by Wilde, Leah
“You look downright giddy, Mr. President,” he said wryly.
“Zeke,” I said magnanimously, spreading my arms wide like a king, “how could I be anything but? Are you not seeing what I’m seeing? This is like my birthday and Christmas and the day I lost my virginity, all wrapped up into one! I’m ecstatic!”
He strolled over to the seat in front of my desk and plopped down, spreading his legs wide. He looked thoroughly unimpressed.
“C’mon, Zeke baby,” I joked, “just gimme a little smile. Just some tooth so I know you’re human underneath that tough guy act you love to put on so much.”
He took a long drag. “It’s a lot of money,” he said evenly.
I threw my hands into the air in exasperation and leaned back. Zeke was who he was; there was no changing him. Then again, that was the reason he made such a damn good number two. He was as even keel as they came, with motherfucking glaciers in his veins. There’d been times when I’d seen him elbow deep in blood as he worked on extracting information from some poor sap from a rival club, and he had looked just as calm as a Hindu cow. All business, all the time. He just did what needed to be done. Money couldn’t buy a better man. Zeke was truly one of a kind.
“Alright,” I said, “let’s hear what you gotta say.” I lit up a cigarette of my own as he started talking.
“There were some mistakes made on the raid,” he said. “A couple of the new guys got a little sloppy.”
“Who?”
“Carter and Bear.”
“What’d they do?”
“The usual shit they like to get up to. Toying around with the guard instead of just putting the bastard out of his misery real quick. They grabbed this from him.”
He tossed a gun onto my desk. It was a small pistol with a red knife logo emblazoned on the bottom of the butt. I recognized it as the insignia of the Knives of Fury. I grunted and picked it up, hefting it in my hands as I thought about what to do.
Carter and Bear were two of the guys who’d just recently patched in. We’d made them take some extra time in the prospecting process to try and iron out some of their kinks, but it looked like they’d gotten a little carried away in their first taste of action. “I’ll take the blame for that. I was the one who suggested they go with you.”
I’d been hoping that getting into an actual piece of work would be good for the two of them. They were still teenagers, not even twenty years old. Being the toughest kids in the high school was all well and good, but this was the big leagues now. I’d figured that maybe seeing some blood and bullets would’ve scared them into tightening their acts up a little bit. Looked like I was wrong, though.
There was no room for acting like a dumbass on jobs like the one we’d just managed to pull. The margin of error was always thin, but in this case, it was practically nonexistent. This wasn’t some upstart chump MC we were striking at; it was the Knives of Fury, Tristan Jenison’s club. Public enemy number one. Or at least, my enemy number one.
Taking a huge gamble like this and failing would have obviously been a huge embarrassment. But even more so than that, it would have put us in an extremely dangerous position. Tristan was a notoriously unstable son of a bitch, and I was adamant that this strike had to be clean and anonymous. No traces. No sign of our involvement, just in and out with the money. If it turned out that Carter and Bear had screwed up that critical part of the job and Tristan had discovered who was responsible for stealing this stash, there’d be hell to pay.
“Think there’ll be any fallout from it?” I asked Zeke.
He shrugged. “Hard to say. We didn’t stick around to canvas the security system. If they got footage, then, well, they might have our number. Only time will tell.”
“Those idiots. Send ’em on the next long haul run. Maybe a cross-country babysitting job will teach them to stop being such morons when they’re on the clock.”
“You’ve always been an optimistic one, Micah.”
“Compared to you, I’m a beam of fuckin’ sunshine, buddy.”
“More power to you. One of us has gotta be the realist.”
We sat smoking in silence for a while. My eyes kept roaming over the mountains of cash in front of me. I felt like that old cartoon where the miser duck dives into the vault of coins. Everyone made fun of that greedy bastard, but if you asked me, that was just because they didn’t know how goddamn good this felt.
“So is that it?” I asked after a few minutes. “Anything else?”
“Not really,” he answered. “Aside from the numbskull younglings, it was more or less textbook. Just like we planned.”
I looked over at the big whiteboard next to my desk that still bore the traces of the plan we’d laid out weeks prior. It was pretty much as simple as they come. A few months back, we’d noticed some unusual movement right on the fringe of the territory controlled by the Knives of Fury and decided to devote spare resources towards keeping an eye on a seemingly empty warehouse there. Lo and behold, it turned out that the Knives had expanded some drug shipping operations to this new location. What was even more exciting was the discovery that not only were they conducting business there, but they were using it as a stronghold for cash that was waiting to be laundered through the variety of outlets they used for shit like that.
Bolt and Zeke, along with a few of the other lieutenants and I, had agreed that it was in a prime location for us to take a swipe at it. The trick was avoiding retribution from our rivals, so it had to be a quick job, one that couldn’t be traced back to us. The diagrams on the whiteboard laid out exactly what needed to be done: take down the two guards at the side door, send one man down through the roofing into the storage room, bust it open from the inside, and get out before the rest of the patrol detail noticed. From what Zeke said, most of it went well, and now we were reaping the benefit of one of the ballsier moves we’d pulled of late.
