Monsters

by Matt Rogers

  ‘Frankie means well,’ Kit said, eyes still on the road. ‘But he’s an idiot. He trusts too fast. He did it with us, too, back when we first started, and we could’ve taken advantage of it. But we liked the old fool. And he had the unique ability to fall upwards. He found jobs by just stumbling into them. So we stuck around. We still will, after this. We’ll get him back on board. He’s easily convinced.’

  Inwardly, Slater was furious at himself. He’d bought their truce shtick, so they were far better actors than he thought.

  Bobby said, ‘If I shoot you here it’ll be obvious we moved your body. So we gotta do it on the side of the road somewhere. Frankie won’t believe you pulled a gun on us one minute after we left.’

  Slater said, ‘And I need to die because…?’

  Kit said, ‘We’ve stuck with Frankie through thick and thin. But, like I said, he’s a fool. So we take jobs where we can get them. Including with other crews. Frankie’s too oblivious to know.’

  Slater’s insides twisted.

  Bobby leant forward and said, ‘What I want to know is where you got Pavel’s gun. That’s the other reason I haven’t pulled the trigger. We were boys with him. If I give Petr a call, I’d say he’ll tell us that Pavel hasn’t been seen in a while.’

  ‘Not since this morning,’ Slater said. ‘I took Pavel’s gun off his body.’

  Admitting his guilt shocked them. They’d probably expected to have to torture it out of him, inflict pain until he confessed. Telling them exactly what had happened made them hesitate, which is what he wanted.

  It gave him the opportunity to re-enact a story King had told him about, a tale that happened many years ago. King had been on an op in Egypt, stuck in precisely the same situation — in the passenger seat with a hostile directly behind him, the gun at the back of his neck positioned the same way. He’d escaped with the help of a unique sequence.

  If Slater spent any more time mustering the courage, he wouldn’t go through with it.

  So he just did it.

  Jerked forward and down, putting his own head in his lap. Bobby fired an instinctive shot in response but the gun was stuck in the small gap below the headrest, and it blasted through the windshield instead of blasting through the back of Slater’s skull. Now hunched over, Slater yanked the release lever — a bar below the front of the seat — upwards, freeing the seat to slide along its tracks. He threw his weight into the seat back, sending it flying backwards. The headrest smashed Bobby in the face, who’d been leaning forward to aim the gun, and his wrist got caught in the gap he’d been aiming through. The bone snapped with a hollow crack, and before he could impulsively squeeze the trigger again Slater twisted and ripped it out of his hands, then used it to pistol-whip Kit in the face.

  Kit recoiled away from the wheel, and the old car started drifting to the right. In the midst of the carnage Slater glanced out the driver’s window and saw them arcing toward an empty commercial lot, nothing more than a barren pit of dirt that would serve as an underground garage at some future date. Excavating the dirt and smoothing it out had created sloped sides that rose sharply up to street level.

  Slater was holding the gun the wrong way round and didn’t have time to reverse his grip so he just whipped Kit in the face again with it, breaking his nose, then leant over and turned the wheel harder, helping the car roar off the road.

  Then he fell back to his side and got his door open and fell out of the car at forty miles an hour.

  He was wearing a leather jacket and jeans so it wasn’t all that important how he landed, but he took caution anyway. Tried to distribute the impact all the way down his side as he hit the asphalt, then rolled with the momentum. He completed nearly four full revolutions before he slowed enough to scramble to his feet, still holding Bobby’s gun. He was hurt badly, but in the moment he didn’t feel it.

  He righted himself just in time to see the old sedan surge over the lip of the slope. It only fell ten or so feet but that was enough to pitch the nose of the car forward slightly, so when it crashed into the hard-packed dirt on the hard point of its bumper all the windows exploded and the momentum carried. It barrel-rolled three, four times, quite like Slater had, but there was a three thousand pound weight difference between Slater and an old Ford, which equalled a whole lot more mass in the force equation.

