Ruin You

by Molly O'Keefe

  And just like that Carissa walks out of the room. I hear her footsteps down the hallway and no one stops her. I imagine her walking out into the night. No cops. No foster homes. She will vanish just like Rosa.

  I can’t pretend I don’t want that freedom. I want it so bad I can taste it.

  But I’m not leaving Tommy in here with Bates.

  The devil.

  “So do I,” Tommy says. “I accept your terms. Leave Simon out of it.”

  The idiot gets to his feet, but he is unsteady and I step to his side, helping him back to his seat.

  “You need to get to the hospital,” I say.

  “I’ll be fine.” Tommy is a terrible liar.

  “What about you, Simon Malik?” Bates looks at me. He looks at me with his eyes narrowed, like he can’t quite figure me out. He looks at me like he’s wondering how — out of all the kids here — I was the one who managed to get a knife in The Pastor.

  He looks at me like he can’t believe I am a killer.

  Join the club.

  “Do you agree?” he asks. “Because it has to be all of you or none of you.”

  “Why are you doing this?” I ask, because none of the dots fully connect. And it matters. I need to know why.

  Bates stands, buttoning his jacket, looking like the lawyer he says he isn’t.

  He shakes his head. Whatever the answer to that question is, he isn’t telling a bunch of kids. “Do you agree to the terms or should I have the police come in and start the booking process? At this point, you would be the only defendant. And that will not look good for you.”

  “Agree to the terms, Simon,” Tommy says.

  “I agree to the terms,” I say, because there isn’t any other choice. And Tommy needs a hospital right fucking now.

  “Smart. Boys, I’ll be in touch.”

  Bates walks out, the door clicks shut behind him. It is weird…eerie how it feels like I dreamed him. How there’s just no way that happened.

  “Simon,” Tommy says. “I’m so sorry.”

  “Fuck off with that. We got bigger problems.” I creep to the door and look out the window. “No one’s coming.”

  I help Tommy to his feet and we lurch our way out of the police station. Waiting, every step, for someone to stop us. My breath sits in my throat, not moving. I can’t inhale. I can’t exhale. I can only walk until the corners of my vision go silver and bright.

  All those cops and not one of them stops us. They watch us walking and I feel their eyes on us every step. But they never stop us.

  Jesus. Whoever he is, Bates is powerful. More powerful than the SFPD.

  We push open the door and the sea-salt air of San Francisco and the roar of traffic in the outside world feel like a goddamned hug.

  “Let’s get you to the hospital,” I say.

  “You…you don’t have to come…with…me,” Tommy gasps.

  “Yeah, because you can do it on your own?” I ask, joking but not really. And both of us know it.

  And I feel, all at once, really shitty for locking this guy out for six months. We needed friends in that place and I rejected the friendship of a guy who just tried to go to jail for me. Tried to put himself in harms way for me.

  I’ve never had a friend like that. Only family.

  And all at once, that’s how he feels.

  Tommy feels like family.

  And I go with him to the hospital, where we get the care he needs and get out before the social workers come. And I take care of him until he can take care of himself.

  Because it’s the right thing to do.

  That kid I was…he slowly dies away and I become someone else. Something else. And I stop thinking about my parents and I stop worrying about whether or not they would be proud of me. I put those thoughts away and I don’t look at them. I don’t even think about them. And soon, I don’t even think about my parents anymore.

  I just worry about justice.

  Justice and revenge.

  That’s it.

  PART TWO

  NOW

  FIVE

  Los Angeles, CA

  Simon

  I’M TIRED.

  I’m tired down to my feet.

  My soul, too, if I still have one. I think I do…hard to say these days.

  And it’s not just that I’ve been travelling for three days. A Chinese military jeep out of the Nuba Mountains. An overnight bus from El Obeid, a farmer’s cart to the capital. A puddle jumper out of Sudan to… Oh, fuck. Who cares? I stink. Bad. I am so exhausted I am nauseous and seeing shit.

