OUR SECRET BABY

by Paula Cox

  The Zippo drops with a hiss of burnt snow.

  Chapter 23

  There isn’t a chance I can off a guy with Maya standing right there behind me. And for whatever reason she’s come here, she sure as hell isn’t leaving without saying something.

  So I put in a call to Crash and quickly explain all the essentials about the situation with the Russians/confrontation and then mention that I’ve left the big guy tethered up back at the Clubhouse for them to decide later what to do with him.

  There are some ruins of an old tenement building still attached to the warehouse. It’s not Theo’s mansion, but it’s enough to keep the guy from getting hypothermia during the twenty minutes it’ll take Crash to get himself down to the Clubhouse. I tie a cloth around his missing fingers for the blood and bind his arms and legs, but he’s not going anywhere. He’s only hanging on to consciousness by a thread.

  Maya is in the exact same spot as before, still looking at me with that mix of wonder and horror.

  I don’t say anything. There’s no trying to explain yourself out of torturing and almost killing a man.

  Maya sees me coming back and starts walking towards the covered car I’d seen when I brought the Russian over.

  “You drive,” she says, cold.

  I pull off the blanket she’s used to cover the thing and take the keys without a word. She doesn’t want to hear me talk. That’s clear enough.

  We spin out onto the main road, in a little globe of snow. The flakes aren’t as fast as earlier in the day. They look more like little bullets made out of ice. I drag us through for about ten minutes. We’re going so slowly we’re not even out of Easttown yet. The highway’s at least twenty minutes away. Maya doesn’t wait for us to reach it.

  “You’d better find something to say. You’d better at least try.”

  I choose my words like I’m doing brain surgery. “They were trying to kill our guy.”

  “Did they torture him? Did they cut off his fingers first? Did they try and set him on fire?”

  “No.”

  “Is that all you’ve got, then?” Her words threaten to break on a sob, but she holds it in.

  “Maya.” I put a hand out for her, but she slaps it away.

  “Kirill’t try, Quinn. Kirill’t you even fucking try. I don’t even want to know what the hell you’ve been doing with your hands.”

  I turn my attention back to the road. “You don’t understand,” I say quietly. “You don’t understand what they’ve done to us.”

  “No, I don’t. I don’t want to understand. If this is what you do—if this is what you meant when you told me that stuff in the hotel, then I don’t want to understand any of it. You’re all murderers and psychopaths to me.”

  “It’s not like that.”

  “Yeah? Do you believe what you’re saying? How could you try and tell me that after what I just saw you do? How can you even think that?”

  “Because it’s not. It’s business. That’s all.”

  We leave the tenement houses behind, finally. I see distance. The gray slush of the canal fed with dirty melted snow. Gloomy clouds like diapers roll over the flat surface of sky.

  “Why are you doing this?” she whispers. “I want to give you a chance. I want to believe anything else apart from what you’ve just shown me, and I can’t. You won’t let me. You say the sickest, the most ridiculous things, and everything in me is screaming not to let you in further. You’ll only make it worse if I let you in further. You’ll only turn yourself into more of a monster.”

  “I’m not a monster. You have to believe that.”

  “I don’t have to believe another word you say.”

  “I haven’t ever lied to you, Maya. Not once. I couldn’t.”

  “You said you killed bad people. I should have run then, but I didn’t. It wasn’t anything new to me, anyway. Daddy did the same thing. And I wanted to believe you two were different from each other. I wanted to believe you couldn’t be like him because there’s only room for one monster in my life. Kirill’t turn here,” she says when she sees me redirecting the Maserati towards the highway. I let it go, and we continue to drift down the back roads.

  “Maybe you didn’t lie,” she goes on. “But you sure as hell didn’t tell the whole truth.”

  “What else could I have said? This is my job. It’s ugly and brutal, but it keeps my brothers and me alive. Try protecting yourself against these people without being violent and find out what happens.”

  “I can’t listen to this.”

  “I kill people for money,” I go on anyway. I can’t stop. “Maybe that’s what I should have told you before. I kill people other people want dead. I do it for money, and I do it for protection. Is that enough?”

  Maya’s eyes are full of tears, but her face is stone. Even though she’s tiny and even if her hair makes her look like a Barbie, she looks weirdly indestructible.

  “That all?” She turns to me. “How about killing people for enjoyment? For convenience?”

  “No. I’m not a murderer.”

  “Kirill’t make me laugh. That’s exactly what you are. Maybe you tell yourself that because you don’t want to believe it. Maybe you really don’t think you are. I know what I saw.”

  “Maya…”

  “Kirill’t say my name,” she snaps, “ever again. I’m done with you and all your bullshit.”

  Back to the road. The clouds twist around and get darker. The snow pellets slacken off. The night’s coming.

  Maya turns and looks out the window and forgets that I exist while I drive. I drive until I can’t recognize any of the buildings on my right, and keep driving. The Gulf rears up sooner than I’m expecting. It has a cruel, hard quality about it.

