The Guardian

by David Hosp

  ‘We will wait,’ Fasil said. ‘And then we will see.’

  ‘How are we going to see?’

  ‘The tavern owner. He will tell us.’

  Sirus was doubtful. ‘That’s not his reputation.’ Fasil looked over at Sirus. His eyes were so black, they seemed bottomless. Sirus wondered what had happened in the man’s life to drive the hatred to such a depth. ‘He will tell us,’ Fasil said slowly. His voice was deep and clear and powerful, and Sirus didn’t doubt him for an instant. ‘Trust me.’

  Sirus said nothing more. Theirs was a partnership of convenience and necessity. In truth, he hated Fasil, and he couldn’t wait to be done with him. If he wanted to waste time sitting on the street, that was his call; it had been made clear to Sirus that Fasil was in charge of this portion of the mission. But that didn’t mean that Sirus had to be polite about it.

  Morrell approached Nick O’Callaghan the way one would a stray dog, slowly and with caution. Nick was sitting on a barstool, looking out on the street. Morrell sat next to him, staring out in the same direction. ‘How’s business, Nick?’

  ‘Knocking ’em dead, can’t you tell?’

  ‘Funny.’ They sat in silence for a moment. ‘You wanna tell me what went down?’

  ‘I already gave my statement. I was upstairs when it happened; I didn’t see anything. Check with your boys.’

  ‘I checked with them. I was just wondering whether you’d tell me what really happened. It’s me, Nick.’

  O’Callaghan took a deep breath. ‘Yeah, it’s you. I figured somehow you’d catch this case.’

  ‘You surprised? You’re my brother. You think no one’s gonna call?’

  ‘Half-brother,’ O’Callaghan reminded him.

  ‘True. But Ma’s the better half of both of us.’

  ‘Ma was never up for Mother of the Year, God rest her soul,’ O’Callaghan pointed out. ‘You were just a little too young to see what was going on.’

  ‘You protected me from that. You both did, probably.’

  ‘You were always her favorite. You were her baby.’

  O’Callaghan looked down at the bar, his brow drawn tight. The resentment had always been there, just under the surface. It was amazing to him that, at times of stress, it could still break the surface. ‘Nick, I’m trying to help here. I could see the way Gruden was lookin’ at you, like he wanted to put a fuckin’ slug in your eye. If you’re involved here, you need to tell me so we can provide a little protection.’

  O’Callaghan looked over at Morrell. ‘From Gruden? Gruden’s a punk. He’s always been a punk.’

  ‘No disagreement, but punks can do a lot of damage when their backs are up against the wall. I don’t want to see him using you to make a point to the neighborhood.’

  O’Callaghan let out a clipped guffaw. ‘Shoe’s on the other foot. You trying to protect your big brother now?’

  ‘Yeah, maybe.’

  It took another moment for O’Callaghan to talk, and it looked like he was wrestling with something inside. ‘It’s okay,’ he said at last. ‘What happened here is over, and it had nothing to do with me. I appreciate the thought, though.’

  ‘You sure?’

  ‘Yeah, I’m sure.’

  Morrell took in a deep breath and let it out slowly. ‘We’re both gettin’ too old for our jobs, you know that, right?’

  ‘Speak for yourself.’

  Morrell stood up off the stool and put a hand on O’Callaghan’s back. ‘You change your mind – either about your statement or taking some help – let me know, okay?’

  ‘Yeah, okay.’ Morrell started to walk away. O’Callaghan looked over his shoulder at him. ‘Hey, Harvey!’ he called out. Morrell turned around. ‘Don’t be such a stranger. Popcorn’s on the house for relatives, you know?’

  Morrell nodded at him. ‘I’ll keep that in mind.’

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  The waiting was the worst of it. Minutes passed like days, and the quiet allowed Cianna’s mind to wander to the darkest possibilities. She knew that dwelling on the worst that could have already befallen her brother served no purpose, but there was no way to avoid it. She was his big sister. She was his protector. She had failed.

