by Hart, Callie
Monica shifted awkwardly in her seat. She lifted her chin, angling her jaw, preparing for war. “I know why you’re here, Felix, and—”
“You do?” I couldn’t hide my incredulity. “You know he sent someone to worm his way in with me, to get inside my home? To fucking kill the woman I’m in love with?”
Pain flickered in her eyes, a brief shadow, there one second, gone the next. “I did what I thought was right,” she said quietly. “This girl’s been screwing you up from day one. You don’t love her. She’s manipulating you. You read that file. She is not the innocent party. She saw a way to bargain for her life and she took it. Don’t be stupid enough to think—”
“You have no fucking idea what you’re talking about,” I hissed. Sera had been standing behind me since we entered the room, but now she stepped around me, her expression transformed from wariness to outright fury.
“Who the fuck do you think you are? You don’t know me. You know nothing about me. You read a bunch of fabricated bullshit some psycho emailed to you, and you decided it was enough to sign my death warrant. This is the biggest pile of horse shit I’ve ever heard!”
It didn’t take much to send Monica spiraling into the depths of a complete breakdown on a normal day; Sera’s verbal assault was like pouring gasoline onto an already out of control forest fire. Monica picked up the empty glass in front of her, swung back her arm and launched it at Sera, screaming at the top of her lungs. “You’ve ruined everything! He’s supposed to be helping me, not you!”
I’d considered Monica might worry that I was no longer going to try and find the son of a bitch who attacked her, but I’d summarily dismissed the thought out of hand. We’d spent the better part of five years trying to hunt the fucker down. It made no sense to me that she’d think I’d stop looking now, for any reason. I hadn’t taken into account the fact that Monica wasn’t exactly rational most of the time, and didn’t think rationally either, though.
The glass sailed passed Sera’s head, shattering against the wall by the bar. Sera surveyed the broken glass on the ground, then slowly began to walk toward the table where Monica and Rabbit were sitting.
Oh shit.
If there was one thing I generally tried to avoid, it was watching a woman getting her hair ripped out at the fucking root. I placed a hand on Sera’s elbow, but she shot me a look that could have stripped paint. “I’m not going to hurt her,” she said.
I believed her. I couldn’t say that Monica wasn’t going to try and hurt, Sera, though. I took the cups of coffee from her, moving beside her until we reached the table, where I placed them down in front of Rabbit. Sera folded her arms across her chest, glaring at Monica with the intensity of a thousand burning suns. “I would never take him away from you,” she said harshly. “I’d help you, too, Monica, if you gave me the fucking opportunity. But you’ve been rude, aggressive and shitty to me since the moment we met. I’m not evil. I didn’t do the things it said I did in that dossier. When my mother died, I lost everything. Everything,” she said, her voice cracking. “And I would never hurt my sister. She’s the only true family I have left. I love her more than you will ever know. I’ve done some terrible things, and I’ve had equally terrible things done to me. I understand the living, breathing pain that exists inside you more than you realize. But if you ever throw anything at me again, I will make you fucking regret it. Do you understand me?”
The fight evaporated from Monica’s eyes. She looked at me, and then back at Sera, her chin wobbling.
“Jesus Christ,” Rabbit spat. “What is this, a fucking Hallmark Special? Mentally damaged girls learn to love and trust one another? Get the fuck out of my house, Fix, and take both of your bitches with you. I think they’re menstruating or something.”
A cold, steely fist clenched in my stomach. Now was not the fucking time to be ironing out relationship kinks with Monica and Sera, I was well aware of that, but Rabbit had run out of hall passes with me. If he’d known any better, he would have kept his fat mouth shut and prayed to whatever deity he held dear that I’d forget he even fucking existed. His arrogance knew no bounds, though. He had friends in high places, had more money than god. In short, he thought he was fucking invincible.
