With me in a sitting position, that kick would snap my neck like a stale pretzel stick.
So I pitched myself forward before he could start his whirlwind of death and sunk my teeth right into the back of his knee.
Ian screamed as I felt his flesh tear and tendons popping underneath my chompers.
He smashed a spinning elbow onto the crown of my skull and I fell, the world blinking out again. Just for a second. I think my face smacking the icy concrete was what woke me back up.
That second was all he needed.
When the blackness flashed back to light, Ian had a sawed-off shotgun in his hands, pulled from the floor of the car’s backseat.
Kelly had lifted herself up, sliding back to the wall, a hand clutching the inside of her thigh.
I could barely lift my head to look my own death in the eye.
There was no way I could get to Summerfield. I couldn’t stand. I couldn’t even take in a final breath.
I was going to die on my hands and knees like a fucking animal.
Summerfield lifted the gun toward me, his face a bloody mask of murderous fury.
Kelly’s hand came away from her leg. In it was a small pistol. As her hand lifted the skirt, it was just enough to see the small holster on her thigh.
“Federal agent!” Kelly yelled at Summerfield like Xena, Warrior Princess. “Drop your weapon.”
Wow.
Hadn’t seen that coming.
Neither had Summerfield.
I wish I had the words to describe his expression. I really do. It was amazeballs. Best I could compare it to was face of someone who just sat on a cactus. And then that cactus went all the way up inside him.
That was what he looked like.
Then he shot me in the sternum. The shotgun blast lifted me off my feet and sent me tumbling end-over-end until I hit the cold concrete wall of the parking garage. Once kinetic energy stopped fucking with me, the pain hit pretty fast.
Sweet bleeding eyes o’ Jesus, it hit fast.
And hard.
Kelly shot Summerfield on the collarbone.
Summerfield turned and tried to lift the shotgun toward Kelly.
Kelly shot him in the face before he could.
Ian’s brains popped out the back of his skull. He dropped to the ground, most of his face twisted around the new hole where his nose used to be.
Kelly ran over to me. “Boo!”
I couldn’t say anything. It was hard enough getting breath from the karate chop to my throat. The shotgun blast to the chest wasn’t doing my communication skills any favors.
I wanted to tell her it was going to be all right, but couldn’t.
Good Christ, everything hurt. Endorphins and adrenaline could only do so much, in the end.
She knelt over me, tears running down her face. I could hear footsteps echoing down the stairs, the authoritative voices of the Feds bouncing off the stairwells.
“I need an ambulance down here!” she screamed as she tore my shirt open.
With an immense effort, I sat up and painfully inhaled a small lungful of air. Enough to say, “Hey, I liked that shirt.”
Kelly’s eyes flew open when she saw the bundles of money that I’d duct-taped underneath my now-ruined shirt.
Just in case.
Bundles thick enough to have stopped most of the point-blank-range buckshot. Well, stopped them from cutting me in half. As I sat up, trying to maintain cool, I could feel my newly broken ribs shift, and fresh hell erupted upon my nervous system. “Always knew you’d tear my clothes off again some day,” I wheezed.
Then, for the second time that week, I fainted.
Just like all us tough guys did.
But I was pretty happy with the line I went out with. So I had that going for me.
Chapter Twenty-One
Want to know what the world’s worst alarm clock is?
Sirens. Dozens and dozens of sirens. Specifically, blaring from the multitude of fire engines, police cars, and ambulances that appeared to take up every square foot of Lansdowne Street and most of Brookline Ave.
I came to with the cold sensation of the shears that were cutting through the thick gray tape of my makeshift—and unintentional—bulletproof vest. The pressure against my ribs was incredibly painful, but the pain meant that I was alive.
“Morning, princess,” Junior said, sitting to the side of the ambulance’s interior. The left side of his face was bandaged up over the eye, pinpricks of blood dotting through the gauze.
“If you start singing Phantom of the Opera, I’m going to punch you in the throat,” I croaked.
“Meh,” he said, touching a hand to the bandages. “Not like this can make me any uglier.”
“True that.”
The shears made it to the top of the tape, popping open the vest that was also keeping my disassembled ribs in place.
The agony was sudden and ridiculous.
Immediately, I started throwing up. I turned my head and unleashed onto the floor of the ambulance, the turning making the pain even worse.
Just as Kelly poked her head into the back of the ambulance.
Perfect timing.
“Painkillers, please,” I said to the EMT.
He drew a syringe as I wiped my mouth and looked at Kelly. She held a compress to her head, the lid already swollen shut over her pretty blue eye.
“Hey,” I said.
“Hey,” she said.
“I’m gonna take a walk,” Junior said. “I can’t sit here and watch you two make goo-goo eyes.”
Kelly rolled the one eye I could see.
The EMT stuck the syringe into my IV bag, and the pain almost immediately started to numb.
Kelly and I looked at each other a little longer before either one of us spoke. I ran my sandpapery tongue over numbing lips.
“So. You’re a Fed,” I said. Might as well get right to the point.
“Yeah,” she said, chewing on her bottom lip. Might have been the morphine, but I immediately wanted to kiss that lip.
