by Gabi Moore
“Boom, here’s your girlfriend, Leo, you can thank me later,” said Vito and cracked up laughing. The girl stood silently to the side like a statue.
“Vito, you sick fuck, he’s just a kid. Christ. You down with this, Leo? You been with a girl before?” said a thin guy at the table.
I knew him a little from here and there, but I also knew Vito and him didn’t get along. They all turned to look at me, expectant. My face burnt hot. I didn’t want to do ‘this’ at all, but looking at Leo and how he was looking at me …I had no choice.
“Yeah, I’ve been with loads of girl,s” I said, voice still croaking. Everyone at the table roared with laughter.
“Fuck’s sake, Vito, this kid. Get outta here you two,” said the first guy. Plank ushered me and the girl into an empty side room, and locked the door.
The girl and I stared at one another as we heard the laughter still coming from outside the door. I didn’t know what to do. I tried to smile at her and hold out my hand for her to shake, but she just looked down at it, pityingly. Of course I had never been with a girl before. The thought terrified me.
Sometimes, late at night, I imagined I was some hot-shot businessman, like Vito, with whatever women I wanted, and they’d have to do whatever I said.
I looked up at her. She was small, my height but thinner, and her skin was so pale you could see a few of her veins poking out from her neck. Girls were an alien race to me. A mystery. I don’t even think I had ever stood so close to one before.
I thought of leaning in and trying to kiss her. Of telling her to …I don’t know. To take her clothes off. To do stuff. I thought of what she might look like under those threadbare clothes. But then she took a step towards me and burst into tears.
“Please, please help me,” she said in a quiet, strange accent.
But I didn’t help her. I couldn’t.
The guns hung heavy at my waist. Cold and heavy, like things that were once alive but not anymore. I felt them shift against my hipbones as I climbed into the car and started the ignition. I hadn’t been myself lately. Not since she had gone. Not since I had started remembering things I’d much rather never happened in the first place. Bad things. Things I had put secretly in mysterious brown boxes and promptly forgotten.
But I couldn’t run anymore.
I woke that morning with something new and dangerous inside me: I was done running. I was done being strung along like a puppet by a man who was too cowardly to speak to me man to man. My past had an ugly face, sure, but I was going to look it square in the eye …and blow its brains out it if I needed to.
I had worked my way – no, crawled my way – to the success I had now. I was better now. Stronger. And Sophia deserved better from me. She was innocent in all this. Uncle Vito had haunted me one way or another ever since I was a kid. But I wasn’t going to run forever. I wasn’t going to be afraid. I was going to fight.
I pulled off and made my way out west to what looked like the middle of nowhere. The maps showed nothing but empty lots at these GPS coordinates, and I could find no registrations, no names, no businesses, nothing. The place was a black hole. But if it was the black hole where I could find this Shawn T fool, then that’s where I was headed. I didn’t fuck around with second hand messages, threats, suggestions. He was the guy responsible for kidnapping Sophia? Then he was the guy I wanted to talk to, face to face.
The highway soon flattened out and became uninteresting. Even the billboards and two-bit diners started to thin out until the landscape was more like a Rorschach test, and I started to imagine I was seeing things emerge from the bare, dry landscape around me. Vague memories sprang to life all around, wiggling in the faint heat shimmering off the black tar.
I swallowed hard and turned on the radio, but turned it quickly off again.
The further on I drove, the further away from my old self I seemed to get. It was getting easier to forget the ‘good Leo’ I had built from scratch back home. The Leo who paid his taxes and got an MBA and found a good, sweet girlfriend. But here alone in the car with nothing but dust and tarmac outside, my mind wandered. What the fuck did I actually think I was doing here? Was I some kind of cowboy?
The shrub grew denser as I finally got closer to the address, nearly two hours later. Eventually I pulled the car into a long, non-descript driveway that was more like a dirt road. No signs, no nothing. I would have easily driven past it if I hadn’t known it was a driveway and not just some slight gap in the bushes. I drove for a few more minutes, my mind racing.
