by Matt Rogers
Blood spread in a black pool beneath him, ebbing from the chest wound.
The driver he’d hit with the door was just getting to his feet, on wobbly legs. Slater figured there wasn’t much difference between one shot and several, and he’d already popped that particular cherry, so he shot the first driver in the head. He turned and did the same to the second, then put one through the third guy’s skull, just as he was moaning from his broken nose.
He tapped into his fast-twitch muscle fibres and got all four bodies back in the bowels of the vans in record time. He slid the doors closed on the corpses, considered the bloodstains on the road, and gave a fatalistic shrug. He looked all around. They were at the tip of Winthrop, at the start of the Parkway, with Short Beach Creek to the west and the North Atlantic to the east.
A freezing wind whipped off the churning ocean and blew ragged gusts across the road, and the closest houses were a few hundred yards south on Revere Street. The shadows were longer and the night was broader, all-encompassing.
Maybe they’d get away with it.
He ducked into each van’s cabin and killed their engines with a twist of each set of keys in the ignitions. He bundled the two sets of keys together and threw them over the lip of the parkway, then returned to his original van.
He slipped into the driver’s seat just as Alexis was clambering out of the footwell. She’d frozen as his massive silhouette rounded the door, fearing the worst, but when she saw it was him she let the air burst forth from her lungs.
A mighty exhale, crammed full of relief.
Tyrell sat up, moving to the middle seat, and peered out the windshield with a confused squint. ‘You killed those guys, huh?’
Slater didn’t answer.
Tyrell asked, ‘Where’d you put them?’
Slater threw the van into gear and squeezed through the gap, then gunned it north up the parkway into Beachmont.
Tyrell said, ‘That’s like … that’s gotta be … damn, man, how many people you killed tonight?’
Alexis said, ‘Tyrell.’
He looked over.
She put an arm around him, gripped his opposite shoulder. ‘Let’s just not talk for a little while.’
He didn’t really get it, but he complied.
Slater gripped the top of the wheel tight, trying to flex the tension out of his body, feeling his frayed nerves.
He’d killed eight men tonight, six the day before.
Something told him it was only the beginning.
44
Rebecca hated sleeping alone.
She lay wide awake as the clock glowed 4:58a.m. beside her, and as the twenty-eighth time she rolled over got her no closer to drifting off she gave up entirely and swung out of bed. Trying not to think about where Myles might be, she dressed and shoved a beanie over her dishevelled hair and set out for an hour’s walk around Mattapan, hoping that exercising so soon after the gruelling day shift would exhaust her enough to drift off by seven and be up by midday.
She got back just before six, her feet swollen and aching, her calves throbbing, her cheeks raw from the cold.
Myles’ car was in its regular spot, overshadowed by the dingy walk-up in the predawn light.
She was almost grateful. She didn’t realise it was the last time she’d be happy for a while. There was something close to a spring in her step as she took the first few steps up toward their little place. No matter what had made him leave, he’d come home. It was all salvageable. There was hope. Then her phone buzzed with a message from Jane, one of her coworkers, and unfortunately she checked it before she walked through her front door. It was a decent-sized paragraph, and she only skimmed it, but it changed everything.
‘I’ve gotta rant. Promise me you won’t tell anyone about this. Ok? Good. You’ll never guess what the fuck happened on night shift. Some cop snuck into the ward. Got caught in one of the rooms by that blond woman’s husband. You know the big guy we were gossiping about? With the eyes? Anyway, I think he threw this cop into a wall or something when he caught him. The cop ran before I worked out what was happening but this other guy made me swear to secrecy. Idk what to do. Still processing this shit. Do I just keep it quiet? Tell me what u think. I’m close to losing it I swear to God. Thinking of taking it to cops.’
Rebecca almost dropped her phone.
But she couldn’t afford a new one, so instead she tucked it into her pocket with a shaking hand and ascended through the walk-up as fast as her legs would take her. She burst into the apartment, shouting, ‘What did you do?!’ so loud that her voice screeched like nails down a blackboard.
She didn’t even know where Myles was.
Then she turned and found him hunched over the sink, dribbling blood down the metal drain. He wasn’t making any effort to stop the blood flow. It was like he wanted to feel all the pain. He looked sickly in a way she’d never seen before. She’d seen him drunk, angry, tearful, even violent, but never like this. It was as if what little hope he had left had been sucked out of him.
But she was furious, so she repeated herself. ‘What the fuck did you do?’
He looked up from the sink, turned his body slightly to square up to her, and that was when she noticed his arm.
She dry-heaved. Brought a hand to her mouth. Fought not to throw up all over the countertop between them.
Myles said, ‘You don’t understand. You never have.’
‘Understand what?!’ she screeched. ‘Myles, you need to go to the hospital. Christ…’
He held up his broken, mangled arm. ‘I went to the hospital. This is what happened. Now you want me to go back?’
‘I know what happened,’ she hissed, clenching her teeth so hard she thought she might break one of them off. ‘I know because Jane texted me.’
Myles’ eyes turned black, soulless. ‘I thought no one knew we were together.’
