by Paula Cox
He hangs his head, rubbing Maya’s hand all the while. She becomes tender with her father and strokes his leathery skin, willing herself to forget the nebulae of blood on his hands or the countless other executions in the past that Kit’s murder has caused her to remember.
“It’s okay. I understand,” she says without really understanding what he was doing or why he was there. She just wants him to stop being so sad.
“I hope it is, my angel. You see, I am sick of killing. Your disgust has now become my disgust. I am tired of being feared and being strong. Do you know what my fondest wish is, my angel?”
“What is it, Daddy?”
“I wish for the sounds of small feet running up and down the hallways, and for screams of joy from my grandchildren to come from the gardens. I want to hold them in my lap and read them Pinocchio—the same as I read to you—and I want them never to ask me what I did as a young man so that I will not have the pain of having to lie to them. This is what I think of every night, my angel. Doesn’t it sound nice?”
“Yes,” Maya says thoughtfully. “I guess it does.”
“Peace and tranquility. Peace, and the freedom to die a boring old man when my hair is gone, and my legs are too brittle to stand on.”
He’s so passionate, and he sounds so sincere when he talks that Maya’s eyes begin to water up, and she has to turn away, so her father doesn’t see. He sees anyway but turns and sniffs his nose loudly to pretend otherwise. Theo takes her hand with more force. Her tears have given him all the motivation he needs.
“You’re not going to die anytime soon, Daddy,” Maya says, a little frantically. She’s forgotten all about the stolen car keys or the plan to drive out to Sunrise Apartments. She’s even forgotten about missing me. “Why are you talking this way to me? Why now? What has happened?”
“Nothing, my angel. I really ought not to say that. I didn’t mean to worry you—and there’s nothing to worry about. The only thing that’s happened is good news. A way for us to end the violence, to start a new life. Everything that we’ve wished and dreamt for, my darling.”
His grasp becomes firmer. Maya forgets the watch and concentrates on her father. She knows that with the way he’s talking and with what he’s promising she ought to be excited but more than anything else, she’s suspicious.
“What are you talking about?”
“The answer to our problems, my darling. A way for us to rest and stop worrying about what will happen in the future.”
He’s talking to her like she’s a little girl: a little girl who doesn’t know better than to believe that cure-all answers drop from the sky into the laps of bad men. And she’s not so ignorant as to believe that in the three weeks since she hasn’t seen him, her father has gone from being anything other than a bad man.
She takes her hand away from his. Theo notices her change of mood and looks at her with renewed tenderness.
“Why are you afraid, my darling?”
“I’m not afraid. I want to know what has happened and you’re not telling me.”
Theo sighs and looks into his daughter’s eyes. He finds them more cold and impassive than before he gave her the watch. His bribe hasn’t worked—now he’s got to admit the truth.
“Mattias has been asking about you.”
“About what?”
“About you.”
The seconds drift down like the slow-moving snow. Then, the realization hits Maya like an unexpected snow bank. The watch, it goes without saying, is completely forgotten.
“You’ve got to be shitting me.”
“He’s a good man, Maya. Honorable, rich, and well-protected. He’s a good man and a moral man.”
“A ‘good and moral man.’ Who the hell are you talking about? Not the guy who makes his living by killing people? Not the guy whose son and I fucked when we were seventeen?” she spits.
“You don’t know what he’s gone through, Maya. What any of us have gone through. You don’t know the choices he’s had to face.”
“Who the hell do you think you are? Who the hell do you think I am? Is this the fucking eighteenth century to you? Do you honestly expect you can just pawn me off like this—like a fucking whore?”
She’s never been so angry in her life. Her fingers fumble over the platinum strap of the watch trying to rip it off but her nails are too long, and she can’t get it. Theo watches her thrashing hands with sadness and pity.
“He’s a good man, Maya. You’ll see that in time.”
“Get the fuck away from me,” she snaps. Amazingly, he stands up and makes his way to the door.
“You’ll see, my angel,” he says.
“I hope you die.” And she means it, too. The rage she felt when her father murdered Kit has returned, but now it’s amplified with something more than just disgust or horror. She knows this isn’t any idle scheming on Theo’s part. He really does expect her to marry Mattias Kroll and draw their two forces together. No—not expects. He knows it, either through her own eventual free will or through force. And it would be a mistake to believe that he would not use force on his own daughter if there were a possibility of a greater good for the Family.
Theo’s spent his lifetimes and countless others building up his business and establishing himself. He has had too much experience to trust anyone but himself to accomplish anything. His daughter means the world to him, but only in so far as their interests align. That had just been made perfectly clear.
