by Matt Rogers
He kept cracking Ronan’s head off the rock until there was nothing left in his functioning eye.
Blood spurted over and over again until what was left of the word MOTHER was fully coated.
King dropped the body, then sat down underneath the only word that remained untarnished.
HELP.
He put his head in his hands and sat there, shaking.
Broken.
Totally.
Utterly.
Where’s Will? King had to tell him. Slater had to hear it straight from him, before anyone else could alert him. It had to be King.
They were brothers.
Then King saw Ronan’s SIG Sauer P365 XL pistol on the ground right beside him.
He picked it up.
Maybe it’d just be better to use it on himself.
Kill the pain.
Oh, God, he thought as the loss truly hit him. The pain.
The love of his life.
And above all his child.
His only child.
He tilted the barrel toward his face, wondering if it was better to join them.
78
Slater had covered maybe a hundred feet when his phone rang, buzzing against his thigh.
Something told him to answer it.
Something told him it meant everything.
He skidded to a halt and fished it out, read: Alonzo.
He answered. ‘Yes?’
‘It’s okay!’ Alonzo screamed at the top of his lungs. ‘It’s okay! They’re fine!’
The pure desperation in his tone sent chills through Slater. He’d never heard Alonzo sound like that. ‘What?! Who’s fine?!’
‘Alexis,’ Alonzo gasped. ‘Violetta. Tyrell. The baby. It’s all okay. They’re not hurt.’
He sounded like he was trying to convince himself, like it had been so outrageously close that he couldn’t believe it happened.
In the dark, literally and metaphorically, Slater’s mind stewed. ‘Ronan blew the bomb?’
‘He tried. So did Arnold. But I was already in Arnold’s computer. I created a worm that would only spring into action when someone tried to overwrite its files. Arnold didn’t see through it. He tried to kill it, and I latched onto him. Those are the simplest terms I can use. The reality was convoluted as hell, but I got it done. Got into his system and took control. Priority number one was killing the electronic connection to the blasting caps. Took me like half a minute to do it. Longest goddamn seconds of my life. Then I started work on getting power and cell coverage restored to Back Bay. I was only maybe fifteen seconds into that when my program spat out the notification: an attempt was made to trigger the Semtex from a location on Cape Ann. Five seconds after that, Arnold tried to do it, too. I’d already rendered his gear useless, so that wasn’t a problem either. But, fuck me, that was close.’
Slater rocked back on his heels, looked toward the sky, and muttered a silent ‘thank you’ to the stars. He pushed the receiver closer to his mouth. ‘When did Ronan try?’
‘About a minute ago.’
Slater remembered the gunshot. ‘Oh, fuck.’
‘What?’
‘King might’ve seen him do it. He might think it worked.’
‘I’ll call—’
‘No.’
Slater hung up and took off again. Soon enough, the scene of the ambush reared out of the dark. Ethan and Harris lay face-up, eyes glazed over and fixed towards the heavens. Bullets in their heads. Slater barely had time to feel anything. Past them he spotted the boulder, riddled with stray bullets from all sides, chips gouged out of the rock.
He ran around it.
King sat in a pool of his own blood, crimson flowing and dripping from his left arm, the source somewhere deep in the crook of his elbow. He was off in some faraway place in his own head, staring vacantly down the barrel of a pistol he’d tilted towards himself, its aim resting right between his eyes.
Slater kicked the gun out of his hand, but he barely reacted.
King squeezed his eyes shut, swaying on the spot. ‘Will…’
The voice of a destroyed soul.
Slater crouched down and gripped him by the shoulders and shook him, trying to get him to open his eyes.
King mumbled, ‘Will, there’s something you should know.’
‘There isn’t,’ Slater said. ‘They’re fine.’
King shook his head, still deep inside his own mind, dwelling in suffering. ‘You don’t know…’
Slater slapped him full in the face. The crack echoed off the trees, floated over the bodies that lay all around them. There was a brutalised corpse beside King, its face unrecognisable. It had to be Ronan.
