I stopped at the bottom step. “He can’t be.”
“He ran off after you. I tried to stop him but I couldn’t move fast enough.” Dom rubbed his abdomen where it was still swollen. “I couldn’t get there.”
“Where would he have gone?” I tried to think. I searched my brain for a sound, a tiny voice that had come from behind me while I was on the way to Maureen’s house.
I couldn’t find one.
“I don’t know, I just saw him run in your direction and he hasn’t been back since.”
The earth no longer felt steady and silver dots pulsed in my vision. I spread my feet apart to keep myself from toppling over.
Dom saw. “Take a breath. We need to think about this.”
A sinking feeling spread across the surface of my brain. I didn’t need to think about it; I already knew. There was only one answer.
I searched every alley between the church and Maureen’s place. I found rats scurrying among the garbage, homeless men cowering in the corners with the hoods of their tattered coats draped over their heads, but no Nick.
Where would he want me to find them?
I thought of the police station. Maybe Keegan would force me to turn myself in to save Nick. But then I would never tell him where his friend was buried. No, there had to be another place, somewhere that would help him remind me that he could destroy me at any time.
Then I had it.
The warehouse.
The sun had started to set by the time I made it to the back of the familiar warehouse where I had almost killed three men. I say it that way on purpose. I take ownership of it. Yes, they would have killed me if they could have, but they had teetered between life and death under my blade, and there were no two ways to spin it: they were my victims, and mine alone.
The blood was still there, reminders of where they had fallen. The same weak bulb hovered above me as Keegan stepped into the dim light, one hand on Nick’s shoulder, the other one on the gun that was for the moment resting in his holster. “Cain, so good to see you. I was so glad to see that your priest friend had gotten home safely. I hope he is healing well.”
Nick’s eyes widened. Normally, I would have expected him to try and wriggle from Keegan’s grasp. The fact that he wasn’t even trying meant that he was just that scared. “Let him go.”
Keegan grinned. “I would love to! But you’ve forced my hand. I need some way to reason with you. Apparently, your friend’s incident wasn’t enough,” he said with a chuckle. “By the way, been getting calls at the station asking about him. I couldn’t every well lie to the good people. So your friend may be getting some angry visits here in the near future. Extremely unfortunate.”
I wrapped my palms around my knives. I saw the muscles in Keegan’s hands contract around his gun. “Really, Cain, I’m giving you an opportunity here. Just tell me the truth. This can be over.” His free hand tightened on Nick’s shoulder.
I stepped closer. “Tell me, what if I do tell you? If you think Maureen killed him, then what?”
“What’s done is done. Every man deserves a proper burial. That’s all we want. Nothing more, nothing less.”
I would have been more inclined to believe him if he had said he would at least beat her up or burn her house down. But when he claimed that no harm would come to her, I immediately knew the truth. The only thing keeping Maureen alive was my keeping my mouth shut. “Let him go.”
He withdrew his pistol and stuck it to Nick’s head. “Suit yourself.”
I knew he would pull the trigger before he did. His finger had pulled it halfway down when I threw my knife. I flicked my wrist and launched it into the air. The blade landed in the flesh of Keegan’s shoulder.
When he dropped the gun, the trigger depressed, firing a bullet into one of the boxes in the warehouse. Nick ran toward me and threw his arms around my waist.
“Wait outside.”
When I got to Keegan, he was in a heap on the floor, clutching his shoulder, blood leaking out between his fingers. I pulled the knife out of the bone. The crunch made Keegan wail.
I pushed him to the ground and held my knife to his throat. I was about to press down when something swept over me. It was a heavy feeling, something like sadness. As Keegan looked up at me, with complete utter fear in his eyes, I hesitated.
As much as I wanted him out of our lives, I didn’t want to kill him. I just wanted it over. That’s all. I wanted him dead, but I didn’t want to be the one to take his life. I was tired of taking lives. Each one made me better at it, and I didn’t want to become an expert. As much as I wanted him punished, I didn’t want to do the punishing. “I’m going to tell you one more time. Leave us alone. If you so much as breathe near Maureen, Dom, or Nick again, there isn’t going to be any more chances. I’ll cut your throat from ear to ear.”
I stepped away from Keegan and retrieved the gun from the floor. I could still hear him howling from his wound as I left the warehouse.
“He was gonna kill me, I know it,” Nick said as he clung to my hand on our way back to the church.
“I know.” Maybe I shouldn’t have been so honest, but I figured after all Nick had seen we were past the point of sugar-coating things.
“What are we gonna do?”
“Not a clue.” Again, maybe I should have told less of the truth. He looked at me with wide, panicked eyes. “All I know is we have to get to the church.”
We ran the rest of the way, and by the time we got there sweat was pouring from both our brows. When Dom opened the door, I could tell he knew what was coming.
“Dom, we have to leave.”
“I know.”
I sent Nick downstairs to get the children ready. They didn’t have many belongings but I figured they would want what little they did have. Dom and I went upstairs and shut the apartment door behind us. When we were alone, he spoke. “I made a phone call while you were gone. My brother, he’s got a big farm in Cuba. He said all of us could stay there as long as we need to. All of us.”