  ‘Stay sharp,’ Saunders snapped, shaking her from her torment. For a split second, she thought she was back in the Army, and she felt good. She looked up at him and saw that he was looking back. It was clear he had been watching her for a while.

  ‘What if they don’t try to contact me?’ she asked. She still couldn’t stomach the notion of sitting still while Charlie was out there somewhere in danger.

  ‘They’ll contact you,’ Saunders said. ‘You have this.’ He held up the dagger. ‘True believers don’t travel halfway around the world for something just to give up after a few days. They’ll chase down every lead until they get what they are looking for.’

  She stood up and walked over to the window, glanced down at the street.

  ‘You spent time over there,’ Saunders said. It wasn’t a question. ‘Afghanistan.’

  ‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘So did you.’

  He nodded at her. ‘You see action?’

  ‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘You wanna compare scars?’ Her tone was aggressive, but she couldn’t help it.

  He shrugged. ‘I was just curious. There aren’t that many women who have seen active combat up close.’

  ‘More than you think.’

  ‘True, but most can’t fight like you. Hell, there aren’t many men who can fight like you. I watched you at the bar. I’d heard that you weren’t the standard GI grunt, but still . . .’

  She said nothing.

  ‘So what happened?’

  She turned away from the window and looked back at him. Her eyes felt like they were burning. ‘You Oprah? You want me to sit on the couch with you while I pour out my troubles? Is that going to help protect Charlie?’

  He was still looking at her. Most men backed down with her when she went on the offensive. They turned away or apologized or blinked. She noticed that his eyes were steady, though. ‘I’d like to know. I gather things didn’t work out. I know about Leavenworth, but I don’t have the details.’

  ‘You think I’m a liability?’

  ‘I don’t have enough information to be much of a judge on that.’

  ‘Fuck off.’ She turned away.

  ‘That’s your choice,’ he said. ‘I can’t make you talk about it. But whatever it was, you made it through. The instinct to make it through the worst – that’s what your brother needs from you right now. I saw some of it here earlier when Sirus was attacking you. I saw more of it back at the bar. You’re gonna need that if you’re gonna help your brother. I just need to know that you can control it when necessary, because this is going to get ugly. Knowing what happened to you over there would help me figure out how useful you’re really going to be.’

  She looked back at him, and all of a sudden she felt more tired than she’d been in a long time. ‘What’s the worst thing you’ve ever done?’ she asked him.

  His eyes held hers, and she could feel the connection between them. ‘I guess that would depend on who you asked.’

  Nick O’Callaghan took his time with the cleaning. To him, scrubbing the bar floor was a labor of love and a sign of devotion. Besides, years of cleaning up after fights had taught him that blood required special attention. If you didn’t get it all up the first time, the stains would set in and become permanent.

  Cleaning also relaxed him after his encounter with his brother. To this day Nick had trouble fully coming to terms with Harvey. They were several years apart, and Nick could remember the trauma of his mother’s divorce. In a way, the time after the split had been heaven for him, as his mother lavished attention on him as a young boy. Eventually, though, she had fallen in love again, or, at least, found someone suitable enough to help in the daily struggle for economic survival in exchange for a portion of her affections. Even that had been okay with Nick. It was clear that she never really lo
ved the man, and her devotion to him never felt challenged. The marriage lasted less than three years and produced nothing but divorce lawyers’ expenses . . . and Harvey.

  Harvey represented the first legitimate challenger for Nick’s mother’s affections, and given the fact that he was the baby, it often seemed an unfair fight. All Harvey had to do was cry and their mother was there for him, scooping him up to provide comforting kisses. Nick tried crying once, but he was eight, and at that age it was apparently far less endearing. His mother had slapped him lightly on the face and told him he was too old for that. It was the last time he could remember crying.

  Nick and his half-brother had carved out a relationship through obligation and sheer force of will. They would never be best friends, but Nick had come to respect Harvey over the years, and even had some affection for him. Harvey, for his part, was always there whenever Nick would allow it, almost as if he was still the little kid trying to tag along with his big brother. For whatever reason, Harvey would do anything for Nick, and Nick knew it. He felt a pang of guilt for keeping his brother at a distance.

