She put her hands on Lou’s cheeks. So hot. On her brow. Blood came off on her hands, but she didn’t care. She kept running her hands down the girl’s arms and body looking for wounds, looking for fresh blood pouring out of some bullet hole. Lou had always been a stoic child, hiding her pain and fear when they went to the doctor or when she hurt herself playing. Once, when she crashed into a concrete barrier on her bicycle, she’d split open her elbow and needed six stitches. Most children would cry. Louie only said gross.
She suspected that tendency to hide rather than show pain had only deepened with her experience.
“I’m okay.”
“Are you sure?” she heard herself say. Her voice went high, grew strident. “Maybe you were shot, and you don’t feel it. Maybe—”
Lou cut her off by squeezing her hand a little harder. Not enough to hurt Lucy, but enough to get her attention. “Keep moving. I am not sure how big their network is, so try not to draw attention to yourselves, and don’t stay in one place too long.”
“Too long!” Lucy felt the pulse rising in her temples. “What’s too long?”
“A day,” she said after a moment of careful consideration. “One night per place.”
Lucy touched the hollow of her throat. She could feel her heart pounding against her fingertips there as if it were going to leap out of her throat and fall to the floor.
Jack, she thought. Oh god, Jack, what have I done? I sent her to King thinking...what had I been thinking?
By taking Lou to King, she had hoped to cure a problem, not inflate it. Show her that there was a life worth building for her out there in the world. One where isolation and running weren’t necessary. But she also did it because...because—
You’re dying. You did this to give yourself peace.
But Lucy felt the tears streaming down her cheeks and the uncomfortable way Lou shifted away from her as if those tears carried the plague.
“I’m sorry,” Lucy said. “Oh, Louie. I’m so sorry.”
Paula tugged on her arm.
“Yes,” Lucy said. “We should go. But we need to pack clothes. We can’t walk around with all this blood on us. We’ll draw too much attention.”
She was already picturing the dark YMCA showers in her mind. Both she and Paula could clean up without notice this late into the night. And once clean, move on to somewhere else. She had half a dozen vacation houses in her mind that stood empty this time of year. She wondered how she could package the idea to Paula, an exciting tour of European closets! An imaginary brochure read. And then how silly that seemed. She was exhausted, and her adrenaline had turned her mind on its head.
“I’ll stay until you pack,” Lou said.
And she did. She’d closed and locked the apartment door.
Lucy went into her bedroom and pulled a vintage suitcase from the top shelf of her closet, throwing in clothes, a toiletry bag, and cash into the hard case. Paula trailed her like a puppy at the heels, drawn to movement. By the time she’d returned to the intersection of her hallway and kitchen doorway, she found the apartment empty of bodies.
The blood and mess were still there, but the bodies and the guns were gone.
Lou stepped out of the closet, her hands and forearms slicked up to the elbow with blood. She saw Lucy staring and said, “I’ll clean the rest. Don’t worry.”
Tears stung the back of Lucy’s eyes again, and her throat threatened to collapse on itself.
Lucy reached up and cupped Lou’s cheek. “Don’t die.”
First, her mind added. Don’t die first.
Lucy Thorne didn’t think she could bear it.
32
I’ll be twenty minutes. Tops,” Ryanson said, and he was saying it loud enough for the men in the other room to hear, but his eyes flicked left, toward a door. “Wait here until I need you. If I need you.”
Konstantine did not move or smile or acknowledge him in any way. He remained standing in a foyer of an apartment until the senator had disappeared into the other room and another male voice joined Ryanson’s in salutation. Their footsteps echoed the way they did in grand cathedrals back home. Because their temples are the temples of commerce, he thought.
Then the sound of chairs creaking and bodies settling in. Briefcase latches released. Someone cleared their throat.
Konstantine stood in the foyer where a magnificent crystal chandelier bloomed overhead. There were three doors: the one they’d entered from, the one Ryanson had exited from, and the last—a dark door to his left.
He waited for a guard to come and check on him.
A man in a red suit and black tie peeked at Konstantine minutes later. Then the guard disappeared again.
He still didn’t move, but his eyes slid to the closed door again. He estimated how many steps it would take to reach it. He reminded himself why he was doing this.
When they came for his father, they took his mother instead.
In the middle of the night, men filled their house. They bundled up his mother and pulled a black sack over her head. So he wasn’t surprised when they did the same to him. Their hands and feet were tied.
The stairs, the corridor and even the street outside their apartment were all familiar. He’d traversed these spaces so often he could do it with his eyes closed. But once the men put him and his mother into the back of a car, the familiarity was gone.
They drove forever. Or perhaps it was only the night that made the drive seem endless.
Then the cars stopped as suddenly as they’d started. They waited. His mother tried to soothe him with reassurances. He didn’t know what to say to reassure her.
Men were talking outside the car. They were shouting.
Then the doors were thrown open, and he was dragged out. He could smell the linden trees and the night air even through the sack. He heard his mother cry out as she was forced to kneel beside him.
The sacks were torn off.