I smiled at him tightly, and Monica’s face turned the color of ash. “I came to have coffee with you, though, Rabbit. You wanted it so fucking badly. You put me through hell to punish me for forgetting, right? Now you don’t want it?” Pulling out a chair for Sera, I sat myself down in front of Rabbit, then I slid one of the coffee cups across the table toward the hacker. He blinked at it, as if trying to process what was really happening here. Taking hold of the coffee cup, he lifted one of his shoulders in a blasé, off the cuff shrug.
“Might be a little too late now, don’t you think?” He took a sip and wrinkled his nose. “It’s fucking cold, man.”
“Just drink it,” I snarled. I took a sip myself and made a show of enjoying it a little too much. “Mmm, that’s a fucking delicious beverage. While I’m here, Rabbit, you’ll be happy to know I procured that item you were looking for.” Reaching into my pocket, I pulled out the thumb drive and slapped it onto the table. I laughed, the sound tinged with a hysteria that even I recognized as borderline insane. “Care to tell me what’s on this, now that we’ve dispensed with the subterfuge?”
Rabbit looked at me closely, narrowing his eyes. “My guys aren’t far, yknow. All I have to do is shout for them, and they’ll come running.”
“I doubt either of those fat pieces of shit can run,” I said airily. “Go ahead, though. Call them if you think you need their protection. I’m just sitting here, enjoying a coffee and a conversation with a friend.”
Sera shifted in the chair next to me. She was close enough to feel the baleful energy pouring from my body like a waterfall of hate, but Rabbit…he clearly didn’t feel it. He took a second longer to stare me down, and then he inhaled, straightening his back, clapping his hands together in front of him. “Okay. Fair enough. You caught me.” Picking up the thumb drive, he got to his feet and stepped around Monica, heading for the bar. I watched the fucker like a hawk as he took out a laptop from underneath the counter and plugged the thumb drive into one of the USB ports.
Monica kicked me under the table. “Fix, please…” she whispered. “I know you’re angry, but—”
“Not even close. Angry does not even come close.” If she thought she was going to bargain for mercy on Rabbit’s behalf, she was sorely fucking mistaken. I used to be merciful. Empathetic. Trouble was, my empathy had caused me way too many sleepless nights. The faces of all the men I’d killed would come to me at night, invading my dreams, until in the end I hadn’t known a moment’s peace. I’d faced a decision: either I quit trying to avenge victims of hate, rape, violence and abuse by murdering their attackers, or I hunted down the part of my brain that dealt in empathy and guilt and I figured out how to turn it all off.
The first option had been a clear no-go. I’d spent some time learning how my own brain worked, and I’d found that fucking switch. I’d thrown it without a moment’s thought, and ever since then I’d slept like a baby. No way I was turning that switch back on now for Rabbit’s sake. He could have sold me out, put me in serious danger, caused me to lose everything I owned, my money, my apartment, my fucking freedom, and there still would have been a chance I’d have found it in my heart to forgive what he’d done. A slim chance, but still, a chance all the same. But Rabbit had made a fatal fucking error. His actions had endangered Sera’s safety. The stunt he’d pulled could have ended her life, and no matter how sorry he was, how hard he fucking begged, there was nothing he could do to save himself now. Not that that was even an issue, because the bastard clearly wasn’t sorry.
Monica whimpered, tapping her fingertip against the tabletop. Her tapping matched Rabbit’s as he hammered away at the laptop keyboard by the bar. “It was kinda genius really,” he said. “Oscar’s been sending his guys to this dipshit on the Upper East Side, some rich momma’s boy who�
��s been undercutting my services for months. I wanted to teach him a lesson about customer loyalty and punish that asshole at the same time, so I whispered a couple of mistruths into a few select ears. Said I had some insider trading info on a thumb drive in my office. Data worth millions to anyone who had a little money to invest. I knew it would get back to Oscar, and whaddya know? Two days later, a guy in a ski mask breaks into my office during a party and steals the drive from my desk.”
“Just get to the fucking point, Rabbit. What’s on it?”
He was unbearably smug as he looked up from the screen in front of him. “An insanely clever trojan. Encrypted so heavily, I knew Oscar’s posh-boy motherfucker wouldn’t be able to resist trying to crack it. And when he did…” He stabbed at a series of keys, hitting the final one with an ostentatious flourish.