King opened his eyes.
‘Fucking listen to me,’ Slater growled. ‘They’re okay. Alonzo killed the signal. The remote, it was useless. It did nothing.’
King’s eyes widened.
Slater gripped him hard on the shoulders. ‘Alonzo got there in time. They’re okay.’
King fell back into the leaves, stared up at the sky. ‘Oh my God…’
He immediately reached out and put pressure on the exit wound at his elbow.
Blood seeped through his fingers.
Slater hustled to strip the faceless corpse of its jacket so he could fashion a makeshift tourniquet out of the material. He knew why King had chosen now to address the grievous wound, instead of earlier.
Life was worth living again.
79
It took minutes for her eyes to adjust.
At first, Violetta thought the world had ended soundlessly. She wasn’t sure if it was a bomb, but the sudden explosion of brilliant white had sent her reeling back, clutching Junior tight against her chest, doing what little she could to protect him against the torrent of sensation. Then he was wailing, beating her collar bone with his fists, hurting from the brightness, too. Tyrell was shouting, startled beyond measure.
It was Alexis who first figured it out, yelled at them all to shut up.
‘The power’s back on,’ she said. ‘It’s the lights.’
The basement steadily came into focus, details and edges materialising out of the whiteness. Violetta kept blinking and, second by second, her vision adjusted. The bulbs all along the basement ceiling glowed brilliantly, in shocking contrast to the deep black. They’d been in complete darkness for the last six hours, and any light at all would have been overwhelming. In reality, it wasn’t even that bright. There were still elongated shadows, much the way there had been when they first stepped into the space.
Violetta soothed Junior with a back massage as she continuously blinked, involuntary tears streaming down her cheeks. Alexis was gaunt, her face haggard and drawn-out. She still gripped Tyrell’s hand. Neither had let go of the other, not once.
Junior deemed the discomfort over, and fell right back to sleep against Violetta’s chest. He nestled in like nothing was amiss, lost in carefree innocence. She held him close. Something told her the worst of it was over.
Progress could only mean good things.
As Alexis got up and began to pace back and forth across the empty concrete space, Violetta considered the possibility that Jason or Will might be dead. Rolled it over in her mind, wondered how she would react, what life would be like going forward, how she would cope day by day.
Then she shook herself out of it.
It was impossible.
She couldn’t fathom a world they weren’t part of.
Tyrell glanced up at the bulbs and said, ‘That’s Alonzo’s work, right?’
Alexis said, ‘No way to know for sure.’
She forced her way through the barricade of furniture and tried the door, as if restoring power had vaporised whatever substance was preventing them from opening it. It didn’t budge. She gave the handle another rattle and then kicked the centre of the door hard. The metal clanged, loud enough to startle Junior. He lifted his head up, rotated it a couple of degrees, then deemed the situation unworthy of his attention and went right back to sleep.
V
ioletta called out, ‘That’s enough.’
Junior had dealt with enough disturbances tonight.
Alexis glanced back, suddenly aware of the knock-on effect of her frustration. ‘Sorry. He’s okay?’
His tiny mouth hung open, taking steady breaths, his eyes squeezed shut. He wasn’t concerned about anything but resting.
Violetta said, ‘He’s fine.’
‘I just want out of this shithole.’
‘Won’t be long now.’
‘You know that?’
‘I will when—’ Violetta froze. ‘Power.’
Alexis realised it, too. They’d been so preoccupied with the return of the lights that they’d overlooked the most important thing. She ran to the closest powerpoint and plugged her phone in. With the battery completely dead, there was a painful interim where the screen displayed nothing but an empty battery symbol with a lightning rod over the centre. It only lasted a couple of minutes, but the basement distorted time, lengthening seconds into minutes, minutes into hours. When her screensaver — Tyrell and Slater, arms over each other’s shoulders — fired to life, she swiped the screen with a shaking finger and found Will’s number in her list of recent calls, even before the signal reappeared in the top corner.
