“Aye,” she confirmed, like she wanted to be certain he understood what an idiot he’d been. “Everyone knew about it, and everyone wanted to keep it from you because you couldn’t handle it! So there you fucking are then. Why don’t you go downstairs and paint or something? I have shite to do and you’re in my fucking way.”
He backed up, following her commands out of habit, though it was far from fun to submit to her now. He briefly gripped the doorframe to center himself, having the door slammed in his face the moment he released it. This couldn’t be happening. It had to be a lie. But it made so much sense, the way everyone acted around her. Everyone but him.
His eyes burned, a lump in his throat he couldn’t swallow. He found himself walking down the stairs, one foot in front of the other, holding the railing so tightly his hand hurt. “Can I borrow the car?” he asked, hearing his voice before he realized he’d spoken, before he’d noticed that Vincent had come up to investigate.
“It’s already packed,” Vincent said like the words caused him pain. Then he set his jaw and looked down, and handed Casey the keys. “Here,” he said, and “Sorry” though Casey had already passed him and was no longer listening.
He nearly collided with Frank in the doorway as he went out, unable to look at him, not wanting to look at him. Frank called after him, reached for him and grabbed his shoulder and Casey wanted so badly to hit him but he didn’t know how.
“Leave me alone!” he said, or maybe he said nothing, just shrugged him off and went to the car. He headed straight to the trunk, hauled out shopping bags and suitcases alike, and threw them across the driveway. Then he got in and reversed over thousands of dollars worth of haute couture. He peeled out with a spray of gravel, becoming one more crazed commuter on the streets of France.
Chapter Twenty-Six
I apprehensively approached Frank, who was staring after Casey like he couldn’t decide whether to cry or kill something. The two of them had never so much as uttered an angry word at each other. Seeing poor Case actually upset, and upset at Frank although we all knew it was Bella’s fault, was just too much for him to bear. “They were sleeping together.”
He narrowed his eyes. Definitely kill something.
“I assume,” I added to get me off the hook. “I’m guessing she told him why she was here.” In fact, I’d heard her tell him why she was here. Everyone in the house would’ve heard her. But Frank was out packing the car. It certainly took Casey less time to unpack it. “You want some orange juice?”
He looked up the stairs at Bella, who was waltzing down wearing knee-high boots and a short gray dress. She had sunglasses on that were nearly the size of her face, and a cigarette in her mouth. “Are we taking my car, then?”
Frank grabbed the keys. “Backseat.”
“It’s my fucking car!”
He spun away from her and stormed outside, not allowing argument. Bella followed him, grabbing the few bags that didn’t have tire treads and trying ineffectually to fit them in her trunk. Frank shoved her away and put our duffel bag in instead, nearly slamming the trunk on her fingers. He tossed her bags in the backseat. She followed them in, sitting in the middle with her arms crossed heatedly over her chest.
“Let’s go, V!” Frank yelled.
I ran to the kitchen to say goodbye to Maggie, who was crying in Gideon’s arms. I kissed her on the head and grabbed the food she’d prepared, yelling thank you on my way out the door. Frank started the car, Bella’s CD player coming to life with rocking bagpipes that sounded like someone was stomping on Kiki’s chew toys with steel toed boots.
“Turn it off!” Bella screamed, and I realized it must’ve been the CD Casey made for her when he'd asked me to put the spark plugs back in. Frank turned it up. This was going to be a long drive.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Fucking Frank the fucking motherfucker she wanted to rip out his fucking throat and spray his blood all over the fucking dashboard. It would match her car.
Her car. Casey must’ve stolen her keys to put the CD in the car. She stared straight ahead, wanting to see a smear of paint on her CD player or a smudgy fingerprint from his stupid filthy hands. There was a splash of paint on the sole of her boot. She didn’t know how it got there. It didn’t match her dress but she was afraid if she wiped it off she would never see that color again. She left it.