Music blared into the booth; sounded like the laptop was connected to the audio system. I knew the song, but it took until the lyrics kicked in for me to place it.
“As I walked through the valley of the shadow of death, I took a look at my life and realized there’s nothing left...”
Gangster’s Paradise, by Coolio.
For fuck’s sake.
Rabbit grinned, spinning the laptop around to reveal a series of spinning numbers and characters that cascaded from the top of the screen to the bottom like something out of the fucking matrix. “The second he bypassed the encryption, the trojan would have taken hold. The virus was designed to crack Oscar’s financial establishments, to drain every single last penny from his accounts. The funds would have been automatically sent to an anonymous holding company in the Caymans. Obviously mine,” he said with a wink. “And the most beautiful part?” He had to raise his voice over the blaring song. “The trojan is unstoppable. It buries itself deeper and deeper into a mainframe as soon as it has access. It would have destroyed that cunt’s entire system in less than a minute. He would have known about it, would have watched it as it happened, and there wouldn’t have been a single thing he could have done about it. It was a beautiful plan.”
I couldn’t care less about his plan. Would have been great to know that Oscar was ruined and penniless, but it didn’t really matter. “You sacrificed that beautiful plan by telling me to go get the drive back. And all because you were pissed at me.” I struggled to keep my voice even.
Rabbit’s expression turned rueful. “Mayfair did pay me a lot of money to orchestrate that complicated little ruse. He badly wanted an in with you so he could take care of your pretty friend and get home as quickly as possible.”
Don’t kill him yet. Don’t fucking kill him yet.
It took every ounce of strength I possessed to listen to the voice in my head. I drew in a steady stream of oxygen through my nose, trying to push down the rage that was burning like bile in the back of my throat. “But you searched him out. Hunted him down and told him we were in New York. He never would have found us otherwise.”
Rabbit came back to the table and slumped down into his seat. An impish light shone in his eyes. “Oh, no. That wasn’t me. Fuck. As if I’ve got time for that shit. It was Monica who—” His eyes went wide.
I couldn’t decide if his sudden hesitation was real or expertly faked. Twin spots of color burned in his cheeks, which made me think that maybe he really was worried about what he’d just let slip.
Slowly, I turned to Monica. She sunk away from the table, her back pressed up against her chair, trying to make herself as small as possible. She had every right to be afraid. Rabbit had fucked me on an unbelievable level, but what she had done was so much worse. She’d reached out to Carver? Told him where we were? She’d done everything in her power to make sure Sera died. The high-pitched whine in my head drowned out all logical thought. I just—I didn’t even know how to wrap my head about the treachery…
“I’m sorry, Fix,” she whispered. The apology burnt in her eyes, but I couldn’t bear to see it. The hurt was more than I could comprehend.
“Don’t speak,” I seethed. “Don’t breathe another fucking word.”
Rabbit drummed his hands against the table, running the tip of his tongue over his teeth. “I, for one, regret sending you to The Barrows. My therapist’s been telling me I need to be a better communicator, and I’m beginning to see that he might be right. In future—”
I reached behind me, into the small of my back. I took hold of the gun that had been sitting there, waiting for its moment to shine. I drew it, my finger hovering over the trigger. With furious calm, I faced Rabbit and said, “What future?”
The crack of the gunshot was deafening.
Monica screamed.
Sera jumped up, her chair toppling to the ground as she pushed away from the table.
And Rabbit’s skull exploded into a cloud of blood, and bone, and brain matter.
“Been spending most our lives living in a gangster’s paradise. Been spending most our lives living in a gangster’s paradise.”
My heart pumped evenly in my chest.
It didn’t even skip a beat.
TEN
SERA
“Let me go! Fix, please. I swear…I didn’t know he was going to send you to Oscar. Please!”
