Burn Down the Night

by M. O'Keefe

  Their strength gave me strength.

  Lagan stopped about ten feet away from me. Far enough that I couldn’t grab him without risking Joan and Jennifer.

  “What the hell is going on?” I asked.

  “First, throw down your gun.”

  “I don’t have a gun,” I said, holding out my arms as if to show him.

  “This is a bad way to start a business meeting, Max.”

  “If you wanted a business—”

  “Throw down your fucking gun!” Lagan shrieked. The sound of him cocking his own gun, the one held to Joan’s head, echoed in my brain.

  “Jesus Christ, fine,” I said. “Keep yourself together.” I reached into the waistband of my pants and grabbed the gun. For a moment I contemplated my odds of actually hitting Lagan if I fired. But he was too smart, and Joan was too close, and the shadows were too heavy.

  I’d known he was going to do this, but throwing my gun into the grass was still a blow.

  “There,” I said, when the gun hit the ground with a thud. “Now you want to tell me what we’re doing here?”

  “Little fish,” Lagan pointed his gun to Jennifer. “Catches bigger fish,” he pointed his gun at Joan. “Catches you,” he pointed his gun at me.

  “You wanted to meet, there were easier ways to do it. You had my fucking phone number.”

  “Yes, but I have a new commitment to loyalty and insuring that I have it from the people I work with.”

  “I’m loyal,” I said, lifting my arms as if to show him I had no weapons.

  “Yes, but you lied about Olivia, didn’t you? Everyone lies. All of them.”

  Lagan pressed the barrel of the gun against Joan’s head and I had to not look. I had to pretend a certain amount of indifference. I spit into the bushes just so I didn’t leap across the grass separating us and tear out his throat.

  “Yeah. I lied. Because I can’t trust you. In case you missed it, we’re criminals, Lagan.”

  Lagan laughed. Joan jumped, startled, and Lagan shoved her, keeping her in line.

  “Excellent point, Max. But it makes me wonder if this gun to her head isn’t going to keep you motivated to uphold our deal?”

  “I’m motivated, Lagan. I’m plenty motivated. But there’s no one left to make a deal. There’s no club. Rabbit’s dead and three other guys are in jail. It’s me and a bunch of kids back in Jacksonville.”

  “There’s you. And your access to other clubs.”

  Well, shit. From his point of view, that was a good plan. From my point of view, it was a suicide mission.

  “I’ll give you Zo’s cut if you find us other distribution channels.”

  “That could work,” I said, pretending to consider it. “The Skulls chapter out of Alabama could do it. I can reach out. The president was a friend of my Pops.”

  “Excellent. How soon can you make this happen?”

  “Let’s get off this mountain and I’ll do it.”

  “Do it now.”

  “What the hell is with you, Lagan?”

  “What the hell is with me? I have millions of dollars in product I need to move! That’s what’s with me. Now, make the call or I will kill one of these girls!”

  “Fine!” I said and I pulled out my phone. “This is going to take some time. I’ll make the call, but they’re going to do some checking around on me. On you, too. They’re not stupid. It will be a few days before they meet with us.”

  “Then stop wasting time.”

  “I came here for the deal and I’m in. You don’t need Jennifer and Joan anymore.”

  Lagan blinked his dead eyes at me and I stared right back, retreating hard into my lizard brain.

  Show him nothing. Give him nothing.

  “In that case,” Lagan said. He shoved Joan out in front of him and shot her.

  Chapter 28

  Max

  Time stopped. Like hard. I swear birds froze in the sky. My heart cranked right off. My blood froze.

  But Joan kept moving. Her death just kept happening while I was frozen. She flew backward at the force of the bullet tearing through her body and she spun sideways, and I watched it all, immobile, catching her wild gaze before she fell to the ground in a heap.

  There was a scream, but from a distance, as if on the other side of the valley there was a drama like this being played out. Something horrible and bloody with grief and madness all around.