Fuck this Shawn T guy. Fuck Vito. And Fuck Sophia.
I blinked hard. Wait, where did that come from? But the more I thought about, and the closer I inched to a house that was tucked far off on the horizon amongst tall trees, the angrier I got.
Fuck her.
I slowed the car down and crept cautiously forward, unable to stop images flitting through my mind. I was done with the same old boring bedroom routine with her. Sick of the look of disappointment on her face. I didn’t want coordinated pillows and incense.
I wanted to fuck.
To spread her pretty little goody-two-shoes ass right over the kitchen table and fuck her so hard and so good that she wouldn’t be able to do anything but scream and come and beg for my forgiveness for being so fucking obsessed with all this wedding bullshit. Fuck her for wanting a staged bullshit Instagram proposal. Fuck talking about our fucking feelings. Fuck her for disappearing like this and leaving me. Fuck her for not wanting to fuck me…
I pulled up in front of a stately mansion that seemed completely at odds with the dry brush all around it. I shut off the engine and took a deep breath. I scanned quickly to see a few expensive looking cars parked around a curved driveway that arched up to a broad staircase. Something about the place gave me a dull, angry feeling right at the back of my throat. Who the hell was this guy, anyway?
I stepped out, closed the front door quietly, and took a few steps to the house, feet crunching on the gravel.
For all he knew, I was only coming to talk. To negotiate. If things went south, I wouldn’t hesitate to do exactly what I needed to. In fact, maybe I secretly wanted things to go south.
The front door was, miraculously, slightly open. I guess with a place this well-hidden, there wasn’t too much need for external security. As far as anyone was concerned, there wasn’t even a residence here.
I peeped my head inside and heard laughter and music from down the hall. The place was all marble, glass and glitz. The kind of thing poor people buy when they’re suddenly not poor anymore. The feeling at the back of my throat intensified. With silent feet, I crept to the source of the sound, weapons knocking softly at my waist. A pair of giant doors opened into to a room at the end of the hall. High pitched giggles and women talking over each other echoed off the tiled floors of the corridor.
I swung the doors open and stood there in the door frame, feet spread wide, arms at my side. I can look intimidating, when I want to. And I wanted to.
About a dozen faces swiveled around to see me there. Every woman was young, beautiful, wearing a bikini and glittering with jewelry. Though the music continued to play, the giggling stopped dead and I noticed the man I had come here to see: skin dark as an eggplant, a neck like a tree stump and the kind of smile you only see on gamblers or cult leaders who aren’t afraid of dying. It was like the set of a cheesy R&B music video. The whole thing had an air of the ridiculousness about it. Even the women seemed slightly bored with their gyrating.
“Shawn T?” I said, trying to sound badass. Maybe I would star in my own little gangster film. Maybe they did mess with the wrong guy this time.
He smiled wide at me and then gestured for the women around him to calm down. Some were seated around his knees and feet; others were lounging on the carpet in front of him. One seemed to be paused right in the middle of giving him a shoulder massage. She was topless.
“Who wants to know?” he said, smirking.
I looked over at each of the women
. I hated to think of the things that had led them here. And I hated even more that her face wasn’t among theirs.
“Leo Bianchi,” I said and took a step into the room. He was laughing quietly.
“Oh? And who the fuck is Leo Bianchi?” he asked and flashed a white smile at me. The women laughed nervously.
I took another step to him. I knew he was bluffing. He wanted to see me sweat, wanted me off balance. But he sure as hell knew who I was.
“Where is she?” I said.
He looked unfazed. Still holding my gaze he gestured around him at the mini-harem of women.
“Where is who? Does it look like I keep track of these bitches’ names?” he said and laughed spitefully.
He was Jabba the Hutt with a million slave Leias around him. I tried to breathe. Tried to remember that soothing weight hanging at my hips. Tried to remember what I had come here for.