  Neither Bobby nor Kit had been wearing seatbelts.

  Kit came out the shattered windshield frame, his body skidding in the dirt. He finished his tumble with a certain finality, a total lack of motion that revealed his fate. Bobby ended up halfway out of the overturned car, his front half sticking out the rear window frame, his arms mangled, his neck twisted the wrong way. Neither of them moved an inch after they came to rest.

  Slater exhaled.

  The night returned to stillness.

  58

  King hissed, ‘Get the fuck out of the way,’ but it was too late.

  Danny didn’t even have the chance to respond before Frankie pulled his gun, so any element of surprise was squandered.

  Both King and Frankie took a step to the left together so they could hope to fire over Danny’s shoulder, but the young man moved with them, sliding across so he was in the way again.

  Frankie said, ‘Danny, move.’

  Danny didn’t take his eyes off King. ‘Nah.’

  The night simmered.

  Frankie said, ‘He wanted Bobby and Kit out of the way before he tried anything. Now he’s gonna shoot me, then you.’

  Danny didn’t move.

  For the first time he refused to look away.

  King didn’t try to look anywhere else. He hoped he could communicate everything he wanted to say with a stare. Something passed between them, a deeper understanding. At least, he thought it did. He couldn’t be sure.

  So he vocalised it. ‘If that’s the way I wanted it to go I’d’ve pulled the trigger already.’

  Danny knew that. He didn’t acknowledge it, not even a slight nod, but he knew.

  Frankie said, ‘He’s selling you some bullshit.’

  Danny didn’t acknowledge that, either. King didn’t know who the kid believed. Frankie had his hooks in, after all. There was no denying that.

  Frankie said, ‘Who took you in? Huh?’

  King didn’t know why Frankie was so desperate to get Danny on his side. King simply needed Danny out of the way. Allegiances didn’t matter. Then it struck him in a moment of clarity. Whoever Danny picked he could just rush toward, allowing them to use him as a human shield. Neither of them would risk shooting him so they’d be forced to dive for cover, behind one of the nearby cars.

  Danny still faced King, but spoke over his shoulder to Frankie. ‘You took me in.’

  No one spoke.

  Danny addressed King now. ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘What does it look like?’

  ‘You came here for this?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘You think you’re doing the world a favour?’

  ‘Probably.’

  ‘Maybe you are.’ A pause. ‘But Frankie looks after me. You should walk away. Find someone else to help.’

  King slowly shook his head. ‘That’s not gonna happen, Danny. Helping you is a second-order consequence. I’m only here for your coach.’

  Because of Danny’s positioning between them, King had to aim the barrel directly at his head in case Frankie took a step to the right or left. On the other side, Frankie would be aiming his own gun at the back of Danny’s skull. King had to try to see through the young man in front of him, through to the monster behind.

  Like some sick hall of mirrors.

  Danny said, ‘If I go to him now, you’ll have to shoot me. There won’t be another option.’

  ‘I won’t shoot you.’

  ‘Even if I choose him?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  No answer.

  King said, ‘You think I’m lying?’

  No answer.

  King said, ‘What I told you on the mats. About a
lways being there. I meant it. I’m not taking that back just because you make a decision I don’t think is right. So if that’s what you want to do, do it.’

  Danny made his decision.

  Started walking straight at King.

  Choosing him.

  It allowed King to lean to the side and aim over his shoulder, using Danny as a human shield, just as he’d anticipated. But he’d assumed wrong before. He’d thought the choice would be the same for both he and Frankie, that they’d both be unwilling to fire through Danny.

  But when Frankie saw Danny make his choice, his face twisted into a grotesque mask.

  Still aiming at the back of Danny’s head, he pulled the trigger.

  Blood sprayed.

  Danny pitched forward and fell into King.

  59

  Slater frantically patted himself down.

  He was a solitary figure perched in shadow on the roadside.

