I glanced up, stopping mid-chew. Charlie. Fuck.
He smiled the widest smile I’d ever seen on his face. Then he chuckled. “Well, well, well. Hello, princess.”
I was suddenly freezing, my wet shirt raising goosebumps all down the back of me. Then my cell phone started ringing, making me jump.
Charlie smiled again. “You gonna get that?”
I stared at him, each ring getting louder as my pulse quickened. I didn’t know what to do. I couldn’t very well attack him. Even if it wasn’t in broad daylight, how could I kill Frank’s father figure? But Frank would understand if I was feeling threatened. And I was definitely feeling threatened. Something was irrevocably wrong. This was the bad feeling he talked about. And I had my hands full.
I took a step back, not wanting to appear afraid but not wanting to stay close to him either. My phone stopped ringing, a brief silence before starting again with a vengeance. I wanted to answer it. I wanted the reassurance of Frank’s voice. But I knew what he’d say. And it was too late for a warning. I’d seriously fucked up. I was far enough from the café to disappear unnoticed, like the little girl in the church parking lot.
Charlie didn’t carry a gun. Frank had told me that. His hands were too arthritic. It would hurt him to fire even the lightest pistol. He was intimidating, his ice blue eyes as vicious as a shark’s, but he wasn’t dangerous. Not by himself.
I dropped my food to leave a trail like Hansel and Gretel. This café was one of three places to buy coffee within walking distance of our hotel. One in three chances Frank was coming to me right now. I kept my eyes on Charlie, the coffee cup shaking in my hand. I squeezed it slightly, popping off the lid. A little scalding never killed anyone, and it would buy me some time. Frank would just have to fess up to fucking me, and we’d deal with whatever consequences arose.
He glanced down as the lid fell haphazardly to the sidewalk, the grin never leaving his face.
My phone began another set of desperate rings. Then I felt it. Someone was behind me. Someone who quite possibly did carry a gun. Someone whose shadow concealed the daylight as he approached, eclipsing me in darkness.
I splashed my cup into Charlie’s face and ran toward him, grabbing my gun from the back of my pants and spinning around only to have it effortlessly slapped from my hand by a man built like a brick wall. I scoffed as my gun clattered to the ground. That wasn’t supposed to happen.
“Cute,” he said. “Got anything else?” He had a heavy cockney accent, and sounded the way Frank made all the villains in Dickens’ novels sound when he read aloud to me.
This would be the perfect moment to hit rewind, to save some of the boiling coffee to melt his face off, but then I’d have to rewind further and not order coffee in the first place so I could say, “Yeah, how ‘bout a cuppa tea?” Instead I shook my head. “No, that was it.”
He laughed and looked towards Charlie, as if to remark on his pathetic excuse for an opponent. I aimed for his diaphragm, not particularly caring whether I sliced my hand off with my knife in the process. The blade came in contact with something soft, just as something hard came in contact with my face.
I heard him above me before I realized I was down, whining to Charlie that “the little fucker stabbed me.” The best kept secret between me and Frank was that his refusal to go easy on me had nevertheless always contained a strictly no-closed fist policy. If the embodiment of evil Bill Sikes from Oliver Twist hadn’t used his fist, he’d found something bigger. And metal plated. I was already having trouble opening my eye when I saw the sole of his boot coming at me a million miles an hour.
The darkness tasted like a blueberry Danish. I was all for a change of scenery, especially considering present company, but having my head kicked clear back to the café wasn’t what I’d had in mind. My ears were ringing so loud it momentarily drowned out the desperate shrieking of my cell phone, and for just a moment I thought the danger was over. I blinked a few times, my eyes surprisingly already open, and found myself face down in a pile of pastry crumbs. My gun was right beside my breakfast, inches from my fingers and dappled with blood. It could’ve been twenty feet away. I couldn’t figure out how to move.
“That wasn’t very nice,” he said, and then his boot made a return appearance, doing something even less nice and kicking my gun toward Charlie.
“Sorry, luv,” I said. Like many of the badly timed sarcastic remarks of my past, this one lost its weight as blood bubbled over my lips. “Fuck,” I added for good measure.
