by M. O'Keefe
Patty’s head poked up from behind the bar. “Hey!” she said. “Where did you come from?”
“Back door was open.”
She shook her head, swearing under her breath. “Here,” she said as I approached the bar. “Jack left this for you.”
She put a heavy manila envelope on the bar and pushed it toward me.
It was money. I knew before opening it. It was a stack of cash.
“Is he here?” I asked. The money still on the counter. I wasn’t going to touch it. I was never going to touch it. That money was covered in blood. Covered in Jack’s blood.
Vomit crawled up my throat.
“No fucking clue,” she said. “Someone is upstairs though. I’ve been hearing a lot of noise. And…” she tilted her head to the end of the bar, where a beautiful Chinese woman in a sleek black rain coat sat drinking a cup of coffee.
She turned and looked at us, her smile a fucking blade. Like danger just…sat beside her.
“I’m with Bates,” she said quietly.
Patty and I nodded, like that made sense.
I turned to look at the staircase, the black eye of the windows.
“I gave my notice,” Patty said. “My advice, if you want it?”
I didn’t.
“Don’t go up there,” Patty said. “Take this stack of money and run far away from this place and Jack Herrara.”
“I will. I am,” I breathed. Because that was the smart thing to do. The thing I should do. I just had to find out if he was alive first.
“But you’re going up those stairs, right?”
I nodded, because I couldn’t speak.
Because I was reckless. And not very smart.
And in love.
“Good fucking luck to you,” she said and walked away, leaving me to climb those stairs on my own.
Silent, I went up those stairs. I climbed them like air. Like wind. Like I wasn’t there. I had no desire to be heard. To be seen. I wanted to make sure he was alive and then get the hell out of this place.
Go back to my plan. The baby and me.
At the same time I wanted to grab Jack, if he was here, pull him out of this world and into mine. Run with him, all the way to Idaho. Where we’d get our feet under us. We’d figure each other out. We’d have a baby.
I put a hand over my mouth, so I wouldn’t make a sound.
The door opened when I turned the doorknob and I found myself in another hallway, surprisingly long and very dark. The end of it opened into another room bathed in mellow light. My angle wasn’t the best and I couldn’t see anyone in that room, but I could hear voices. Low murmurs.
A sudden shout.
I flinched at the noise and reached behind me for the doorknob, unclear on how I’d been so stupid to come up here.
I knew better than this.
“Jesus, Bates!” It was Jack’s voice.
Relief made me giddy. Relief made my legs buckle and my heart leap and I put my hand against the wall so I wouldn’t fall over.
“Don’t do this,” Jack said, and in his voice I heard fear. I heard pain.
“It’s already done,” Bates said. “You do it, or I will.”
And suddenly I wasn’t just walking down the hallway toward his voice, I was practically running. Silent as I could be, I crept along the wall, staying hidden by the angle of the doorway as best I could.
I pulled my phone out of my purse and dialed 9 and 1, my thumb poised over the second 1 if I needed it.
The closer I got to the door the better I could hear everyone.
“Those are your choices,” Bates said.
I leaned forward until I saw Lazarus’s office. It looked like any other office, a wide wooden desk, couches along the side, walls full of non-descript artwork and there, in the middle of the room, was a large man I’d never seen.
On his knees.
Was that Lazarus, I wondered? It had to be.
Standing beside him was Jack.
Bates stood in front of them by the desk, his sleeves rolled up. His knuckles red and bleeding. His pale blond hair falling into his face. Now he looked young. So young. Impossibly young.
“Pay the debt,” Bates said to Jack. “And you’re free to go.”
“My debt isn’t to you,” Jack said.
“It is now.”
“I’m supposed to trust you?” Jack whispered.
“Do you have a choice?” Bates asked and Jack was silent, standing there with his shoulders rigid under his jacket.
“Kill him and you’re free,” Bates said. “All debts paid.”
I put my hand over my mouth, trying to hold back my gasping moan. My heart was thundering in my ears and I wondered how no one could hear me. My fear was the loudest thing on the planet.
“Jack,” the man on the floor said, his voice garbled. He turned slightly to spit on the floor and I saw his beaten, raw face. “Don’t believe him. You can’t trust him. Look at what he’s doing to me.”
“I’m doing this to you,” said Bates in a quiet voice, “because you’re a piece of shit.”
“And what are you?” the beaten man spat. “What gutter did you crawl out of?”
Bates stepped forward and crouched down in the beaten man’s face. “All of them. Every gutter. Gutters you’ve never even heard of. Gutters so dark. So dirty you can’t even fathom them.”
“This is about those cunts—”
Jack smashed his fist into the man’s jaw, knocking him onto the rug. I jerked back into the shadows, tears squeezing out beneath my eyelids.
“Another word about those women and I’ll kill you with my bare hands,” Jack said in a voice I’d never heard before.
I leaned forward in time to see Bates grab a gun and point it at the man on his knees, but he was looking at Jack.
“Kill him or I will, and then you’ll never be free.”
