Fathers

by Matt Rogers

  King remembered that.

  Decided to put it to the test.

  Still holding the cop from behind like an oversized baby, he dropped his hips at the same time as he lifted the cop higher. It was a feat of tremendous strength, but he barely even realised. He hurled the cop like a wet sack over his shoulder, twisting his whole body into it to add momentum. He landed on his knees, which hurt a bit, but that was an acceptable trade-off to send the cop spinning into the rock-hard wall.

  The cop hit the wall with a meaty slap, his shoulder impacting the concrete first, probably tearing it right out of the socket. He ricocheted off and fell to the ground, right in front of King. The sound was significant enough to send the nurses on night shift running toward the source, so King knew he didn’t have much time.

  Which helped him move quickly.

  Still on his knees, he reached out and grabbed the cop’s right wrist. It was the arm the guy had used to go for his gun. His dominant hand. King wrenched him forward by the wrist and seized control of the cop’s elbow with his other hand. Now he had a double-handed grip on the arm, with the forearm in between.

  Like holding two ends of a stick.

  King brought the forearm into his knee.

  Snapped the stick.

  The crack was horrific, and the cop went white as a sheet as he fell away from King, his good arm now clutching his mangled one. He wouldn’t be able to use it for months. The cop let out a guttural moan.

  King stood up like nothing had happened at all, just as the midwife he’d spoken to earlier spilled into sight at the other end of the corridor.

  Her face was a mask of confusion, made worse by the presence of violence. She hadn’t seen anything, but the aura of physical punishment was obvious. The cop staggered to his feet beside King as she rushed down the wing toward them. He spat blood through his teeth and it splattered all over the floor. Maybe his face had bounced off the wall, too. It had all been too chaotic to assess the extent of the injury.

  The bones of his forearm were broken clean in two, the lower half of the limb dangling around like a limp noodle.

  King grimaced.

  He’d done what he could given the time constraints. Neither he nor the cop could do much else. The guy wouldn’t risk arresting him in case he had to explain why he was in the maternity ward in the first place, and King wouldn’t disarm or murder him in front of witnesses.

  The nurse screeched to a halt in front of them, and two more materialised down the corridor. There was no sign of Rick, the ward clerk. Maybe he’d fled.

  She kept her voice low, but her anger hissed out through gritted teeth. ‘What is this?’

  King shrugged, so nonchalant you’d think he’d just rolled out of bed. The cop was swaying, unsteady on his feet, and the rapid pulsating of his throat indicated he was focusing most of his conscious energy on keeping the puke in his stomach.

  King jerked his head toward the cop, but kept his eyes on the nurse. ‘He can explain.’

  He turned to the guy and finally got a good look at him. He was maybe thirty, tall and lean with thinning hair dyed jet black and tanned leathery skin you’d expect to see on a sixty-year-old from Miami who’d spent too many years absorbing the sun. Unhealthy skin, riddled with cracks and crevasses, miniature peaks and valleys. Bags under his eyes. He drank too much. King knew the signs. The guy’s uniform was incomplete. He had the dark blue shirt tucked into the slacks but everything that would usually identify him was missing. No name badge, no insignia. He must have used his uniform to get past some of the hospital staff he hadn’t paid off, knowing they wouldn’t look too closely at it. And if it all went to shit, like it just had, he could hide in anonymity.

  Half-heartedly the cop swallowed the pain and stopped cradling his broken arm, trying to reach across his belt for his gun. He managed to mumble, ‘You’re, uh, under arrest for—’

  King just stared at him.

  The cop retched involuntarily. That brought him back to reality, and he seemed to notice that King was only a few feet away and bristling like a gorilla on steroids. It wasn’t supposed to go like this. So the cop had no prior knowledge of who King was. It had taken him by surprise, the pure violence unleashed upon him. He seemed to recognise King could really hurt him, whenever the hell he wanted.

  He reconsidered, his good hand right next to the butt of his service weapon.

