Under the Bones

by Kory M. Shrum

  She understood now that her blind panic was partly to blame. And also the idea of defying her father. He had wanted her away, wanted her safe. Her compass wanted this also. Both of these factors stacked against her. And so when it came time to return—a third strike. She had been aiming for her parents. Trying to let the compass take her to the arms she wanted most.

  But they weren’t there anymore. That connection had been severed.

  A tether snapped.

  “Why does Nico want to kill you?” she asked. She wanted the conversation to steer away from her now. Far away.

  His eyes opened again, and light reflected in those ink-black pools. “Padre warned me this would happen. Nico was jealous of me since we were boys. When we were children he would hit me, push me around and Padre always put a stop to it. He never did that for other boys. I think that only made Nico hate me more. One day he broke my hand with a hammer.”

  She said nothing.

  “Padre tied him to a post in the courtyard behind the church and beat him for it. He made everyone watch. I’m certain we’ve been enemies since.”

  “Padre must have known he was fueling the rivalry.”

  He was silent for a while. Finally he said, “Whenever Padre had a problem, he would ask me what I thought even though my suggestions were often ridiculous. For example, he once asked me how could he bring in something very large through the city without anyone seeing it. And I told him to put it inside an elephant.”

  He smiled to himself.

  “This was ridiculous, of course,” he added. “Padre and all the other men had laughed. But then his face lit up and he cried, ‘Madonna Santa!’ He used the statues in the parade to hide the guns. They were carried through the streets right to his church and no one knew the difference. He always listened to me. Encouraged my ideas.”

  “I imagine intelligence is hard to come by in the criminal world,” she said.

  He didn’t laugh. She noticed.

  Finally he said, “I would argue that intelligence is very common is the criminal world. We must know your rules well enough to break them. And we must know the minds of men, so we can control them.”

  Silence hung in the air for a long time.

  “There is a blanket in the closet,” she said, before turning away.

  18

  Lou woke before Konstantine. It wasn’t dawn. She had at least an hour or two of night on her side. The pain in her arm made it hard to sleep. It wasn’t only the pain keeping her awake.

  She hadn’t slept so near a man, not since she was a child. When her mother was away on their annual sisters-only vacation, when they left their husbands and children at home and retreated to somewhere tropical—once the Virgin Islands, another time, an all-inclusive resort in Mexico—she would sleep with her father then.

  She would climb up onto their elevated four-poster bed with much difficulty and he would let her watch television while he did paperwork that he hadn’t finished on this or that case during the day. She would wake hours later, to find the popcorn bowl moved, and she herself tucked into her side of the king-sized bed, while he snored softly beside her.

  It was too vulnerable, sleeping beside someone. Sex was easier.

  From time to time, she found men while hunting. Never the men she hunted. Someone who was simply in the right place at the right time. Someone who walked up to her, and said hello while she tracked this or that man. Someone who’d smiled the right way. Someone who’d noticed her in a world where she moved mostly unnoticed.

  She’d let them take her back to their place. But she didn’t tolerate wine, conversation, or any of the tactics that they seemed to think she needed. They gave her names. Numbers. She gave them nothing.

  She’d never seen a man more than once. Never taken them back to her apartment. And sure as hell had never brought them food. She couldn’t imagine lying down beside them, and closing her eyes. There was always the chance a knife would slice her throat or a gun would be pressed to the side of her head. So no, she hadn’t slept beside a man since Jack Thorne died.

  Yet here he was. Konstantine. His chest rising and falling with each relaxed breath. His cheek on her pillow.

  Of all the men in the world…

  It’s done, her father said. If it’s done, no point in worrying it like a bone. You’re only punishing yourself twice.

  She slid from her bed and grabbed her black boots. Still wearing her scrubs, she stepped inside the closet and closed the door behind her.

  The first stop was a thrift store. She exchanged the scrubs for camo pants and Ramones t-shirt. A black hoodie befitting the chilly September night. A black sports bra with one of its cups missing, the other easily removed. Socks for her feet which she laced her boots over. Had she come during business hours, this ensemble would have cost her $13. She took a twenty from the pocket in her boot and put it on the counter.

  The first thing she did to every pair of boots she bought was sew an inner pocket into the tongue. Something tight enough to hold a few compressed bills without them slipping loose.

  When she needed two hands for guns, purses or backpacks were impossible. Even fishing money from a bra was too much trouble, often shifting and disappearing in this or that corner of the fabric.

  She wasn’t fit to see the priest, but hopefully she wouldn’t see him. Get in, get out. Avoid the formalities.

  She stepped out of the parking lot light spilling from a display window of the thrift store and into a changing room outfitted with a thin black curtain. When she emerged, she was in what looked like a ticket booth. Did churches have ticket booths?

  She supposed this one did. And a cash register. But the room was locked, so unless she wanted to bust the handle, she was forced to slip again. This time she emerged behind a great stone pillar reaching up to the tremendous ceiling above.

  A prism of color danced across the blood-colored carpet running between the pews toward a suspended figure of Christ on the cross. She stepped into the light and looked up. A stained-glass ceiling spraying reds, blues and yellows. Emerald greens and the white wings of an angel. Mary holding a child, as the angels bore her on high. The first light of dawn.