Jack raised his arm, and for the first time I saw the gun he was holding and I could tell, I could tell looking at him that the gun was not empty. It had a silencer on the end. Ominous and chilling.
On the floor the beaten man put his hands up, cowering from the rage on Jack’s face.
No, I thought, shaking my head in the shadows, sick and crying and biting my lips until they bled. This was not Jack. Not the man I knew.
“Jack,” the man cried, reaching for hem of Jack’s rain-splattered coat. “I’m begging you. I have children—”
“So did those women, motherfucker,” Bates said.
Jack pulled the trigger.
Despite the silencer it was loud. So loud the night ripped open and I might have screamed. I couldn’t be sure. All I knew was that Lazarus hit the floor, blood pooling around his broken body. A hole in his forehead.
I tore my eyes away from the horror and found Bates staring right at me. I’d jumped at the gunfire, out of the shadows and into the well-lit doorway.
He saw me.
I didn’t give Jack a second glance, because in that heartbeat, that blood-soaked moment when he pulled the trigger, he wasn’t my Jack. He wasn’t anyone I knew.
My instincts kicked in and I ran.
Chapter Thirteen
JACK
AFTER
I killed him.
I was a killer, now. I put the bullet through his skull, splattered his brain across the wall.
I did that.
And the relief… oh my fucking god… the relief.
It was as if I lost my body for a second, I was the same consistency as the pink mist that had billowed out the back of Lazarus’s skull.
That, more than pulling trigger, made me a killer. My relief. The hard clench of joy on my soul, like the bite of a dog that would not let go.
Lazarus is dead.
I killed him.
I could have laughed. I could have fucking wept.
All these years doing everything in my power to not become this thing. And yet, here I was. It had been inevitable in a way. My fight against the tide for nothing.
You c
an’t control what won’t be controlled.
Marxist Economic Crisis Theory made real.
And I wished I could stay in this place—numb and mist-like. But I became aware of the ringing in my ears and that my hand was numb and slowly—horrifically—piece by piece I returned to my body. I returned to this room.
The smell of blood and gunpowder gagged me.
Bates’s face, calm and knowing like all had gone according to plan, enraged me. Filled me with a blood-red wrath.
I pointed the gun at him. Steady. Calm.
An animal. A machine. Nothing human left in me.
That bullet had killed so much.
“That is an option,” Bates said. Like killing him was a thing on a menu I could point to.
“Tell me why I shouldn’t?”
“Because someone has to clean up the mess Lazarus left behind,” Bates said, leaning back against the desk like I wasn’t holding a gun on him. Like his life wasn’t in the balance.
But this man was completely opaque. Unreadable.
“The women in the container,” I said, pushing the images from my mind.
“The cops will investigate.”
“We were a part of that,” I said. I didn’t give a shit about the cops. Like any other filthy sinner all I cared about was what was left of my soul.
“We didn’t know.”
“Does that make us less guilty?” I asked and to my shame I really asked him, like the cold man standing in front of me splattered with blood could lead me out of this horror.
Bates shrugged. Indifferent. Though something about it was not convincing.
“I’m not interested in conversations about guilt,” he said. “We’re all covered in the blood of the innocent. But you, Jack, despite the body at your feet, are not a killer.”
Not a killer?
I was a brother once. A son. A student, even, a million years ago. And despite the last two years and the sickening darkness overtaking me, I clung to the idea that I still was a brother. A son. A student.
A good man, worthy of those things, mundane and ordinary and beautiful.
The fucking empty gun I carried like it meant something, like it negated the beatings I gave. The fear I inflicted.
Like I could split hairs over the nature of my soul.
That was over.
I couldn’t undo this. I couldn’t pretend it never happened. And I couldn’t pretend that I didn’t do it for my own freedom, not just for the women we saw tonight, dead in that shipping container, starved of oxygen, their goodbye notes to their faraway children scribbled on the backs of far too few food wrappers.
I swallowed down the vomit screaming up my throat.
The air smelled of burnt blood. Of gunpowder and brain, and I threw the gun into the corner of the room.
“What’s next?” I asked, staring at Lazarus’s body.
“You’re free,” Bates said, circling the desk to sit in the chair behind it. He sat and grimaced as if the chair was all wrong and he stood up, pulled the chair away, and replaced it with another one. A hard one from the corner.
“My father’s debts—”
“Don’t interest me,” Bates said. “They barely interested Lazarus. He enjoyed the process of trying to squeeze the honor out of you.”
I had felt that, keenly. My honor so small I forgot where it was. Forgot I ever had it.
“Why?” I asked. “Why let me go?”
He seemed startled at the question. Or as startled as I ever saw him. A brief widening of his eyes. A slight flaring of his nostrils.
“Why does it matter?” he asked.
“Am I just supposed to believe you?” I asked. I was going crazy. That was the only explanation. I was losing my mind.
“Perhaps I wish someone had given me an out when I needed it.”
I never considered who Bates might have been before he became this. That there might have been another road for him.
“Don’t,” he said, lifting a hand. “I am king now. And kings don’t need pity.”
“Was this your plan all along?” I asked, connecting dots in my memory. Years of his silent and steady presence at Lazarus’s side, how he’d made himself indispensable.
