Hawk

by Abigail Graham

  “What?” I blurt out.

  “You’ve pieced it together by now, I’m sure. Yes, I killed your mother. Not with my own hands, of course. I always have clean hands. I tried to teach you that, but you never learned. So long I tried to teach you, and you picked up all the wrong lessons,” he shoots Victor a scathing glance. “You. I keep trying to turn you into an asset but you become a thorn in my side. I can’t have you exposing me or interfering anymore. If you’d cooperated I’d have let you have her. She’d no longer have been any use to me. Truth is, some sentimentality leads me to prefer not to dispose of my only blood, but practicality must overrule sentimentality. You both have to die. With you gone there will be no one to contest my daughter’s last will and testament or my status as her sole beneficiary.”

  “You think you can just get away with killing your own daughter?”

  “No,” he sighs. “You will. Or rather, you will commit murder suicide. You see, you were released from prison and began stalking and harassing her. I have evidence of this, of course. Once it was clear she’d moved on and rejected you, you lost your mind. Unable to cope, you broke in here, killed her, and set the house on fire.”

  “Tragic,” Vitali adds, chuckling.

  “I wait an appropriate time, of course, and after the necessary legal wrangling everything that belongs to your family is now mine.”

  “Why?” Victor says. “What did we ever do to you?”

  Vitali starts laughing.

  Father… Martin doesn’t.

  “You’re expecting me to deliver, what is it, a monologue, yes? I suppose I should tie you up over a shark tank and reveal my entire dastardly plan to take revenge on your family for some slight. No. You were an easy target. This is business. Sentimentality is for idiots.”

  “You,” Victor barks, looking at Vitali. “He sent you to prison.”

  “I make mistake. I do time. I get out. That is how game is played. Sorry boy. You were right not to trust me. Whoever said not to make friends inside, give good advice.”

  “Let’s go,” Martin says, standing.

  Vitali steps behind us, covering our backs with his gun. Martin keeps his distance, and leads us upstairs, to Victor’s father’s office. It still smells the same inside, the air stale from remaining closed up so long. I catch a whiff of a bitter, sulfurous smell and wrinkle my nose.

  “That’s gas,” Victor says, softly.

  Vitali’s men are carrying jerry cans through the house, slopping it everywhere. They throw it on the walls, soak it into the carpet, pour it down the bannisters. The smell is overpowering.

  In the office, they take Victor and shove him down into his father’s chair. Vitali takes a heavy rope while Martin holds the gun on us, and winds it around Victor’s arms.

  “They’ll know he was tied up,” I point out.

  “They will, but they will support my narrative, just like they would have convicted Victor no matter what he said or his lawyers did. Money is power, Eve. I tried to teach you that, but you keep forgetting your lessons. If you’d been more tractable and cooperative, I wouldn’t have to get rid of you. It’s a pity.”

  He didn’t feel anything for me. I could see it. He was looking at me like I was a potted plant.

  All those times he punished me, hurt me, he didn’t care. Somehow that makes it worse. It must have been like whipping a dog that pissed on the carpet. I feel cold, all through my body, like my blood is freezing in my veins.

  “Still, I’m not cruel. I’m not going to let you burn alive.”

  He turns. He’s going to shoot me in the head instead.

  While he’s not quite facing me, I lunge at him. Caught off guard, he cries out in surprise. I rake my nails down his cheek, and go for his eyes.

  “Get her off me!” he bellows.

  Vitali grabs at me. I get my mouth on the meat of his hand and bite. He howls in pain, and punches me in the stomach. All the wind goes out of my lungs, and I double over in agony and collapse to the floor.

  The big desk turns up with a massive grunt from Victor, topples, and he throws himself at Vitali. Martin, clutching his bleeding face in one hand, searches the room for the gun. He dropped it when I attacked him. He spots it. So do I.

  I leap for it, feel my fingers on the grip. He tromps on my hand and I scream, try to pull out from under his hand, but he grinds his heel and twists his foot. I think I can feel bones breaking. It’s like he’s going to rip my hand right off. He bends, reaches for the gun.

