what you do. You’re still a monster to me, and I told you before there’s only room in my life for one monster.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean I’m done with this bullshit. I’m sick of being sandwiched between two killers, like a fucking bone you’ve thrown to two different dogs. Maybe this is what I’m supposed to do, or who I’m supposed to be. Everyone’s got a type they gravitate towards, yeah? Maybe I’m that crazy girl who has a bunch of killers in her life. Sure as hell seems that way. And if that’s what I am and I’ve got to choose someone to throw myself at, fine. I choose you. At least you still have a soul. He doesn’t.”
“Who are you talking about?” My mouth’s so dry. Every breath is like swallowing ash.
“Theo,” she says.
I had a good reason for being nervous about this. “What do you want?”
“For you to do what you do. If you want to keep working. If you want us to keep whatever we’ve got, whatever you care about: the money, the fucking, me, then kill Theo Butler.”
“You can’t be serious.”
“Kirill’t say that mobster bullshit to me. I wouldn’t have said it if I wasn’t serious. But this is a contract. For pay, whatever you want that the Family can provide.”
“This is insane,” I wheeze. Why? Because I’d be betraying the guy who hired me in the first place? Because it was his own daughter who was making the request? Jesus Christ. What world had I fallen into?
“It’s not insane. It’s a contract kill. I don’t give a shit how it’s done. You’ve got seventy-two hours. Better decide quick.”
The line goes dead. The phone drops from my hand. My fingers are shaking so violently I have to sit on them to keep them from moving. Somehow, my body and my heart feel strangely calm. This whole thing was fucking insane, but I’d learned to adjust to insane. I was a tool for whatever the moment called for. And at this moment, I was a tool designed to put a bullet through the heart of Theo Butler.
Chapter 24
Maya turns off her phone and throws it on the bed. It springs up and down on the cover, then springs off and hits the floor. She doesn’t notice it. She feels the tears welling up in her eyes, hot and agonizing, but she doesn’t even try to brush them away. There’d be no point. She’s not in control of her body right now, and that’s fine—she doesn’t need it to do anything aside from what it’s already doing: processing.
And like this, she slowly begins to understand what she’s just done. Put a hit on her father. Sell herself for Theo’s death. Trade one life of killing for another. Theo or Quinn. Family or Stitches. Death or death.
The words jump around in her brain with strange finality, like the phone bouncing on the bed before it clunks down with a little thud to the ground.
For some reason, her legs go weak, but instead of sitting down on the bed or at the desk, she slumps down with her back to th
e mattress, facing the door. She’s eerily calm. She’s so calm even she knows there’s something strange about it, like she was looking at her body through the eyes of someone else. She’s generally and scarily calm, despite the circumstances and the day she’s had, and her thoughts come to her one at a time like letters she can open and examine at will.
The first thing she needs is a plan, and the first thing on that plan is some place where she can go tomorrow. The mansion is one hundred and fifty percent off limits, and with the mansion comes that whole chunk of the outskirts of the city. Better to get away and stay away, especially now that she’s given the order for Theo to go in the ground. For all she knows, Quinn’s already at the mansion, plugging guardsmen. Getting closer. Doing anything other than what he was doing, which was sitting in her car in hotel’s parking lot, going exactly nowhere, waiting to see where his thoughts would lead.
She’s still sitting on the shag, cheap-ass carpet of the Motel Six, facing the door like she’s waiting for someone to come plowing through at any moment. She’s still calm. She’s still completely in control of the situation and even more so, of herself. There are no doubts about her contract being filled, that in three days or less she’s going to read in the paper or see online an article detailing the ruthless and efficient murder of Theo Butler, respected and deeply beloved businessman.
What would they say about her? Would she even be mentioned? “Whereabouts of Maya Butler currently unknown?” No—that wasn’t right. “Maya Butler could not be contacted at this time.” Not that either.
With any luck, they’d have forgotten about her. Or, better yet, the kill would be so efficiently done, and the body so well hidden, or an excuse provided detailing how her father was out of town and wouldn’t be back until so-on-and-so-forth. Something offering enough liberty that there’d be at least a week before any kind of suspicion would be entertained.
Maya hopes.
She could really use that week. It could be that maybe she doesn’t intend on ever seeing Quinn again, and getting as far away as soon as possible just so that she doesn’t have to think about what she’s leaving behind, or what might come after her. She’s been tagged all her life by her father and her father’s people. Quinn’s just the latest in the newest batch of prison enforcers.
“The hell am I doing?” she says, not even sure whether she’d said it out loud or whether the thought was so abrupt and sudden it just sounded like it. She gets up off the ground and smooths out her skirt, then picks up the phone and manually dials the first number she can think of.
“Mmmellow?” Anthony Gerard says. He stretches the word like an eighth grader chewing Hubble Bubble.
“Anthony!” Maya cries, all smiles. She manages just by saying his name to make Anthony seem like the most unexpected and wonderful surprise she could have ever imagined. But that’s her talent— putting on voices and faces just like a trained actress. But she’s had a lifetime of practice and deceiving other people. Like with Theo, when she wanted her way but knew she wouldn’t get it unless she could apply herself—the tone of her voice and the smiles or frowns of her lips. Like a bribe, the curve of the lips or the blink of mascaraed eyelid would add extra value, like another ten or twenty-dollar-bill handed over to the traffic cop. “How are you?”