“You know exactly who. Sophia Cane. I tell you where the shipment’s being held, you tell me where she is, and both of us go on our way, OK?”
“Shipment…?” The expression on his face suddenly changed. “What do you know about a shipment?” he said, leaning forward now and shaking off the woman’s hands from his bare shoulders.
I smiled. At least I had his attention now.
“I’ll tell you if you tell me where she is,” I said and took another step towards him. Some of the women looked uneasy and drifted off to the edges of the room. He frowned hard at me, like he was trying to figure out some riddle. The whole room went quiet as I watched him think. He cracked his knuckles then gave me a hard look.
“Ok, I’ll tell you where she is. But you gotta tell me where the shipment is first,” he said quietly, then watched closely for my reaction.
I couldn’t believe it. This scum had kidnapped an innocent woman, and god knows where she even was right now, and now he had the balls to try and haggle with me.
“No can do. Where is she? I need to see her first.”
Some of the women were slipping behind me and trying to slink out the big doors. In one fluid jerk, I yanked the .22 from under my shirt, cocked the trigger and spun round to aim it at them.
“You! You’re not going anywhere,” I hissed. Their eyes widened and their hands flew up in panic, before they all tottered back over into the room.
Shawn T glared at me. He couldn’t tell that my hands were shaken on the grip, or how pleasantly surprised I was that my body seemed to remember how to handle a weapon even if my mind had long since forgotten.
“Just chill, man.” He signaled for the girls to sit back down. He was unarmed, sitting on his fat ass and probably high, too. I could take him, if I needed to. I was aiming straight for the thick furrow between his eyebrows, jaw clenched, almost sure that my finger would be squeezing right now where it not for that fact that he could still tell me how to find Sophia.
He lifted his hands up in surrender.
I walked closer to him and planted the cold tip of the pistol right to his forehead. At that moment, ‘good Leo’ was a distant memory. I would have done anything for Sophia. Even this.
“Is he storing them out at the old factory in Milton? Where? What’s he up to?” he pressed. He looked pretty cool, for a guy this close to getting his brains blown out. I had no idea about a factory in Milton. But I couldn’t let him know that.
“Nope, not there. I’m going to ask you just one more time, where is she?” I said through clenched teeth.
He smiled, tilted his head and in a heartbeat had sprung up, swung his thick arm in a wide arc over me and collided a fist straight to the side of my head. I staggered, gun now lowered, and raised my elbows to defend myself, but he was already on his feet and coming at me, delivering a string of punches to my sides, then going for the weapon. I spun around quickly, slammed the butt of the gun back and up so it came smashing square to the center of his chest; as he staggered back I lifted my knee high and kicked him down. He fell backwards but not before tripping me up and sending the gun skidding to the floor.
The women screamed and scattered.
Just as he gathered himself and hoisted his weight up again, I made for the gun but he stomped at my fingers, caught me in arm-bar and twisted deep into my neck, making me cry out in pain. I dug my fingers into his meaty bicep, dropped my weight and swiveled over my hip, swinging his entire body up and over me so it came crashing into the hard floor in front. He held on, cursing, as I reached for the gun again, but this time, he was too slow, and the instant my fingers made contact with that cold metal, I spun my outstretched arm to him and shot him at point blank range right through his left shoulder blade.
The entire scuffle was over in a matter of seconds. The marble and glass rung out from the blast. I leapt back and threw his grasping limbs off me, then swung the barrel of the gun round the room in a panic, threatening any woman who was thinking of making a run for it. They all stared with horror at the twisted shape on the floor, bent double to cradle his shoulder and the river of blood that was now snaking down onto his chest.
“Motherfucker!” he screamed.
I backed away from him, gun still aimed and cocked again. Shit. It actually happened. This isn’t what was actually supposed to happen.
“You fucking shot me?” he cried. “What the hell’s the matter with you?” His face twisted in pain.
“Tell me where she is!” I bellowed. I couldn’t recognize myself anymore. These hands weren’t my own. The sweat prickling on my face wasn’t my own. Even the face itself felt alien and expressionless.
