by Jake Irons
“Yeah.”
I glance at the clock then look back out the window. We’re a few minutes early. She’s supposed to meet him at 9 p.m. sharp.
“Why’d you have to meet him so late?”
“Nine o’clock isn’t late.”
Nadia called her uncle and set this meeting up yesterday evening, after we finally snuck out the back exit to my building, hours after the ominous knocking stopped.
Nadia plans to tell Michal a story that is mostly true, but she’s going to fudge things so I seem more like a bumbling idiot rather than a credible writer, and she seems less like she was betraying her uncle and more like she was just using me to gain access—which is true. She’s going to pretend that I didn’t know who Michal was, and that the book was just called “Mikey’s Boys” by coincidence (she believed it wouldn’t be hard to convince Michal of this “because what idiot would do what you did?”). And despite what she said in my apartment, she does thinking paying Michal off is the right thing to do, so I’ve got a big duffle bag filled with two hundred thousand dollars cash. I’ve never actually seen so much cash before. It’s all in stacks of hundreds, and it barely fits into the bag.
“Are you sure we should do this?”
“Eli, yes! You can’t run from my uncle, or hide. This is the only way you’re going to be able to avoid a bullet to the back of your brain.”
“I can go to Mexico.”
“He’d find you.”
“No he wouldn’t!” I know this is dumb, but I’m kind of offended she thinks I’m that helpless. “I’m conversational in Spanish.”
Nadia rolls her eyes. “You wouldn’t last six months. And when my uncle did finally catch you, he’d break your bones until you told him who snitched. And then he’d break all of my bones for not telling him in the first place. This is the best plan.”
I nod. “You’re right.”
“Now give me the bag.”
“The bag?”
“Yes. With the money.”
“That wasn’t part of the plan.”
“What?” Her brow furrows. “What do you mean?”
“I mean that I’m supposed to bring the money in when I come.”
“So? I’ve changed my mind. Give it to me.”
Reluctantly, I reach into the back seat and lift the black duffel into the front. It’s not that I don’t trust Nadia with it; I just don’t like any changes this close to “go” time.
“I forgot how heavy this is,” she says as I set it on her lap.
“Yeah.”
Nadia opens the door.
“Wait, Nadia—are you sure?”
She nods. Her smile is thin. “Despite what I’ve said, he is my uncle. I’m sure I’ll be fine. It’s you I’m worried about.”
I groan. “That’s exactly what I need to hear right now.”
“I’ll call you, okay? Answer your phone.”
“I definitely will.”
“Okay. Remember, look him in the eye, but not for too long. Speak clearly and in short sentences. Do not—”
“I remember. I promise.” Nadia’s gone over all this with me a hundred times. There are so many rules, I feel like I’m meeting the Pope. “Just, you be careful.”
“You too.”
She smiles, then steps out of the car. She slings the duffel bag over her shoulder and walks toward Seweryn’s. I’m impressed by how confident she seems. Back straight. Eyes forward. Stride long.
She knocks, and a few seconds later the door swings open. I can’t see who opened it.
Nadia goes in.
The door shuts.
I wait.
I’m terrible at waiting. I open my phone, then my browser. The Watcher’s site comes up. I check the time. Not even a minute has passed since Nadia shut the door. I scroll the site. I haven’t been paying enough attention to it lately, and I don’t think I’m going to be able to re-focus now. I browse to ESPN, but that doesn’t work either. I check the time. Not even two minutes have passed. Fuck.
I settle on timing how long I can hold my breath, and after an initial, pitiful performance of one-minute-six seconds—I need to quit smoking for real—I’ve worked my way up to one minute and twenty-seven seconds.
Nadia has been in Seweryn’s for eleven minutes and no call.
The phone rings, and I let out my breath in a rush. “Hello,” I gasp, and fuck, that was probably too loud. “Hello?” I say more quietly. “Nadia?”
I don’t hear a response. I move my phone off my ear, confirm the call is still active, and put it back. “Hello?”