The first thing he saw was the giant hole in front of him. It wasn’t the perfect square usually dug for cemetery plots. It was crude and shallow, wider on the bottom and more narrow at top.
His father stood on the opposite side. He saw him clearly. His mother saw him too and at the sight of him, began to cry. She didn’t beg for her life. She begged for Konstantine’s.
Somehow Konstantine began to realize what was happening. This was a negotiation. They wanted something from senior Martinelli, and they were prepared to murder his lover and bastard son to get it.
Martinelli resisted, and they shot his mother. Konstantine remembers the look that passed over her face. She’d known death was coming but her mouth still opened in surprise. The sight of her pitching forward, nightgown billowing as she fell into the dark hole. Her gown seemed to glow in the bottom of the dark cradle, but her body had disappeared, swallowed by the shadows.
He did not remember what happened next. He didn’t remember returning to Florence. Didn’t remember being turned over to Padre Leo for safe keeping. He knew his grief had swallowed him, masticated him to bits and spit out another boy, months later.
None of that bothered him.
He had only one regret.
That he did not pay more attention to his mother’s final moments. Consequently, he did not know where she was buried, didn’t know how to honor her passing or make sure her bones were properly laid to rest. He could not honor her on her birthday, holidays, or the Day of the Dead.
Good women died at the hands of bad men.
He knew this was true.
But he could not accept his mother was alone in some Italian field, waiting to be found, waiting for a proper burial in a place where her son could visit often. He would make this possible as soon as he found her.
And he would find her. Lou would help him. Somehow he knew, Lou would reunite them at last.
When the guard peeked and disappeared for the second time, Konstantine darted for the office door. He reached it in eight steps.
It was an office. Unlit and silent. And completely
and utterly dark as he slid the door closed behind him. But leaving it open was stupid. Anyone who walked by would know where he’d gone. But with the door closed, he had only the light from the computer to guide him.
He wasted no time rounding the desk and inserting his USB into the port. The laptop was already open, and three fish swam on the screen as if in an imaginary aquarium. Konstantine punched a series of buttons, and the password screen fell away. The air in this office was cool and the keys soft under his fingertips.
As he furiously typed, he imagined a series of bots marching out of the USB into the defenseless computer, sliding down these channels toward their battle stations.
He strained to hear the men talking. Listened for their booming voices vibrating through the walls, but heard nothing. For all he knew, they could be standing en mass outside the office door, ready to seize him, string him up and tear him limb from limb.
There was also the matter of the office itself. The dark office.
Konstantine’s eyes kept slipping toward the thickest shadows in the corners of the room. Places where the walls seemed to breathe.
Any minute she would be there. She would appear, her face glowing in the darkness like Banquo’s ghost come to choke him in his guilt.
But the shadows remained shadows. The darkness remained still.
And even if she did appear, he couldn’t stop. He had to do this.
For his mother. And for Louie.
One did not approach a goddess empty-handed, begging for favor.
On the screen a green bar marking his progress filled. The task was done. He stepped out into the hallway, closed the door again without a sound, and assumed his same statuesque pose.
The guard checked him for a third time.
Konstantine’s heart pounded in his ears so hard that he was certain if someone spoke to him, he wouldn’t hear it.
As long as no one wanted to shake, he would be okay. If he had to unclasp his hands for any reason, they would certainly notice the tremor in his fingers or the dampness in his palms.
But it didn’t matter.
It would be worth it as long as he could complete the job.
Of course, this would be the hardest part.
How to stay alive long enough to deliver the truth?
33
King traced the small container for the hundredth time. Flecks of rust had wiggled beneath his fingernails, and when he tried to dig them out with another short nail, they were only wedged deeper. Now a sharp edge bit into the tender flesh and a line of blood filled the crescent moons.
“My head is killing me,” Brasso whined as he pulled himself into a sitting position. And he made a ruckus doing it. His boots boomed against the floor, heels scrapping. And something was wrong with his arm. It lay across his lap, limp as a dead fish. But King couldn’t remember anything happening to his arm. Unless Lou had done it.
Brasso rubbed the back of his head. “Did you give me a concussion?”
“No.” King’s tongue felt swollen. Either he’d bitten it and hadn’t realized it, or it was his fear choking him. “You were hit in the head with a cast iron skillet.”
“Jesus,” Brasso said and touched the back of his head. “I should sue you.”
“If you get out of this container alive, you do that.” King’s heart floundered in his chest.
These walls held no exit. No seam he could pry open. Lou had called it a shipping container, but unless the communists had tried to conserve money by not installing a door, it was an iron coffin.
His mind began a running list of everything that could go wrong.
What if Lou died? What if she was mortally wounded enough to make a return trip impossible?
Would he starve to death? Would Lucy come looking for him?
An air vent kicked on and air smelling like basement pipes filtered into the space. The air, no matter how dank, helped. He remembered what he was supposed to be doing.
He turned to Brasso and aimed his pistol. “Why did you do it?”
“What a stupid question.” Brasso snorted and rubbed at his nose. “Why does anyone do anything? For the money. For the perks. If you want to start a conversation with me, Robbie, make it a good one.”
“How much did Ryanson pay you?”