Maya sits on her bed and cries for an hour. At the end of the hour, she is ready: her suitcase has been packed for a week. The keys are in her jeans pocket. She puts on her peacoat, her green hat, her scarf, and makes herself into a dark little bundle. At seven o’clock when the guard is at dinner, and there’s no chance of accidentally running into her father, she drops the suitcase from her balcony and follows it down into the snow bank behind the bushes in the front yard. The Maserati is in the garage to her right, facing the front circle that rounds its way around the front entrance.
A separate, smaller key on her ring of house keys opens the garage. She’s been watching Youtube videos for a week, learning the rudiments of driving. It’s not really all that hard, she realizes. Gas, brakes, lights, turn signals, and keeping your shit: mix them all together, and there’s your secret.
And after five minutes of fiddling around, the Maserati creeps out of the garage, through the gate and down the road. Final stop Sunrise Apartments, but with a short one on the way, just to clear some things up, in Westtown. At the Clubhouse. By now she’s sure as hell thinking of me.
I don’t think even Maya knows why she’s heading our way. I want to believe that it was because she really did want to see me, as she missed me, but it could’ve also been because her intuition had kicked in and made her realize that she needed a bodyguard if she was really planning on making her way alone. Whatever it was she was thinking, it must have distracted her away from seeing the black BMW pull out from behind and start tagging her down the long stretch of windy, snow-sprayed road.
Chapter 21
It’s a shit day for driving. Palmer and I would know. We’re trapped up by the Docks watching the white stuff accumulate, still wondering how much longer we’re gonna have to sit it out for until the action hits.
I don’t know how Maya managed it down the highway driving for the first time, but she did. And with no tails or targets on her path wondering where the little pixie was going ninety miles a minute in a car that looked as least as expensive and rich as she. Turns out, it was the Clubhouse. To me. If I’d have known that then it sure as hell would have saved us a lot of trouble later on, but Maya wasn’t exactly keen on letting anyone else in on her plans. I’m almost sure she surprised herself by coming out to Easttown, or maybe it was the car talking. I didn’t think she was missing me bad enough to drag everything over to surprise me, but I guess that shows what I know.
It’s not hard to see where all of this is leading. Maya winds her way through the snow-clogged streets, and i
t’s by some kind of sixth sense or crazy intuition or photographic memory I still don’t understand that she manages to find the Clubhouse where I’d driven her the month before. Just one drive was all it took—she’d memorized the address.
She gets out of the car, turns around and takes one look at it. The thing is, over in Easttown, Palmer’s piece-of-shit pickup is just about the best thing you can find, meaning the best the whole place has to offer is a pair of wheels that can still turn and not turn over their own shredded rubber. A Maserati in Portsmouth means Family—but you take it to the backwoods and the people have got no idea it’s a mob man’s car. Why would they when they’ve never so much as heard the names Theo or Ceallaigh or any of that? So knowing how dangerous it is just leaving it in a snowbound parking lot, she rummages through her pack and comes up with this enormous blanket she must have packed for emergencies and drapes it over the car like the thing was an invisibility cloak. That’s it for protection. I don’t know how Maya feels about it, but she must have been satisfied enough because she didn’t move the blanket.
She goes up to the door of the Clubhouse, but there’s no Bolt. No Stitches to be found in the near or far vicinity—everyone’s gone to the Docks. The place looks closed down.
I figure right here Maya weighs her options. The Stitches have disappeared without a trace, and she can either wait in her blanketed Maserati for us to come back, or she can say ‘screw it’ to the whole slapdash plan and continue on to Sunrise Apartments like she was wanting to. Then I imagine a whole cluster of other thoughts descending on her, one after another after another really quick like a meteor shower.
Supposing that she could even make the long snowy and difficult drive along the highway, with the day already beginning to get dark: she couldn’t even hope that she’d be able to get an apartment that night. She would have to book into a hotel, and booking a hotel room required that she not only find one in the next few hours but pay for it, too. But money wasn’t the problem. It was the credit card - Theo’s credit card. The whole point of sneaking out in his car and making sure no one knew where she’d gone was to break free. Once she used the card, it would only be a matter of a few minutes before her father knew exactly where she was and exactly what she’d been doing. She would be back in her room by the next day, and that was if she was lucky.
The two options then quickly became one option, and with no Stitches in sight, that one option was waiting. A lot of waiting.
She gets the other blanket out of her bag (she’d told me once that she was always cold which I had thought then was just an exaggeration—but she really does bring blankets everywhere) and cocoons herself in the covered Maserati and flips off the engine to save gas and waits.
The wind is tearing so hard the blanket flies off, and Maya chases it down and plasters it down with the bricks she can find by the base of the Clubhouse. She works and fights and stretches the fabric over the top for I don’t know how long before asking herself what the point was—she hadn’t seen anyone around the Clubhouse for at least an hour. Plus, with all the new snow accumulating it would hardly even look like a Maserati in the snow. The weather was doing enough to keep her practically invisible.