  Jennifer fell to her knees beside Joan and Lagan, looking at me. Lagan lifted the gun as if to send a bullet right into her brain.

  Time roared back and I was moving.

  I exploded off my toes, feeling the burn in my calf, and I launched myself through the air into Lagan, knocking him off balance. There was another gunshot. Another scream. But I didn’t look. My eyes were glued to Lagan’s, where the surprise was swiftly replaced by a kind of understanding. A sense that he’d known this was coming all along.

  He lifted the gun but I grabbed it, forcing his hand down on the ground, smashing it over and over again into the dirt until I felt one of his fingers break, and his grip loosened.

  I put my hand around his throat and I held him there, picking up the gun with my other hand.

  Jennifer was curled over Joan, her hands covered with blood. Joan’s blood.

  “Is she dead?” I screamed.

  “No,” Jennifer said. “But it’s really bad.”

  I could kill Lagan and the world would be better. But I wasn’t that man anymore.

  I flipped the gun in my hand and sent the butt crashing down on Lagan’s skull until it was lights out for him. I might have killed him. I didn’t know and couldn’t be bothered to care.

  The bloody gun slipped from my hand and I crawled over to Joan and put my hands over Jennifer’s adding my weight to stop the warm blood seeping out of her side.

  “Hey!” I said. “Hey! Olivia, open your eyes.”

  I saw her eyelids twitching as she struggled up through consciousness toward the sound of my voice. I kept talking, giving her something to follow. A rope she could use to pull herself toward me.

  “Hey, baby. Open those eyes. Let me see you.”

  They fluttered open and I felt my heart explode.

  “There you are,” I said. “There you are. Stay here. Stay with me. You’re going to be fine.”

  “He shot me,” she said, her voice a whisper.

  “He did.”

  “Did you kill him?”

  “I might have.”

  She smiled, her eyelids closing again. “Hey!” I jostled her just a little and her eyes flew open again, filled with irritation.

  “Stop,” she breathed. “Hurts.”

  “I know. I know. But you’ve got to keep those eyes open. You have to stay here with me. You can’t go. Not now. We just found each other.”

  Her hand, blood-splattered and pale, touched my hands. “I told you not to love me.”

  I laughed but it came out like a hard cough. A sob. “Too late, baby. I think you’re too late.” Her eyelids slid shut and I got to my knees, lifting Joan into my arms. “We have to get her out of here,” I said to Jennifer. “Grab my phone, call 911, and find out where the nearest hospital is.”

  I met Jennifer’s panicked eyes for a moment. They were so much like Joan’s it hurt to look at them. And they were so scared.

  “Go!” I yelled.

  I got Joan in the backseat of the SUV.

  “You…kidnapping me?” she asked, through white lips.

  “Only a little.”

  She smiled and I clung to the hope that smile gave me. I held it with both hands and my whole heart.

  “Max!” Jennifer yelled and I turned and found her standing in the clearing, holding the phone.

  “Let’s go! You called the hospital?”

  “Better!”

  In the distance I heard the sound of a chopper.

  “I called the cavalry.”

  Chapter 29

  I’ve been in dozens of hospital waiting rooms, waiting for new
s on guys who’d been shot, knifed, or got the crap kicked out of them in a fight. I’d sat in my share of hospital waiting rooms with my brother, waiting to hear word on my mom when she’d OD’d.

  They were all the same. Gray-green and filled with the smell of fear. Of anxiety and boredom. CNN on the televisions. Months old People and AARP magazines sitting in tatters on the end tables.

  All that to say, I knew my way around hospital waiting rooms. You had to pace the stress. The trips to get coffee. You couldn’t let the boredom and the not knowing turn you into knots. Waiting had a rhythm. And it wasn’t easy.

  Jennifer didn’t know any of this. And she paced the far end of the room like a tiger in one of those shitty everglade roadside zoos. Out of place and ready to tear through the walls. People were watching her from the corner of their eyes like she might start speaking in tongues. Or pull out a gun.

  She had that kind of unhinged look about her.