“Listen to that language,” he laughed. “You kiss my brother with that mouth?”
Fuck was right. I closed my eyes. I knew it! Soap operas were never wrong!
“Frankie isn’t queer,” Charlie said. “He’s just…spiteful. I told him to—”
“Frenchies are all fucking queer. Isn’t that right, luv?”
There must’ve been a proper way for outing your fiancé to his long lost psycho brother and his not-long-enough-lost psycho father figure, but short of drooling on my chin I was lost myself as to what it might’ve been. “Why don’t we go ask him?”
“Now there’s an idea. Let’s go ask him. What do you say, Charlie?”
“I’ve got a better idea, Henry. You want a family reunion, you kill this fucking kid like your brother should’ve done two years ago. And bury him on hallowed ground so he doesn’t come back.”
Just as I was starting to get back in touch with my motor functions, ready and willing to reach my gun that was no longer there, Henry grabbed my hair and pulled me upright, clamping his forearm over my throat like a vice and dragging me across the pavement.
My lungs burned as I expended all my remaining oxygen on struggling, trying to pry his huge arm away, elbow him, grab his eyes, kick his knees out and get my skull to connect with his face to break his nose. I could see Charlie in duplicate just as my vision was starting to go black, holding his blistering face, smiling like he’d just gotten a steal of a deal on something he’d wanted for a very, very long time. My phone kept ringing.
It was a step up from dead, but not by much.
My wrists were bound behind me with rough cord, my ankles tied to the legs of a tall metal chair. I was in the center of a large room. Empty walls painted slate gray. The floor was cement. My cheek ached. It had swollen enough to hinder my vision, but I could see Charlie standing against the wall, smiling with peeling lips. “Vincent, this is Henry. Henry, Vincent.”
The cockney crusader came out of nowhere, breaking my nose with the first hit, a wet crunch that brought a bright white flash of pain exploding through my entire face. The second split my eyebrow wide open, my head whipping to the side with nearly as much agony as the blow. I was trying to blink away blood when he punched me in the mouth, sending my head thrashing the other direction with more fluorescent excruciation. When the room stopped spinning I spat in one of his faces. A tooth went with it. Through all the pain, I couldn’t help but think of the damage to my poor face. Vain to the very end.
He laughed and swung again, his fist making contact with the side of my head, sending me flying sideways to the floor. My face continued the journey while the rest of me remained strapped to the chair, landing with a thwack on the cement, a starry night sky quickly consumed by blackness.
I couldn’t have been out for more than a few seconds, my body was still sliding toward my face as the rope dug deeper into my wrists, but it was enough to leave me too foggy to know which way was up. I didn’t try to pull free. It was all I could do to focus on where I was as blood pooled around my head, soaking into my hair.
I tried to think what Frank would do in this situation. But he wouldn’t be in this situation. He wouldn’t have let some maniac sneak up behind him.
Henry kicked me hard in the ribs, the impact sending the chair scraping several inches across the floor with a sound like opening a rusty metal gate. I closed my eyes, feeling acidic stomach bile try to force its way into my mouth as I coughed a spray of blood onto his shoes. I
hoped it was from my face, and not somewhere inside of me.
“Fuck!” he roared, and he grasped his bleeding side, which I assumed, and really fucking hoped, hurt like hell when he’d kicked me. It was hard to tell with all the extra padding he was carrying, but the wound looked serious. Vincent Moreaux strikes again.
“Quit your griping. That faggot over there got stabbed worse than you and he walked a mile in a blizzard,” Charlie said.
It seemed weird that Charlie was bragging about me, who apparently needed to be buried on hallowed ground, until I realized he wasn’t bragging. He was manipulating.
“Where the fuck did he get stabbed?”
“So, you’re Frank’s brother, huh?” I asked. I could manipulate too.
He grabbed my upper arm, his fingers overlapping around my pathetic bicep, and pulled me upright. My head swung like a rag doll, rolling back front and center, my chin resting on my chest. It should’ve weighed less than usual from all the blood seeping down my face, but I could barely lift it.
