by C. S. Starr
“He said he’d be here by four,” Arnold, a kid who’d been employed as a security guard at the studio said, his hands in his pockets. He wasn’t a very intimidating guy, but Tal knew him to be particularly sadistic after an incident with an actress who got her nose broken for rejecting his advances. It had cost her a starring role, he’d fucked her face up so badly. Connor’s muscle had changed since Juan’s death. “It’s only 3:45pm.”
“Did you really have to shoot the other three? That just seemed so unnecessary,” Rika snapped. “You could have just taken—”
Arnold silenced her with a backhand to the jaw. “No more talking. Either of you.”
The small group of Rika, Tal, and five of Connor’s men stood there, the only noise the wind blowing around them, and the occasional car that would drive. Passengers would gawk at the scene on the road before Arnold waved them on with his pistol. Four o’clock came and went, and Tal felt a renewed sense of hope that Bull, Ricardo and Steve would be able to bring Connor in on their end. He had no idea how things would play out from there, however, since no one had any idea where they were.
Five o’clock hit and the sun started to drop. Rika pulled her hoodie around her the best she could with her hands tied and Tal caught a glimpse of the huge bruise starting to form on her face. He gave her a look that was meant to say, “If we survive this, we will kill him.”
The grin that flashed across her face indicated that she agreed.
“Okay, how long are we going to wait for him?” Tal finally said. “If you’re going to kill us, just kill us, but if he doesn’t come you probably don’t want to do that.”
The five of them looked back and forth at each other, and pulled away from Tal and Rika to have a powwow of sorts.
“If they’re going to throw us over the side, I’m not going without a fight,” Tal whispered. “You in?”
“I will claw their eyes out,” Rika uttered fiercely. “There’s no way I’m not going back to my girls.”
Arnold came back and looked at the two of them critically. “Why does he want you dead?”
“Because we want him dead,” Tal said, without hesitation.
“Where is he?”
“Hopefully handcuffed somewhere until I can get there to rip his throat out.” Rika’s eyes flickered and Arnold looked visibly chilled. “If you help him, and we get to him first, I’ll remember you.”
Arnold leaned in and looked at her hard, sneering, “What are you going to do?”
“I don’t know yet,” she whispered. “It depends on what you do.”
He looked to Tal. “You got anything to say, Bauman?”
“I’m the only one that knows about the money. How much we have, where it is. Who signs your pay check?”
“That’s bullshit,” Arnold scoffed, thinking about it. “Someone else—”
“Is it bullshit?” Tal challenged. “Maybe it is. Maybe it isn’t. Maybe I had an idea all of this was going to happen and I’ve shifted our entire reserve to Campbell. Maybe I’ve been burning money in my fireplace for the past eight months.”
That got Tal a cuff to the face. It was then he decided there was no way he was keeping Arnold around, period.
A pair of headlights started over the bridge and the group moved to the side as the car slowed down. Tal caught Lucy’s grey eyes in the passenger seat of a beat up Lexus and he subtly glanced at Rika, who was paying more attention to Arnold who now had his back turned to them. Her eyes bore into his back and like a flash the tiny, furious girl was on him, and her bound hands were around his neck.
In the split second that it took for Rika to take Arnold down, chaos erupted on the bridge. The car that had just passed them swung around and bore down on them, stopping when it hit the side of the bridge with enough impact to shake everything. Smoke billowed out from under the hood.
Tal barely blinked and Lucy was in front of him untying his hands. It would have been the perfect moment for some sort of declaration of affection, but instead Tal was met with cold eyes and a frown. “Come on. We’ve got to get out of here and find Bull,” she stressed. “Zoey said they went for Connor?”
“And we need to find another car,” Leah announced, standing over one of Connor’s men with a gun. She looked down at him. “You want to die today?”
The guy shook his head and fumbled for his keys before tossing them at Leah. “Take ours,” he stammered. “It’s the van—”
“Of course it’s the fucking van!” she shouted. “After the day I’ve had, I should shoot you for being a fucking idiot.”