This was Frankie’s fault. He must’ve found out. She scowled at the back of Vincent’s head. Except Vincent kept looking at her and it didn’t have the same effect to scowl at his face.
She would see Silva. That made her calmer. She would see Silva and no one would ever hurt Casey like this again. How could they? She was a fucking expert.
Bella smoothed her hands over her dress. She could feel the music pulsing through her. She loved to feel the music. It was so loud it nearly drowned out her thoughts.
His lighter was still in her purse. And his underwear. A different pair of underwear. A different purse. She’d been so upset that morning. Woken from dreams of fashion week with her six foot accessory on her arm, his hair tied back prettily, everyone loved him but only she could have him. Frankie telling her they were leaving, throwing her clothes into a suitcase. Casey ran them over. She could kill him! No. She wouldn’t kill him. She’d done enough already.
She meticulously reapplied her lipstick, her eyes invisible behind oversized Chanel sunglasses. Casey hadn’t been able to get her lips right. It wasn’t his fault. He couldn’t have known how cruel her mouth could be.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Casey pressed the buzzer with sporadic repetition. Alan considered it desperate to answer anything on the first ring. After roughly forty-five seconds of playing the tune of “God Save the Queen” with the doorbell, Alan opened it as if surprised to find someone standing there.
“Oh darling, you look like the canary that got eaten by the cat. What is it?”
He sighed heavily. “Can I come in?”
“Of course you can, Casey.” Alan ushered him in with a grandiose gesture that allowed him to shamelessly stare at his backside before he shut the door. “Would you like a cup of tea?”
“I’d prefer something stronger.” Casey slumped onto the bubblegum pink sofa that like all of Alan’s things was either stereotypically effeminate or pricelessly antique. The sofa was both, and had once belonged to either a duchess-turned-actress, or Elton John.
Alan handed him a bottle of gin with no glass. “You’re going to get a ticket where you parked.”
“It’s Frank’s car, let him worry about it.”
“Mad at Frank, are we?” Alan asked, sitting down daintily beside him and placing one hand on his inner thigh.
As Alan's fingers were inching closer to an inappropriate working relationship, Casey nearly hesitated to ask, “Do you mind if I sleep on your couch tonight?”
“You can sleep on my back, Casey.”
He fought back a smile with great difficulty. How did Frank go the whole day scowling? It was physically straining to be unhappy.
“What happened, dearest?”
He took a sip of gin and kicked off his boots, bringing up his feet and resting his head in Alan’s lap. “Am I a joke?”
“Only when you want to be.”
Casey sighed. It was never yes or no with Alan Barker. “You remember the succubus?”
“How could I forget? She paid my rent for the next two years.”
“What are you talking about?”
“She bought your painting.” Alan gasped with faux surprise, putting his fingers briefly over his mouth to demonstrate how terrible he felt about revealing a secret when and where it benefited him the most. “Oh, dear. Vincent told me not to tell you.”
“Vincent?”
“Yes, the little wretch came to me with that vile female after you left the gallery. I wasn’t supposed to tell you, God knows why.”
Casey beamed, feeling his hopes restored. Then he remembered that Bella hadn’t spurned him, she’d lied to him. Th
ey all had. And it wasn’t even that she kept it from him that was so upsetting; it was how she broke the news with a razor blade to the jugular. Like being kept in the dark put him in the wrong. “She came here to kill Gideon. They all knew about it, and no one told me. I slept with her for fuck’s sakes! I…I think I’m in love with her.”
“And that’s the confession of a sober man. I shudder to think what you’d say after a few drinks.”
“I’m serious, Alan! Someone hired her, and now the three of them have gone to Prague because they’re running out of time. He’s running out of time.” Casey leaned forward and put his head in his hands. He shouldn’t have left. The man was his father, and he’d abandoned him.
“Have I ever told you the story of how I met Frank?”