I glance at the door—oh shit it’s open! But Nadia isn’t coming out; two guys are.
“Nadia, is that you?”
They’re looking for something—they’ve just seen me.
“Nadia, if you can hear me I can’t hear you.”
They’re walking in my direction.
“Nadia?”
They cross the street, and now they’re on my block. They’re moving quickly, and they’re definitely coming for me.
“Nadia! Nadia, answer me!”
Fuck, I’ve gotta go! I turn on the car and the two dudes start running after me. I peel away from the curb as one guy pulls a gun from his jacket. I speed past them and he opens fire. Fuck, I think the car got hit. Fuck, that’s a corner! I take it fast, the Fusion is going to spin out; oh shit; no, it held. I speed through the red light and take the next left.
“Oh fuck oh fuck, what the fuck, what the fuck!”
Chapter 7
Tara
“I drove like a bat out of hell. I had an escape route planned out in advance. I was going to drive to into New Jersey, but I completely forgot it. I ended up driving out of the city and up to Vermont.”
Eli’s face is very tight. His whole body is tight, so tight I can’t even tell if he’s breathing. “I assumed Nadia betrayed me. I—I don’t know what I was thinking.” He shakes his head. “I made all my arrangements from a hotel room. Someone from MOFO Media had expressed interest in The Watcher a few months before. I got in touch with them and things moved quickly. After that…” he shrugs. “I was in a safe house in Richmond when I found out about Nadia. Michal…killed her.”
Eli looks down at his hands. “The Marshals, the FBI, the ATF, they all tried to get me to testify, but I didn’t. If I thought my testimony would have been worth a shit, I might have. But I never actually witnessed a crime.” He sighs, running his hand over his beard. “Because I wasn’t working with them, they couldn’t put me in official witness protection, but they did introduce me to Special Agent Todd Harris. I got his number, for what that’s been worth.”
Eli looks at me, his face bleak. “I’ve thought a thousand times since then, if only I could do something different. Like never write that stupid book. And where I am, where I ended up, that was my fault. But it wasn’t Nadia’s. Her uncle killed her because she told me stories and I wrote them in a book. It’s fucked up, and it’s the truth.”
Eli sighs. “Anyway, that’s the story. Got any questions?”
A thousand. “Just two,” I say. I’m going to limit it to just two.
He nods. “Okay.”
“Why didn’t you name your book something different?”
Eli sort of winces a little bit, and shit, now I feel bad, like I rubbed salt in his wound.
“I don’t know. I really don’t know.” Eli shakes his head. “I didn’t think anyone would make the Mikey-Michal connection. I didn’t think the book would be successful. I—I don’t know, really. I just thought he—Michal—would never see it. And no one he knew would ever see it.” Eli shakes his head. “It’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever done. I’m still surprised, sometimes, when I think about how wrong I was.”
I nod. I know exactly how he feels. I think I’m smart, but I really fucked up coming to Colorado.
“I think it makes sense,” I say. I don’t really, but I hate to see him looking so miserable.
He nods. “Thanks. Next question.”
> “Why does Michal care?” That’s the other thing I just don’t get. “Even if you did make him look ‘gay’ or whatever. Even if that was intentional, why does he still care?”
“I wasn’t that,” Eli says. “He was worried about what I knew. Either he didn’t believe Nadia, or he didn’t give her a chance to talk. And now…I don’t know. I guess in the end it just came down to ‘business.’”
I feel sick. “But to kill his own niece? He must be a psychopath.”
“Yeah.”
Eli falls silent, but… “I have a third question.”
“Okay.”
“Did you know any of those guys…from your house?”
Eli makes a noncommittal “mm” sound.
“No?”
He shrugs. “I don’t know.”
“You don’t know.”
Eli shakes his head. His eyes drop for a second, before he lifts them back to the road. “I knew Borys. I knew Armand only by reputation. One of the men at my house was named Peter, and I’d seen him before, too. I don’t know who the other guy was.”
