by Matt Rogers
The bolt snapped the moment his boot struck the wood.
Pathetic, really.
Doors in rural Afghanistan were sturdier.
He would’ve appreciated the interior decoration if he had an eye for that sort of thing. The furniture was expensive and carefully placed. A broad sofa, a polished entertainment unit, rugs smothering the carpet. It was a home, but he’d never had a true home, so to him it just seemed alien, offensive. He emptied one of the jerrycans — twenty litres of fuel — over everything in the living room. He ignored the huge kitchen on the other side of the open-plan space. No flammable surfaces. No point.
He went down the hall and chose a random door.
It led to a nursery.
He poured half the fuel from the second jerrycan over the floor, the jet powerful enough to send splashes up to fleck the sides of the bassinet. He didn’t check the bundles of bedding within the crib. He was pretty sure there was no-one home, but either way…
It wouldn’t be the first child caught in his crossfire.
He went back out into the hallway and kicked open the door opposite the nursery. The master bedroom was immaculate — bed made, a throw draped across the foot of the mattress, a tasteful rug in front of the bed frame. He poured the last ten litres from the second jerrycan on the mattress itself, shaking the dregs on the decorative pillows. Seemed fitting. He tossed the can aside, backed out of the room, retraced his steps back up the corridor, and stood at the front door surveying the scene. Forty litres of fuel. There’d be nothing left of the house.
No going back from this.
He’d crossed that bridge a long time ago. There’d been no going back from Korangal. It was a miracle he’d even made it this far.
He drew the lighter from his pocket and flicked a blue flame to life and tossed it from the entranceway to the sofa without a second thought.
He was back in the pickup and speeding away before the windows began to glow.
Slater’s house was only a couple of streets over.
29
A morose silence hung in the air as King and Slater emerged from the basement into moonlight.
The concrete space they’d emerged from lay spotless, the blood cleaned and the bodies gone. King had insisted on taking their time with the clean-up after they’d received word that Alexis had holed everyone up in their own safe house near the Charles River. With their loved ones out of the equation, they didn’t need to leave in a hurry. They’d broken into a dark and isolated commercial shopfront with a FOR LEASE sign in the window to interrogate the brothers. Better that than tarnishing the sanctity of their homes.
King said, ‘I could’ve got it out of them if we took our time.’
Slater said, ‘Is that who we are?’
No answer.
‘We were never those men. Not even when we were working. Torture is…’
He didn’t know how to put it.
King did. ‘There’s no coming back from it. A bullet is one thing. Inflicting life-altering pain is something else. I get it. But…I might’ve been capable of it. If it was to protect our families.’
‘You would’ve lost yourself in the process. That’s not a sacrifice worth making.’
‘Yeah,’ King said. ‘Probably.’ He lifted his gaze to the moon. ‘You really believe they gave us Troy?’
‘I think I do.’
‘They were toying with us. There’s no way that was real information. I think they spat out the first address that came to mind.’
‘Did you hear them? “Spice things up.” I think their relationship with whoever they’re working for is … complicated.’
‘Yeah. I picked up on that. But I don’t think that means they’d switch sides.’
‘Switch sides?’ Slater said, flabbergasted. ‘You saw what just happened.’
‘So whose side were they on?’
Slater paused for thought.
Then said, ‘No one’s. Not at the end there. They were on their own side.’
He looked at King for confirmation. He could see the man coming to the same conclusion.
King said, ‘So we chase that address?’
‘Can’t hurt. We’ll get them, one way or the other. All of them. And everyone on our side is safe. Holed up. So we can take our time.’
King rubbed his jaw, betraying his emotions. Slater could sense the hesitancy, the uncertainty.
King said, ‘Are we looking at our future? Hiding our families away, defending ourselves against anyone from the past who wants our heads on a stick.’
Slater didn’t answer immediately.
King said, ‘That’s what this is, right? You heard them. Black ops in Afghanistan. You think they were with our division?’
‘I’m not sensing that. You think they seemed like solo operatives?’
‘No. I don’t.’
‘Me neither. The way they phrased things…I think they were a wet-work crew. There’s, what, five of them? The three who went for Tyrell, and those two?’
‘Could be more.’
‘Could be.’ A pause. ‘To your question — no. I don’t think this is our future. Somehow, they got through. But I trust Alonzo to do his job, maybe more than I’ve ever trusted anyone besides you and Alexis. He’ll patch up whatever holes he missed in that digital blanket.’
‘It’s Alonzo,’ King said matter-of-factly. ‘He’s a goddamn super-genius. However they found us, I don’t think it was because of any errors Alonzo made.’
‘Then how’d they find us?’
King’s eyes had turned steely, focused. ‘We’ll find out. I’ll get my hands on them and find out exactly what we did to piss them off.’
‘Maybe nothing,’ Slater mused. ‘Maybe it’s for bragging rights. Remember when those hunters came after us, back in Vegas and then El Salvador? They’d been tasked to take us out, but there was more to it than that. For some of them, it was a purer pursuit. Not just work. Not just a contract. It was like … if they were in the business of death and they put our heads in their trophy cabinet, then they’d achieved mastery…’
King said, ‘It’s not that. We did something to them. Something to enrage them.’