  It had been a shade over half a minute since his escape from the car, and already the consequences were revealing themselves. He was familiar with the sensation. It was that slow, dull ache that crept its way up the body, from the toes to the fingers and everything in between. Shock wears away, adrenaline dissipates, and it hits you that what just happened was real, it wasn’t a dream, and you’re about to start feeling it. Effectively, the brain catches up to the body.

  Slater had to get in touch with King or Alexis before his brain caught all the way up and rendered him immobile.

  He didn’t think that’d happen, didn’t think he was hurt that badly, but you never know…

  A drilling headache flared to life as he finished the patdown and came up empty. His phone and wallet were nowhere to be found. It made sense given what he’d just been through, how forcefully he’d exited the car and then rolled, but the area of asphalt where he’d landed was empty, too. It must’ve happened as he forced the door open, tumbled out of the seat. He gazed across the road at the sliver of the crash scene in his field of view, most of it masked by the lip of the slope.

  He could go down there, but everything was starting to hurt, and it’d be just his luck to descend into the pit and find he could no longer walk.

  His temples flared. Pain pulsed behind his eyeballs.

  Blood ran down his forearm into his palm, from where rolling across the road had scraped skin away. He shook his hand, fingers straightened, and droplets flecked off his calloused skin.

  He needed a phone.

  Urgently.

  He started for the slope.

  His ankle twinged and gave out.

  He wasn’t sure if anything was broken but it sure felt that way. He sat down unceremoniously in a heap on the roadside, struggling not to shout a curse.

  Then he heard a noise, building from nothingness to a crescendoing roar in the space of maybe five seconds.

  Two vehicles racing toward the scene, coming from the tip of Hunters Point. Out the way of Frankie’s gym.

  Headlights flaring, engines screaming.

  Slater lurched backwards on his rear end and rolled off the side of the road into a shallow ditch, pressing his face into the weeds.

  Hoping he hadn’t been spotted.

  60

  Time stopped.

  King had a direct line of sight on Frankie for maybe a half-second, perhaps even less. Milliseconds, most likely. He could’ve fired but Danny’s limp body was rushing toward him and his instincts took over and he lowered his gun to reach out and catch the young man, stopping him from continuing to fall and slamming his head against the pavement, even though it was futile since he was already dead.

  Except he wasn’t dead.

  As King took a knee to absorb Danny’s weight and lower him into his arms, he saw the kid’s eyes were wide open, but not frozen over. Danny was in shock, not a corpse. And the source of the droplets of blood that had coated King came from a missing earlobe, loose skin that had been torn away by Frankie’s bullet.

  King registered all this and it radically shifted his priorities.

  He dropped Danny the few remaining inches to the concrete and jerked upright, gun coming back up, anticipating return fire—

  No return fire.

  Frankie had fled.

  Frankie’s car door slammed, only several feet away from where he’d been standing, and an engine spluttered to life. King fired three times through the driver’s window, throwing caution to the wind and sprinting at the stationary vehicle to get a better shot.

  He was maybe a second away from barrelling right up to the shattered pane and firing in through the window frame, pumping Frankie full of lead in his seat.

  But Frankie got his foot on the accelerator and tore away, tyres squealing on the asphalt.

  King kept firing until the clip was empty.

  Shot most of the windows out.

  Evidently none of them served as the kill shot, because the car kept accelerating, and it turned onto the street and gunned it northwest toward Bayview and, beyond, the city. There was no telling whether Frankie was hit. He was nothing but a dark silhouette pressed into the seat, hands wrenching the wheel left and right.

  When King turned around to check on Danny, the kid was sitting up, blood dripping steadily from his missing earlobe. ‘Did you hit him?’

  King shook his head. ‘Don’t think so. Hurry up and put pressure on that.’

  Danny lifted a palm to his ear and pressed hard and moaned in pain. When he pulled himself together he mumbled, ‘Guess I’ll stay here.’