  I’m tired because the world keeps being awful. I’m tired because nothing ever changes.

  In two days, my story will be on the front page of the Los Angeles Times and the world will know that the Chinese military are taking Sudanese oil. They are taking all the oil. And Russia is sniffing around. And villagers are getting bombed and no one is doing anything to stop it.

  And no one will.

  The rich get richer, and the poor get bombed.

  That bright, hot feeling of doing the right thing? I haven’t felt much of that lately. And justice when it comes, it comes too late.

  I take the stairs up to my second-floor condo. It’s nice, this condo. A nicer place than I’ve ever lived before. So nice my furniture looks ridiculous in it.

  Various girlfriends have tried to get me to buy new furniture, but I can’t seem to get rid of the crappy chair and sagging sofa and beat-up table that I got when I first moved to Los Angeles.

  After that night in St. Joke’s, I stayed in San Francisco for a year.

  Tommy and I lived low to the ground. Under the radar of cops and the social workers who would be looking for us. The newspaper said that the pastor died of a heart attack. His wife was moved to a mental hospital. The congregation disbanded.

  A total cover-up. Absolute lies.

  I wrote an anonymous letter to the editor about the truth behind St. Joke’s but there was no article. No outcry of rage. No justice.

  I used my mom’s maiden name and got my GED and every scholarship I could get my hands on and ended up at UCLA.

  Journalism school.

  I did the course load in three years, working full-time, too. Killing myself, really.

  And the past five years I worked my way through some beat reporter jobs in other parts of the state, until I landed at the International desk of the Los Angeles Times. Junior position, shit pay, but I was there.

  Still am.

  When I moved to Los Angeles for college, I’d gotten a shit apartment off Le Brea, because it was what I could afford and because it was what I knew. I’d tried to get Tommy to come with me, to trade in the crap apartment in San Francisco for the crap apartment in Los Angeles. But he wasn’t leaving the Bay area. Not for anything. We didn’t talk about it, but it is obvious he’s waiting for Beth. Like a kid who gets lost in the woods, if he stays in one spot, he might be found.

  We stayed tight, though, with weekly conversations about the size of our kitchen cockroaches.

  But then I was part of a team that won the Pulitzer. And I got a raise. So I moved twenty blocks away from the beach in Santa Monica. Four units in a tidy little building. Quiet neighbors. A cat we all feed because we aren’t sure who exactly is the owner.

  I bought a new king-size bed for the place.

  Oh, sweet, sweet bed.

  I might not even get my shoes off before I collapse into it.

  I thought a new bed might help with the nightmares. But nothing helps with the nightmares.

  The staircase ends at the second floor. There is my unit on one side and the Mendozas’ unit on the other side. It’s long after midnight but not yet dawn and, again, I’ve been travelling for a while. I’m dehydrated and hungry so I’m not sure what I am seeing. My brain can’t quite process it.

  My door is open.

  My keys are in my pocket still, so I haven’t blanked over the act of opening my door.

  But it’s open.

  Cracked just
slightly, the darkness inside of my apartment leaks out into the bright foyer.

  I glance behind me and the Mendozas’ door is still closed, her cinnamon wreath smells up the hallway. Her kid’s bike and baseball crap, the cricket bat I bought him for his last birthday is stacked against our shared wall.

  My door is open.

  Did I not close it? Has it been open for two weeks? No, Mrs. Mendoza would have used her key to lock it. She’s good like that.

  Which only means…

  Oh, fuck. I’ve been broken into.

  Adrenaline clears the cobwebs and I pick up Abel Mendoza’s cricket bat and let my bag slide soundlessly to the ground. I don’t expect the thieves to still be inside but I’m not taking any chances. My heart’s pounding in my ears as I ease into my shadowy entryway.

  My kitchen is dark and the house is silent. I edge into the hallway that splits into the living room and my bedroom. My bedroom is exactly the way I left it — bed made. TV still sits on the dresser. The remote on the shitty bedside table. Nothing…nothing seems disturbed. Or ransacked.