  Vitali crashes into him. Somehow, Victor got the ropes off and has the thick cord looped around Vitali’s neck. He’s clawing at it, turning purple, lying on top of Martin in a heap. Victor has his knee in Vitali’s back, pulling the rope in both hands, twisting it like he means to saw through the man’s neck. Father’s fingers graze the grip of the dropped pistol and he tries to pull it towards him.

  A letter opener glints on the carpet. I snatch it, raise it high and bring it down. The blade punches through the back of Father’s hand and into the floor with a solid thump and he bellows in agony, trying to claw it loose.

  I grab the gun, roll away. Victor pulls aside.

  Martin pulls his hand loose and rolls, just as I pull the trigger. The report rings in my ears, and the gun jumps in my hand. My shot went wild, blew a hole in some books on the shelves. Father is on me before I can aim at him again. He collapses on top of me, pinning my arms to the side, grabs my wrist and squeezes so hard it feels like he’ll put his thumb through the bones. I scream in agony and the gun drops from my limp hand. A savage backhand knocks me away, the world flashing white as his knuckles hit my jaw, and the room tilts and spin when my head hits the edge of a bookcase. My head is wet, and my hand comes away slick. I try to get up but I can’t. Vitali rolls on top of Victor and Martin aims the gun at him.

  Victor lets go, holds his hands apart in surrender.

  Vitali pulls the rope loose and clambers up on all fours, gasping and rasping.

  “Idiot,” Martin barks, and shoots him.

  It comes so fast I don’t know how to process it. There’s a flash and a bang and a wad of Vitali’s head meat hits the books with a loud slap that I can somehow hear despite the gunshot. He flops down limp, and Martin aims the gun at Victor.

  Then swings it over to me.

  “I changed my mind. I will let you burn to death, you annoying little cunt. Make one move, Amsel, and I’ll put a bullet in her hip. Bad way to die.”

  He backs through the door, and slams it closed. Victor is on his feet in an instant, smeared in blood from the huge dead Russian. He shoves the door open but it pushes back, and then there’s a loud whump and flames so hot they’re almost clear lick up under the door.

  “They put gas on the fucking door,” Victor bellows.

  He rushes to my side and cradles my head in his hand. “Eve, Jesus, you’re bleeding.”

  More whumps outside, and the sound of glass breaking.

  I start to get up. “We have to get out of here.”

  He nods, rushes up the ladder to the second level, to the door to the cupola. He throws his full weight against it, over and over, screaming each time.

  “It’s boarded up or something. I can’t get it open.”

  My head is bleeding. I clutch my hand to my scalp, trying to stop it. My other hand is throbbing, already swelling up. I think he broke something. There’s more smoke coming in, rising under the door like vengeful spirits, swirling. It’s starting to darken the air in the room. I cough.

  “Victor, get down here,” I call out, “Smoke rises.”

  “If we don’t get out of here, we’re both dead.”

  He throws himself at the door again.

  There’s something odd. The smoke is swirling, gathering around one of the bookcases. I blink a few times, trying to understand what I’m seeing. It’s flowing between the cracks between the bookcase frames, and there’s a little swirl like a whirlpool around the hole in the book from my wild shot.

  “Victor! Get d
own here!”

  “Damn it, I’ve almost got the door-“

  “Victor, I think I found a way out.”

  He looks over the railing and rushes down, sliding down the ladder. He stops next to me and stares, as I start coughing.

  “Get down,” he says, almost pushing me to the floor. I breathe a little easier, take a deep breath. Victor sees it, too. He shoves his finger in the bullethole, then rips the book of the shelf, then more.

  “Help me,” he says.

  I lurch to my feet. With my blood-slick hand, I start wrenching books off the shelf, one after another after another, and pile them on the floor. Finally there’s only one left on the shelf. It doesn’t budge when I pull at it.

  “What the hell?”

  “The underground fucking railroad,” Victor almost cheers. “Get ready. We have to run. When I open the door the air is going to feed the fire, it might get through the door. Wait.”