He surveyed the empty street.
He said, ‘I just can’t figure out what.’
Slater’s phone rang. He tapped the screen and lifted it to his ear. ‘Alonzo.’
Alonzo said, ‘Get home. Now.’
Slater sensed the urgency and was on the move before Alonzo had even finished the sentence, racing for the car. King didn’t need an explanation — for years they had relied on each other’s intuition. He took off after Slater, accelerating to keep up.
On the move, Slater barked, ‘What?’
‘I’ve been monitoring chatter. Police, fire, and ambulance were called to Seafoam Avenue sixty seconds ago. There’s a house on fire. The initial call didn’t say which house specifically—’
Slater knew which house.
He pressed the receiver to his shoulder to mute what Alonzo could hear, and looked over his shoulder as he said, ‘They got to your place. Torched it.’
King didn’t even react, just ran faster, which was scarier than an emotional outburst.
Slater put the phone back to his ear. ‘What makes you suspect they’re burning mine too?’
‘Only gut instinct,’ Alonzo said. ‘Only what they’ve already done.’
Slater leapt in the car and was accelerating almost before King dumped himself in the passenger seat.
30
Ronan kicked in the front door of Slater’s house, looked around, and thought, Same deal.
It was Dutch Colonial, two-storey, with a four-car driveway out front and the same clean and orderly open-plan interior. A huge fireplace in the living room, an enormous flat-screen TV mounted to the wall, and a kitchen countertop sporting all sorts of complicated coffee-making machinery. Expensive Italian engineering. The guy was a real hobbyist.
A black-ops warrior who could take down an army with his bare h
ands was fretting over the best way to brew an espresso.
It was as pitiful as King’s docile existence, if not worse.
Ronan wielded two new jerrycans from the rear bed, each full to the brim. Forty litres of fresh fuel. He worked at a faster pace, pouring the first can over everything in the living room. Couldn’t be as lackadaisical as he’d been at the last house. Very soon the authorities would be on the scene, and whoever was responsible for digitally protecting King and Slater would be monitoring the airwaves for any mention of their address.
He was on borrowed time.
There was no use changing the game plan if it worked so well the first time. He repeated the process, dumping the first can after drenching the living room, then lugging the second can down the hall. Again, he picked a random door and toed it open with his boot.
Another kid’s bedroom.
This room belonged to a teenager, though, the boy they’d tried to snatch on Massachusetts Avenue. He’d proved to be a slippery cretin. There was a LeBron poster above the king single bed, and a framed Conor McGregor print above the desk. The desk lay sparse, cleared of its usual furnishings. The faintest perimeter of dust outlined a rectangle where a laptop used to rest. But a couple of items remained — a small journal, a stack of homework — which Tyrell must’ve deemed unnecessary to take with him when they all fled.
On a whim, Ronan crossed the room and snatched up the journal, starting flicking through it one-handed. He kept the other one wrapped around the jerrycan’s handle, veins throbbing in his forearm. Sure enough, the journal contained pages and pages of messy teenage scrawl, all vague self-improvement quotes and lines of positive reinforcement that everyone thinks makes them unique but in fact makes them all the same. There weren’t any of the insights Ronan had been hoping for. No revealing details on Will Slater, or his pretty woman.
Ronan was seconds away from throwing the journal down when a certain passage made him double-take.
In the middle of a paragraph detailing the daily improvements Tyrell had made on July 29th, the kid had written: Will told me bout the new crib on Marlborough Street today. Now he got multiple houses. A “portfolio.” Pretty cool.
Ronan said, ‘Huh,’ out loud and dropped the journal back on the desk. Marlborough. He didn’t know about that one. Hadn’t come up in the files.
He poured fuel over the journal and the desk and the mattress, splashing a trail back to the door and out into the hallway. He retraced his steps and connected the narrow river of soaked carpet to the larger puddle in the living room. Before he’d left their pad in South Roxbury he’d packed two lighters along with the four jerrycans, and now he took the other one out of his pocket and flicked it to life.
A noise made him hesitate.
His blood ran cold at the thought of Slater sneaking up behind him. The jolt of electricity through his veins was pure adrenaline, but Ronan identified the sound as the house creaking in the evening wind.
Where are you, Will? he thought. Come to save the day? Too late.
He threw the lighter on the rug in front of the sofa.
A whoosh as the oxygen was sucked from the air, flames belching into a twisting pyre that reached for the ceiling. Ronan didn’t see the beauty on display. His back was already turned, and he hustled fast out the door and down the drive as crackling emanated from behind. The house seemed to reach out for him, fiery tendrils trying to coax him back into the molten core. Like it was whispering, You don’t know what you’ve done.
Ronan knew exactly what he’d done.
Only when he made it back to the pickup did he hear the faint sirens drifting over from Seafoam Avenue.
Firefighters were on the first scene, which meant King and Slater would be en route here. Ronan thought about hanging around, shooting it out like some old western. He’d probably go down, but maybe he’d take one of them with him.
