BAD BOY’S SURPRISE BABY

by Kathryn Thomas

  I turn back to Roman. “I’m sorry,” I say. “I just can’t. I can’t live this life.”

  Then I spring down the hallway, running as fast as my legs will take me, running toward the police officers in the driveway. I stumble on the stairs, almost fall, catch the railing and jump the last two steps. When I reach the bottom, Roman booms from the top: “Stop, Lily! You don’t know if these fuckers are clean! They might be dirty! Stop, before you get yourself hurt!” He has his gun drawn, aimed down the stairs. Not at me, but at the door beside which I stand.

  “I’m sorry,” I say. The tears have started again, the wretched, unstoppable tears. They sting my eyes, already sore from too much crying last night. I can’t bear to look Roman in the eye knowing that I’m going to be leaving him soon. He won’t kill police officers, not if he is the man he says he is. He won’t kill me, either, not with our child inside of me. “I just can’t do this, Roman. I can’t live this life.”

  Roman is halfway down the stairs. He’s not even looking at me. His eyes are fixed on the doorway. He brings his fingers to his lips. “They might be dirty,” he repeats, this time in a low whisper. “If you want to get away from me, running into the arms of dirty cops ain’t no way to do it.”

  I want to believe him, I want to go to him, but I also want to re-enter the real world. I want to be able to go to work, to go to Carol’s funeral, to live a normal life. I want to go to sleep knowing who I am, where I am, where I’m going. I want my life back.

  “I’m sorry, Roman,” I say, and then turn toward the door. I open my mouth to shout. I don’t know what I’m going to shout. Help me, perhaps. Although that will make me feel rotten and mean. I don’t need help from Roman. I don’t think he’d hurt me. But then, do I know that? How well do I really know him? How well do I know the killer whose child is growing inside my belly?

  It doesn’t matter, because the second I open my mouth to shout, the police officer yells: “They’re there! I can see them! Look, in the doorway! Fuck!”

  I barely have time to register the words before the glass in the door shatters into thousands of pieces. A split-second after, bullets pound through the door, through the walls, thudding repeatedly all around me. I would be dead if it were not for Roman, who leaps down the stairs and tackles me to the ground. I don’t know what’s happening. Everything is chaos. Bullets thud into the walls, over and over, shattering picture frames and tearing through the plasterboard walls. I am crawling without really crawling. Roman is half-dragging me somewhere, I have no clue where, and I have no choice but to follow him. I keep thinking: are these police? Are these police? And then: are they mad? Are they mad? They must be, surely, to shoot up a suburb in naked daylight.

  I was going to run into the arms of these men. The thought causes more horrid tears to slide down my cheeks, as Roman and I crawl through the house.

  “Roman, what is happening? What is happening?”

  My voice sounds crazed and shocked, even to myself. I know what is happening, but I keep mumbling it, over and over, until I am whispering it to myself, a whisper only I can hear over the gunshots. Am I going mad? Is it possible to go mad this quickly?

  When we’re in the kitchen, crouched low with our hands over our ears as bullets cut through the oven, the microwave, the blender, the knife stand, all of it exploding in a frenzy of shrapnel that sends wood and plastic and metal flying to all corners, the front door smashes open and the men charge into the house. Even over the chaos, I hear their footsteps, eager, too eager. These men, these police, want us dead, badly. The bullets stop. I open my eyes—I didn’t even realize they were closed—and see Roman, blurry, tear-shrouded, take his gun from his waistband. He brings his fingers to his lips. This time, I listen.

  “Think they’re dead?” one of the cops says.

  “No idea,” the other replies, quieter. “Let’s not risk it, though. Stay sharp.”

  “Look at this place.” The first cop’s voice is deep and gravelly. I imagine him as a much older man, wrinkled and grim-looking. The other sounds like a kid. “No way in hell anybody survives this.”

  They’re getting closer now, their boots crunching over the broken glass of the living room. Another ten seconds and they’ll be in here, ready to do us real harm. But Roman lifts his gun and aims it at the doorway, and then calls out: “Stop right where you fuckin’ are.”