Tal had never seen his cousin so unhinged, not in ten years of spending nearly every day together, and he wondered if it was Lucy Campbell’s influence or the stress of the day. All of a sudden, everyone stopped moving and stared at Rika, who was squirming to get free of the dead weight she’d made of Arnold.
“A hand, please?” she croaked.
After being tied together for a few hours, Tal’s hands didn’t seem to be working, and after a few minutes of failing, Lucy nudged him aside and helped her out, leaving his body face down on the road.
The four remaining from Connor's group looked back and forth at each other, realizing they were evenly matched in numbers with those standing with Tal. Tal’s group had them beat in the anger department, however.
Barry, a chubby kid with a face full of freckles, stammered, “We’ll…we’ll be on your team, if you want.”
“You’re going to get a car, and you’re going to go to LAX,” Leah barked. “Then you’re going to do whatever you need to to make sure Connor doesn’t leave there—”
“I think he’d land at Van Nuys,” Tal interjected. “It’s more private.”
“Maybe?” Leah shrugged. “We’ll go there then, and these guys can go to LAX. If we’re wrong and they fuck up?” She nodded at Arnold’s body. “We’ll give them to Rika for strangling practice.”
“Enough with the attitude,” Lucy muttered. “You sound ridiculous. Let’s go.”
***
After sending Connor’s boys off to LAX, Leah climbed in the driver’s seat and Lucy took shotgun, leaving the back bench for Tal and Rika. He was unprepared for and surprised by the relationship his cousin and Lucy had developed in the hours since he’d seen them.
“Go left here, onto the expressway.” Lucy instructed.
“No, I’m not going to take the most obvious way.” Leah shook her head.
“It’s the fastest way.”
“Are my girls okay?” Rika asked, wringing her hands. “Do you know—”
“It’s not going to be any faster if we’re dead.”
“We’re not going to die. If we were going to die, we would have died when we flipped the car.” Lucy sighed.
“Who’s fault was that?”
“I didn’t say it was anyone’s fault. I was just saying—“
“My girls are okay?” Rika interrupted loudly. “You saw them?”
“They’re fine. They’re with Zoey.”
“Lucy’s fake girlfriend,” Leah countered.
“She’s not my fake girlfriend.”
“You’re sleeping with Tal.”
“No, I’m not,” Lucy said firmly. “Am I, Tal?”
Tal paused, aware that Leah had determined they’d spent many nights together. “Sleeping is such a vague term…we have slept together, but we’re not—”
“We are not having sex.”
“Tal always fancies himself more of a lover than a fucker anyway,” Leah said with a chuckle. “Enough of your semantics.”
“I don’t like men,” Lucy insisted. “I’d rather fuck you than Tal, and the last thing I want to do is fuck you.”
Tal bristled. “All right, well, I think there are more important issues right now than Lucy’s preferences,” he said brusquely. “Like finding Bull and Rika’s—”
“They’re my family. The ones dead on your lawn too,” Rika fumed. “They’re not disposable. And whomever thought they were, they’ll pay—”
“Okay, okay,” Leah replied with a sigh. “We didn’t kill them. You don’t need to read us the riot act.”
“I almost got thrown off a bridge. My kids could have been orphaned.”
“Zoey’ll take care of them. She’s good with orphans. Better than I am,” Tal told her, avoiding Lucy’s piercing glare in the rearview. “Right Lucy?”
Lucy flinched at his words, even though she knew she’d asked for it. “If you’re referring to the fact that she’s a warm, compassionate person, then yes.”
“Why the fuck did I take down the phone lines?” Rika muttered, ignoring them both. “I can’t even call and see if they’re—”
“Your kids are fine. No one gives a shit about them. Although if we bite it, they might as well be chopped liver,” Leah said flatly.