“Maya Butler?” Anthony matches her tone to the pitch. “It’s been ages!”
“Way too long—I know.” She smiles and begins bit by bit to explain the situation. Not the real situation. Never the real situation, but the situation as designated by her needs. There’s been a fight. She improvises on the spot: a nasty fight.
“Yes, with Quinn… And Daddy too,” she says a little quieter.
The quiet becomes a prolonged silence. While she scrubs her bare feet up and down the cheap sheets of her motel bed, she lets Anthony color in the silence like a toddler with a new box of crayons. The enormity of the argument, her hurt feelings, and the devastation left by the exchange of words. She doesn’t have to make up any of it. By the silence itself, Anthony assumes the worst. Assuming the worst, he becomes immediately sympathetic. Does she need a place to stay? Something to eat? A listening ear? Someone just to share the silence? He’s already making up the room. Of course, he and his boyfriend will sleep on the couch; she doesn’t need to say anything (and she doesn’t). And does she need a ride? If she just says the word he’ll be there as soon as he can.
“No, no.” Maya tries to convey a blush through the phone. “I can call a cab.”
Anthony tries to insist, but she insists harder. She tells him she’s still unpacked in a motel and needs time to collect herself, which is partially true, at least. She knows that the most convincing lies have, as their nucleus, a very simple truth around which is constructed all the other details of the lie.
She thanks Anthony as graciously as she can, careful not to make him think he’s done too much for her in case she needs to worm something else out of him later and hangs up. With a place to go and the first part of her plan complete, she needs to begin working on the second: moving far, far away.
It’s here that she runs into her first pitfall: she’s never traveled before. Around town, sure. A few times to Italy with her father and his team, but she felt weird calling that traveling. She’d gotten into the car when they told her to, then gotten onto the plane, then, seven hours later, gotten into another car three thousand miles away from the first car. And then let herself be driven around for the next ten days to drink different regional wines and take Snapchats of the predictably stunning and repetitive scenery.
She’s never done any of it by herself. The very idea of calling all those people and organizing her way frightens and excites her. Maybe Anthony could help her when she went to his apartment? No—she throws the idea away quickly. She doesn’t want anyone to know she was planning on going away, not even her closest friends. It’s not that she doesn’t trust them. She’s just called a guy begging for a room, and she certainly wouldn’t have done that if she didn’t think it was a good idea. Rather, she’s realizing how things would be from now on. Even if she’s slow to grasp everything, she knows the basic rundown of things. After Anthony’s house, in three days, five days, a week or two—there’d be nothing else. Just herself: her skills and her wits.
She’s already determined that she won’t be around when the lawyers read off her father’s will. Even if by some miracle they manage to find her she decides that she will grandly reject the money, the estates, the workforce: all of it. There’s no way she’s going to let herself be controlled by her father beyond his grave. What’s the point in living if you’ve got to do it under a thumb? Worse, a dead thumb.
But they won’t find her. She’s going to dye her hair. Apple red, she thinks and quickly rejects it. Too conspicuous. Maybe a darker blonde. Maybe dark brown. Could she pass as a brunette? It’ll take some practice, like learning another language. She’s been blonde her entire life.
She’ll need a job, too. Anthony will lend her some money: how much will depend on how good of a show she can put on for him, though she’s confident her situation by itself will guarantee her at least a few thousand. It’s not like it’s anything to him. He’s a successful designer, and his boyfriend is an accountant. They’ve got more money than they know how to spend.
What kinds of jobs? Nothing manual. Maybe a waitress at a fancy restaurant. Did she need experience for that? Or a barista, if worse came to worse. She shudders thinking about the worst and quickly decides that her worst was still better than grinding coffee beans. Maybe Anthony could help her find something? But that certainly wouldn’t work if she were going to get out of the city. No. Definitely not. She needs to pick a place and work on getting there, and only after she’s gotten there, find out what she will do. New York. But it’s so big. And dirty.
She throws the idea out: New York is too obvious, anyway, and she needs to find some place where she can escape to, not where she can get totally lost. Maybe Vermont. It’s beautiful in the winter.
She could hole up in a tiny cabin and learn to cook and make cider. She might even work at a cider press. Come spring she could go south and find something else. She might even find a designer she could help make designs for, if only he shows her how it’s done. They’ll see how good she is. How quick a learner. And with no prior experience!
“Where did you say you were from again?” she imagines them asking. She’ll throw her hand aside, say the first thing that pops into her head. You wouldn’t know it. It’s tiny-tiny. Not on any map I’ve ever seen.
“Well, this is one of the finest first designs I’ve ever seen. Perhaps the finest. Reminds me of my own work, when I was your age.”
A whole new life of possibilities spreads itself out on the ceiling of Maya’s hotel room. Her heart begins to beat quicker and quicker with all the excitement of the promise of a new life, soon to be lived. Freedom, soon to be had. It’s all so near to her, so much within her grasp that she can barely control herself. She doesn’t know what to do and forgets all about the fact that she’s left the Maserati out in the parking lot or that she has a father, still very much alive, that she hasn’t eliminated yet.