“Tristan’s gonna shit himself when he finds out,” Zeke added.
I grinned ear to ear. “That’s the best part,” I said. “My only regret is that I can’t be there when it happens. Just to see it for myself.”
Chapter 3
Paris
The house was silent when I walked in. “Daddy?” I called into the musty stillness. “Daddy, are you home?”
No answer. I didn’t see any lights on the ground floor. Dropping my keys into the dish on the island counter in the kitchen and slinging my bag to the floor, I padded upstairs to check his office.
As I reached the top of the stairs, I saw that the door to his office was shut, but I could see a thin sliver of warm light coming out from under the bottom edge. He must be inside.
I stopped in the darkness, one hand on the railing, and closed my eyes. C’mon, Paris, I thought to myself. Just go in there and state your case. Tell him you’re eighteen years old now and all you want to do is go on a simple date with a very nice boy. It’s just dinner, nothing more. Not a thing in the world for a father to worry about. I let out my breath in a long, slow exhale. Then, steeling myself, I knocked on the door.
“Daddy, it’s me,” I called through the thick wood.
“Come on in, Par Bear,” he said back, using the nickname he’d had for me since I was just a little girl.
I twisted the knob and walked in. His office was fairly sparse, with only a rickety desk and a small lockbox safe tucked in one corner. He was seated behind it, calmly flipping through the folder he held in front of him. With his reading glasses on and a long-sleeved henley shirt covering up most of his tattoos, he looked like the world’s most normal dad. He could have been an accountant or a lawyer or some other ordinary, suburban job like that, the kind of dad who told corny jokes and brought home flowers for his wife in the evenings. He wasn’t any of those things, of course. But sometimes I liked to pretend.
“Hey, sweetie,” he said, looking up and smiling at me as I entered. “How was your day?”
“Fine,” I said. “I just studied at the park for a bit, then I went to Katy’s.”
“Ah, the infamous Katy McClendon. How’s she?”
“She’s good.” I was dying to get past the small talk and discuss what I really wanted to talk about, but I was too nervous to jump straight into it. Besides, maybe it would help to warm him up a little bit first, just so he was in a better mood when I finally got down to it. “Same as always,” I added.
“Which means crazy,” he said with a chuckle. “That girl is a wild child.”
I forced myself to smile. “Most definitely.” I opened my mouth to bring the conversation around to the real subject at hand, but suddenly, fear squeezed my stomach hard and I froze. I felt feverish and claustrophobic, like the walls were closing in around me and I was hurtling forward in time faster than I could possibly handle.
Daddy noticed my discomfort and gave me a quizzical sideways look. “Something wrong, dear?” he asked.
“I, um…” I stuttered, unable to find the words.
He lowered his glasses on the bridge of his nose and looked at me with concern. “You know you can tell me anything, right?”
“Yeah, of course,” I blabbered. “I know that. I just, I wanted to ask, if, um…” Where was the speech that I’d practiced with Katy? Where were all those perfectly neutral words I’d rehearsed, the ones that made my request seem totally reasonable and normal? I’d forgotten completely how to speak and all my resolve was leaking out of me like sweat. I couldn’t even think straight.
Focus, said the voice in my head. One word at a time.
I took a deep breath. I had this under control. I could do it. All I had to do was ask. “I was wondering if—”
But just then, the cell phone lying on top of a stack of papers on his desk came alive, bursting with a ring tone and flashing colors. He picked it up and frowned when he saw the name of the person who was calling. “I’m sorry, doll, just give me one second. I have to answer this. Hello?” he said as he picked up the call.
I stood in front of his desk squirming as he listened intently, eyebrows furrowed. The tinny voice at the end was talking rapidly, although I could hardly understand anything it was saying. I heard the word “warehouse” repeated multiple times, whatever that meant.
Apparently, though, the caller was delivering some very bad news indeed. As the seconds went by, ticked off loudly by the hands of the clock on the wall, my dad’s face went from calm to stormy. His gray eyes took on a swirling anger and the lines in his forehead and around his mouth deepened. By the time the voice quieted down, he looked ready to kill somebody.
“Call a meeting,” he commanded in an acidic tone. “I want everyone involved at the clubhouse tonight.”
The voice squawked again, but he cut it off quickly. “I don’t give a damn,” he said. “If they had plans, cancel them. Somebody fucked up. We’re gonna sort this out immediately.” He hung up the phone without waiting to hear the response. Dropping it on his desk with a thunk, he ran a hand through his flowing silver hair and looked back up at me. As he readjusted the glasses to sit properly on his face, he said, “I’m sorry about that, Paris. What were you saying?”