  Weird.

  I let the bat slide off my shoulder and I blow out a long breath. Maybe I did leave the door open? I was in a rush to get to the airport —

  The lamp clicks on in the living room and I whirl, the cricket bat lifted high over my head.

  There is a man sitting in my chair that faces my bulletin board. I see the glimmer of his blond hair over the top of the EZ Boy.

  “You have exactly three seconds to get the fuck out of my house,” I say, stepping sideways towards the chair. “Or I’m using your head like a cricket ball.”

  “Simon,” a strangely familiar voice says. “You’ve brought a bat to a gun fight.”

  He lifts a blunt, black gun so I can see it in the pool of lamplight and my hands tighten on the bat. My exhausted brain clicks through possible scenarios and none of them are good. Our team got a few death threats after that story about the drug war in the Philippines. Linda had some asshole follow her home.

  “If you’re looking for money —”

  “I don’t need your money.”

  “Then what do you want?” I ask, taking another sideways step to get a look at the guy. He is wearing a suit. A good one. His blond hair is combed back off his face. His profile sharp and lean.

  But not familiar.

  “It’s time to repay the debt you owe me,” he says and when he turns the pieces click together.

  Bates.

  I put the bat down with a thunk.

  The Debt. I’d forgotten about it for years, but six months ago, this guy showed up in Tommy’s life and had him go kidnap Beth. It ended up being for the best, but shit got real at the end and Tommy hadn’t been sure if Bates was going to kill him or let him live.

  Now the guy is in my apartment. With a gun.

  “You’ve been busy since last we saw each other,” he says and gestures with the gun towards my revenge wall.

  As revenge walls go, it’s a beauty. Full of hacked surveillance photos and articles. Some written by me. Some written by other people.

  All of them about Dale Simpson.

  “Do you just sit here and look at these stories?” Bates asks, pointing at the bulletin board, the photographs with X’s through them. Dead end, after dead end, after dead end. Business partners. Business competitors. Whistle-blowers. Mistresses. Ex-wives. None of them got me anywhere.

  “Sometimes,” I say without irony.

  “Little morbid, don’t you think?”

  “Are you here to lecture me about my free-time habits?”

  “Not at all. That is good work,” he says, pointing with his gun at the article on my bulletin board about the conditions in Simpson’s Mexican factory. I wrote it my first year at The Times. “You got the factory shut down,” he says.

  “Didn’t slow down Simpson, though, did it?”

  “Vengeance is a long game.” He looks at me with an arched eyebrow over those eerie gray eyes.

  “You don’t say.” I have to force myself not to roll my eyes at the killer holding a gun on me in my house.

  “Journalism is an interesting choice. I thought for sure you’d be headed into law.”

  “Well, I hate to be predictable.”

  “You seem to be very good at it.”

  “That is a Pulitzer on the shelf.” Granted I was on a team that won it. A very junior member of that team. But still.

  He laughs. “Your ego really is something. I remember thinking that about you in that jail cell eight years ago. How in the world you could stand there with blood on your shirt, your glasses falling off your sweaty face and demand answers. It takes a special pair of balls.”

  “It’s a real comfort that you’ve been thinking about my balls all these years.”

  “I have,” he says. “And I thought once you graduated J-school that you might come after me.”

  It had been a tempting thought, and I’d dug around, but Bates is a ghost. He sprang up out of nowhere and he left no traces.

  “Are you upset I didn’t?” I ask.

  He shrugs. “It would have released you prematurely from our bargain.”

  Not because my work would have sent him to jail, but because he would have killed me.

  “I didn’t write about you.” I am pushing the issue, because I’ve been kidnapped and beaten and intimidated by some serious players around the world, and it takes a lot to scare me these days. And this motherfucker, I could feel, was about to do some damage in my life. “But it hasn’t stopped me from following you. The Lazarus takedown…I’m assuming that was you?”