“Nick.”
Eli shrugs.
“What, ah…” I’m not sure how to ask it.
“What happened to them? Peter and Nick?”
I nod quickly.
“They’re in the bottom of the house. In my office.”
“Oh.”
Eli nods, looking grim. “I’d never killed anyone before three hours ago,” he says quietly. “Now I’ve killed four at least. Probably five.”
He doesn’t sound super upset about it, but I’m going to guess he mentioned it because he is—at least a little. Which makes perfect sense, of course. If he could shoot five people—even five people who were shooting at him—and not be affected, he’s be a psychopath himself.
I feel the heavy weight of guilt again, but I try to ignore it and think of what he might want to hear right now. All I can think of is “you had to”, which I’m sure he’s already thought of himself.
“Thank you.” It came to me suddenly, and I say without looking at him, because I’m afraid of how he might react. “You did some of that to protect me. Thanks.”
He’s quiet and still. Then I hear his breath catch, and I look at him, expecting…I’m not sure what. What I see is his mouth narrowed into a thin line and his eyes wide and intense. I follow his gaze and see a person stumbling to the road from the trail we took.
Everything happened so fast, when we were running through the woods. I didn’t actually see any of our pursuers. But this guy has to be one of them. Is he alone? And where is Acer?
We hold our breath as the guy—on the taller side, with a thick brown mustache and brown hair—crosses the road and looks for our trail.
Eli shifts, impossibly quiet, and pulls his revolver from his ankle. I gave it back to him on the trail, but now he hands it back to me. He has his pistol in his right hand, but our pursuer fails to find out trail. There’s a terrible moment when Bad Guy lifts his eyes to scan the hills, but he gives that up, too. He pulls his cell phone out of his pocket and crosses to the other side of the road. He has a short conversation. He paces, bends to inspect the snow, crosses the road a second time to look for the trail again. Eventually the gray Taurus we saw at Eli’s house picks him up.
It drives off, and we wait quietly until it comes back around ten minutes later. Whoever is driving must have driven all the way to the end of the road before turning around.
I’m happy that I’m not going to have to use the gun in my hand, and I’m wondering when I can give it back. After several more quiet minutes pass and Eli hasn’t taken it, I try to hand it to him.
“You keep it.”
I shake my head. “I haven’t shot a gun since I was seventeen,” I protest. “I think we’ll both be safer if you’re handling things on this end.”
Eli shakes his head. “I only have a little more experience shooting at people than you do.”
That may be true, but, “You hit Armand in the head from…I don’t even know. Where were you?”
Eli grimaces.
“Sorry,” I rush to say, “I didn’t—”
“It’s okay,” he assures me. “I…I was behind a tree near the greenhouse. I had a decent line on him. But…”
“What?”
Eli looks at me sheepishly. “I wasn’t going for the head shot.”
“You weren’t?”
“No. His chest. I kind of lost control of the gun when it fired.”
“You—What?”
“I was aiming for his chest.” Eli grins, then sees my astonished face and drops the grin. “Anyway, I was at kind of a bad angle, and I hadn’t shot that rifle since deer season. And, I don’t know. I think I was too geared up. ”
“Are you serious? I was standing right by him!” I’m not mad. Just terrified.
“Yeah. That’s why I came in close for Borys.”
I blink at Eli, stunned.
“Remember, there’s only four rounds in there,” he says, nodding at the gun. “Instead of five.”
“Time-out. I’m still trying to get over the fact that you almost shot me!”
Eli rolls his eyes. “I didn’t ‘almost’ shoot you.”
“It sure as hell sounds like you did!”
He gives me a once over. “You look okay.”
I glare at him. “I think I will hold onto this gun after all.”
Eli gives me a thumbs up. “Do you know how to shoot?”
I shrug and hold his .38 in both hands, sort of like an offering. I look at it and imagine myself pulling the trigger. “Like I said, I haven’t shot a gun since I was seventeen.”