  Maya tells me to drop her off at the Motel Six to our right, and I do. She has just enough cash on her so that she doesn’t have to use her card. I offer to help her in with her things, but she shoulders me off and slams the passenger door shut so hard I’m pretty sure I hear the glass chipping.

  “Just tell me one thing.” She stops at the stairs.

  “I’ll tell you anything you want to hear. Anything at all.”

  “That’s not worth anything to me anymore. Not after I know what you do.” She breathes in deep, cold winter air, and coughs lightly. “Your brothers. Your gang. The ones I saw earlier. The ones you do all this with. You’d do anything for them? Kill and torture and all that?”

  “Yes.” I don’t hesitate.

  “And you’d give me up that quickly?”

  Her eyes burn holes in me. I’ve never seen brown look so cruel. But I don’t hesitate here either. Not when it comes to my brothers. Not my family.

  Maya nods like she’s expected it all along, wheels her bag through the blanket of snow, and disappears through the revolving doors. I stand outside, ignoring the cold and the other drivers pulling into the parking lot, watching her at the front counter. I watch her until she’s got her room card. I’m even watching her while she goes upstairs, lugging that damn suitcase with her, keeping her eyes as far away from the parking lot as possible. And I’m still standing there when I see the light go on in one of the upper rooms.

  The wind bites. It gets underneath my coat and through my jeans and I start to realize how cold and unforgiving the temperature is when I don’t have adrenaline keeping me warm. But even when I get back inside the car I just sit there, doing nothing, waiting for nothing. It’s not like I’m thinking she’s gonna suddenly just change her mind about how she feels and come running back out into the lot. She doesn’t ever want to see me again, and I believe it. It doesn’t change the fact I’m still sitting here, wanting something else to happen. Because right now it feels like everything inside my body has been carved out and dumped away like the insides of a Jack-o’-lantern, and everything that told me to move, to breathe, to eat, to sleep, to fight, was lost when I lost that.

  I let the inside get cold. It’d be easy to flip the switch and start the engine, but I don’t. The cold
is nice. The cold keeps me awake. The cold keeps me focused on the nothing that aches so bad in the pit of my stomach.

  The wind pummels the side of the car. The sky spits out flaky wads of snow like chewed-up gum. Night has fallen. Darker than the nights before. A disgusting night, filled with the sounds of the rocking waves from the beach and the slap of snow and the fists of the wind. The afternoon had seemed pretty bad, but it wasn’t like this. Like the city’s being punished for something.

  My brain’s all scattered like it’s been blasted to pieces, and my thoughts are all trying to crawl back together and combine into wholes. Soon enough, though, I start thinking. I’m thinking of Palmer laid up in the hospital with his knees shattered and that bullet lodged in his thigh. And I wonder how Miles is pulling along and that maybe they’re in the same unit with one another, but that wouldn’t make sense. If they had any smarts at all on them, they’d have taken my boy straight to intensive.

  Why am I not there with him? What’s keeping me from putting the car in gear and driving out to the hospital to see how my boy’s coming along? Why can’t I leave Maya?

  None of the thoughts crawling around have any idea. But I can’t go. It’s like my arms have been chopped off or my legs removed. I just can’t.

  Hours pass sitting in that goddam car, doing nothing. Not even waiting, just sitting. I try to guess the time judging by how dark it is near the water, but I get bored so soon that I can’t keep my eyes on it any more than five minutes or thereabouts. It’s around eleven at night when my phone starts to buzz.

  I think it’s the boys calling to tell me what’s up. My fingers are so stiff with the cold it’s a struggle just working the phone out of my pocket. But I do, and put it up clumsily to my ear.

  “It’s me,” Maya’s voice radiates through, cold and clear. My heart rises up to my throat so fast I think I’m gonna choke on it. “Honestly, I don’t know why I’m calling you. I mean, I know why, but I still don’t want to.”

  “Okay.” My hand holding onto the phone is trembling so bad I’m sure I’m gonna drop it at any minute, but I don’t.

  “To tell you the truth, what you do disgusts me. It’s the sickest and degrading work I can imagine. But that’s what you do, and I’ve been sitting here for the last four hours telling myself to get as far away as possible. To put as much distance as I physically can between you and me.”

  The line goes quiet. I wait, holding my breath.

  “But I’m still here,” she finally croaks. “I don’t know what you’ve done to me, but I’m still here. I don’t know if I believe what you said about protecting your friends or if I’m just crazy or if I have a death wish, or what’s happened. You’ve fucking spun me on my head, and I don’t know what to do about it. You know, if you didn’t make me hate you so much, I think I might actually love you.”

  Another pause. I can hear the blood working its cycles through my brain. I can hear each pump of my heart, slowed down to super-slow motion. I can feel my whole body moving with what Maya tells me.