  “Can I help you?” a voice called.

  A man approached her.

  He wore the black clothes and white collar of a priest. He was bald on top and what was left covered the flesh from his ears down.

  He stopped three feet from her and confusion seized his face. “It’s you!” he said. With part terror and part excitement.

  “Are you the one who found me?” she asked, shifting in her boots as the socks she’d hastily pulled on began to slide down. They were too small. A small price to pay for keeping Konstantine asleep and avoiding more slumber party chitchat.

  “Yes,” he said. He raised a shaking hand as if to touch her face and then froze, dropping it. “How did you survive?”

  She realized now what she’d forgotten. Her sunglasses which she saw perfectly in her mind’s eye on the glass coffee table back home.

  If she had been wearing them, he likely wouldn’t have seen the hard, uncompromising glare that met him when he’d reached out to touch her. She knew her gaze was hard. She’d heard more than one person comment on the way she seemed to look through them. Benji had said that when she smiled it didn’t reach her eyes. Lucy had said much the same. I feel like you smile only to please me, Louie. Never because you’re happy.

  When conversation was unavoidable, it was best if she wore sunglasses.

  “Thank you,” she said and smiled, hoping that at least some of it crossed the plains of her cheeks and achieved a facsimile of sincerity. “But you have something of mine.”

  It was part question, part hope.

  And it was enough to kick the priest into motion. “Oh yes! I have it all. I’m so glad you came back because, heaven help me, I honestly didn’t know what to do with all of it. Follow me.”

  The two of them, utterly alone at this hour, moved silently through the dim chur
ch.

  She didn’t ask why he was the only one here. She had no right to question why the good father couldn’t sleep at night.

  At the end of a short stone hallway, he pulled a collection of keys from his wrist.

  A loud clanking sound released and he pushed the door wide, flipping a switch on the wall. It illuminated a small office. A desk that was very tidy but also quite full of books and papers in need of reviewing.

  The priest went around the side of the desk and bent under it, slowly retrieving one thing or another from the darkness beneath.

  Her holster. The guns. Blades lined up one after another on the tabletop.

  Then at last, the vest.

  Something in Lou’s chest loosened when she saw it. Though blood soaked as it was.

  “Thank you,” she said. “For keeping it safe.”

  Then she wasted no time slipping the weapons into place where she could. The priest stood silent, watching her every movement as if she were an elegant dancer on stage.

  “You really are just a girl, aren’t you?” His mouth hung in wonder. “Forgive me, young woman.”

  “What did you think I was?” She put her arms through the holster, moving quite slowly with the left arm as to not pop another stitch while the flesh was swollen tight.

  “I’m sending an angel ahead of you to guard you along the way and to bring you to the place I have prepared.”

  Lou froze. The place I have prepared. She thought of La Loon instantly. That nightmare standing between her world and what?

  “Exodus 23:20.”

  “I don’t know the Bible,” Lou said, checking to make sure everything was secure. The knives in their holsters and the guns in theirs. Not the vest though. She would simply have to put it on or carry it. And there would be no walking around in public tonight. As every piece of metal she wore stood in plain sight.

  “Angels,” he said. “I’m speaking of angels.”

  She searched his face. But there was no teasing there.

  She gestured at the guns, the knives. “Do I look like an angel?”

  “Angels are the warriors of God. And you simply appeared.”

  Irritation nipped at the back of her neck. “I’m not an angel.”

  His face screwed up with genuine concern. “Why?”

  “I have too much to answer for.”

  “Don’t forget this.” He handed her something she’d forgotten she’d been wearing. Her German watch. The international pager that Lucy had given her several birthdays ago, under the pretense that she should be able to reach her niece if she needed her.

  She clicked the small button on the side of the device and its digital face blinked to life. Four pages. One from Benji, a thank you no doubt. And three from King.

  “I have to go,” she told the priest. One page from King would have been enough. Three…

  “Godspeed,” he said, his eyes wide with wonder. “I hope we meet again.”

  Careful what you wish for. Lou stepped into the corner of his room and pressed her back into the shadow.

  A dramatic exit, she knew, that would only fuel his superstitions. But it was rare that Louie had a chance to enjoy herself.

  19

  King looked at the cell phone in his hand again and sighed. Would paging her a fourth time really matter? If she didn’t answer the first three pages, it was either because she wouldn’t or couldn’t. If the first reason, it pissed him off. But that voice in the back of his head was quick to point out the ridiculousness. She owes you nothing. She isn’t going to come running just because you’ve given her a page, Robbie. Maybe there were women in the world who responded that way, but he understood Lou Thorne wasn’t the kind to come at his beck and call.

  If she wasn’t answering because she couldn’t—well, that was a whole other bag of shit.

  He squeezed his eyes shut and exhaled slowly. “At least have the decency to die after we put her in the ground.”

  “I’m trying,” a woman said.