  King said, ‘I’ll get them to do bloods on Violetta. Right after I’m arrested. There’ll be questions about who fed her more painkillers. You’ll lose your freedom faster than you can fucking blink.’

  The nurse was facing the cop now. ‘Who let you in?’

  The cop blinked. He was moments away from passing out. If his cheeks turned any whiter he’d faint and smash his head on the floor, maybe break his arm worse. Maybe make it irreparable. King saw the forearm hanging at almost a right angle and figured it would never heal the same.

  He found it hard to care.

  The nurse stammered, ‘What’d you say about painkillers?’ to King.

  King didn’t take his eyes off the cop. One inch more movement toward that gun…

  ‘Try it,’ he said. ‘You know you want to.’

  The cop started breathing heavier.

  ‘Called your bluff.’

  The cop started to laugh. Low, under his breath, uncontrollable. The shock setting in, making everything surreal, scrambling his emotions. There was desperation in it, too. Like whatever he’d been doing with Violetta was a last-ditch effort on his part, and now his fate was sealed.

  The cop cradled his arm, giving up on the idea of drawing his piece.

  Then he hobbled away from the both of them.

  ‘You’re dead,’ he muttered on the way out. ‘You’re so fucking dead.’

  The nurse opened her mouth to call after him.

  King said, ‘Leave it.’

  She froze. Turned to him. Beyond confused.

  King didn’t look away, stared her in the eyes.

  ‘Trust me,’ he said. ‘Nothing good will come from pursuing it.’

  ‘If he so much as breathed on a patient, like you claimed…’

  ‘I misspoke,’ King said. ‘I’ll be in our room. Don’t worry about my partner. Don’t run any tests on her. Use your selective memory. Forget anything happened. Forget that guy exists.’

  The nurse blinked hard, opened and closed her mouth. At a loss for words.

  King said, ‘Look at me.’

  She already was, but she concentrated harder on his eyes.

  ‘Leave it,’ he said. ‘I’ll handle it. Something could have happened but it didn’t. The last thing I want right now is a scene. I’ll take care of it in due course.’

  He had a way of earning trust fast. He couldn’t pinpoint exactly what did it, but she slowly inched her way on board. ‘You don’t want cops here? You don’t want to do it the official way?’

  ‘Nothing good comes from that. Just bureaucratic bullshit. He’ll get away with it. You understand?’

  She nodded slowly. ‘Did you do that to his arm?’

  King said, ‘I only startled him. He leapt into the wall, he got such a fright.’

  His eyes told a different story.

  She said, ‘You have yourself a nice night.’

  Turned and walked away.

  He watched her hands shake all the way down the hallway.

  41

  Tyrell recoiled at the sound of the distant wailing.

  He said, ‘Is that for us?’

  Slater’s stomach fell into a pit. He’d fired two gunshots, unsuppressed. Was that enough? He peered outside. There were a couple of lights on behind windows along the cosy street, but no more than usual. There certainly weren’t neighbours hopping from foot to foot in their dressing gowns out the front of their houses, shrieking into their phones, but that wouldn’t happen anyway. If upper-middle-class folk thought they’d heard gunshots, they’d get under the bed and call the cops from there.

  Which was the s
mart thing to do, really.

  Slater growled, ‘Have to assume it is,’ and ran out of the room, down the hall, back into the master bedroom.

  Alexis had heard them too. She was already throwing clothes into an open suitcase on the bed, as frantic as he’d ever seen her. She looked to him as he came in. Her eyes asked the question, Right idea?

  He nodded. ‘Got to go.’

  ‘For fuck’s sake,’ she sighed, as calmly as she could. ‘What about the bodies?’

  ‘Leave them. When the cops come, their investigation will die. They’ll try to trace the home owners and hit Alonzo’s digital roadblock. And that’ll be that. A murder mystery in cosy Winthrop.’

  She said, ‘You sound real sure of that.’

  ‘I’m not,’ he admitted. ‘Now let’s go.’