Monica was losing her shit, but I barely registered her frantic pleading. My ears were still ringing from the gunshot that had claimed Rabbit’s life. I was never going to stop hearing that sound. I was never going to be able to eradicate the sight of the guy’s head bursting like an over-ripe watermelon that someone had struck with a sledgehammer.
The blood…
There had been so much blood…
At a respectable distance, that shot would have created a neat little hole in the center of Rabbit’s forehead, but at the distance we’d been sitting—point blank range—things had gone a little differently. Rabbit’s cheekbone had caved under the pressure of the impact, and his jaw bone had been all but severed from the rest of his skull, leaving it hanging by a bloody rope of sinew. What had once been his mouth had transformed into a gruesome, yawning maw that I was going to be reliving whenever I closed my eyes for the foreseeable future.
No one had come running. The guards Rabbit had warned of hadn’t shown their faces—probably a calculated move on their part, if they’d known Fix was on site—and the guys dressed in black had been nowhere to be found when we’d made our exit. Fix had been grim and forbidding, his hand clamped like a vise around Monica’s arm as he’d dragged her out of the place. He’d growled like a rabid wolf when Monica had kicked and screamed, trying to free herself, and when she hadn’t calmed down, he’d thrown her over his shoulder and carried her out of the church.
We were almost back in Brooklyn now, and her anxious wailing had increased instead of tapered off. “Fix, please,” she sobbed. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I had no idea he would do that, I swear. Just…please!”
Finally, the deadly calm that had fallen over him after he pulled that trigger shattered. Slamming his fist into the steering wheel of our stolen sedan, he bared his teeth at the rear-view mirror, a brilliant silver storm flashing in his eyes. “Fuck, Monica! Really? You really think I’m going to fucking hurt you?”
“I—I don’t…” she whimpered. “You’re angry. I don’t know.”
“Then you don’t know me,” he hissed at her reflection. “I promised I’d find the guy who hurt you. I promised I’d protect you. But fuck,” he said, grinding his teeth together. “I never thought I’d need protecting from you.”
A miserable silence fell over the car.
I watched the city whip by in a stream of orange and red lights, and I tried to formulate something to say. I felt Fix’s eyes on me a number of times, but I couldn’t return the eye contact. I needed to unpack everything that was going on in my head before the pressure became too much and I ended up screaming at the top of my lungs like a lunatic.
Was I angry?
Was I horrified?
Was I scared?
Was I going crazy?
I couldn’t answe
r a single one of the questions that were furiously demanding my attention. All I could do was sit in the seat next to Fix and stare out of the window, replaying the moment when Rabbit’s head exploded on an endless, terrible loop.
Exhaustion gnawed at me, but I wasn’t going to sleep tonight. No chance of that. My thoughts were going to fester until I was mentally raw from their constant chaffing, and even then I wasn’t going to be able to pass out.
I didn’t know where we were going, and I didn’t even bother to ask. The tides of influence that affected my life were so far out of control now that trying to rein them in would be much like sticking my hand into a blender to try and catch hold of the spinning blades.
I realized Monica had stopped crying.
A cop car hurtled by, lights and sirens cutting into the night, but no one inside the car flinched. We were a group of friends on our way home from a night out. Fix was studiously observing every road traffic law there was, so there was no reason we should be noticed. The blood that spattered our skin couldn’t be seen; the gun tucked into Fix’s waistband was hidden from view. It was beyond strange, but I wasn’t worried we were going to get caught.
It seemed as if the events of the evening had taken place outside the realms of normal life, in some other place unreachable to anyone who might cause trouble for us. In my head, Rabbit’s body was going to rot and eventually turn to dust back there in the crypt, undisturbed for the rest of time.
At some point soon, someone was going to come across him, of course. Rabbit’s parties were frequent and popular, and by the sounds of things his client list was extensive. The question was, what was going to happen when he was discovered? I kept trying to picture someone calling the cops and reporting his death, and I just couldn’t do it.
Fix had located Rabbit’s office and destroyed all of the security camera footage before we’d left the church, so there was no direct evidence that we’d been there. There were so many fingerprints all over those crypts that it would be near impossible to separate one from the other.
