by C. R. Jane
I wanted to find out. No, I needed to find out.
Steve Wolf had just finished his season with Dallas. I was a Redskins fan, you kind of had to be growing up in the District, but I followed football as a whole enough to know that he’d had a shitty season. He was a Super Bowl winning quarterback, a shoe-in for the Hall of Fame, until he injured his knee. News reports had said for a while he was going to come back better than ever. But then he’d had another surgery, and everything went to shit after. I wondered if it had something to do with her. Was it the surgery that did him in, or had she fucked him up as much as she had with me?
I sat outside his house. I didn’t usually stalk professional athletes. I had hobnobbed with them at various events enough that I didn’t get starry-eyed at the sight of them. We were both masters of our respective worlds, and I once again wondered if that had been what attracted Holland to target us in the first place.
I got out of my car, a nondescript piece of shit rental because I didn’t want to attract attention with anything flashy. There was a gray Ford truck parked in the driveway. It looked brand-new. From what I’ve seen of Steve, he seemed like a Ford truck kind of guy.
At the door, I raised my hand to knock. Why was I doing this? Did I really want to see one of Holland’s lovers? Because I was sure he had to have been. You couldn’t be with Holland for five minutes without wanting to tear her clothes off. It was part of her mystique, how she got you wrapped around her finger so fast.
Or at least, that’s what I told myself.
He had the door opened before I knocked, and I realized, belatedly, he had one of those Ring doorbells. I was off my game.
“What do you want?” he asked suspiciously. He showed signs of a hangover, or at least, like he had been sleeping all day and had just decided to grace the world with his presence.
“My name’s Graham Kempner,” I told him, watching him closely to see if that rang a bell. I knew the date of the photo. I knew it was taken before her time with me. But I wasn’t sure if Holland liked to sometimes string her victims along.
There was a time after she’d left that I’d wished that she had done that with me.
There was no recognition on his face.
“I’m here to talk about Holland,” I told him, as a wide range of emotions flickered across his face. Confusion. Sadness. And then rage.
And that was about the time he punched me in the face.
Steven
A Few Months Earlier
There was a knock on the door, and my skin itched at the sound, like it always did nowadays. I was ashamed to admit there was a part of me that still held out hope that when I opened that door, it would be Holly’s face I saw. I hated that about myself. I hated that about her and what she did to me.
I walked to the door, my leg twinging a bit with each step. I knew it was partially my fault the injury hadn’t recovered all the way. I had been progressing so well with Holly, because she made me want to get better for her. I had dreamed about her sitting up in the box with my teammates’ wives and girlfriends, watching me as I led my team to another Super Bowl.
Now, when it was unlikely I would ever win the Super Bowl again, I didn’t even have my ring from the first one. I sighed and opened the door, flinching inwardly when I saw it was Graham Kempner standing there. He had a nasty bruise on his face from where I’d punched him, and a part of me felt a little bit bad about it. But just a small part. I’d never been good at sharing, so having to come face to face with someone who knew Holly intimately like I did…well, I didn’t handle it too well.
“What are you doing here?” I barked at him. He was a good-looking son of a bitch, and you could actually feel the confidence exuding from him. Holly evidently had a type. Alpha males all the way. No wonder I wasn’t playing well with him.
“Just seeing if you’re in the mood to talk more today than yesterday.” He smirked at me. “Or maybe I just needed my right eye to match my left one.”
I rolled my eyes and rubbed my face with my hand, just wanting this all to go away. How was I supposed to get over her when it was in my face twenty-four-seven? I had almost been able to get through a night without dreaming about her. And then he came along, and last night, she was all I thought about once again.
Maybe it was just best to get it over with. I opened my door reluctantly and gestured for him to come inside. He walked in and glanced around, curiosity written all over his face. “Nice place you got here,” he said to me.
“Not enough to get Holly to move in with me,” I told him bitterly. “Evidently, you must have nicer digs than I do.”
His face closed off at that statement. I had hit a nerve. I couldn’t help but wonder what it would’ve been like to live with her. Had she ever slipped, giving clues as to who she really was? It must have been hard to keep a false identity up all the time. I wondered why Graham was the one she took that step with.
I shook my head, wondering why I even cared about any of this shit. “Okay, you have ten minutes of my time. The clock starts now.”
“I think I can find her,” he said to me. “It’s the same way that I found out about you, a software program. It’s able to run through cameras and everything on the internet to locate certain faces.”
“She let you take a picture of her?” I asked, well aware of the jealousy rippling through my question. After she left, all I wanted was to be able to see her face, as pathetic as that was. She’d always had an excuse why I couldn’t take her picture when we were together.
Graham was awkward for a second. “I took it when she was sleeping,” he finally explained. Now, I just felt like an idiot for not doing that myself.
I closed my eyes and gave a sigh of frustration. “Okay, so you have this program. And that’s how you found me?” I asked.
“Evidently, at least some journalists were interested in how your recovery was going. They captured a picture of you at some point coming out of a restaurant with Holland, and that’s how I found you.”