There was enough of a resemblance for me to believe he was Frank’s brother. Henry was tall and dark, but where Frank was handsome, Henry looked fucking psychotic. His eyes were the deep, cold, nearly black color of the deadly water in Casey’s painting. It scared me to look at him. There was nothing but evil in his expression, his mouth twisted cruelly, and scars on his face that were undoubtedly from fighting. He was several inches taller than Frank, and a hell of a lot sturdier looking, with shoulders wide enough to make his head look too small.
Henry gave a new meaning to the word creepy. Not even Charlie could accomplish the sense of wrong I got off him.
“He killed your sister,” I said, knowing that this was where it had started. Frank had been right all along.
“Did you?” Charlie laughed, looking toward him. “Well, she had it coming.”
“Did Frank have it coming?” I asked, imagining with horror what would’ve happened if Charlie had asked him to go to the funeral for emotional support.
“He isn’t going to hurt Frank,” Charlie said confidently.
“Yes I am,” Henry said. “I’m going to destroy him.”
Charlie turned to him, uncertainty flashing on his face.
“What did you do?” I asked shakily.
“Frankie’s your brother,” Charlie said, beginning what he obviously assumed would be a convincing speech of brotherly love.
Henry rolled his eyes, then punched him just as hard as he’d hit me, sending him to the floor in a heap. I’d waited a long time to see Charlie get his lights punched out, but I couldn’t enjoy it. My face throbbed with sympathy pain.
“Do you know about this?” he asked, grabbing my hair and forcing me to look at a well-handled color photocopy of a newspaper article, a picture of Frank dead center, younger than I was, his face fuller with youth, the same sad, suspicious eyes. The headline read Billionaire Leaves All to Illegitimate Son. “I’m his son!” he said, yanking my head back, shoving the paper in my face.
Pain shot through my neck, making me squeak like an effeminate mouse. I clenched my jaw, unable to right my head when he released my hair. “Someone has daddy issues,” I muttered. He smacked me in the back of the head. At least it wasn’t the face. “Tell me something, junior. Why didn’t he leave it to you?”
He gritted his teeth, breathing ferociously through his nose like a bull. And me without my red cape and sequined pantalones. “Frank didn’t even want it, the ungrateful queer! He didn’t want him!”
Jesus, this guy needed a shrink. Didn’t they have psychiatry in England? “That must have been very frustrating for you.”
He looked at me, his eyes full of pent up emotion, wide so I could see every inch of bloodshot craziness. “You’re mocking me,” he said, and he pulled out a knife.
“No,” I said hurriedly, the blade bringing an onslaught of terror. “No, I meant it. I had a brother. My parents gave him everything.”
“They didn’t love you?” he asked, soothed by my words, subdued by my empathy.
“Not as much as him,” I said, keeping my eyes on his weapon. The blade was nearly the length of his hand, with a serrated edge that could’ve sawed through bone.
“Does this scare you, darling? Where’d you get stabbed?”
“Already stabbed once, no point in being stabbed again,” I said, trying to scoot back further in the chair as he lifted my shirt with the tip of the blade, sucking in my stomach the best I could. The muscles were tight and sore from being kicked, like the gnawing pain of hunger from days without food.
“There it is,” he said, touching the knife to my scar. “Did that hurt?”
“Yes,” I whimpered. To think that knife play used to turn me on. So did being tied up, my body at the mercy of my captor, the threat of danger in my bound limbs but never my mind.
“Why didn’t they love you?” he asked, loosening his grip on the knife and letting my shirt fall back down.
“I don’t know,” I sighed, my breathing slowing from the point of hyperventilation. “Why didn’t he love you?”
“He didn’t know about me.”
“That must be Frank’s fault, too,” I mumbled, then gasped and bit my tongue. God damn my lack of inner monologue! I’d just committed suicide.
He tilted the knife toward me with a shit-eating grin on his face.
“I didn’t mean it,” I said pleadingly. There was no acting tough now. All my training amounted to nothing when I was tied to a chair. I couldn’t even flee. Begging for my life was my last resort. “I didn’t mean it.”