  The steady crunch-crunch-crunch of the men’s boots ceases.

  “We’re stopped,” the younger one says calmly.

  “Drop your guns,” Roman says.

  “Now why the fuck would we do that—”

  “Okay, we’re dropping them.”

  There’s a pause, a rustling noise, and then two distinctly metal clinks as their guns hit the floor.

  I begin to calm down during this recess. I wipe my eyes. My heartbeat is still like the stampeding of a herd of buffalo, but my mind is less clouded. I stop whispering to myself, bite down on my lip, try and make myself tough. But I am a nurse. I am experienced in the aftermath of violence, not violence itself. Still, I will try and be stronger. I have to be. At least they dropped their guns—

  “That wasn’t your guns,” Roman says, his voice tinged with anger. “Don’t fuck with me, boys. If you don’t drop your guns right fuckin’ now, I’m goin’ to kill you both stone-fuckin’-dead. You’ve got three seconds.”

  “How the hell did he know they weren’t our—”

  “Three . . .”

  “Let’s rush him—”

  “Two . . .”

  “Fuck, I’m not dying for this. You know who this guy is, don’t you?” The younger one sighs, and then something else drops, something heavier. After a moment, there’s another drop.

  Roman mouths to me, wait here, and then stands up, gun aimed in front of him, and goes into the living room.

  I wait a few moments to make sure the gunfire isn’t going to start again, and then I creep to the door and poke my head around. I was wrong. Both men are young, even younger than me. Around nineteen or twenty, pink-faced, with embarrassed looks on their faces as Roman takes the curtain rope and ties them back to back.

  As I watch, one of them turns to me. He smiles, licks his lips.

  Then his head sags as Roman cuffs him across the ear.

  “You don’t fuckin’ look at my woman.”

  I return to the kitchen, thinking about that. His woman. Is that what I am, now? His woman?

  I’m not sure how to feel about that.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Roman

  I don’t like the idea of attracting any further police attention—not that those bastards were true police—so instead of stealing a car, I collect the cash which is stowed under the floorboards in the basement and head to the nearest car dealership. As we leave, the two cops mumble and wriggle. I gagged them for good measure. “All this time, you’ve had that money under there,” Lily says, as we drive toward the dealership. “That’s crazy.” She wipes her face with the back of her hands. Her eyes are puffy, red, but she seems to be getting a little better. “And why don’t we just drive this car?”

  “They know this car,” I say, making the turn out of the suburbs. I drive calmly. I don’t want to attract the attention of the bystanders who crowd at the end of the street, staring down at the bullet-ridden house. I even wave to one old lady, who smiles and waves back.

  “They’ll know the new car, too, when you’ve registered all your details—”

  “I won’t be registering any details,” I mutter.

  Lily’s forehead furrows. After everything, her big hazel-brown eyes are still capable of naïve innocence. “But you have to register, don’t you? I didn’t think you could just go in and buy a car without giving some of your details.”

  “Everybody can be bribed,” I tell her. “Everybody. That’s lesson number one, in this life. Sometimes paper is much more efficient than lead.”

  That quiets the conversation for a time. I was right. Bribing the eager-faced man behind the
desk is no difficult feat. As soon as I ask him if we can talk privately, his eyes light up like a kid on Christmas morning. He clasps his hands together, worrying them at each other, and almost pounces on me when I reveal the bag full of cash. I tell him I need a new car, a set of plates registered to a different state, and I need him to personally see to the demolition of my old vehicle. For that I will personally pay him a one-hundred percent commission on top of the fee. I barely finish my offer before he pounces on me with an enthusiastic, “Yes!”

  I register the car to Betty Baker, just in case.

  About twenty minutes later, Lily and I are driving north-west in a grey Toyota Prius, starting the four-hundred-some-mile drive up toward Carson, where I have a safe house. Where, perhaps, Lily will be safe. I want Lily to speak to me as we drive, as cars drift by us and Vegas becomes smaller and smaller in the background. But most of the time she just sits there, pale, silent, staring out of the window as though seeing something else before her, some fantastical land completely disconnected with our journey. Yin-and-yang, I remind myself. You can’t kidnap a woman, cause her best friend to be brutally murdered, and then have her almost killed by police and expect her to be her same happy, optimistic, sarcastic self.