“Is everything, um, okay?” I asked.
He waved a hand in the air. “Fine, fine, don’t worry about it. Just a…disruption at one of our warehouses. Nothing for you to be concerned about. Now, please, finish what you were saying. I didn’t mean to cut you off.”
I faltered, the nice flow of words I’d built up in my head completely gone now, vanished without a trace. “I was at the park, and was, uh, wondering, you know, because this guy asked me if I wanted to, like, you know, go to, like, eat a, what do you call it, a, um, dinner, sometime?” My voice rose to a pipsqueak at the end, but before I had even finished, I knew it was no use at all. Every word had only added to the angry wrinkles on my father’s tanned face, and by the time I was done, he didn’t even need to say a thing. I knew what the answer would be already.
“Paris,” he said, a hint of irritation on the edge of his voice, “you know my rules.”
“I know,” I whispered.
“I’m sick of repeating myself, too. I’m going to say this one last time, and then I don’t ever want you to bring this topic up again. Ever. You are not allowed to go out with any boy, do you hear me? Not now, not ever.”
“It’s just that I was hoping—”
“You shouldn’t have been. With your mother gone, you’re all I have left. I have to keep you safe, and that means keeping you out of situations where I can’t protect you. Who knows who this boy may be working for?”
“Daddy, he’s not working for—”
“Enough. I have lots of enemies. They’ll do anything they can to hurt me and the people I love. I’m not willing to let you expose yourself to that kind of danger.” He stood up and planted his fists on his desk as he looked me down. “That’s a no, Paris. You are not to leave this house tonight. Am I understood?”
I looked down at my feet as I answered, “Yes, Daddy.”
“Good,” he said, straightening up. He walked up to me and put his hands on my shoulders. I didn’t meet his eyes.
“Look at me, Paris.”
Still, I kept my eyes trained on the ground. He repeated himself. “Paris, look at me.” He tucked two fingers under my chin and gently raised my gaze to his. I was trembling with an exhausting mixture of anger and disappointment. My body felt thin and achy. All I wanted was to lie in bed and cry for a long, long time. That was the only outlet I had left. “You’re precious to me,” he said softly. “I just don’t want to see you get hurt.”
He kissed me on the forehead. “I’m not sure when I’ll be back tonight. Don’t stay up too late; I know you’ve got those exams coming up soon.”
He let me go, then turned and walked out the door without another word. I stood there for a long time, hot tears burning my eyes. I felt so stupid for crying, since it didn’t solve a single one of my problems, but I didn’t know what else to do. So I just stood there in his empty office and cried.
After a while, my phone vibrated twice in my pocket. I had two texts. The first was from Craig.
Football practice got cancelled. Are you free tonight?
I deleted it right away.
The second text message was from Katy.
How’d the talk with Papa T go????
I typed out my response slowly with shaking fingers. Terrible.
She shot back, I’m coming over.
I tucked my phone back into my pocket and walked downstairs. Without bothering to turn on any of the lights in the living room, I slumped onto a couch and closed my eyes while resting my head back against the armrest. I focused on breathing deeply and evenly. In through my nose, out through my mouth, then repeat until I stopped feeling like I was going to puke or pass out or break something. Eventually, the blood stopped pounding in my temples and my breath started to come a little more easily.
The door flew open, introducing a wide swath of light into the dark room. Katy burst inside and scanned the room. She saw me and leaped over towards the couch to sit next to me where I was lying down.
“You okay, Paris?” she said as she brushed away a lock of hair that had fallen over my face.
I kept my eyes closed gently. “I hate him.”
“I know. It’s not fair.”
I sat up straight and locked eyes with my best friend. “It’s not fair at all! Why am I cooped up in here all the time? Why can’t I ever just do what I want? Is going to dinner such a big freaking deal? Would it be better if I had a fucking security patrol to go with me? God, I hate it so much!”
Katy cooed wordlessly and kept stroking my hair as I buried my head in my knees. I wanted to cry some more, to help relieve the savage pressure built up behind my eyes, but the tears just weren’t coming. I’d exhausted the supply.
“I just don’t get it,” I said after I’d regained my composure. “He goes flying off at all hours of the night to do his job, which he doesn’t ever even bother to explain to me, and I’m just stuck here alone, not a
llowed to go out or do anything fun with my life. Maybe I should just run away.”
She tilted her head to the side and looked at me. “You know what?” she said. “Fuck your dad. Let’s do something fun tonight.”
I looked at her curiously. “Like what?”
“Well,” she began slowly, “don’t freak out…”
“That’s never a good way to start something, Katy,” I said cautiously.
“I know, I know, but listen. On my way over here, I ran into my friend, Hawk, from the tattoo shop. He told me about some awesome party that’s happening tonight. If you wanted to, we could go.”