  “It doesn’t change anything,” she cuts in at last. “It doesn’t change what you are or what you do. You’re still a monster to me, and I told you before there’s only room in my life for one monster.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean I’m done with this bullshit. I’m sick of being sandwiched between two killers, like a fucking bone you’ve thrown to two different dogs. Maybe this is what I’m supposed to do, or who I’m supposed to be. Everyone’s got a type they gravitate towards, yeah? Maybe I’m that crazy girl who has a bunch of killers in her life. Sure as hell seems that way. And if that’s what I am and I’ve got to choose someone to throw myself at, fine. I choose you. At least you still have a soul. He doesn’t.”

  “Who are you talking about?” My mouth’s so dry. Every breath is like swallowing ash.

  “Theo,” she says.

  I had a good reason for being nervous about this. “What do you want?”

  “For you to do what you do. If you want to keep working. If you want us to keep whatever we’ve got, whatever you care about: the money, the fucking, me, then kill Theo Butler.”

  “You can’t be serious.”

  “Kirill’t say that mobster bullshit to me. I wouldn’t have said it if I wasn’t serious. But this is a contract. For pay, whatever you want that the Family can provide.”

  “This is insane,” I wheeze. Why? Because I’d be betraying the guy who hired me in the first place? Because it was his own daughter who was making the request? Jesus Christ. What world had I fallen into?

  “It’s not insane. It’s a contract kill. I don’t give a shit how it’s done. You’ve got seventy-two hours. Better decide quick.”

  The line goes dead. The phone drops from my hand. My fingers are shaking so violently I have to sit on them to keep them from moving. Somehow, my body and my heart feel strangely calm. This whole thing was fucking insane, but I’d learned to adjust to insane. I was a tool for whatever the moment called for. And at this moment, I was a tool designed to put a bullet through the heart of Theo Butler.

  Chapter 24

  Maya turns off her phone and throws it on the bed. It springs up and down on the cover, then springs off and hits the floor. She doesn’t notice it. She feels the tears welling up in her eyes, hot and agonizing, but she doesn’t even try to brush them away. There’d be no point. She’s not in control of her body right now, and that’s fine—she doesn’t need it to do anything aside from what it’s already doing: processing.

  And like this, she slowly begins to understand what she’s just done. Put a hit on her father. Sell herself for Theo’s death. Trade one life of killing for another. Theo or Quinn. Family or Stitches. Death or death.

  The words jump around in her brain with strange finality, like the phone bouncing on the bed before it clunks down with a little thud to the ground.

  For some reason, her legs go weak, but instead of sitting down on the bed or at the desk, she slumps down with her back to the mattress, facing the door. She’s eerily calm. She’s so calm even she knows there’s something strange about it, like she was looking at her body through the eyes of someone else. She’s generally and scarily calm, despite the circumstances and the day she’s had, and her thoughts come to her one at a time like letters she can open and examine at will.

  The first thing she needs is a plan, and the first thing on that plan is some place where she can go tomorrow. The mansion is one hundred and fifty percent off limits, and with the mansion comes that whole chunk of the outskirts of the city. Better to get away and stay away, especially now that she’s given the order for Theo to go in the ground. For all she knows, Quinn’s already at the mansion, plugging guardsmen. Getting closer. Doing anything other than what he was doing, which was sitting in her car in hotel’s parking lot, going exactly nowhere, waiting to see where his thoughts would lead.

  She’s still sitting on the shag, cheap-ass carpet of the Motel Six, facing the door like she’s waiting for someone to come plowing through at any moment. She’s still calm. She’s still completely in control of the situation and even more so, of herself. There are no doubts about her contract being filled, that in three days or less she’s going to read in the paper or see online an article detailing the ruthless and efficient murder of Theo Butler, respected and deeply beloved businessman.

  What would they say about her? Would she even be mentioned? “Whereabouts of Maya Butler currently unknown?” No—that wasn’t right. “Maya Butler could not be contacted at this time.” Not that either.

  With any luck, they’d have forgotten about her. Or, better yet, the kill would be so efficiently done, and the body so well hidden, or an excuse provided detailing how her father was out of town and wouldn’t be back until so-on-and-so-forth. Something offering enough liberty that there’d be at least a week before any kind of suspicion would be entertained.

  Maya hopes.

  She could really use that week. It could be that maybe she doesn�
�t intend on ever seeing Quinn again, and getting as far away as soon as possible just so that she doesn’t have to think about what she’s leaving behind, or what might come after her. She’s been tagged all her life by her father and her father’s people. Quinn’s just the latest in the newest batch of prison enforcers.

  “The hell am I doing?” she says, not even sure whether she’d said it out loud or whether the thought was so abrupt and sudden it just sounded like it. She gets up off the ground and smooths out her skirt, then picks up the phone and manually dials the first number she can think of.

  “Mmmellow?” Anthony Gerard says. He stretches the word like an eighth grader chewing Hubble Bubble.