  One guilt led to another, and as he scrubbed the blood from the floor, Nick wondered whether he had done the right thing in letting Cianna leave with Saunders. He felt the guilt gnaw at him. For no rational reason other than that he was a decent man deep down, he had come to view her as his responsibility. His dalliance with her mother had not lasted long, and his feelings for her had been admittedly shallow. Back in the day, though, he’d had no problem letting her children hang out in the bar if it meant that he’d get laid later in the evening. It never occurred to him that they would be far more effective at worming their way into his heart than their mother would be.

  That was how it happened, though. He could remember Cianna there, a little kid helping with the dishes at the scalding hot sink when not even asked, sweeping up broken glass that wasn’t hers, doing anything she could to gain the attention of her mother, to make her happy – an unachievable goal, Nick could tell early on. Kate Phelan was not a woman born to be happy. She was a woman made to carry the weight of slights and injustices, most imagined, nearly all self-imposed, on her narrow, defensive shoulders. She was a woman who saw the world and everyone in it as owing her something. Nick realized within a few weeks of seeing her that she was auditioning for the role of ex-wife number four, and he wanted none of that. He continued to see her because he had grown attached to her children, particularly Cianna. Charlie was easy to like because he was her shadow, but in Cianna he saw real genius for survival. It inspired in him a paternal streak he’d never known before. When the melodramatic end came for his relationship with Kate, his only regret was that he would lose his relationship with Cianna and Charlie. He couldn’t have been happier the next evening when the two of them wandered into the bar by themselves and took up their normal positions near Nick.

  ‘Your mother coming in?’ he’d asked her.

  She’d shaken her head. ‘She’s out on a date.’ He didn’t think she’d said it to try to make Nick jealous; he thought her more perceptive than that. His impression was that she wanted to make clear that Kate’s break with Nick was permanent, but that it wouldn’t keep Cianna and Charlie from hanging around. He could still see her face, watching him, waiting for a reaction, probably terrified that he would toss them out.

  ‘She leave you at home?’ he asked.

  ‘Yeah. I’m not sure when she’ll be back.’

  He served two customers without saying anything. He’d long heeded the dangers of caring for others too much, particularly in situations where they might come to depend on him. Finally he spoke again. Without looking at her, he said, ‘You wanna do me a favor?’

  ‘Sure,’ she’d said.

  ‘There’s a rack of glasses in the dishwasher. You wanna pull them out for me?’

  ‘Sure.’

  That was how it had started. Perhaps it was the shared understanding of maternal abandonment that had created the bond. She was eleven at the time. Now, seventeen years later, he could see that she still needed him. And what had become clearer to him since seeing her again was that he needed her, too.

  ‘Do you have a gun?’

  Cianna turned and looked at Saunders. He was sitting on the couch, cleaning his semi-automatic, pulling it apart and putting it back together to make sure that all the moving pieces were well-lubricated and that it wouldn’t jam up on him at an inopportune moment. She remembered what it felt like to clean a weapon. It felt good. It felt right.

  ‘I’m an ex-con,’ she said.

  ‘Lots of ex-cons have guns,’ Saunders said. ‘I’d be willing to bet that a higher percentage of ex-cons have guns than the general population.’

  ‘You could be right. But, no, I don’t have a gun. It would violate my parole, and I have no interest in getting myself violated and going back on the inside.’

  He considered that for a moment. After a brief internal debate, he reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out the gun he’d taken off of Carlos McSorlly, put it on the table and nodded to her.

  She walked over slowly. ‘You sure?’

  ‘These aren’t local thugs we’re dealing with. These people are well-trained and fanatical. We’re a lot better off with two guns if we’re going to be thinking seriously about dealing with them.’

  She picked up the revolver and opened the cylinder. It was loaded; six shots. She closed it and held it up, feeling the weight and finding the balance.

  ‘You know how to handle one of those, I assume?’ Saunders said.