“But you haven’t found her yet?” I asked, hating how much I cared what the answer to that question was.
He stared at me with determination. “Not yet, but I will. There’s a few more of us out there, I’m sure. I’d like to talk to some of her victims, see if they’re interested in finding her, too.”
Victim. I hated that word, and I knew Graham probably did as well. Guys like us never wanted to feel like “victims.”
It didn’t seem like the right word for what had happened.
I certainly hadn’t felt like a victim when it was happening. I felt like the world’s luckiest guy, like I’d won the lottery and gotten everything I ever wanted.
Graham seemed to be watching me closely. “I hate her, too, you know,” he told me.
I laughed bitterly. “I’m not sure that it’s all just hate.”
Incredulity filled his expression.
I sighed again and stood up, my leg whining with the effort. A reminder that I needed to get this over with so I could do my exercises for the day. I’d gotten a new physical therapist. A mousy looking older woman that was as safe as Holly was dangerous. She wasn’t nearly as good as Holly had been, but at least I didn’t have to worry about being robbed.
“I want to show you something,” I told him. I walked out the front door, and he followed me. After locking the door, I headed to my car. The car that I resisted trading in every single day. It felt like Holly had won if I started driving a Ford truck. Graham got in the car, and we drove silently, too lost in our own thoughts to exchange anything worthwhile. My stomach started to hurt as we got closer to our destination. The hurt was made up of a mixture of sadness and longing, but anger as well. They were all culprits for the sick feeling that I carried with me daily.
We got there, and I got out of the car and gazed out the overlook to the land below. I could feel Graham’s curiosity as he walked up behind me.
“What’s this?” he asked. “Gonna throw me over the edge of the cliff?” he continue
d dryly.
I sent him a look that said I was thinking about it. I gestured to the land below us. “This is why I don’t want to find Holly. I bought this land for her. I created a whole dream in my mind where we built a house right here, had a bunch of kids, and lived happily ever after. I’d sold myself on this idea, built all the years ahead of me with that goal in mind. And she traded it away for a fucking ring. A ring that had no meaning to her and really doesn’t have much meaning to me nowadays. There’s nothing good that can come from going after a broken dream, Graham. Finding her isn’t going to land me the white picket fence and two point five kids. Finding her will solidify that I haven’t moved on. That I’m still stuck with these acres and acres of broken dreams that I can’t seem to put up for sale.” I glanced over at him, and he stared out at the land. His eyes filled with the same longing that had to be written in mine. Probably lost in the thoughts of the future I’d once dreamed
After a few more minutes, where we both attempted to quell the demons she’d created in both of us, we got in the car and drove back to my place. We had just pulled into the driveway when Graham burst.
“You really don’t want to make her pay? That land and that dream should be the reason you want to find her. She shouldn’t be allowed to just get away with something as big as what that land represents,” he said, his face reddening. I said nothing, just got out of the car and started walking to my house.
“I’m not done talking to you,” he yelled after me.
I didn’t give him a second glance, there was nothing good for me back there.
Chapter 3
Holly
Now
My uncle’s house appeared so ordinary from the outside. The utter normalcy had struck me the first time I came here and continued to bug me now. It was so… middle class. Nothing about it would call attention, nothing would say to anyone driving by that a kingpin of crime lived on the inside. Nothing to tell the IRS that the income on his tax statements was very, very false.
Mafia movies got that much right. Pay in cash, and it was very hard to track what a person was doing. Not that my uncle was in the mafia. He possessed no heritage dating back to Sicily that I knew of. Although a lot of organized crime media used that term like it meant anyone running a crime syndicate was Italian, that wasn’t at all correct. I sighed. I really, really needed to get my head back in order.
The red brick, three thousand square foot home fit right in on the street with all the other homes presumably built around the same time, the nineteen eighties. Just old enough that they were all starting to need work done on them to keep them up. The last time I’d been here, before I was sent after The Chef, after I’d had my nervous breakdown over Jamie, I’d sat quietly in the kitchen, sipping iced tea while workmen walked through the house replacing old outlets that had started to malfunction. It was such a normal occurrence. It turned my stomach to think about it.
There was nothing that resembled normal that went on in that house.
It had never been lost on me that my uncle’s favorite targets were the people who displayed wealth in some way or another. It was as though he didn’t like anything that might be considered showing off.
Of course, I wouldn’t have labeled the four men in the car with me as show offs.
“I thought you were from Louisiana.” Steven spoke for the first time since we’d gotten in the car, since I’d left two dead bodies in The Chef’s apartment. If they hadn’t been in shock, I probably wouldn’t have been able to get them in the car with me. Eight hours, and they’d hardly said a word. It was like they’d become my hostages, and that was the last thing I wanted. If I could have thought of where to stash them where they wouldn’t have been hurt, I’d have done so.