He prided himself on self-awareness, though. He accepted what he was — a raging and impulsive drunk only a couple of months removed from being completely suicidal. He wouldn’t mind staying alive now.
He said, ‘Sorry, boys,’ as he put the pickup into gear and drove away. ‘Too slow. Just too goddamn slow.’
He turned out of the street as Slater’s abode went up in an inferno.
Part II
31
Slater veered into Pleasant Street and noticed the glow.
One of the homes halfway down the street radiated orange, lighting the asphalt out front.
The angle of the street made the flames invisible until he drove closer, identifying exactly which house was alight.
His.
Really, whose else would it be?
He didn’t have an immediate reaction. King seethed beside him, and rightfully so. It was easy to compartmentalise information that was detrimental to yourself, but when it was happening to your best friend, your brother-in-arms…
Slater braked in front of his home and watched fire dance along the exterior walls. All the windows were already blown out, and upstairs was alight. There was no salvaging anything, not so much as a single sentimental possession. All gone.
Without a moment’s hesitation, he took his foot off the brake, letting the car drift on past.
The sirens were audible from nearby Seafoam Avenue, and soon they’d be all-encompassing as the authorities surrounded the second burning home in Winthrop. It would be the gossip of the small community for weeks, if not months, on end. A coordinated arson attack. That sort of thing just didn’t happen here.
Slater turned at the end of the street and found a dark patch of asphalt where he could pull over in privacy.
Killed the headlights, turned the car off, and sat there in the cold silence.
Ever the forward thinker, King managed to shut his emotions down. ‘What will an investigation lead to? Those homes aren’t listed in our names, obviously.’
‘Some shell company owns them. Alonzo made sure it was a labyrinth that no sane cop would bother diving into. They’ll take one look at the start of the paper trail and shake their heads and write it off. Some offshore real estate multi-millionaires lost an insurance property each. Big deal. It’ll fizzle out. We’re clear.’
‘They’ll question neighbours. People who’ve at least seen us around every day.’
Slater turned to stare across the dark cabin. ‘So?’
King stopped, thought about it. ‘You’re right. Even if there’s suspicion, it’ll die.’
‘All things die.’
King didn’t have anything worth retorting with. Nothing lasted forever.
Not their hopes.
Not their dreams.
Especially not their peace.
They stewed, plagued by that feeling they were in Groundhog Day, destined to do the same things over and over until the day they died.
Eventually Slater said, ‘It’s material. It’s all material. It means nothing.’
‘Each time we say that,’ King said. ‘Each time we mean it a little less. We find somewhere we enjoy, we make it ours as best we can, and it gets obliterated. Like clockwork. That place outside Vegas in Summerlin … it felt like home. We personalised it. Then the Special Activities Division shot it to pieces, forced us out. We ended up here. We even split up. Weren’t living under the same roof anymore, not clustered with a target on our backs. Didn’t matter. We got found out. Now we start over.’
‘Which we will.’ Slater shrugged. ‘All this talk is meaningless, really. What the fuck else are we going to do? Give up?’
King said nothing.
Slater said, ‘We press forward. We’ve got our families. We’ve got the basement near the Charles River. We hole up there until the heat’s off us, and we find somewhere else to live. We’re good at that by now.’
‘Yeah. We are.’
Slater sensed the reservations. ‘You had anything in that house that was irreplaceable to you? Priceless?’
‘No. It’s not about the stuff itself. It’s about the pattern.’
‘And it’s about the fact that it’s not just me anymore. It’s not just you. What if Junior was home when that happened?’
‘He wasn’t. You’d never let that happen—’
‘Only a few weeks ago I told myself — and Violetta — that I’d keep him safe. Right after we got back from California. You want to know what I said? That I’d keep the monsters at bay. And look what a fucking fantastic job I’ve done of that.’
Slater let him stew. He and King knew each other almost better than they knew themselves. Right now, words were empty. There was nothing he could say to alleviate the frustration, so he shut up and gripped the wheel, worked the leather under his callouses, using it as a makeshift stress ball.
After several minutes had passed, and the distant sound of sirens crept closer to Pleasant Avenue behind them, Slater looked up and said, ‘You good?’
King’s voice came back devoid of emotion. ‘Yeah. Let’s just get on with it. Someone needs to pay.’
Slater put the car in gear and let it roll down the street. ‘That they do.’
With his free hand he pulled his phone out and dialled Alonzo on speaker, who answered with, ‘Too late?’
‘Yeah.’ Slater left it at that. ‘I need you to do something for me.’
After hearing the news that Slater’s every material possession was gone, Alonzo was in a generous mood. ‘Anything.’
Slater fed Alonzo the address Dom had given them, the one he said would lead to Troy. It was a walk-up apartment block a touch south of Roxbury. A real bad area, rampant with crime, a veritable hotspot for most of Boston’s gang shootings. Slater said, ‘I want you to find me one of the biggest pieces-of-shit in that area. I want you to get into his emails or his encrypted messaging service or whatever the hell he uses to talk to his buddies, and I want you to spoof one of his business partners and organise a meet a few doors down from where we’re headed. Can you do that for me?’