‘They don’t!’ Rebecca shouted. ‘They don’t know shit, but Jane’s my friend, so when a cop sneaks into the maternity ward to interrogate a patient before being assaulted by that patient’s husband, it hits the rumour mill. She doesn’t know who you are. She’s thinking of reporting it.’
Myles’ face morphed into something grotesque. ‘She’d better not do that.’
‘Why not, Myles?’ she asked. ‘Why shouldn’t they obey the law?’
She didn’t see the plate coming. He must have already had the cabinet open, because his good hand rose into her line of sight like a whip, and the next thing she knew there was a flash of something circular and white and suddenly she lost feeling in her shoulder. The pain followed, along with the explosion of noise as the dinner plate shattered on the ground at her feet. She careened away, stumbling back into the wall, too frightened to cry.
Cowering.
He didn’t care.
‘Don’t you see?’ he said, leaning forward. ‘I did this to protect you, Rebecca. Because the people who have me by the throat are very bad people. Bad people demanding instant results. So that’s what I needed to do. If I didn’t, our corpses would be strung up by our throats in this shithole. Do you get that?’
‘You’re a cop,’ she said, her face drawn. ‘Can’t you fix this the right way?’
He laughed at that.
She cowered more, shrinking into a ball. Or at least trying to. Then her train of thought brought her to the inevitable, and she had to ask. ‘Who has you by the throat?’
‘Not your problem.’
‘Now it is.’
‘I’ve dealt with it on my own for a year now,’ Myles said. ‘What difference do you think you’re gonna make?’
‘You didn’t think about telling me about any of this?’
‘No,’ he scoffed, like it was offensive she’d even asked.
‘Fuck you, Myles.’
‘Fuck me?’ he asked. ‘You ungrateful bitch. Look what you’ve done now.’
She froze up. ‘Done now?’
It was like he’d forgotten she existed. He strode out of the kitchenette, a
cross the living room, and into the bedroom. He didn’t slam the door. He didn’t display any emotion at all, which scared her more than if he had.
Something told her to run. To go, to move, to put distance between her and the unknown.
She didn’t listen to that voice.
She should have.
‘Myles,’ she said, starting for the bedroom. ‘Let’s talk—’
She was about to follow it up with some sort of reassurance when she stepped into the bedroom doorway and nearly got her head blown off.
It took a moment to compute. There was some sort of flash and she lost her hearing and something shredded her left cheek. Lots of little somethings. She touched a hand to her face and it came away bloody. She looked down and noticed the wooden splinters all over the floor, then turned and saw the chunk taken out of the door frame, right by her head. Shock set in then, thudding into her gut so hard she almost puked, and when she turned to face Myles the gun he was holding didn’t seem real.
This couldn’t be real.
But it was, and it all happened too fast. He re-adjusted his aim and she only stared down the barrel for milliseconds before it computed and she turned and sprinted back out, away from the bedroom, away from her psychotic killer boyfriend, away from the danger. Looking back on it, she’d never know if she heard the gun go off a second time. The adrenaline response was that strong. Her heart thudded and blood roared in her ears and she was running, pumping her arms, rasping, and she crashed into the front door so hard she thought she broke it, or herself, and then she was out and taking the stairs down, four at a time, five at a time, leaping and bounding and—
She was away.
She got in her little beat-up car and gave the meek engine everything it had, and didn’t stop until she was miles away, in some neighbourhood she didn’t know.
She pulled over, put the handbrake on, slumped forward, and broke down.
It became real then.
She didn’t stop shaking for nearly thirty minutes, and when she finally pulled herself together enough to work her phone, she stared down at her list of contacts and realised she couldn’t trust any of her friends to stow her safely away.
For a moment she considered going back to him. Maybe he’d hit her, swear at her, but eventually they might be happy again.
It made her snort, that thought. When had they ever been slightly happy? Those early days were only exciting because of their novelty. That hadn’t been happiness. Some sort of fleeting satisfaction. Or not even that…
She wasn’t sure why, but she logged into her work’s online portal and pulled up the records of yesterday’s patients. She scrolled down to the new mother’s listed contacts and found the number she’d been urged to find. By whom? A higher power?
She didn’t know, but she dialled it all the same.
It rang and rang and rang.
Then it was answered by silence.
She sucked in a breath to keep her voice level, but it cracked all the same when she asked, ‘Is this Jason?’
45
The safe house was in Waltham, ten miles west of Boston, tucked into a grimy industrial zone opposite an auto body shop and a struggling welding business close to insolvency.
In the early hours of the morning, the street was a grey, alien mass of misshapen metal buildings and predawn murk.
So cold. So unwelcoming.
At least it suited Dwayne’s mood.
He parked the shitty backup car out front of his safe house and stormed inside, huge shoulders hunched against the cold. He stuck his head through the door of the warehouse space that served as his heroin mill, but it was hard to figure out whether his men were only making themselves look busy. He didn’t have the energy to follow it up, so he retreated to the small office he kept in a dingy back room. There were more important things to worry about than the productivity of his crew.