  And it was made worse by the scrubs the nurses gave her when we got here because her clothes had been saturated with Joan’s blood. The cupcakes with sunglasses looked utterly maniacal on her nearly vibrating body.

  “Take a deep breath,” I said, because I had to say something. Her stress was starting to screw with my rhythm and I could not lose my shit right now. I was working very hard to not think about Joan behind the walls separating us. If I thought of her in some sterile operating room, with some surgeon who didn’t know her, didn’t know her heart and her courage and her pain—putting her together after Lagan tore her apart—I would lose my shit.

  And I could not lose my shit. My shit was going to be locked down tight until I heard that Joan was okay.

  “Like a deep breath is supposed to help?” she snapped.

  I shrugged. “Doesn’t hurt.”

  She sucked in a hard deep breath and let it out like a fist breaking through her chest. “Didn’t help.”

  I smiled, kicking my feet out in front of me. I crossed my hands over my stomach. The nurse hadn’t offered me any scrubs and I still wore Joan’s blood. And I would wear it until I knew she was alive.

  “How come you’re so calm?” she snapped.

  “I’ve had some practice in waiting rooms.”

  “You love her?” she asked, watching me sideways. “That’s what you said back there, that you love her.”

  “You got a problem with that?” I asked. Because the words were new. The feelings uncertain, and I didn’t want to talk them over with Jennifer, who was looking for a fight to take her mind off waiting on Joan.

  “Not if you treat her right.”

  “Then you got no problem.” She paced again, over to the wall with the television and then back toward the corner. Five steps each way. She was making me dizzy.

  “She gave you some fake name.”

  “Joan. She’s been using that for months. I think ever since she left you.”

  “Why?”

  I explained how she’d been working undercover at the strip club. Different hair. Different name.

  “Joan’s a shitty name for a stripper,” she said. She was so much like her sister, it hurt.

  “I can’t really argue with that.”

  “That’s how you met?” she asked.

  “That’s how I met Joan. I met Olivia when she saved my life. Took me down to Florida so your aunt could take a bullet out of my leg.”

  “It’s weird you know my whole family and I don’t know you at all,” she said.

  There’s time, I thought. There’s plenty of time for that.

  “What else she tell you?” she asked, her eyes narrowed like she wanted to catch me out in a lie. Like she was giving me some kind of test to pass to get into their secret club.

  I understood that, too.

  “She told me you were the smart one.”

  “She always says that. Olivia’s not dumb.”

  “I know that.”

  Again, she paced back to the TV. “What else?”

  “She told me about your father.”

  That made her stop in her tracks. “All of it?”

  “The junkyard. Ice fishing. The year you guys spent alone. Trying to get you into that school.”

  “Wow,” she breathed. “She doesn’t…she doesn’t talk about that stuff. Ever.”

  “Yeah. I know.”

  She paced a little more and I could feel the tension getting dialed down. Like the fact that Joan told me that unlocked something in her. I took a breath that wasn’t shallow in the back of my throat.

  “What did you tell her?” she asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Like what secrets did you tell her?”

  “That’s between her and me.”

  For some reason that made her laugh. “Dude, you’re crazy if you think she’s not going to tell me everything. We’re sisters.”

  I remembered quite clearly the days when I told my brother everything.

  They’d been good days. And I was glad Joan had someone like that. I wished…I wished I had my brother back like that again.

  “I told her about my brother,” I finally said.

  “What’s his name?”

  “Dylan.”

  “Where is he?”

  “We’ve…we haven’t been close for a while.”

  “That sucks.”

  I laughed, a painful harrumph. “It does.”

  “What else?”

  “I told her I wanted a boat.”

  “That doesn’t seem like a secret.”

  I leaned forward, my hands on my knees. “Listen, Jennifer. I’ve spent the last six months of my life preparing to die. I didn’t make a plan for anything past the next day, because I knew it was only a matter of time before someone put a bullet in the back of my head.”