I swallowed. “I was born in Virginia, about forty-five minutes from Washington, D.C.” One of my first memories was the Lincoln Memorial, but that was neither here nor there at the moment. “When my parents were killed, I went to live with my gran in Louisiana. I was ten. I spent five years with her before she brought me here.” We were an hour outside of Raleigh, North Carolina. Just about as beautiful as this country could be, with the fall foliage on full display. Any second, it would get just cold enough that those pretty leaves would hit the ground, exposing the barren, old branches beneath.
“One year, back in Virginia, we had an unexpected snow storm right before Halloween. The trees still had all their sap in them. The ground was soft from rain and the sap plus the snow made them too heavy. Old trees, I mean ones that had been around for hundreds of years, they fell. Branches breaking. All of it. Just too much weight. The cracking noise… I’ve never heard anything like it before or after. These old, going-to-last-forever, huge, beautiful trees cracked in half, brought down by the weight of snow and their very own sap.”
Graham, who sat up front with me, shifted in his seat. “What the hell are you talking about?”
I sighed. I’d been in my own head. Of course, they wouldn’t have read my unspoken thoughts. “Doesn’t matter. I moved to Louisiana after that, a couple months later. Louisiana feels like home. Not Virginia. Not here.”
I held out my key to Charlie. It just made sense to me that he would drive. Jamie was lost in his head, withdrawn. Steven was too pissed at me right now to be trusted with a car, and Graham would want to direct from the driver’s seat.
“That is where my uncle lives. I may not be coming back out once I go in.”
Jamie shook his head, a lot of movement from him. He’d been so utterly still, I wondered if he was awake. Not even the usual twitch of his fingertips. “Then why are you going in at all?”
They didn’t understand. Why would they? All they knew was that I’d killed two people that morning. My first kills ever, actually. I was a con-artist. A thief. A liar. A really bad person. But before today, I’d never been a killer. Cross that right off the fucking list. “To keep you all alive. To convince him, somehow, that you will never bother him again. That you’ve all made a terrible mistake that you’ve learned from and won’t repeat. That I am responsible for the death of his men. Not you. And,” I swallowed, “because he owns me.”
“People don’t own other people, Holland. There are laws about that.” Graham stared out the window and not at me.
I sighed. “Don’t be so naive, Graham. People own other people—metaphorically and literally—all the time. And my uncle owns the police department here. Find one that he doesn’t have operatives on the inside, and he’ll quickly get someone there.” I sighed. This wasn’t important right now. They hadn’t believed me that we were being watched. They did now. That was a step in the right direction.
Before I got out of the car, there were things to say. “If it were me, I would go to the local motel. The one here in town. And stay put for a few weeks. Put your heads down. Graham, Steven, stay out of sight. You’re recognizable. Jamie you would be in New York, London, places like that, probably not here. I’d stay very close. Why?” I answered their unasked question. “Because he won’t be looking for you here, and hopefully by then, I can turn his attention elsewhere. Convince him this was my fault, not yours.”
“Do you think that’s possible?” Charlie spoke in a gentle voice. I didn’t believe that meant he’d softened. By contrast, I could feel the anger coming off him in waves as it smacked into my conscience.
“We need to hope.” I leaned against the door for a long second. “It was just stuff, guys. You could have left it alone. You didn’t have to do this.”
Jamie shot forward in his seat even as Steven grabbed his arm. “It was never just stuff, Holland. It was never about that.”
I knew that was true. But denial wasn’t just a river in Egypt. Yeah… my gran had some dumb jokes, and I was great at using them, even in my own head.
I wasn’t supposed to ring the doorbell when I came home. That had been the rule since the first time Gran brought me back here after I’d run away the first time. People didn’t ring the doorbell in their own home. My uncle in
sisted to this day that was how I was supposed to think of this place. We were family, after all. If the other girls he wasn’t related to could think of it as home, why couldn’t I? He’d repeated the idiotic assumption over and over.
He was my father’s brother, although I’d only met the man once in my life before Gran brought me here. My father and his brother had been long estranged before my parents’ deaths. The reasons for which no one ever explained to me. Not to this day. My father couldn’t have been more different than his family if he tried. Upstanding. Straight-laced. He’d never have run a network of thieves set out to destroy people who ticked him off.
I tried the handle, and of course, it turned. It would be a really unlucky burglar who decided to rob my uncle. Talk about what a terrible accident that would be. Run of the mill robber, and they step into the middle-class, falling-apart home of the biggest crime syndicate in the United States. So well hidden, so camouflaged, that not even the FBI knew of its existence. That stupid robber would wish he’d never been born.
I stepped through the door. With one last peek over my shoulder, I took comfort from the fact the car hadn’t moved. I really hoped they took my advice.
Steven. Graham. Charlie. Jamie. I’d never thought to see any of them again, and yet, there they were. I’d been in the car with them, and I’d never said it… not once. I’d never told them I was sorry, how it was funny they’d joined up together since they were the four who had almost been my undoing. How I’d never really recovered from each of them.
I never said the words, and I never would. I wasn’t sorry. This was my life. I had to live it the way I had to live it. No one had asked me if I wanted any of this. The people who should have protected me from it absolutely hadn’t, and fuck the world, I was going to survive. End of story.