  We stop that evening at some dog shit motel with more blinking lights on its sign than steady ones. I insist that we share a room—I don’t want anything happening to her—and Lily says fine, but it has to be a twin, not a double. So that night Lily and I lie on our backs on opposite sides of the room, on a single bed each. Even when she takes a shower, she gets changed inside the bathroom. It’s as though we didn’t have sex yesterday at all.

  “What do you do, Lily?” I ask. The night is late, past midnight, and outside the motel is quiet as death but for the occasional stumbling drunk. Moonlight slants in through the too-thin curtains and rests on Lily’s shoulders, a subtle curve I’d love to trail my finger along.

  “What do I do?” she replies, confused. “I’m a nurse.”

  “But for fun, I mean.”

  “Fun.” She speaks as though she doesn’t remember the word.

  “Humor me,” I say.

  She doesn’t speak for a while, but then she mutters: “I read, if I’m not too tired after work. I sometimes go to the movies. I like checkers. Mom and I used to play when she had a day off and it was raining outside. Checkers and milkshake.” She pauses and on the night-black ceiling I see a younger Lily and the cop who Mom saved playing checkers together over chocolate and banana shakes. “What about you?” she asks.

  “I read, too,” I reply. “And I fish.”

  “You read?” She sounds surprised. She even leans up, but she doesn’t turn around and face me.

  I chuckle. “Yeah. Is that so shocking?”

  “I guess not.” She slumps back down. “I’m tired, Roman. We’re tired.”

  “Alright,” I say. “Sleep well enough for the both of you, then.”

  The next few days are the same, long stretches of open road, diners, motels, grimy toilets with more graffiti than actual wall. A long series of rest stops and silences. Lily spends most of her time in the passenger seat with one hand on the curve of her belly gazing out of the window. I get the sense that she is unhappy, but I don’t know what to do about it. What the hell can I do? Her friend was killed, she was almost killed, she’s being kidnapped by a hitman. I keep telling myself that I’m not kidnapping her. This is for her safety. But then we reach the diner and there’s no doubt about how she sees our relationship.

  We’ve been driving for around five days, most of it with Lily in introspective silence, when we reach the diner just outside Carson City. I drove us straight through the night, Lily asleep in the passenger seat. It’s a deep sleep, the one she’s fallen into, the sort of sleep somebody throws themselves into when they don’t want to face the world. I feel bad when I shake her awake. She doesn’t wake up straightaway. As I shake her shoulder, she mumbles, smiles. I know that look and I recognize that sound. She moans, then, and sleepily lifts her hand to lay it upon mine before her eyes snap open. She leans toward the glass, no longer enjoying my touch so much.

  “Breakfast?” I say.

  She rubs sleep from her eyes, and then nods. “Okay.”

  The diner’s walls are glassed so that as the sun rises, it glistens, a beacon for travelers just like in the old days, only instead of mead they’ve got Coke. Lily and I take a corner booth. Lily is still half-asleep by the looks of it. Her snow-white skin is flushed red, her hair mussy and curly around her round face, making her look cherub-like, and her eyes are constantly drawn to the table, her body hunching over, as though she could curl up and fall asleep at any moment.

  When the waitress arrives, a redheaded woman with purple heart-shaped glasses propped on a pointy nose who looks almost as tired as Lily, I order us two coffees and a round of pancakes. Lily asks for chocolate sauce on hers. The waitress gone, I stare at her across the table. Dammit, but I wish I knew women better. I know women. I know how to get ’em into bed and what to do when I get them there. But this stuff, the awkward silences, the long-drawn-out looks. That’s something I’m not equipped to deal with.

  “Lily,” I mutter, thinking I have to try even if it’ll make me look a fool.

  “Yes?” she says, one hand laid protectively over her belly as usual.