‘There’s coverage,’ she breathed out.
She was far detached from civilian life; she hadn’t the slightest impulse to dial 911. It had taken her a while to shake that built-in tendency, and now it was gone for good.
Slater picked up.
She smiled before he even said anything, before she could fear that she’d jinxed it. A sinister hunch told her someone else might have his phone, having stripped it off his body, so when his voice came through the line, her eyes welled with relieved tears.
‘We’re coming,’ he said. ‘Don’t worry. I’ve got to patch King up, but we’re coming.’
She slid down the wall and squeezed her eyes shut.
A sob escaped her lips.
80
The highway took them back over the water and into the woods of Mt. Ann Park, the trees along the roadside swallowing them.
It was thirty-five miles back to inner city Boston. The GPS told them forty-five minutes.
King hoped for less than thirty. He gripped the wheel one-handed, his left arm bound egregiously tight at the elbow with gauze and slung to his chest. Back by the boulder, after answering Alexis’ call, Slater had fished a field medkit out of Niccolò’s bag and packed gauze deep into the wound, held tight for three minutes the way he’d been taught a couple of decades earlier, then applied a pressure dressing and pinned the arm in place with a makeshift sling. A couple of Oxys that Niccolò probably lifted straight from the evidence room dulled the pain, and they hiked straight back to the car, the bullet wound no longer an immediate threat. It’d need medical attention eventually, but that could wait a couple of hours.
Slater sat beside him, the rest of the seats empty.
Eight men converged in Dogtown.
Two walked out.
King said, ‘What we left back there … it’s bad.’
‘No shit.’
‘It’s really bad.’
One leg up on the dashboard, fist under his chin, Slater touched his upper row of teeth to his knuckles, a tic he fell back on whenever he dove into his thoughts. ‘What do you want me to say?’
‘Obviously we’re going straight to the safe house. I get it. But we can’t hang around and count our blessings. If we leave that scene to be discovered in a few hours, every cop in the state will be on it. An entire antinarcotics task force wiped out by two disgruntled military vets, who were, what, caught in the crossfire? A group murder-suicide, maybe? It won’t just be the headlines of the month. It’ll take years to die down. And we can’t afford the heat right now. We don’t even have beds to go home to…’
Slater said, ‘Relax.’
‘You’ve got some magic fix, I take it?’
The words came out drenched in sarcasm, but Slater ignored the rhetorical nature of the question and said, ‘Yes I do.’
King accelerated faster through the sea of evergreens and hardwoods. ‘What, you hired a clean-up crew without telling me?’
‘No. I did what we’ve been doing all evening.’
King said nothing. He was sick of the games.
Slater said, ‘I used blackmail.’
81
An hour earlier…
Newton hadn’t had a drink in twelve years.
Before he walked into the dispatch centre, he tipped up the three miniature bottles of Smirnoff vodka, one by one, and drained their contents. Only a couple of ounces of liquid each, but he knew they’d hit him like a truck. He couldn’t even remember what it felt like to be drunk. They’d sent him to AA as a junior officer after they caught him asleep at his desk, reeking of booze and the previous night’s woman. The thought made him shudder now. There’s a first time for everything: he no longer wanted to think about sex.
Imagine what you’d have done over the years if you hadn’t got sober.
He put his game face on, got out of the cruiser, and strode into the PSAP (public safety answering point). The staff at the dispatch centre knew him well. The station house he usually lorded over wasn’t far away. He stepped into a plain lobby and the female receptionist offered a tired nod of recognition. A tubby white man in his late forties was halfway across the space, takeaway coffee in hand, eyes heavy from a lack of caffeination.
Newton said, ‘Gavin.’
The man turned, careful not to spill the open-topped cappuccino. ‘Sarge? The fuck you doin’ here?’
Newton ratcheted the charisma up to eleven, jerked a finger at the dispatcher. ‘With me. Need a word.’