  Jennifer blinked at me and I could see her understanding it. She’d been an FBI informant inside a cult for fuck’s sake. “You know what I’m talking about, don’t you?”

  Her eyes were filling with tears but she ducked her head and wiped them away on the shoulder of her cupcake scrubs. “Yeah,” she whispered. “I know what you’re talking about.”

  “I didn’t trust anyone. I didn’t expect anything but the worst from anyone. And then your sister came along—”

  “Yeah?” Oh, the hope in her voice. It told me everything I needed to know about how much she loved her sister.

  “She saved my life. Like all the way. Not just the bullet in my leg.”

  But also my soul. She saved my soul. I didn’t say that, but I could tell she saw it in my face.

  Oh fuck, the tension was suddenly in me. The endless torture of waiting. Jesus.

  I got to my feet, needing to move. Needing my blood to pump this useless adrenaline out of my heart.

  “What the fuck is taking them so long in there?” I asked.

  “Hey, man,” Jennifer sat down under the television, her legs stretched out in front of her. She’d stolen my cool somehow, and I scowled at her as I paced. But she only gave me this cocky half-grin. “Take a deep breath.”

  Oh man, I was going to like this girl. I could tell already.

  “Tell me about this brother of yours.”

  I glared at her because I knew what she was doing and I resented it.

  And at the same time, I appreciated the fuck out of it.

  “Come on, one story. It won’t kill you.”

  I’d put away the stories for so long. I’d banished them and tried to forget them, but they’d been there waiting for me. Waiting for the day when it was safe to bring them out. Waiting for the day when missing him wouldn’t rip me apart. A day when the weakness of love wouldn’t be the end of me.

  I had all the stories. And I was fucking flush with love. And it didn’t make me weak. Just like trust didn’t make me weak.

  “Jennifer Matthews?” The surgeon’s voice had both of us whirling toward the door. Jennifer got out of her chair.

  “Yes,” she said.

  “Your sister is out of surgery. We stopped the
bleeding. Repaired the spleen. She lost a lot of blood and she’s not out of the woods yet, but she’s doing well.”

  With a huge exhale of air, like she’d been holding her breath forever, Jennifer folded over, bracing her hands on her knees, and I put my hand against her spine, lending her what I could of my strength.

  My hand, I noticed, was shaking.

  “Can we see her?” she asked, standing straight again.

  “I’m afraid we only allow family.” The surgeon glanced my way.

  “He’s her husband,” Jennifer said. The Matthews girls were convincing liars.

  “In that case, yes.”

  He gave her the room number and then left. “You coming?” Jennifer asked, already halfway out the door.

  “I’ll be there in a second,” I said. I wanted to give Joan a minute with her sister and there was something I had to do first. I wasn’t sure if I could fix it, but I had to try.

  Jennifer all but sprinted out the door and I collapsed back against the wall. The first time I tried to get my cellphone out of my pocket I dropped it. And while picking it up, I nearly fell over.

  Fuck, I was a mess. Relief made me light-headed.

  The number I called was Dylan’s.

  “Hello?”

  Dylan’s voice hit me in the chest like a fist.

  “Max? Is that you?”

  I cleared my throat but my voice still came out like gravel. “Yeah…it’s me.”

  There was nothing from Dylan’s end but the sound of his breathing, hard and fast like something had hit him, too. Like we’d been running a race, side by side and didn’t know it.

  The ache to see him, really see him, was vast and bottomless.

  “You okay?” he finally asked.

  “I’m alive.”

  “Joan—?”

  Her name is Olivia and she’s amazing. And brave. And smart. She’s funny and she’s holding my heart in the palm of her hand. I can’t wait for you two to meet. She has a sister, who is incredible. And I can’t wait for us to be a family again. A real one.

  The one we always should have had.

  “Max? You’re freaking me out. Has something happened?”

  “Yeah. Something has. Everyone’s fine, but it’s…it’s a long story.”

  “I got plenty of time.” It was an invitation and it was understanding. It was my brother offering me space in his life if I wanted it.