  “I just want you to know. I never meant for anything to happen to your friend. I never meant for you to be in danger like you were back at the house. I never meant for any of that.”

  She nods shortly. “I know,” she says. “I understand that.”

  “Then . . .”

  She shrugs in answer to my unasked question.

  “I’ll protect both of you until the day I die,” I say, but even to myself I’m beginning to sound like a broken record. “Once this business is dealt with, you’ll never have to worry again.”

  “Going well, is it?”

  I turn away from her. She knows it isn’t going well. She must’ve heard me, perhaps not the words but the tone, talking on the cell to my various sources. All of them have shit, or aren’t giving me shit. Boss is getting impatient. Soon he’ll take the contract to somebody else, robbing me of the biggest payday of my life. But it’s not even the cash that bothers me. It’s fuckin’ Darius. Slipping through my grip just like last time.

  The waitress brings the food and drinks over before I have a chance to reply, and both of us, road-starved, fall upon it silently.

  When we’ve finished the food, Lily says, “I’m going to the bathroom.”

  She walks down the aisle toward the restroom, at the end of the diner. I sit back. I have a full view of the exit and the restroom doors, so there’s no way she’s getting out. I’m angry with myself for thinking like this, thinking about whether or not my captive is going to be able to escape. But I have to. Lily doesn’t understand the scope of what she’s caught up in. She thinks she can flee to the goddamned police and everything will be alright. She doesn’t realize that in this life, you only trust who you have to.

  And when you’ve been in this life for a long time, you get a sense for when something else is happening, the picture behind the picture. Take Lily and her trip to the bathroom. The picture is that she’s just finishing up, splashing some water in her face. But the picture behind the picture is that something’s wrong.

  So I stand up, toss a few bills down on the table, and make my way to the bathroom.

  We’re the only people in the diner except for a couple of truckers, both of whom are men, so Lily is the only person in the ladies’. I open the door quietly, creep in, and lean out around the corner to the bathroom proper. Lily is standing at the mirror, a stick of lipstick in her hand—dirty, obviously picked up off the floor—writing our license number and our names on the mirror.

  I clench my teeth, step out. “Lily,” I say, voice tight.

  She pauses, just as she’s about to finish my last name. She’s already written out hers and the license number.

/>   “What the fuck are you doing?”

  I walk across the room, right up to her, and then smear the lipstick with my shirt sleeve. The shirt is checkered blue. Now the sleeve is blood-red.

  I expect her to look embarrassed, caught out, but she just shakes her head slowly. “I can’t live a killer’s life, Roman. I can’t live with a man who tortures and kills people. I mean . . . Roman, are you really better than the men you hunt? Are you really—”

  I walk away from her, to the bathroom door, lock it, and then return. She watches me, head tilted, lips pursed, either about to shout or cry. In the end, she does neither, just folds her arms and watches me.

  “Listen to me,” I say, leaning over her. “Listen to me closely, Lily. I’m going to do somethin’ I’ve never done before. I’m going to tell you the specifics of the man I’m hunting, alright? If, after you’ve listened to me, you still want to get the hell out of here—you still want to skip right back into Vegas, the heart of the storm—then fine, I won’t stop you.” I swallow. Giving the details is something I’ve never done. When I first try to speak, it’s like when you’re a little kid trying to say a curse word for the first time; there’s a mental block. But slowly, the words come, and then I can’t stop them. “His name is Darius Taggart and he’s a war criminal. And when I say a war criminal, I mean a real fuckin’ war criminal. He was involved in North Korea in the ’nineties, selling Kim Jong-Il chemical torture devices to use in his prison camps. He sold mustard gas and all kinds of nasty shit to Saddam Hussein. He has himself personally administered dozens of doses of lethal poison to women and children during his tests, as he fuckin’ calls them. There are widely reported accounts of him leading war-bands through Uganda and raping and killing anyone in his path, all armed with advanced weapons he personally acquired for them. In some places, he’s known as the Acid Man, because he gets some sort of sick fuckin’ thrill from throwing acid in people’s faces. In others, he’s known as the Red Demon, because wherever he goes, there is blood. In others—”