“Never,” Casey said out of habit. He’d heard many stories about the day Frank and Alan met, most of which began with Alan being held hostage and ended with Frank rescuing him in various states of undress.
“I was living in London. Shagging this yummy Italian named Paulo. Well, Paulo had a brutal little temper and to be quite honest, I was horribly frightened of him. But I just couldn’t seem to shake him off. One day I met this atrociously-dressed American man in a pub, and by God he talked me into giving him fifty thousand pounds to make my problems disappear.”
“This was Charlie?”
“Yes, it was Charlie. I gave him the money, and wouldn’t you know it the very next night I come home to find young Frank sitting in my flat. He couldn’t have been more than fifteen, his head shaved like a juvenile delinquent. I thought he’d come to rob me. I hoped he’d come to rape me.
“He had found a postcard of the Champs-Elysées that I was using as a bookmark. He held it up to me and asked if I spoke French. My how his English was terrible. And he was obviously insecure about it. Well, his French was beautiful. Classic, not the way the young people speak today. The French of literature.
“He’d been following me. And Paulo, but I was more interesting. That’s what he said to me, ‘You were more interesting, so here I am. I am not going to kill your friend, but I will make him go away for you.’ And he did. I haven’t seen him since.
“No matter how many times I asked about Paulo, Frank never told me what he did to him. Do you know why?”
Casey shook his head.
“Because if he’d killed him for me, we could not be friends. Don’t you see? He cares about you. That’s why he kept this from you. You are too important to be involved in the details of something so unthinkable.”
Frank’s version of the story was that they met, Alan gave him a book, and voila, they were friends. He never mentioned an abusive Italian. Or that he was only fifteen. “Is that true?”
“I do not lie. I merely fabricate.” Alan winked salaciously. “And when I saw Frank again years later, in a little pub that was once the scene of a brutal murder, five young men, all nude at the time—”
“Skip that part.”
“He mentioned you. He said to me ‘Do not do him any favors because of me. Just look at his work. It speaks for itself.’ And it does, Casey.”
“You asked me for a self-portrait.” Casey remembered the mysterious middle of the night phone call. If not for Alan sounding so foppishly English it would’ve scared him to death: “Casey Evans? I’m a friend of Frank’s.” And when he had nervously told Alan to continue, he’d been verbally molested for an hour like a reverse phone sex line. With the international calling rates, it probably cost Alan just as much as a nine hundred number.
“A nude self portrait, if I recall,” Alan said. They both laughed. “I’ll tell you, darling. I was terrified to meet you. I couldn’t imagine you possibly living up to his praise. And if you didn’t, I couldn’t even force you to sleep with me to sell your work. Now look at us.”
Casey sighed. “What am I going to do, Alan?”
“What do you want to do?”
“Paint. I want to paint.”
“Then do it. And quickly. I just lost twenty grand betting on the horse with the largest prick. It makes them run slower, if you can imagine.”
“Oh, Alan,” he groaned.
“Come with me.” He stood and led Casey to one of two spare bedrooms. Like the rest of the flat, it was full of heirlooms from the Barker family estate that had no purpose except to collect dust and make a fortune at auction. There in the center of the room was an easel, holding a perfectly hand-stretched, welcoming white canvas nearly as tall as Alan himself. When one adored artists as Alan did, having supplies to bait bedrooms was a priority. “You can do a nude of me, if you’d like. But I’ll tell you now that your limited use of the color gray is the only thing that will guarantee our continued friendship.”
“Thanks for the offer, but I have something else in mind. And I’m going to need a lot of red.”
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Despite circumstances, it felt really good to be riding shotgun with Frank behind the wheel. I could pretend things were back to normal, driving to or from our latest hit instead of driving to Silva's to save a life. At least I'd get a murder in once we found out who ordered it, and then maybe, just maybe, things would go back to the way they were.