  He ran back to the spare room. Tyrell owned no belongings besides the phone in his pocket. They’d planned a huge shopping haul the next morning to stock him up with some worldly possessions, but that’d have to wait. Slater took the boy’s hand and led him out of the bedroom at a brisk jog, instructing him to close his eyes so the boy didn’t have to see his uncle’s henchman missing a face. Alexis met them in the foyer with the suitcase stuffed to the brim with clothes, their valuables (including all passports and electronics), and a few guns. Everything else was inconsequential, and could be left behind.

  It had been maybe a minute and a half since they’d heard the sirens, and they were ready to abandon the home they thought they’d spend the rest of their lives in.

  Such is life.

  The wailing was only a couple of streets away, growing closer by the second.

  Slater picked Tyrell up — he was heavy for twelve, with a long frame, but to Slater it was nothing — and carried him over the two bodies in the entranceway, ordering him to keep his eyes shut. Then he picked up speed down the sloping driveway, putting Tyrell down halfway along. The boy ran with him to the idling cargo van parked across the driveway, blocking access. They’d have to take it. There wasn’t time to move it and go back for the rental sedan in the garage. The van was more spacious anyway.

  Tyrell piled into the cabin first, and Alexis threw the suitcase through the open side door and slid it shut on its tracks. She hopped over the driver’s seat to sit in the middle of the three-man compartment, and Slater got behind the wheel.

  The sirens were almost right on top of them, but he still couldn’t see lights.

  He threw the van into “Drive,” twisted the wheel hard and ripped a U-turn in the quiet street. Gunned it away from where he thought the cops were coming from, and skidded round the bend. It felt like seconds before police cruisers would light suburbia up with red and blue.

  He had no idea if they were being pursued, but he treated it like they were. Left the van’s headlights off as he hurled the vehicle forward like a speeding bullet in the dark, and only when they were out of Winthrop’s limits did he allow himself to exhale fully. Before that it had been short, sharp breaths, keeping him zoned in like his tunnel of vision was all that existed in the world.

  As they came to the tip of Winthrop he noticed the roadblock, monitoring the parkway that led out of the small town in the dead of night.

  It wasn’t police. It was civilian. Two cargo vans, identical to his, like they’d all been plucked from a fleet of clones. It wasn’t exactly a roadblock, either. The vans framed the sides of the road, leaving just enough space for a single vehicle to squeeze between them, but both engines were on and Slater had no doubt the vehicles were in gear, ready to reverse diagonally and trap an oncoming car in a funnel.

  Slater eased off the gas, trundled toward the vans.

  Alexis asked, ‘Trouble?’

  Tyrell said, ‘I seen all these rides before. They used to come by the house, pick up stuff from Dad. Didn’t know they were Uncle Dwayne’s.’

  Both pairs of headlights came on, brilliant white spotlights in the gloom.

  Slater said, ‘You two, down.’

  Alexis led by example, sliding off the seat to sandwich herself into the footwell, and Tyrell lay down across the freshly empty seat. Slater stayed upright, both hands on the wheel, assessing the situation as each long second passed.

  A guy got out of each van’s driver’s seat, circling around into the middle of the road, a human barricade. Slater could have stomped the accelerator and run them both over, but there might be more men in the back of each van, and he’d rather emphatically quash this here than turn it into a high-speed chase through Boston.

  He slowed to a crawl, studied both drivers as his own headlights fought against the glare of the opposing vans. They were African-American like the rest of them, and similarly built, too. Enforcers. Hard cruel men that would do whatever Dwayne asked of them.

  Slater stopped maybe six feet from them.

  They couldn’t see him through the windshield because his headlights were shining right back at them. Maybe they saw the vague shape of a big man. At the very best, they might have noticed he was black, which still didn’t raise their hackles.

  Only when they approached did the risk go up. But they both made a mistake. They both came to the driver’s side. They should have rounded to separate doors, made it harder in case it was an ambush. But there was no need for that in their eyes. This was a friendly vehicle.

  Slater kept his door closed so the interior lights didn’t come on. He was still a dark silhouette, the same size and ethnicity as the men who’d previously commandeered the van.

  Still no suspicion.