“You asshole!” shrieked Twitch, poking his head out from the other side.
“Hey, Twitch,” I said.
“There was gunplay, Boo. Fucking gunplay! And you left me at the goddamn bar.”
“Sorry ’bout that. I was kinda hoping it wasn’t going to come down to that.”
Twitch angrily pointed a finger at me while his eye made spastic accusations. “But it did. Do you have any idea how disappointed Benito and Manny are?”
“You remember Kelly, right?” I said.
“Hey, Twitch,” she said.
“Hey.”
“You know she’s a Fed?” I said.
“Really?” Twitch’s finger came down.
“Really,” she said with a smile.
“Later,” Twitch said, and was gone in the space of a blink.
“Nice to see him again,” Kelly said.
“So, back to this whole ‘you’re a Fed’ thing. How long’s that been going on for?”
“Long time,” she said, pulling a tight grin across her face.
The EMT climbed out the back. “We’re ready to roll. You gonna ride with us?”
“If that’s okay,” she said.
“Fine by me,” he said, shutting the doors.
I looked back to Kelly. “So you were a Fed when we…uh…”
“Yeah.”
I felt the ambulance slowly navigate the congested mess of vehicles, siren turned to blazing. I closed my eyes against the sense memory from decades ago, to the last time I was in a speeding ambulance after being shot in the chest.
That was the worst day of my life.
I lost everything that day when I was eight years old.
This one, while not the greatest day I’d had, left everyone I cared about alive.
I was going to chalk that up as a win.
***
The hospital was a mad rush of doctors, cops, and Feds, all pretty much yelling at each other, then me and Junior, then each oth
er again. All were jockeying for answers to what no doubt was going to be a logistical mess for everyone involved.
At least they put Junior and me in the same room while we waited for our various diagnoses and related treatments.
And there were a lot of them.
Where to begin this conversation with Junior? Fuck it. Full steam ahead. “So, you want to tell me about the wire?”
“Sure. Cops were up my ass for about six hours before a couple of guys in suits came in and started yapping at me. That was when I knew shit had gone weird.”
“Okay. Then what?”
Junior picked at his bandages.
“Don’t do that,” I said.
“Shit itches,” he grumbled.
“I’m not the guy you want to complain to right now,” I said, waving a hand over my shattered and blood-spattered self. “Go on.”
“Where was I?”
“Shit had gone weird.”
“Oh, yeah. They figured pretty quick that you and me weren’t involved in doing any kind of hitter work for Summerfield.”
“How’d they do that?”
“My phone. Dumbass Byron called Raja, Summerfield’s personal number, and IronClad security. Either to threaten them or asking for a ride. I don’t know.”
“How did that clear us?”
“Didn’t, exactly. But they tracked his phone and it was with us. They figured out a rough timetable for when he died, and we were already back at Ginny’s.”
“Pretty thin.”
“True dat. And they still didn’t know exactly who did do it.”
“So you agreed to wear a wire.”
“Not yet. Dammit, dude. Let me finish.”
“Fine.”
“Feds have been keeping tabs on Summerfield and his crew for a while. They had a lot of suspicions, but nothing solid. They thought they finally had something when Byron came back from France.”
“Amsterdam.”
“Same thing.”
“Actually, not even close.”
“I can stop talking here.” Junior pulled a couple bottles of Bud from his coat and popped them on the stainless steel bench next to the bed.
“Where did you get those?” I asked.
“Pinched ’em from the fridge at Raja.”
He handed me one. It was warmer than I normally took my beer, but I was in no position to complain. “Well done.”
“I have my moments.”
“Go on.”
“Oh yeah. Where was I again?”
“You agreed to wear a wire? Byron in Amsterdam?”
“Mmm, yeah.” He took a big swig and wiped the foam off his lip. “Problem was, Byron didn’t do what he was supposed to do. He came back with the money he left with and not the pills, powder, whatever the fuck he was supposed to get. They still could have pulled some IRS or Customs charge, but that wasn’t what they wanted.”
“Okay. So how did you end up wired in all that?”
“I volunteered.”
“Why?”
Junior shrugged and took another gulp of warm suds. “Because fuck that guy.”
As good a reason as any.
Junior went on. “But then I started to feel bad, because, you know, snitches get stitches. Also, I didn’t know much more than you did. Far as anybody else knew, Summerfield did have Byron killed and was trying to make it look like we popped his ass. Cops seemed to think that he decided to take advantage of the situation that we set up by kicking his ass in the first place.”
I thought about all of it. Summerfield hadn’t taken advantage, but Marcus sure did.
We were never going to know now about his reasons. Maybe he was the one who convinced Byron to walk with the money in the first place. Maybe he planned on punching Byron’s ticket either way. Maybe Byron was the one who got greedy and decided to rope his secret hook-up into making it look like something it wasn’t. They weren’t the important questions, but they were the ones that we weren’t ever going to get the answers to.