“You like getting buggered, do you? Does it feel good? You like penetration?”
“NO!” I screamed, the fear overwhelming me. I prayed that I’d pass out before he hurt me. I prayed that Frank would come.
He laughed. “What’s the matter? You don’t think I’m handsome?”
“No,” I said, starting to cry, trembling against my restraints.
His hands were calloused and rough as he touched my face, caressing my cheek. I didn’t want him touching me. Frank’s hands were soft. They were warm. They weren’t about to stab me.
He slipped the knife in slowly, a fraction of an unbearable inch at a time, relishing in reopening my scar as I screamed in pain, the rush of adrenaline abandoning me. Then it started to go numb, my eyelids fluttering as I was filled with warmth. Shock. He knocked the knife downward, away from the original wound. A fresh gasp of pain infiltrated the calm like a gunshot in the night.
I moaned, my head falling against his shoulder, weak from trauma. He held my head almost affectionately, then plunged it in deeper, the blade making a plinking sound as it popped through the back of my shirt, hitting the metal of the chair behind me.
It hadn’t hurt this much before. I never would’ve been able to walk to safety if it had. The only thing keeping me from slumping to the ground was the rope around my wrists.
Charlie mumbled something from the floor, drawing Henry’s attention away from me. I would’ve thanked him if this wasn’t all his fault.
Henry helped him up like he was a child who’d tripped and skinned his knee. “Call Frank,” he said, and gave Charlie a shove away from him. “Tell him I want to meet him. If he comes in armed, I’m killing you and the pretty boy.”
Charlie started dialing with his head down. There was blood racing down the side of his face. He looked defeated. And scared. “Frankie. Frankie, listen. No, listen. I made a mistake, kiddo.”
I closed my eyes. I could imagine Frank’s voice, hysterical and angry. Charlie didn’t explain much, just where we were, that I was here, that I was dying. He told him to leave his gun at home. Charlie was crying. Even with all the things he’d done to him, he really did have love for Frank.
Henry took the phone from him, droning a badly accented bonjour into the speaker. Then he approached me again. I struggled to raise my head, defiantly looking him right in the eyes.
“Say ‘ello, sweetheart,” he said, pressing the phone again
st my ear.
Frank didn’t sound scared. He sounded pissed. “Vincent?”
I whimpered his name, the tears starting to flow. I could feel it, the bad feeling Frank always spoke of, the sense of danger loud and clear, distinct in the way my premonition of dying young had never been. I was going to die. Eleven days after my eighteenth birthday. And even if Frank was able to end his brother’s life before he ended Frank’s, he still would’ve won. Henry still would’ve killed him, because Frank couldn’t live without me any more than I could live without him. We were both about to die.
“It’s okay, baby,” he said reassuringly. “Do you remember what I said before? About you causing me trouble for a very long time? Don’t be scared. I will get you out of there. We’re going to get married. We’ll have cake. We’ll get a big TV. The flat kind.”
“Okay,” I sobbed.
“I’m going to hang up the phone, but I want you to keep talking. Tell me a story, V. Talk like you’re nervous.”
I sniffled, straightening up with a renewed feeling of strength. He was coming. He was already close, on his way before he got the phone call. Frank wouldn’t have been sitting around, twiddling his thumbs and waiting for Charlie to call him. He would’ve been searching for me. And he knew all the best places.
“Your brother doesn’t look like you, Frank,” I said, fighting back tears when I heard the call disconnect. “He must look like your father. I’ve always looked like my mom. My brother looked like my dad. Henry must look like your dad too. Maybe it’s something to do with birth order. Only my parents loved him more than he deserved. I’m sure if your dad knew about Henry he’d love him more than you. He probably wouldn’t love you at all, if he knew what you do. Vocationally I mean. And for fun, really. Fathers don’t usually approve of that sort of thing. Charlie certainly doesn—”
Henry rolled his eyes and tossed the phone in Charlie’s direction. Where Charlie should have been. “You talk too fucking much. I told you to say ‘ello.”
Chance Assassin: A Story of Love, Luck, and Murder Page 30