  One of the drivers got right up to the driver’s door and Slater heard his muffled voice say, ‘Thought the cops got you,’ before he pulled the handle and shoved the door hard.

  42

  Half a year ago in El Salvador, a double agent had slipped King a heroic dose of oxycontin.

  Violetta had helped nurse him back to reality.

  Oh, how the tables turn…

  He pulled a chair up to her bedside and stroked locks of her hair off her forehead. It took her a moment to come to, and he spent the time watching the little crib on the other side of the bed, feeling that new sensation he couldn’t get enough of, the one he couldn’t put into words.

  Contentment like nothing he’d felt before.

  She blinked, groggy but happy. The cop had probably done her a favour. Taken it into his own hands and administered more pain relief than the hospital would ever allow. King tried to think about that, not what the cop had planned to do.

  He watched Violetta closely. She wasn’t as loopy as he expected. Either she’d been given fewer drugs than he thought, or she could hold it together better than he could. Something told him it might be the latter.

  He asked, ‘How you feeling?’

  She half-grinned, a tad sheepish. ‘Great.’

  Her voice was low and hypnotic.

  He said, ‘We don’t have to talk right now. You just rest.’

  She squinted, her expressions exaggerated. ‘Who was that guy?’

  ‘A cop.’

  ‘Mmm,’ she mumbled. ‘Uniform. Thought so.’ A long pause. ‘He gave … me drugs. He’s … cop. Not supposed to do that. Nurses do that.’

  ‘Yes,’ King said, nodding.

  Best to keep it simple.

  She mumbled, ‘Is Junior…?’

  ‘Fast asleep,’ King said. ‘All safe.’

  ‘What if … cop comes back?’

  King bent down so he could whisper in her ear. ‘Then I’ll fucking kill him. You’re not leaving my sight until the morning.’

  That made her smile, and she closed her eyes and settled into the pillow.

  King sat back in the chair and watched the door.

  He vowed not to move until the sun rose.

  43

  The swinging door completely crumpled the guy.

  It hit him like a medieval shield, impacting his face and chest and hips all at once because he was standing fully upright. He practically flew back, recoiling from the pain and carried off
his feet by the momentum. Slater’s hand was on its way to his waist, ready to pull the compact Glock, but a real-time assessment told him he probably didn’t need it, and it’d be better not to draw the cops to them by firing unsuppressed rounds everywhere he went.

  So instead he spilled out of the cabin and swarmed the second driver, making a beeline for him. The man was huge but he couldn’t decide between reaching for his piece or throwing a punch, and he got caught in that unfortunate no-man’s-land of indecision, which squandered his chances of achieving anything. Slater dropped a shoulder down to finish the charge and visualised running straight through the guy. It was the same technique as throwing a proper strike — punch through the target instead of just trying to hit it.

  Impact.

  Shoulder to chest.

  Even though he outweighed Slater, the second driver flew back much like the first. He collapsed against the side of his van, more than two hundred pounds slamming into the flexible panel, sending a colossal boom into the air. It was the first startling noise of the whole confrontation, and Slater took advantage of the urgency it’d create. He stomped on the driver as he spilled to the asphalt, ensuring he was out of the equation, then came to a halt right in front of the side door.

  It slid open.

  Slater grabbed the guy who’d pushed it along its tracks and hauled him out of the darkness. Slammed him down on the road in a makeshift judo throw and elbowed him square in the face, shattering his delicate nose. The guy’s head bounced off the hard surface of the road and he lay still. Slater wheeled back to see if anyone else came charging out of the van, but there was nothing.

  Then the opposite van’s door slid open, too. He heard it grinding on its tracks over his shoulder.

  Slater wasn’t about to get himself killed over some idealistic notion that he shouldn’t use a gun. He pulled his Glock and spun and fired a round into the silhouette he saw spewing forth from the van. He caught the guy in the chest just as he was lunging out of the dark space. The backup enforcer had a fearsome MP5 submachine gun in his hands, but it fell from his grip as his momentum carried him out the door and he splayed across the road face-first.