  ‘Yeah,’ she replied. ‘But how do you know that you can trust me?’

  ‘I don’t. But I don’t have any reason to distrust you, and I can’t say the same for the people who will be coming for the dagger.’ Saunders finished reassembling his gun, pulled the release back. ‘Besides, if I think for a minute that you’re going to cross me, I’ll kill you.’

  She looked off her aim and over toward him, the gun still pointed at the wall. ‘That’s not really fair,’ she said. ‘I’ve only got six shots, and you’ve got sixteen.’

  He shook his head. ‘It wouldn’t matter.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because, you’d be dead with my first shot.’

  The noise came from the back of the bar, outside by the dumpster. It was a loud, dull thud against the back door, followed by an ear-piercing meow. At first Nick O’Callaghan figured it was a cat chasing after a large rat. Normally he would go out to make sure that the cat was successful in its chase; rats were bad for business, even at the water’s edge in Southie. It had been a long enough evening that night, though, that he wasn’t even going to bother with it. The dumpster had a solid lid, and it had been emptied two days before, so there wasn’t enough trash to worry about the mess if an animal got in. He could take care of it in the morning.

  When the noise came again, though, it made his hair stand on end. It was the same sound, but this time it continued in a slow, steady rhythm.

  Thud . . . meow . . . thud . . . meow . . . thud . . . meow . . . thud . . .

  The bar was dark, and he was alone. He had just finished cleaning the floors, and was about to wash down the bar before heading back to his nearby apartment. He had a rag in his hand, and as the noise continued, he could feel the muscles in his hands tighten on the cloth.

  For a moment he thought about calling the police. Then he remembered his conversation with his brother. He put the rag down and picked up the shotgun he kept behind the bar. No one was going to scare him out of his place.

  The noise continued as he walked toward the back door, growing louder as he drew close. There was a tiny window just at eye level in the center of the dark green steel, but it was caked over with years of smoke and grime. It was dark outside, and when he flipped the switch to turn on the back light, nothing happened. He thought he remembered the light working the night before, but he couldn’t be sure.

  It was quiet now; the banging had stopped. When he listened closely, thoug
h, he could still hear the cat, alternating between a satisfied purr and an angry growl.

  He stood next to the door, the gun at his side, rubbing at the tiny window, trying to see. Realizing the futility, he finally pushed the door open a crack, sticking the barrel of the gun out first.

  The light from inside the bar illuminated a sliver of ground in the alley out back, narrow and bright in close, spreading out in a diffuse fan further from the entryway. He narrowed his eyes, searching at the edge of the darkness. ‘Anyone there?’ he called out.

  His voice drew a response from the cat. She hissed angrily from six feet away, over near the bar’s brick siding. Her back was to Nick, but she was looking over her shoulder, baring her fangs. Nick had seen the cat before. She was one of the thousands that wandered the street of Boston, fighting for any available scrap of sustenance. Her eyes were bright and threatening, but her coat was mangy and insect-ridden; half an ear was gone, and ribs showed through her fur. After a moment’s territorial display, she went back to the prize hidden from view. She bent down, head facing away from Nick now, sinking her teeth into something tough enough to require several pulls to dislodge a small chunk of stringy meat.

  ‘What you got there?’ Nick asked the cat, opening the door a bit wider. The light and the sound of his voice drew a renewed protest from the cat, and she turned more fully to face him, adopting a pathetic battle-stance. Nick knew the cat would back down; he’d been dealing with strays his entire life.

  ‘Get outta here,’ he said, lowering the barrel of the gun toward the cat. He’d never been more tempted to shoot an animal than he was at that moment. Something stopped him, though; threw him back into the doorway, his mouth hanging open.

  As the cat turned to face him, she’d moved enough that he could see what she was chewing on. And even in the dim light, he could make out the knuckles of a hand. At first, he assumed that it was some sort of a sick rubber toy, but then the cat went back at it with her teeth, tearing a patch of skin from just below the thumb, and a fresh patch of red muscle appeared. ‘Oh, God!’ he exclaimed.