“What did you shoot?”
“Um…some kind of Ruger.”
“Pistol?”
“Yeah. I don’t remember the model or anything.”
“Whose was it?”
I grin. “It belonged to this guy from school. That was one of our dates: to shoot. He was obsessed with it. Thought he was some kind of Appalachian gangster.”
Eli snorts. “God bless a country where seventeen-year-olds can play out their violent fantasies with their own Rugers.”
I smile. “He was sixteen.”
Eli laughs. “Even better.”
“Yeah.” I laugh, too. “And it was only one of his guns. Not even his favorite. He had like seven.”
Eli shakes his head. “I had plenty of friends like that growing up.”
“My dad was even worse,” I say. “He probably had like thirty or more guns.”
“That’s a lot of guns.”
“It is.” They were mostly rifles. He had two huge, premium gun safes he kept them locked up in. “He really liked hunting, but mostly he just liked buying guns.”
And TVs, and trucks, and boats, and everything else.
“My mom wouldn’t let us have any in the house.”
“She wouldn’t?”
Eli shook his head. “Only my stepdad’s. And he was a detective, so it was a work thing. But he had to lock it up every evening when he got home.”
I sigh. “I wish my mom had been like that.”
“You didn’t like the guns?”
“It wasn’t that,” I say.
“Then what was it?”
“I don’t know.”
I do know, I just don’t know how to explain it without giving TMI.
“Oh yeah?”
I shrug. “My dad blamed me and my sister for all his troubles. Never enough money, never enough…never enough anything for him. A man who had thirty guns—thirty fucking guns! That’s thousands and thousands and thousands of dollars. He bought a new truck every year. Not a new-used truck even—a brand new F-150 every year. Meanwhile my sister and I had to work after school jobs to afford halfway decent clothes and study our asses off when we weren’t working so we could get scholarships.” I sound very bitter. “It’s not like I think parents should do everything for their kids, or give everything to their kids, or not have anything for themselves or anything, yo
u know? But money was always tight around our house, and my parents—they didn’t care about me. Or my sister. Not really.”
“Your mom?”
I shake my head. “She saw us as her Christian duty,” I say. “Like, God commanded women to have babies or something. I don’t know. I think she liked the idea of having kids more than the real thing.”
Eli is silent while I sit with my anger. It’s been a while since I let it out of the box, but I guess the context of my trip to Colorado brings everything into sharper focus.
“She was always telling us how much trouble we were,” I say. “Especially when we were older. When were kids she was all about tea parties and dress up and then, I don’t know… She stopped being that way.”
By the time I graduated high school, my mom didn’t even know my GPA. She had just pulled out of my life completely.
“What’s your sister’s name?”
“Mckaleigh.”
“Remind me what’s she doing?”
“She’s a senior. At Virginia Tech.”
“Does she feel the same way?”
I shrug, and Eli stretches out on his back.
“Is it nice, having a sister?”
“Sometimes,” I say. “We were always in competition with each other. For, you know, whatever our parents would give us. So I don’t think we grew up as close as other sisters might.”
“Oh.”
“You sound disappointed.”
Eli shakes his head. “No, no. I always thought it would be cool to have a brother. So I was just wondering.”
“But—” I stop myself. I was going to reference something I know only because of Frankie’s E-Facts.
“But don’t I have a step-brother? Yeah. That doesn’t count. Or at least, it didn’t for me.”
Eli’s step-brother is four years younger than him. He’s a cop now, like his dad.
“Family stuff sucks,” I say.
Eli nods in agreement. He doesn’t seem too focused on the road, and I feel like my eyes are redundant anyway, so stretch out on my back beside him.
“Can I ask you another question?”
Eli nods.
I bite my lip a second before cutting my eyes at him. “Why did you let me stay at your house?”
He shifts onto his side, his cheek propped in his palm, and his blue eyes are electric as his mouth twitches. “I thought you were hot.”