***
The rest of the drive was dead silent, each of them deep in thought and seething in various degrees. Tal bored through the back of the seat, wondering if he could somehow pry his way into Lucy’s brain and ask her why she was being a bitch. He caught her glancing at him in the rearview a couple of times, and knew that whatever she was angry about was enough to have changed things between them drastically in just a few hours.
Try as he might, he couldn’t imagine what could possibly be that bad.
Leah pulled off the freeway and onto a side street in The Valley that Tal recognized as being a few blocks from Van Nuys by the tiny Korean grill built onto someone’s porch. He’d frequented the area often when they used to fly out of Van Nuys, before Connor had decided he owned LAX.
“If we’re not too long, the Korean over there is the bomb,” he said, hoping it would cut the tension in the car.
“Oh, shut up, Tal,” Leah snapped, pulling up beside the curb. “You’re not funny.”
“I’m fucking starving,” he grumbled. “Let’s go. We’ll have to try and hide in the shadows.”
They darted onto the seemingly abandoned airfield and made a run for the terminal. He nodded to the left, indicating they could use the building for camouflage.
It wasn’t long before they found a tense situation similar to the one they’d just departed, only this one was amplified by larger guns, bigger men, and a noisy spinning helicopter blade that forced everyone to yell. Tal did the math in his head, and if Connor had planned to be at the bridge in Pasadena at four, that meant these men had probably been there for the better part of five hours.
It showed on everyone’s faces.
Lucy nudged him from their spot in the shadows. “So what do we do now?”
Tal glanced back at her. “How do I know?”
“You seem to be on top of things these days. I thought you’d have some brilliant plan.”
“What the fuck is your problem?” Tal whispered.
“Can we focus on the task at hand?” Leah hissed. “I say we start shooting and let the chips fall where they will.”
Rika rolled her eyes, and began barking orders. “Here’s what we’re going to do. We’re going to create a distraction and hope that Bull and my guys catch on and use the opportunity to gain the upper hand.”
“What are we going to do?” Lucy asked with genuine curiosity. Tal noticed the way she looked at Rika had morphed from general disregard to moderate respect, and he felt relieved.
“We’re going to split up and shoot in the air from two different locations, then run like hell. That’s what we’re going to do. See that control tower?” Rika nodded at the field.
“We’ll meet there,” Tal agreed. “And take down as many of them as we can in the process.”
“But not Connor,” Lucy and Rika said simultaneously.
“No, not Connor.”
“I’m with Tal,” Lucy announced, pulling her gun out of the back of her pants. “We’ll go left.”
“Fine,” Rika replied dryly. “But we get two of the guns.”
“They’ll want the two of us more though,” Lucy insisted. “Tal needs a gun.”
“If you want two guns, you’re taking the long way around, and you’re going first,” Leah countered, handing Tal the small revolver that she had stashed in her purse. “Seriously, I’m never touching a gun after this. I hate them.”
“Gun control?” Tal said with a grin.
Leah’s lip wobbled and Tal thought about the promise they’d made to each other after Rachel’s death, a move which Connor had vehemently been against, because there were big profits in weapons. She wrapped her arms around Tal and held on for dear life, and for the first time, he was unconcerned if anyone had any suspicion about the often-inappropriate level of affection between them.
“Gun control,” she whispered in his ear. “Don’t die, you stupid asshole.”
“I won’t,” he nodded back, pressing his lips against her cheek. “You really grew a set today.”
“They were always there,” she murmured. “I just never had the opportunity to use them before.”
***
Tal and Lucy started around the building, which took much longer than either of them imagined it would. Off in the distance the helicopter blades whirred through the air, creating a tense adjunct to the scene that was better than the soundtrack of any movie Tal had ever been a part of making.
“Run in a zig zag line,” she mumbled. “It’ll make us harder to shoot.”
“Why did you want to go with me? You and Leah seem to be getting along famously.”
“Fuck off,” Lucy hissed. “I know you have my back, and you know I have yours. That’s why I wanted to go with you.”
“Why are you being such a bitch?”