He led Gavin deeper into the centre, but not in the direction of the man’s cubicle, with its ergonomic gaming chair and eight computer monitors. Newton had been given the tour before, and once was enough. He only needed to relay the request.
Everything depended on making it believable.
Personifying confidence, he ushered Gavin into an empty meeting room and sat him down at one end of the long table. Newton sat on the table himself, so he could look down at the dispatcher.
Gavin adjusted his glasses, pushing them up the bridge of his nose. ‘What’s, uh, what’s this about—?’
Newton had been waiting for him to talk first. He quickly cut him off. ‘You trust me, right? We go back?’
They “went back” as far as Newton once visiting the dispatch centre for a bit of free PR. He waved for the photographer as he toured the PSAP, patted the honourable and highly-trained call-takers on their backs, and got a puff piece in the Herald for his efforts. He remembered Gavin Wade. The geeky dispatcher had been almost physically desperate to impress, quaking in his boots as he trailed around behind Newton like a dog. Gavin was a victim of the belief that rank and seniority actually meant anything. Newton had never let himself get sucked down that rabbit hole, and it had led to innumerable benefits in his life, mostly because he didn’t believe anyone above him on the hierarchy was actually better than him. People like Gavin, he realised, were the type to become celebrity super-fans, living vicariously through others — worshipping them, practically — to mask their own lack of purpose and drive.
Now it could save Newton’s life.
Gavin said, ‘Yeah, Dom. We go back.’
‘Good.’ Newton put out a hand and rested it on Gavin’s shoulder. ‘That’s really good. Listen, I’m here on business that we’ll need to keep on the down-low for the time being. Are you following?’
Gavin nodded.
Newton would keep this pace, drip-feeding the dispatcher so he didn’t lose him with too much in one go. ‘My antinarcotics boys are onto something. Trust me when I tell you it’s big. I’m talking Štefan Čapkovič big.’
Gavin’s eyes widened. The Slovakian gangster was well-known by the authorities, largely because everyone knew what he was doing but no one had the means of proving it. He was as elusive as he wa
s violent. Newton obviously hadn’t told anyone about his task force catching Čapkovič red-handed in Roxbury, letting him go for a seven-figure payday. That wouldn’t go down so well, not even amongst the cops Newton knew were dirty. There were lines you didn’t cross.
Gavin lowered his voice to a whisper. ‘You’ve found him?’
‘Not him. Someone along the lines of Čapkovič. Same level of power and influence. If we pull it off, it’ll be the bust of the century. But … there’s something I need.’
Gavin seemed reluctant to speak, but he pressed forward anyway. ‘I’ve, uh … heard rumours. About your task force. Some cowboy stuff. I won’t go into detail. It’s probably bullshit.’
‘This is cowboy stuff,’ Newton said, refusing to look away. ‘I’d never bullshit you, Gavin. I’m a direct man. I pride myself on that. To pull this off, my boys aren’t going to be able to do this the official way. A couple of them are deep undercover — I’m talking two, three months of work just to get to this point. And it all goes down tonight.’
‘Where?’
‘Dogtown. Somewhere in those few thousand acres on Cape Ann.’
‘That’s Delia’s zone.’ Each dispatcher was assigned a specific geographic area to field calls from. ‘She’s handling Cape Ann tonight.’
‘How well do you know Delia?’
‘Well enough.’
‘Gavin, there’ll probably be some emergency calls over the next couple of hours from concerned residents. Rockport isn’t far from Dogtown. People might hear some loud pops. They might think they’re gunshots.’
Gavin stared, posture slouched with uncertainty. ‘Okay.’
‘If those pops are interpreted the wrong way, Dogtown will be swarming with cops soon after they’re reported. That’s very bad for us. You catch my drift?’
Gavin swallowed. ‘Can’t you just go to the nearest station-house yourself, tell them what’s up?’
‘No,’ Newton said, ‘because that makes it real. That means my request needs to be written down, logged, acknowledged. Right?’