So she stows the dirty wet blanket and decides to go back inside the car and give it another hour before finding somewhere where she can pick up a cheap dinner, in case she needs to make her cash last, when she hears something. Not something. Even with the wind roaring through her ears and ripping across the street like a snow tornado, there’s no mistaking the blasts.
She freezes. She’s not scared—not scared exactly—but she wants to be sure of what she’s heard, and so she says nothing, makes no movement, becomes as still as a statue and as concentrated as a philosopher on what follows.
And there’s a lot that follows.
***
I’m roping the story back to where I left off, which is with Palmer sitting there next to me as cool as a clam, calculating if he can make it to the shotgun in ten seconds or less: roughly how much time he’ll have before the two guys in red sweaters get wise and start blowing holes.
The guys are about fifty feet away and moving steadily towards us. It’s not shotgun range, but in less than a minute it will be.
“Kirill’s on his way. Bolt too. Ten minutes.” I put down my phone.
“You really wanna wait this out for ten minutes? Ain’t no way we’ll find them again if we let them go now.”
“We’ll tag them.”
“I’m not tagging anyone,” Palmer says. “Look around us. We’re the only motherfuckers in a mile. If those are our guys and this car starts moving, especially if it starts moving straight behind them, they’ll blast us to pieces faster than I can shift to fourth.”
I don’t like this. I thought there were options. Room for delays. Backup plans. Something that wouldn’t involve us jumping out, guns blazing, praying for solid accuracy. I’m a decent shot in a good environment, but I don’t like ambushes, and I don’t like having to concentrate on my fire when I’m nervous. Hand to hand is different. You get a feel for a guy’s strength when you’re the one handling it. But Items are the wild card. I’ve seen too many good guys and good fighters go down just ‘cause the other guy could blast more rounds a second.
“Q? Q?” Palmer’s been calling my name without me realizing it. “We need a decision here.”
“I’ll go.”
“What?”
“The shotgun,” I say. “I’ll get it. I’m faster than you, anyway. You wouldn’t make it there in ten.”
“Damn right I wouldn’t.”
I put my glock in Palmer’s hand. “You’re a better shot with it. But you have to keep them pinned so I can get close enough to unload. Got that?”
“Pinned where?”
“Wherever works for you. Now tell me you got it.”
Twenty feet. Definitely shotguns beneath those sweaters. Christ Christ Christ. When was the last time I’ve been in a firefight? When was the last time I’ve jumped a guy? Have we ever come out of something like this with all our parts still in one place? What the hell were we doing?
Then I think of Miles. Shredded up on his home turf. That could have been any of us not watching where he was going. And by some weird compound division process, I turn myself away from thinking of Miles and start thinking about Maya. Not at all the same deal with Miles but something close. She wasn’t safe on her home turf. She couldn’t just stay in one place without having to worry about someone else bullying her. These guys had made an attack on the Stitches and on Maya. There’s no way I’m letting them get away with even more.
“Closing in, Q,” Palmer says. “I pop the trunk you run. I fire. You fire. Easy peasy.”
“Easy peasy.”
Ten feet. I can see their faces. Then I run.
Chapter 22
I count in my head. Seven seconds, eight by the time I hear the first two shots. The guy rips them off with a slight delay that, even if I’m not listening for, I know comes from the pump of his shotgun. Both shots explode in little-powdered globes of snow over to my left.
Eleven. Twelve. I get the sawed-off firm in hand and duck as another shot slices the air where my head was. Three, four pops ring in the air from the glock, but no screams. The two sweaters race towards the Docks, to the left.
There’s a smell of burning and gunpowder in the air. The passenger door swings open and out heaves Palmer. I look quickly just to make sure he’s not hurt. Nothing coming from his head.
I do a quick check down the line to make sure I’m not in line with any of the Russians, and then duck behind the makeshift wall of the Chevy, along with Palmer. Just in time, judging from the heavy clunks of bullets sinking into the side of the car.
“Sons of bitches are gonna pay maintenance on this thing,” Palmer says. I crack a grin because I know he wants me to.
“They knew we were there, Q. Whipped those guns out faster than anything I’ve seen. You see where they’ve gone?”
; “Left.”
“Canal? Why the hell they going there?”
“Run around and then cut us off from behind.”
“If they wanted to be sneaky why the hell they still in those bright motherfucking sweaters?”
I smile. He smiles, too. “Cover me,” he says, poking his head up from the car. He holds it up there, one second, two, then drops it down.
“Just one. Can’t hardly see him in this goddam snow.”
“Decoy?”
“For what? We’re even. Take him down, and the guy he’s decoying for is left alone.”
“Could be drawing us into a trap.”
“Could be giving us an opportunity.”
I pump two shells into the chambers and stick another six in my pockets from the box I took in the car.
“What’s the plan?”