She stopped in her tracks. “You know where we went this morning?”
“The worst mani-pedi imaginable?” Tal raised his eyebrows. “No, where?”
“We went to your office. At the studio.”
“Okay?” He shrugged. “And there you became best friends and started hating me?”
She reached into her pocket and pulled out a thin silver band on a long chain. “This is Cole’s. So was all the blood all over a prop shed. Cole’s blood and a bunch of shit that he had to die around. My brother died in a shed full of shit from shitty movies, a five-minute walk from your fucking office, after you got back.” She stuffed the ring back in her pocket. “So you’ll have to excuse my mood swings. Or you can blame it on my period. Whatever.”
Tal’s gut dropped and his mind raced as he put the pieces of what she’d said together. “What?”
Lucy pushed him and her fists landed on his chest in quick succession, hard. Tears poured from her eyes, wetting her cheeks. “You were there. You were there when he was taken, and you didn’t know, and you didn’t try to know. You just went along your merry way, counting the nickels and dimes from your office, while your friend tortured and killed my brother.”
He grabbed her wrists and held her to his chest as he processed what she’d told him. Nausea bubbled up in his stomach and it was all he could do not to throw up on the tarmac. “I didn’t know. You know I didn’t know.”
“Ignorance does not excuse liability,” she muttered. “You should have known. None of this would have happened—”
She cut herself off by pressing her mouth against his, shoving him up against the side of the building. It was both the saddest and most passionate kiss they’d shared, which Tal decided was fitting, considering their luck.
“And now it’s too late. It’s too late,” she shook her head, tears continuing to stream down her cheeks as her face hardened. “Too late for anything.”
Tal dropped her hands. “I didn’t know. You know—”
“I know now, though.” She quickly wiped her eyes and reached for her gun. “So help me save my Bull so I won’t have to hate you for that too.”
He pulled his gun out of his belt and checked it, taking a deep breath before he fired the first shot into the air.
“Run,” he whispered, as they both took off seconds before Leah’s shot cracked the air.
Lucy tried to keep tra
ck of what was going on as gunshots started going off in all directions. She focused on Tal just ahead of her, who was moving like a bat out of hell, and she got a second wind when she saw Bull wrestling someone smaller to the ground.
Connor.
By the time they reached the control tower, Tal felt like he was going to die of exhaustion and made a promise to himself that he’d take up running if he survived.
“We’re alive,” he said with disbelief, blinking as he leaned against the tower. “I couldn’t tell if I’d been shot.”
“I think you would have known if you’d been shot,” she gasped. “Now what?”
“We wait for Leah and Rika—”
“We’re here,” Leah said, pressing her back up against the tower. “Holy fuck.”
“Holy fuck indeed,” Rika echoed. “So, from what I saw, I think our guys are doing okay. I didn’t shoot anyone.”
“I think I saw Bull with Connor.” Lucy peeked around the side. “I’m going to go help him.”
***
She took off like a flash, and without giving it a second’s thought, Tal followed her, running in the direction of the scene they’d just raced to flee. Lucy nearly tripped him as she suddenly planted her feet and fired four very decisive shots, which seemed to hit their mark; a kid with a much bigger gun heading toward the pile of human just in front of her. She finally reached Bull and, with adrenaline-charged strength, shoved him off Connor. He scampered away from her friend, but at that moment Lucy didn't give a shit whether he escaped or not.
“Shit,” she whispered, seeing the red mass that was spread along most of his lower half. His breathing was shallow, his face strained. “Bull, I’m here.”
“Goose, I’m cooked,” he winced, a pained grin on his face. “It hurts, being shot. I always wondered.”
“I bet,” she replied, stroking his hair and smiling fondly at him. “Can I look?”
“You can look wherever you want, whenever you want,” he winced.
“I’d smack you, under any other circumstance, James,” she tisked, pulling his shirt away from the sticky blood. As she felt around, she realized that most of the blood was from a second wound in his leg, and he was in rough shape.