I exhaled with relief, but I still felt guilty it had come to this. “Dom?”
“Yeah?”
“I’m sorry.” I didn’t know what else to say. There were no words that I could tell the man that would have made up for destroying his life. However, he didn’t make me try. He just nodded.
“I know.”
Dom explained to me that we would need to figure out a way to smuggle the children down to the coast of Florida by that Friday. Once we got to a certain dock, a boat would be waiting for us to take us across the border to his brother’s farm. That gave us three days. “I just don’t know where we’re going to get a car big enough to fit all of us.”
Panic swept over me suddenly and I realized I didn’t either. There was only one thing I could think of, and I didn’t like it one bit. “I may know a way.”
The man at the hardware store across the street had helped me out on more than one occasion. He had known that I had stolen two knives from him, but let me walk out of his store anyway. And when Keegan was showing my picture around the neighborhood, he claimed he had never seen me.
There had to be a reason.
I had passed by his store numerous times, enough to know that he had a supplies van parked in the back. I walked through the rear parking lot one more time just to make sure and stepped inside his shop.
I found him hunched over a desk in the back, a lamp barely illuminating the paper in front of him. “Hello, Cain.”
I nodded.
“Hello, sir.” When I got closer, I realized he was painting little wooden soldiers: a row rested on a paper towel to the side of his desk. The one he was working on had a blue uniform on, and I noticed he was carefully adding little yellow buttons. The detail on the faces was near perfect. Despite their size, I could see their tiny eyes looking straight at me, pupils and all. “What are those for?”
“They’re for you.”
I stared at him.
“I may spend a lot of time here in this shop, but I notice t
hings. Like how those kids keep going in that church of yours and never come back out. Except for that one that couldn’t wait to get back in earlier today. Figured they might like some toys.”
I stepped closer.
“And you’re not gonna turn me in?”
“Course not. You’re doing a good thing. Besides that, I owe your mother.”
My heart climbed into my mouth and attempted to claw its way out. “My mother? How do you know my mother?”
I wondered if he knew she was dead.
“She was a good woman, your mother. I went off to join the military, long time ago. Made the mistake of not marrying your mother before I left. Never even asked her. Such a coward.” As he talked, his eyes never left his tiny soldier, and his brush never stopped moving. “By the time I got back, she’d met your father. I’d visit now and again, until one morning she opened the door with a black eye.” He sat the soldier down to dry next to his comrades. “I told myself it was none of my business, that me comin’ by would be doing her more harm. But I was just doing the same ol’ thing, playin’ the same move. I was a coward.”
Finally, he turned towards me. “Sometimes, I’d still pretend that you were mine. Sounds silly now, ‘specially since you’re a spittin’ image of him, but I did it all the same.”
I felt a tickle on my cheek and realized a tear was inching its way down my face. I didn’t want to tell him. “I’m sorry to tell you this, but my mom’s dead.”
He half smiled. “I know.”
“You know? And you’re still helping me?”
“Darn right. Blame myself for her, though. I was there.”
“What do you mean you were there?”
He looked me square in the eye. “Your momma could barely lift you, let alone your father. When she found out what you did, she called me.”
At first, my stomach tried to escape through my mouth; now it sank to the floor.
“She got you outta the house that night, then called me. Told me to just help her put him in the car. Told me to put him in the passenger seat, to throw a blanket over him. I was so shocked, it didn’t even occur to me to ask what she planned on doing with him. Before I knew it, she was speeding away. Then I saw the news.”
My knees gave out and the man had to jump from his chair to catch me. He slowly lowered me to the floor. “Cain, your mamma loved you. Maybe she didn’t show it as much as she had planned, but none of us ever do. When I saw the news that day, I know she blamed herself for what happened between you and your dad. But she loved you, never forget that.”
All I could do was nod. “Thank you.”
He got up and went over to his soldier collection. “Ah, just about dry.” He folded up all of them into a piece of leather, carefully wrapping each one, keeping a layer of fabric between them. The last one, he handed to me. “This one’s for you. The leader. Keep this one close to you.”
I squeezed it hard and put it in my pocket. “Thank you.” Before I knew it, I was hugging him. This man had saved me more times than I could count, despite what he’d known I’d done.
“Go on now, you better get back. Steer clear of those policemen.”
I swallowed hard. “I really hate to ask, but that’s the thing…we need to leave but we can’t fit—”
“Say no more.” He dug into his pocket and tossed his keys at me. “She doesn’t smell too good but she runs great. Now get out of here.”
I smiled at him, carefully closing the shop door behind me. When I glanced back, he was back to his desk, painting faces on his nameless soldiers. I squeezed the one he had given me and hopped into the van.
I had one more stop to make before I went back to the church. We would have to wait until the next day to get supplies ready for our journey, so I wanted to make sure I talked to Maureen before then.
When I got to her house, she was sitting on the couch, reading a book. I sat down across from her.
“You aren’t on shift today, why are you here?”
I grabbed her book straight from her hands and threw it across the room. “We’re leaving and you have to come with us.”
A loud laugh, almost a yell, left her mouth. “Leave? Are you crazy?”