  “Well.” His half-smile is chilling. “I hate to be predicable.”

  “With Lazarus out of the picture you’re running most of San Francisco’s drug trade.”

  “Am I?”

  “You’re also responsible for a growing pile of dead bodies.” That almost all the bodies are of men worse than he is no comfort.

  “We are the same in that, aren’t we?”

  He’s talking about The Pastor and I feel the old shadow over my soul. It was an accident, self-defence, and I don’t regret it. But there’s no pretending it didn’t leave a mark. The nightmares.

  “In terms of numbers, you’ve got me beat,” I say with a shrug.

  “It’s not really numbers, is it?” he asks. “That does the damage.”

  “Your first murder is the hardest?” My mouth is full of sarcasm and something bitter. “Or the most special?”

  “Why can’t it be both?”

  “Are you here to talk to me about killing people? Is that how I’m supposed to repay the debt?”

  It felt, in the last few years, that I’d done so much worse. Killing a man who needed killing is nothing compared to the blind-eye I’d turned to people who needed help, all in the pursuit of getting a scoop. The jaded edge of my soul that cut a swath through people just to get to a story. I’ve been telling myself the same thing for many years: hurt one to help many.

  And it’s not a lie.

  Yet.

  But every day…every day it feels less true.

  “You are a very different man than the boy you were,” Bates says in his strange formal way.

  “Everyone grows up.”

  “Your parents would be —”

  “What are you doing here, Bates?” I don’t know how he was going to finish that sentence. I don’t know how I would finish that sentence. But I am not discussing my parents with this man. I don’t discuss them with anyone. I don’t think about them. I don’t even remember how, it seems. Like the memories are someone else’s and I have no rights to that happy family. That normal thing. “I mean, I hate to rush the reunion, but I’m tired enough to throw up.”

  “I have something for you.” He reaches into a briefcase at his feet with the hand that isn’t holding the gun and I take a step back, deeper into the shadows beyond the pool of light cast by the lamp.

  “Are you scared, Simon?”

  “No. I’ve just l
earned some better self-preservation skills since last we met.”

  He smirks at me. The prick.

  Then from the briefcase he pulls out a worn, red notebook. The edges frayed, newspaper clippings hanging, ragged, from the top and bottom.

  “Recognize it?” he asks and I nod, speechless. Reaching for it, I’m shocked to see my hand is shaking.

  “Where did you get my notebook?”

  “The drawer in your desk at St. Jude’s.”

  “How?”

  “Carissa.”

  I look at him, hard. Tommy mentioned Carissa is working for Bates or…something. Something bad.

  “Where is she?”

  “Carissa goes where she wants.”

  I take the notebook from him and open it. All the Simpson Pharma clippings.

  At the beginning of the book are the oldest articles. The ones about my dad. About me. I know that story so well I need no reminders. I inhale and I am it. I go to sleep and I am it. I walk and talk and live all while being that story.

  I close the notebook before I can accidentally see his face. Or my mother’s. When my dad died, the newspapers used a picture of the two of them from my mom’s Facebook account. For weeks I couldn’t get away from it.

  It was a goofy one of my parents on the beach. My mom dressed head-to-toe so she wouldn’t get a sunburn, my dad fully in suntan-man mode.

  I’d been teasing them. And I took the picture so they could see how ridiculous they looked together.

  But in the picture they didn’t look ridiculous.

  They looked happy.

  “What do you want? Why did you bring this to me?” I flip to the articles not about my family. The mistress who went down for tax evasion.

  Bates shrugs. “I need you to find someone for me.”

  “Who?”

  “Simpson’s daughter.”

  The girl with the rock and the rage like a nuclear bomb. She’s a question I have not been able to find an answer for.

  And that bothers me. A lot.

  “Simpson doesn’t have any children,” I say, definitively. Because I have spent years chasing this loose end.

  “We both know that’s not true.”

  “There’s no record —”