Namely, the fact that he might not have much of a crew anymore.
He went through the same ritual he’d spent half the night carrying out. He called all eight numbers, one after the other. Each went to voicemail, like a melancholic domino effect as each electronic beep sounded, one by one. Dwayne considered himself a big shot in Boston, but even professional criminals have their limits. He didn’t command an army. He had eight reliable killers, men he’d sent to enforce his demands dozens of times each in the past, and now they were radio silent. He’d considered himself paranoid, sending eight men in for that stupid brat and his new friend. But he’d known the crime scenes around his brothers were grisly, so he hadn’t taken any shortcuts.
Now he felt uncomfortably isolated, like a flashing beacon in the middle of an exposed island.
There was no ring of security anymore.
All eight had to be dead. There was no way they’d ignore his calls otherwise. They knew if they let him go to voicemail, they were as good as dead anyway, so this mystery man, Tyrell’s knight in shining armour, must have taken care of them.
But all eight?
Who was this motherfucker?
Dwayne stood up, aimed at an invisible target in the centre of the cheap plaster wall, and punched a hole through it.
Punching walls never goes as smoothly as it does in movies, but that was the point. He wanted to hurt. When he wrenched his hand out of the broken plasterboard, his knuckles were coated in blood. The crimson dripped off the webbing between his fingers, spilling on the carpet. He liked that. Numbness had set in, a certain fatigue, a shocked disbelief. This woke him up. If he thought about it long enough he would realise his sanity was slipping, but he didn’t focus on that. It didn’t really matter what happened to him in the long run. All he cared about was sweet, beautiful, violent revenge.
Punching through the wall had helped him make a decision.
He called a number. It rang for a long time, which was to be expected at five-thirty in the morning, but eventually it was answered.
It was always answered, no matter the hour.
There was too much money at stake for anything else.
Dwayne had used the number twice before in his life, both times to go to war in the underworld. He had those eight enforcers on his payroll, but there were independent contractors out there, men who were a cut above anything he could afford for a full-time wage. He liked mercenaries of their calibre, especially since they were for one-and-done jobs. They were grossly expensive, but it was only a single hit, without the slow squeeze of running costs.
The voice on the other end of the line said, ‘I wasn’t expecting this.’
Dwayne growled, ‘Yeah.’ Only a single syllable, but he slurred it all the same. He probably shouldn’t have slammed those nerve-soothing vodka shots before he got behind the wheel. They hadn’t kicked in until he was alone in this cramped space.
‘There’s no tension right now,’ the voice said. ‘At least, not according to our sources. Are we wrong?’
‘I’m not hiring you to hit the usual competition.’
A pause. ‘We’re not cowboys, Dwayne.’
‘Name your price.’
‘We can’t do that. You’d go bankrupt.’
‘Try me.’
‘$100k per man. That’s our fee for atypical business. And that encompasses pretty much anything. You name it. Domestic terrorism, even. We’ll shoot up a mall, make it look like it was—’
Dwayne growled, ‘Ten.’
‘Ten thousand?’ the voice asked, flabbergasted. ‘Oh, Dwayne. You’re losing your edge. Undercut the named price by ninety percent and expect us to bite?’
‘No,’ Dwayne said. ‘The price is fine. I want ten men, and I want them for as long as it takes to clean up my personal business. I can have a million in cash at your doorstep before the sun comes up.’
‘Where are you getting that sort of money?’
‘I move more heroin than you think. Than anyone thinks.’
A long pause. ‘You shouldn’t have told me that, Dwayne.’
‘No shit. I kept it a secret f
or a reason. But I need a personal matter cleared up now, so I’m trusting you. You can take me, if you want, cut me up, make me spill the beans. You’d probably clear a few million in cash by the time you were done torturing me and looting my mills. If you can do that and sleep at night, go for your life. I’m at my wits’ end. But I think you’re a man who lives by a code. I think you’ll be satisfied that I’m agreeing to your price, and you’ll honour our agreement. Am I right?’
‘What’s the personal matter?’
‘That’s between your men and I.’
‘Must be serious to be worth seven figures.’
‘I’ll make the money back.’
‘But you won’t if you don’t snuff this problem out?’
‘I have no idea,’ Dwayne admitted. ‘The guy’s a fucking enigma. I need to be sure he’s out of the picture.’
‘“Guy”?’ the voice said incredulously. ‘You want ten of my men for one of your enemies?’
‘Yes.’
Dwayne couldn’t be bothered explaining. A splitting headache was compressing his brain, drilling behind his eyeballs. He just wanted this over with. And if he let slip that all eight of his enforcers had vanished into thin air, then the guy on the other end of the line might change his mind about torturing him. It’d be easier pickings with no security cordon.
The voice said, ‘Okay. It’s done. Have one of your workers bring me the cash.’
‘On it.’
‘I’ll call back when my boys are ready.’
The line died.
Dwayne gripped the phone tight, stared through the ragged hole in the wall beside the desk, letting his gaze blur over in the darkness.
He stared into space like that for a long while.
46