I grabbed her by her shoulders and pulled her out of her chair. “They want to kill you, don’t you get it? For killing their friend. I’ve been protecting you but I can’t protect you anymore.”
“What are you talking about?”
“They know. I stabbed Keegan tonight. They know I’m never going to tell them where we buried their friend. We have to get out of here.”
She freed herself from my grasp. “I’m not afraid of them. I can take care of myself.” She gestured around her as a maniacal smile that I’ll never forget stretched across her face. “I’ve built this. Myself. Look around you, I have an empire. A fucking empire. They can’t touch me.”
“Maureen, please, what you have is a whore house and what you’ll be is dead if we don’t leave.”
As soon as the words escaped me, I knew I had lost. She just stared at me, stone cold and silent, all feelings drained completely from her face. “We have no more to say. Get out.”
When she slammed the door behind me, I remembered the words I had said and prayed that when the door shut it wouldn’t be for the last time.
CHAPTER SIX
A noise danced in the air as I made my way up the steps and back inside the church. No lights were on, but I could hear feet scurrying around, making plans and readying themselves for their journey. When I saw Dominic, I smiled. “Van’s in the back.”
He embraced me. “We will have to wait until the cover of night tomorrow, but if you and I load the van during the day while Nick keeps watch, we should be ready by nightfall.”
A knock on the front door of the church startled us both. I didn’t move fast enough, because as I took a step toward it, Jordyn flung the door open and marched toward me. Dom glanced at me with a who-the-hell-is-this expression. Before I could explain, Jordyn turned to him and stuck her hand out.
“Name’s Jordyn. I’m coming with you.”
“Um…okay? How about we start with where you came from?” Dom extended a cautious hand and Jordyn shook it vigorously before she turned to me.
“I heard what you said. At the house. I was listening.”
I didn’t have time to be irritated that she had eavesdropped. I remembered the promise I had made Maureen. “I’m sorry, Jordyn, but I can’t let you come with us.”
Jordyn smiled. “Look, dude, I don’t remember asking. And besides, you really think you won’t need me?” She looked over at Dom. “Your friend doesn’t look so hot and I darn well know you don’t want to have to deal with a bunch of kids by yourself. Besides, you can’t go all the way to the coast without stoppin’ once or twice. My parents have a big house with a big field. We can camp out in the woods there and they won’t even be the wiser.” She paused. “Please, Cain, I can’t do it anymore. That house…I just can’t be anywhere near it anymore.”
“Dom’s fine.”
Dom signed then looked at me. “She’s right, Cain, anything could happen between now and the farm. We might need her.”
I stared at her, arms folded across her chest and one hip popped out to one side. She wasn’t about to let it go. Sucking in my breath and dreading how I was going to make it up to Maureen, I nodded.
I woke up the next morning with a knot in my stomach. I curled up in a ball and tucked the blanket over my head.
If I can avoid today just a little longer, maybe I can fix this.
Denial is a powerful drug.
I could have stayed there forever, except Dom was already up and pulling things out of the closet, digging under the bed, and throwing things in bags. I don’t know where he had all those bags hidden away but they were there all the same. He saw me stir. “Make yourself useful and start emptying the cupboards. My brother doesn’t have enough pots and pans for an extra dozen people, so we need to bring it all.”
Picking up
a plate in the sink, I started washing it. And washing it. And washing it again. Dom finally noticed me scrubbing the same plate, just staring into nothingness. I felt a hand on my shoulder. “Okay, out with it.”
I didn’t even bother pretending I was okay. “It’s Maureen. She needs my help but she’s never gonna forgive me. That was her one rule: don’t mess with her girls. The second I said yes to Jordyn, I lost her.”
Dom turned me away from the sink. “You know how I feel about that girl. But I know you care about her so I’m trying to ignore it. Come sit for a second.”
We sat down on the bed, ignoring the masses of stuff that still needed to be done. “Just go talk to her. If she’s any kind of woman, she’ll understand.”
“I asked her to come with us.” Dom swallowed hard. “She said no.” I could almost see the muscles in his body relax. “But that doesn’t mean she’ll forgive me.”
“She may not. But isn’t it worth one more shot?”
I hesitated, looking around at all we had left to do. Dom pushed a hand into my back.
“Go, you stubborn kid.”
I smiled with cautious hope as I ran out the door.
I found Maureen in the kitchen, hunched over the sink. When I came in, she didn’t look up. I noticed a knife in her left hand.
“Maureen, I’m sorry about yesterday. I didn’t mean to say that.”
“Say what?”
“You know.”
She looked up, grip tightening. “No, repeat it for me. Tell me again about my whorehouse. Oh, but remember to throw in the part that you’re stealing one of my girls from me while you’re at it.”
She turned to face me, knife thrust out in front of her.
“Whoa, put the knife down.”
“Why? You know I’ll use it. I have before.”
“But you won’t on me.”
The blade started to shake in her hand. “Well I should. I should kill you for what you are doing. I thought I could…”
“What?”
She dropped the knife onto the floor. “I thought I could trust you.”
Between the Cracks and Burning Doors: Book 2 of The Extraction List Series Page 10