“It would seem to me that a man bent on freedom wouldn’t ask these questions?” Bates said. “A man bent on freedom would leave. Fast.”
“You mean this?” I asked. “That I’m free. My father. My brother—”
“I don’t care about your brother.”
I stepped back, away from the blood I’d spilled and the brains I’d splattered on the wall.
With that one miniscule effort, the tiny amount of pressure applied to the trigger of that gun, I’d somehow opened my prison bars.
“Be smart,” Bates said. “And leave town for a while.”
I thought of that dude ranch Abby told me about. The work and purpose she found there.
Work and purpose.
Two things I never thought I’d have again.
I nodded, feeling like my neck was broken.
“And the girl,” Bates said.
“What girl?”
“Abby.”
“What about her?” I asked, feeling everything in my chest sharpen and push outward, like there was a bomb exploding in slow motion in my heart.
“Get her out of town too.”
“Why?” I asked.
“Tell her if she talks—”
“I didn’t tell her anything.”
“She saw plenty.”
“She didn’t see anything.”
Bates said nothing, but he looked at me with pity. Enough pity that I knew there was something he knew that I didn’t.
I charged the desk, pulling him up by the lapels of that suit he wore like a skin.
“What have you done?” I asked, feeling the cold hand of dread on the back of my neck. His silence enraged me.
“What have you done!” I bellowed, yelling so loud my voice burned. I shook him, and his expression did not change. He smiled at me like I was pitiful, and I grabbed from the desk the gun he’d left there.
“She was looking for you,” he said. “I just told her where she could find you.”
She was looking for me because of that message I left her. That fucking message. I told her I loved her because I thought I was dying.
“What did she see?” I asked, even though I knew. Because the world turned like a screw, I knew what she saw.
“She saw you put that bullet in his head, and then she left.”
“You planned that?”
“Of course not—not even I am that good. I took an opportunity. But it doesn’t change the fact that she saw and now, I’m afraid, she’s a loose end.”
“If you hurt her, I will kill you.” I put the barrel of the gun under Bates's chin.
“I don’t need to hurt her. You did that yourself.” He arched an eyebrow at me. For a second I was sure I was going to blow his brains out. I felt it so sharp I could see it, the splatter of his blood across my face. Across the wall. The jerk of the gun in my hand. “You forgot we don’t fuck the innocent, because it’s not transferable. You will only diminish it. Ruin it. Men like us—”
“I am nothing like you,” I spat in his face, jamming the barrel deep into the soft palate of his mouth.
“You can no longer say that, can you?” he asked, lifting his chin so he could speak, his eyes flickering to the dead body behind me. “As of ten minutes ago, you are just like me. At least to her you are.”
The words struck me like bullets, hitting and destroying the places I’d protected in the last two years.
He was right.
I was no different than the men I’d disdained.
And it wasn’t him I wanted to kill. It wasn’t him I wanted to hurt.
My heart burned in my chest, every pound a scream.
I put the gun under my own chin, the cold barrel pressing up into my throat.
Something registered in his eyes. A fleeting panic, a shock that vanished
as soon as it was there.
“You don’t want to do that,” Bates said.
“I do,” I said. “I should have done it two years ago.”
“If you die, who will tell your brother he can stop risking his life in those junkyard fights of his? If you do this thing, I will have to bury your body in the same grave as Lazarus. And no one will ever know.”
I didn’t care. I didn’t give a shit about any of that. My brother would survive, and going down in a grave with Lazarus is everything I deserved.
“If you kill yourself I will send Sammy after the girl,” he said. “And Sammy will put a bullet in her brain and leave her body for crows. Or you can walk out of here and take care of her yourself.”
“I won’t kill her.”
“As long as she’s silent and not in the city, I don’t give a shit what happens to her. But without you, she’s just another shots girl. Get her and get gone, or you’re both dead.”
I sagged. Broken by his words. Beaten by exhaustion. I put the gun down and let go of Bates.
I didn’t see or expect the left hook he landed across my face, and I staggered back. He charged around the desk toward me while my ears still rung.
The calm, expressionless Bates was gone. Vanished under something cold and vengeful. Something that had been simmering beneath his still and silent exterior.
As bad as Lazarus was, and he was evil, this man was worse.
“Get the fuck out of here before I change my mind and kill you both right fucking now,” he said. I blinked. “GO!” he roared.
I needed no other warning. I was out the door and down the steps. I didn’t think about my future. My life. My freedom after all these years.
My world shrunk to a tiny pinpoint of light. Everything now was about Abby. About making sure she was okay. About making sure she got out of the city and stayed safe.
At the bar was a woman I’d never seen before, she stood up from her stool as I came down.
“Are you done up there?” she asked, pulling the tie on her raincoat. I nodded, speechless and numb.
“Excellent,” she said and climbed the steps to the second floor. I almost warned her but something told me she knew what she was going to find in that office.
On the bar was the manila envelope I’d left for Abby. The money I wanted to give her so she could realize her dreams; that café where everyone gets what they need.