  King thought of Bobby and Kit taking Slater away at gunpoint. He couldn’t picture Slater letting anyone get the better of him, but it’s better to plan than to hope. If there was even the slightest chance Slater was dead in a ditch and Bobby and Kit were on the way back…

  They sure wouldn’t like what they found.

  King said, ‘You’re not leaving my sight until this is through. Get up. Come with me.’

  Danny seemed disbelieving as he clambered to his feet, a wince now etched into his face. He was in serious pain. ‘You really ain’t gonna shoot me?’

  ‘I was telling the truth.’

  The tiniest smile of relief. ‘Man, fuck that guy.’

  ‘His real name’s Frankie Booth,’ King said, hustling for the ride he and Slater had driven to the gym.

  ‘I know,’ Danny said, jogging to catch up. ‘He told me a while back.’

  ‘He tell you what he did to need to change his name?’

  ‘No. But it can’t be worse than what he does now, can it?’

  They threw themselves inside and King started the engine and took off after Frankie. ‘Fair point.’

  King let the car climb from twenty to forty to sixty miles an hour. His heart was in his throat, but not for the reasons one might assume. Blazing after a murderous gangster in a speeding vehicle wasn’t as important as the question he needed to ask.

  ‘Danny,’ he said. ‘Have you done this before?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Have you taken jobs for Frankie before?’

  ‘Nah, man. Earlier tonight was supposed to be my first. Then you sent me away. Then I got called back. I didn’t know what to think.’

  Relief flooded King.

  It was salvageable, and for now that was enough.

  He didn’t ask the follow-up question.

  Not yet.

  Namely: Would you have done it?

  They tore through the desolate industrial zone toward residential Bayview, and by chance King glanced to the right at precisely the correct moment. He looked past Danny, out the window into the gloom, and he swore he saw the Ford sedan that Slater had been taken away in. It was overturned, its frame twisted out of shape, resting at the bottom of an excavated lot set low into the ground for an underground garage.

  He blinked once, and then they’d sped past it.

  Danny noticed the look on his face. ‘What?’

  King couldn’t slow down. He could barely see Frankie’s taillights in the distance, and if he so much
as touched the brakes they’d lose him, probably forever. Frankie had disappeared and changed his name before. He could do it again.

  King surged faster.

  Danny said, ‘What was that? You look like you saw a ghost.’ The side of his head was stained crimson, dark red in shadow.

  King said, ‘Maybe I did.’

  Danny went quiet.

  King’s phone rang.

  He hoped for Slater. Fished it out of his pocket.

  Alexis.

  So she was alive, which meant she’d probably decimated the Russians. All of them, over the course of two days. He couldn’t think straight in the moment, but he knew later he would start to wonder what she had become.

  He answered. ‘Where are you? Are you hurt?’

  ‘I need you in Hayward. Along the San Lorenzo Creek. I’ll send you coordinates. They’re converging there.’

  ‘Who is?’

  ‘Petr. And Heidi.’

  ‘Heidi’s left her mansion? Left her security?’

  ‘She’s desperate. She called Petr, then Petr called me. He told me he wants to double-cross her, gave me the address. But I don’t trust him. He’s coked up, erratic. I could hear it over the phone. I don’t know what I’m walking into.’

  King stared at the taillights ahead. They were gaining ground on Frankie. ‘Listen, Frankie’s still alive. I’m tailing him. You think she’ll call him for help?’

  ‘Probably. Does he have men with him?’

  ‘No. It’s just him left.’

  ‘Is Will with you?’

  He hesitated. ‘No. He went to deal with the guys Frankie had left.’

  ‘He’s not answering.’

  King remembered the sight of the overturned car. ‘I think he’s preoccupied. He’ll be fine.’

  Alexis sighed. ‘Let’s just get this done.’

  Frankie made a left out of Bayview, onto the 101.

  Only one guess as to where he was headed.

  King said, ‘I think Heidi called Frankie. He’s heading toward San Mateo. I think he’s going to help her. I won’t be long.’