Brasso grinned. “A fuck ton. So much you’d piss your panties if I told you.”
“Your reputation is fucked,” King said, “The moment I get back—”
“Oh come on, King, you’re not going to out me.”
“The hell I won’t.”
Brasso laughed. Laughed. “You won’t. You know why?”
The walls were warping, moving in. This fucking orange light wasn’t helping. It gave the room an off-kilter look.
“Because when I go down, I’ll smear your name all through the mud with mine. I’ll talk about how many cover-ups we did in our years together. I’ll point my finger at you so hard you’ll feel it up your ass.”
The world shifted as if on a tilt. “They won’t believe you.”
Brasso laughed again. A great big belly laugh. “Oh, they’ll believe. And you’ll rot in a cell right beside me. And I’ll sell out your old ass again, more specifically your asshole in this case, to the first young buck willing to give me a cigarette.”
King punched him twice. The skin split across his knuckle bones before he caught himself.
He pushed back. He ran a hand through this hair and resumed pacing. He threw one last punch. “Son of a bitch.”
Brasso touched his face tenderly and hissed. “Yeah, yeah. You knew what I was. Like I’ve always known what you are, Robbie boy. The sanctimonious pratt who wants a gold star for every shit he takes.”
King was going to kill him long before Lou returned, he decided. He would do it now, except the only thing worse than rotting in this container, was rotting in this container with a dead body. Everything was worse with a dead body.
“Thinking about killing me?” Brasso huffed. Sweat beaded on the man’s forehead.
King shot him a look.
“Oh come on. I can read you like a stop sign. You’re too predictable. Make you a little angry, and you want to shoot first and ask questions later.”
“I was trying to decide if I wanted to eat you alive or dead.”
“Ah, so we are stuck,” Brasso said, his face pinched. “York all over again?
Mention of the collapsed building where King spent two whole days made his back clench. He was going to vomit. If he didn’t pull himself together, he was going to do more than vomit.
“How long?” King asked.
In the orange light, Brasso’s face looked slick with oil and his eyes shrunken in their sockets. “Twelve fucking inches. Why? You want to blow me?”
King didn’t even flinch. He’d heard this dirty mouth for decades. “How long have you been Ryanson’s fuck boy?”
Brasso’s shit-eating grin flattened to a thin line. "Do you want to know that, Robbie?"
“Why wouldn’t I?”
“It might change the way you view our relationship,” he said. “The wife never likes to hear about the other woman. How happy can she be to learn her happy marriage included thirty years of infidelity?
King’s stomach dropped. Not unlike the way it dropped when Lou pulled him through the thin fabric of time and space. But she had not returned. The only time he was falling through now was his own.
“How long?” he asked again, and he felt the muscles along his spine clench as if bracing for an impact.
Brasso pushed himself up even taller before falling back against the rusty wall. The walls gave a metallic pop that echoed through the container. “Do you remember the talk Bennigan gave me? I was gone for a whole day, and then I came back with my tail tucked.”
For a minute, King didn’t. He reached deep into the back of his mind but felt only cobwebs. A sensation of groping blind in the darkness. Then a lightning flash of recognition and his pulse kicked. “When I got shot.”
Brasso was no
dding. “You took a bullet and became a hero, and I got a goddamn lecture about not being where I was told to be...like a fucking five-year-old. Bad boy, little Chazzy. Mommie told you to come inside when the street lights came on, and you didn’t listen and look what happened. You got a medal and were sent off to school the kiddies...”
And had the pleasure of meeting Jack Thorne.
“...and while you did your 90-day tour of Quantico, I was downgraded to a desk. Man, that rubbed my ass wrong.”
King was waiting for the connection to be made.
Brasso wasn’t done talking. “So when Ryanson rolled up on a white pony with a fuck ton of cash tied in a pretty bow, why would I say no? No? To more money than I’d ever make with the department? No to black-tie parties drowning in beautiful women who would blow their own fathers six ways to Sunday if you offered them one snort of coke, which by the way, is about as easy to come by in the DEA headquarters as an STD at Coachella.”
King tried to count how many times drugs went missing between the bust itself and the evidence locker. Too many to count. But had he ever imagined that Brasso was palming the stuff himself? No.
“Thirteen years,” King said. The shock was wearing off. After all, he knew it happened. How many cops or agents were in the pocket of this or that powerhouse? Most. Why? Because everything had a price. King knew full well that the price of his guilt was too high to be bought by anyone—but he wasn’t naïve enough to believe that meant he had no price at all.
“Or maybe you think I should’ve said no to being fucking appreciated for my talents rather than kicked like a dog who pissed on the rug? You know what happened when I saved your life?”
King pressed his back against the metal wall as if to make the room wider.
“Nothing,” Chaz said. “No medal. No slap on the ass. Just a that-a-boy, Chazzy. That-a-boy.”
“If Ryanson wanted something overlooked, I took care of it. I pointed the hounds in another direction. Maybe evidence went missing. Maybe witnesses did. Enough misdirection to keep them off Ryanson’s ass.”
Shadows in the Water Page 25