The unfamiliar roads wound before us like they’d done in America, signs promising the next big city only such and such distance away like coming attractions on an old fashioned movie theatre marquee. Hours, minutes, seconds, getting closer to unseen sights, speeding cars passing us by and slow lumbering trucks taking up the rear.
Even in Europe freeways were ugly. I kept moving the rearview mirror to watch Bella sitting quietly, filing her nails, eyes dry behind oversized sunglasses. Frank always adjusted the mirror back without a word, not even bothering to threaten me over it. I could tell his mind was on Casey, where Bella’s mind should’ve been. She acted like she’d forgotten all about him, even with his music blasting over her speakers.
The first time we stopped for gas, Frank discreetly asked me to turn it down while Bella was touching up her makeup in the ladies' room. He’d consider it giving in if he did as she’d requested, but it was as much of a punishment for him as it must’ve been for her.
When Frank listened to music at all, he tended to favor what could be a soundtrack to his books, songs composed rather than written, classical and moody. And boring. I preferred television, or the sound of my own voice, which I was more than willing to listen to after three and a half hours of cockney mumblings. It was punishment for me, too. Casey’s tastes ran the gamut from strange and mildly entertaining to headache inducing, and had Bella not deserved the punishment, I would’ve turned it down even before Frank's request.
Frank said it would take about ten hours to get to Silva’s house. It took longer than that to drive through Texas, and yet Prague seemed so foreign it may as well have been on another continent. I knew nothing about the Czech Republic. I barely knew anything about Germany, and there it was, right next door.
We were the slowest travelers on the Autobahn. In that car, we very well could’ve been the fastest, yet no one was flipping us off, or honking, like they’d do in France. Or in America. It was unsettling, and my apprehension grew the closer we got to Silva's. I reclined my seat and ate a couple of Nutella sandwiches. I was worried about Casey. And I hadn’t had nearly enough time to practice keeping my mouth shut.
Chapter Thirty
Frank did not see the road. He turned the wheel by instinct. Muscle memory. This was the way to Prague. To Silva. To Hell.
Casey hadn’t let the weight of the world crush him even at its heaviest, but Frank had always feared that someone would break the kid. He had thought it would be Casey’s father, or himself—extinguishing that precious, unwavering bright light with his own seeping darkness. But it was her. Bella, whom he had hired to guard Casey all those years ago, fearful of losing him within the vastness of Europe; those bleak cities that had cradled him through his own adolescence. Frank’s own sister, who had looked after him on his first professional hit;
who he looked after when his skills surpassed hers.
Bella may have considered injuring Casey to be incidental, a means to an end, an opportunity to punish Frank for retiring. For leaving her. Or else out of boredom. Boredom he had pressed upon her, punishment in its own right. And this was the reasoning that brought on his guilt, and his silence as accompaniment. Killing Silva would be unforgivable. Introducing Casey to Bella was worse.
Chapter Thirty-One
There was no toilet. Just a piss-smelling dumpster that Bella squatted behind, snow so thick she couldn't see the splash of paint on her boot. She felt anxious, ripped in two, closer to Silva but further from Casey, knowing she couldn't have both. Not like Frankie with his little fucking act, buying his way into a normal life.
Frankie deemed it necessary to guard her in such a place, even as he kept up the silent treatment. She wanted to tell him to fuck off, that the silent treatment only worked when the person you were punishing wanted to fucking speak with you to fucking begin with. But instead she squatted in the snow, shivering as she held her long Alexander McQueen coat bunched around her waist.
This was their last stop before Silva. Another hour at the most, but Frank insisted they have a full tank, to be ready to flee at a moment’s notice. In her car. Well, she had fucking news for him. He was never driving it again, full tank or not. He’d have to buy one off Silva. Or beg for it.
“What did you say to Casey?” he asked, not looking at her. Watching Vincent fill the car.
“I told him the fucking truth,” she said. Her pee would freeze before she was able to drip dry. She wiped with Casey's shorts.
Les Recidivists (Chance Assassin Book 2) Page 18