  King looked up from his socked white feet and met the eyes of Lou Thorne. She stood armored, clutching a vest in her fist. He recognized it was one of the old, outdated vests they used in the DEA SWAT teams. He wondered if that was Jack’s vest, the one that had never ended up in inventory after his service weapon and all other equipment had been reclaimed.

  “Coming or going?” he asked.

  She glanced at the vest in her hand and seemed to note the guns and knives for the first time. “I’m not hunting tonight.”

  Hunting. King laughed. “This is your usual evening attire, is it? I guess I will cancel that Macy’s gift card for your birthday then.”

  This was meant as a joke, but she wasn’t laughing. She seemed only interested in getting him back on track. “You paged.”

  Right to it then. King ran a hand through his hair. “Do you, by chance, still have Paolo Konstantine stowed away in your apartment?”

  There. The smallest twitch in her arm and a stiffening of her neck.

  Before she could put a bullet in him, he added, “It was a guess. I haven’t been snooping.”

  Her shoulders didn’t relax. “Good guess.”

  That’s a yes then. “I’ll hazard another guess that you haven’t seen the news in the last 48 hours.”

  She frowned. “What’s happened?”

  He sank onto his red leather sofa and used the remote control to turn off the fan overhead. She propped the vest against the side of his coffee table and took a seat on the cushion beside him as he powered up his laptop.

  The page he’d viewed last was still up and running, so he simply refreshed the page and then clicked the arrow that restarted the newscast.

  She watched it without speaking. When it was over and the screen was dark again, she said, “Is there more?”

  “Not public, no.”

  “What’s un-public?” she asked.

  It took him three tries to get onto the DEA server. They were changing things up then. A televised beheading can do that. King could crack it, but admittedly, they were making it harder. He filed this warning in the back of his mind, along with the idea that he should change his IPs more frequently and then found what he was looking for.

  He hesitated for a moment before playing this death tape. Then he realized how ridiculous he was being. Trying to shield Lou Thorne from the sight of slaughter was like trying to prepare a carcass out of the tiger’s sight, lest he disturb its tender sensibilities. There was nothing on this tape she hadn’t seen with her own eyes—or caused for that matter.

  He pushed play.

  And watched as eight men forced onto their knees had their throats slit for the camera. He turned away from the screen and watched her reaction for the last line: “I am Paolo Konstantine. You will hear from me again, very soon.”

  He saw what he wanted, loosing a breath he hadn’t realized he was holding. “It’s not Konstantine on the tape is it?”

  “It’s Nico Agostino,” she said. “I told you there’s a turf war over the Ravengers.”

  King didn’t recognize the name. He grabbed the yellow legal pad off the coffee table and scribbled. He didn’t have it in him to ask her how she spelled it. Augustino?

  She glanced at his page. “You spelled it wrong.”

  And corrected him.

  King tried to recall what he knew of the Ravengers and the man who ruled them. The last time King had seen Konstantine in the flesh, he was tied up on Ryanson’ boat, about to be drilled to death by another gang member.

  What interesting friends you have, he thought but he didn’t speak. She seemed deep in her own thoughts.

  When he couldn’t stand the silence, he said, “It looks like Agostino wants to remove Konstantine from the field completely, not just from the drug trade.”

  She was cold beside him. No warmth radiating from her. A chill ran down his spine.

  “It looks like it,” she said.

  “I can’t believe you missed.”

  She leveled him with a frosty s
tare.

  He raised his hands in surrender. “I’m sure it couldn’t have been helped.”

  She gestured toward the screen. “What does this mean for Konstantine?”

  “Three of those agents were British Intelligence, but the other five were ours. So I suspect that the great US of A will be rushing in, guns blazing soon.”

  “Konstantine will have to stay out of sight until his name is cleared.”

  King laughed. “Do you think they’ll just let him go? A drug lord? Once they realize he isn’t the man they want, I’m sure they’ll find something else to arrest him for.”

  She considered this.

  King swallowed all the comments he knew were uncalled for. What would your father think of you shacking up with a drug lord? First of all, it wasn’t King’s business what Lou did or didn’t do with any man in her life, and two, he knew better than to bring up Jack Thorne. He glanced at the vest propped against his coffee table.

  “What about me?” she asked, meeting his gaze directly.

  The strange question startled him out of his thoughts. “What about you?”

  “Has my name turned up?”

  “No,” he said, perhaps too quickly.

  Her gaze hardened.

  “I’ve been watching and listening to the wire,” he said, trying to infuse his voice with indifferent calm again. But it wasn’t working. Throwing the ball back into her court would be better. “Did you end up in a hospital by chance?”

  She blinked. The briefest fluttering of eyelids.

  “I wondered if that was you. Unnamed woman brought in for several gunshot wounds. Which arm was it?”

  He reached out to brush her left arm, but she was already up and across the room, standing in the center with the vest in her hand.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, hoping he hadn’t gone too far. Now was not the time to push her away. “Is that why you’re taking the night off?”

  “I’ll be ready when it’s time to take out Nico.”

  Anger, surprisingly furious, rose in him suddenly. “So are you going to take on half the world to protect Konstantine with only one of your arms in decent shape? That sounds brilliant. See where that gets you.”