“I don’t know, man, Jesus!” he yelled. “I was just shitting you, man, I don’t know where she is, fuck I don’t even know who you’re talking about,” he spat, then moaned a little as he peeled away his hand and looked dejectedly at his bloody chest. If I hadn’t hit his heart, I had hit damn close to it. With a queasy feeling, I noted that the blood seemed almost black.
“Bullshit. Tell me where she is, this is your last chance,” I said, but my hands were beginning to shake more violently now.
He raised pleading eyes at me.
“I don’t know man, I’m serious.” He shook his head. “Fuck… that lying piece of--”
“So you’re not trying to shake Vito down before the Feds get to him?”
“What? Of course I am, man. Everyone in this town is.”
“And then you thought I’d tell you where to find the shipment if you kidnapped Sophia?”
He burst out laughing.
“Man, are you stupid? Look around. You’ve been played even harder than me, fool!” he said, and sputtered a little, sending a trickle of blood out the corner of his mouth.
I took a step back, mind reeling. The women seemed torn between hugging the walls and rushing forward to help him.
“Vito wanted to make a deal, you know, come to a truce now that it’s over for his ass, so I came to see him…” Shawn T said, slowly, as though it pained him to speak.
“Wait, this isn’t your place?”
“What? No. This is Vito’s little haven. He wanted to parlay. Cut a bargain. But he’s a rat right till the end. I have to give it to him, he’s smart.”
“But they told me …they said you’d taken her …they said--”
“They told you to come over here, huh? Can kinda see why, can’t you?” he said and gestured ironically to his gushing wound.
I felt like all the air left the room, leaving only a frightening whine. This man wasn’t behind Sophia’s kidnapping at all. It was all Vito. He sent me here, knowing I’d…
I looked down in horror at the blood streaming onto the floor. Shawn T, all pomp and arrogance a few minutes ago, seemed to be deflating before my very eyes, the wound in his chest puncturing through all the tough-guy attitude. Now he just looked at me pathetically.
This was all wrong. This wasn’t the way it was supposed to happen. The ache at the back of my throat was threatening to choke me completely.
Shawn T sputtered a little, slouched over to the side and nodded o
ff. I felt like I wanted to be sick.
I snapped back to attention, spun around and tried to think. The women looked petrified, and scuttled out of the way as I stormed out the room and back into that cold corridor. I had been an idiot. One woman clattered after me in her heels, then grabbed my arm and started babbling away in a language I didn’t understand. Or maybe I was in so much shock that anything she said would have sounded like gibberish. I wriggled from her grasp.
“Wait, please.” I turned to see another woman walking timidly towards me. “Please help us,” she said in heavily inflected English.
I was in shock, but even I could understand the terror in her voice. The look of pain in her eyes shone clear despite the heavy makeup, the spangly lingerie and jewels.
But I couldn’t help her.
I didn’t even know how to help myself.
I stared at them in a daze and turned, a small crowd of them gathering to watch helplessly as I left. They were the women from my childhood. Hollow, empty eyes always trained on the alpha male in the room, women who had two modes: cower and hide or seduce. Broken women.
I threw myself into the car seat and sped aware, tires spitting up gravel as I raced back down the dirt road. Waves of nausea washed over me. I couldn’t think of what was worse – the fact that I had killed a man, or the fact that doing so had brought me no closer to finding Sophia.
I was soon out on that anonymous highway again, although now I was speeding so hard I could hear the engine screaming. I still couldn’t get away fast enough. I was never meant to be involved in any of this. I was never supposed to have wandered into that old granny’s house all those years ago. This wasn’t my life. This was a life that belonged to a man I had spent all my life trying to prevent.
When I had covered some ground, I fumbled for my phone and dialed Joe’s number, venom in my fingertips. Fueled by white, hot anger, I needed a few seconds just to remember how to speak. The phone was answered.