Was Marcus so ashamed of his sexual needs that he would kill to keep them a secret? Was it a tough guy thing? I thought about 4DC Security and Junior and me—running our own fiefdom tucked into the smallest corner of the security world. What would happen if one of us came to the realization that we were gay? All of the possible outcomes weren’t positive.
It was bullshit of course. Who you fucked had no bearing on how tough you were.
But I wasn’t ever going to have to face that. What I had to do instead, was face the people I’d hurt. Whether or not we’d meant to, the shit we’d casually said had contributed to Ollie and even Marcus feeling the need to conceal themselves. Marcus to the point of killing.
That was fucked up.
But then again, so was I.
We all were.
But I could try to be better, couldn’t I? What was the point of any of it if we weren’t at least trying?
Then I remembered something odd. Not enough that it should have even returned to the forefront of my mind, but once I started revisiting every decision I’d made, every second of the last week, this almost unnoticed detail kept sticking its tongue out at me.
I looked at Junior. “You took off your coat at my house.”
“The wire was laced through the lining. You started talking about money. Didn’t particularly want the Fibbies hearing about that.”
“Thanks for that. I think.”
“Hell, brudda. We were already well screwed. I didn’t want you to hand those pricks more weight to throw around our shoulders.”
“You could have told me.”
“Yeah, but I was also hoping that you would say some stupid shit that I could get on tape. That would have been fucking hilarious.”
Yeah. Hilarious. Thank the gods I wasn’t feeling up to discussing the death of Galal Shaughness.
I guess in the end we all wound up with secrets we had to carry.
Junior and I sat there quietly for a minute, drinking our beers, feeling a gulf between us deeper than any time before in our lives. Secrets we’d kept. Secrets we’d have to keep.
“I’m really sorry about Miss Kitty,” I said.
“Yeah,” Junior said as he stood and put his coat on. “So am I. Sorry about this too.”
“About what?”
In one fluid motion, Junior whipped out the antenna and whipped it down hard onto my shins. I sat up too fast, my ribs grinding together, and almost blacked out from the pain.
I clutched my side with one hand, while trying to save my legs with the other.
But Junior was one and done, putting the antenna that I was starting to regret saving for him back into his pocket.
“We done?” I wheezed.
“We done,” he said. “How much longer you going to be in here?”
“They said another night for observation.”
“Okay. See you tomorrow. I’ll bring donuts and beer.”
“You giving me a ride home?”
Junior reached into his pocket again.
“Never mind,” I said.
“Still not funny. Not yet.”
“I’ll give it time.”
“You do that. Love ya, brudda.”
“Love you too, cupcake.”
Then he was gone, leaving me alone with my thoughts, guilt, and confusion. I was no stranger to the trio, but they were usually no more than static in the background of my normal ponderings.
I felt a momentary pang for Marcus, not dissimilar from the one I did for Ollie. Much as I hated the guy, Marcus was a tough bastard, had clawed his way to running the top security firm in Boston. But one loose tongue and that house of cards could have come crashing down.
Fucking image. People dead over a fucking image.
Then the pang for Marcus went away. He made his bed, he took the life. And at the end of the day, the guy was a Grade-A asshole. Normally, I’d have said fuck him, but under the current circumstances, I’d just say to hell with him.
I didn’t know if that qualif
ied as personal growth, but I’d take what I could get.
Then I thought back to Ollie, hiding important parts of who he was from the only family he had, the people who loved him more than anybody on the planet, simply because he feared that they wouldn’t love, couldn’t love the truth. They weren’t the most important pieces of what made Ollie who he was, but we’d never seen the whole Ollie. And that hurt my heart.
But no matter what, it never stopped him from being our brother, even when he lived with the fear that our brotherhood, our family, our love for each other would be damaged or destroyed by the simple fact of his nature. It never stopped him from loving us.
I don’t care what anybody says.
That’s was toughness is.
That was as tough as it fucking got.
And that’s what a true family is.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Conversation after conversation with all kinds of law enforcement.
First it was a briefing with the Feds.
Then the Boston police.
Then the freaking ATF.
Then we were both released with the promise that there would be more to come.
No doubt.
Junior went back to work. He had some new scars on his ugly face, but there was no real damage to his eye. I think he was a little sad about that, muttering once or twice about how cool he’d look in an eyepatch.
We gave G.G. a well-deserved vacation and a bonus.
All the various forces of several federal agencies came down like the hammer of God on Ian Summerfield’s holdings. We saw Alex being led into and out of a few courthouses on the news. Assets were seized, the empire crumbled. IronClad Security was gone, and more than a few of their former employees came to me and 4DC looking for work.
All returned to normal, or as normal as our world ever got.
I couldn’t work for at least another three weeks. My leg got re-braced, my stitches were re-stitched, and my ribs healed slowly and painfully.
Not that I didn’t spend all my time at The Cellar anyway. After all, that was where the booze was. Certain elements of my darker nature had reaffixed their grips on my every day.
I thought about secrets.
All the time.
This may sound shocking, but I had trust issues.
Take a minute.
I was questioning…well, everything. Some secrets are born screaming into the light, others we keep to the grave. I had to let some of mine go. I had to.
Rough Trade Page 27