  He runs to the other side of the room, yanks his father’s chair from the floor and smashes open the glass gun cabinet. He pulls out an old double barrel and a box of shells, and tosses another to me. I catch it against my chest. He yanks on the stuck book and it comes loose with a pop and a thunk behind the shelf. It falls open, and there is a solid boom behind us. Victor pushes me inside as the flames road around the door, just eat it, the sides folding in and turning to ash as the fire reaches through, hammering the wood with a burning fist. Victor slams the door shut behind us and braces his shoulder into it as the office lights up like a sunrise, flames rushing up the wall and flowering over the ceiling. It’s almost beautiful. The shock batters at the door and he coughs, hacks, coughs again.

  We’re in some kind of tunnel. The stones are old, part of the structure of the house itself, but they’re getting hot and smoke is pouring in from the false bookcase door. Victor seizes my arm and almost holds me up as we run. The tunnel only goes a few feet to a tight spiral staircase that twists down through what must be one of the big columns outside. I stumble my way down, almost knocking him over when I hit the bottom. Victor pulls me along and we stoop through a narrow, low tunnel barely tall enough to stand in. I don’t know where it goes but I can feel the heat from the flames above. There’s a great crack and behind us stones and dust fall into the tunnel. The staircase folds with a loud groan, and we’re trapped. The only way out is through. Victor grabs my hand and pulls me along. My hand throbs but I don’t care.

  The tunnel goes on, and on, and on. Finally there’s an end, but it’s just dirt. A horrid wave of panic hits me as I realize we’re trapped, we’ve just run from a fiery death into a grave. It might be ten feet of dirt over our heads, ready to collapse. Then Victor slams the butt of the shotgun against something over his head and there’s a sound of wood groaning and shearing and a sudden rush of cool, sweet air. Then Victor is lifting me up and I sit on the edge of a square cut stone pit and roll over the side, just as he pulls himself up beside me. He looks behind me, a look of naked agony on his face.

  The house is burning. Flames lick up through the windows, pour out of the chimneys. The fiery tongues slice the ivy away in burning, charred strands. There is a crack and one of the columns holding up the roof over the terrace gives from the heat, and the whole thing folds and noses in. Victor just stares, the flames painting his face a bruised color, shining in his eyes.

  I shake his arm. “What do we do?”

  “Shit. I don’t know. Where the fuck is Martin?”

  “I don’t know. Where are we?”

  “There’s another… you gotta be fucking kidding me,” he blurts out. “Follow me. I’m not leaving you here.”

  “Where are we going?”

  “There’s another tunnel.”

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Victor

  “We’re leaving,” I tell her, and take her into the Scary Tunnel.

  Eve never says a word, she just follows me, clutching my hand with hers. Her skin is sticky, dried blood from her scalp. It’s not as bad as she probably thinks it is. Any scalp wound bleeds like a stuck pig. It’s matted in her hair, a dark clump of rust on the white gold.

  She keeps her head down as we traverse the tunnel. My every step is sure. I know where I’m going. The first time I came through here, it felt five miles long. First thing I need to do is get Eve to safety, then I need to get my hands on Martin. The son of a bitch is not getting away with this. The end of the tunnel isn’t far. Once we reach it I open the trap door and Eve hauls herself up the short staircase and out, and I’m right behind her, breathing free air on the other side of the wall.

  “What is all this?”

  “My family used to shelter runaway slaves,” I tell her, panting. “Back during the Civil War. Before that, too, I guess.”

  I can see the flames over the treeline. It’s all burning, everything.

  “The house,” she says.

  “Fuck the house. Pictures of my Mom and Dad. Pictures of you and me. My life was in that house…” I trail off.

  “No,” I touch her shoulder and pull her to me. “My life is right here. The rest of it can be replaced. Let’s get out of here, I want you safe.”

  “How?”

  The Toyota is still parked under the trees. My neighbor the dairy farmer must not have noticed it. Please let the key still be in the ignition. Of course, it is. The door is still unlocked. I help Eve into the passenger’s seat, rush around to the other side, and start her up. It’s rough going back to the road.

  Headlights flash in my rear view mirror. Oh shit.

  I tromp the pedal and the little hatchback gives her all. I suddenly feel sorry for disparaging her before. I wish for the Firebird but the Firebird is sitting in a garage somewhere right when I need her. The Toyota tries her best, and I weave from one side of the road to the other, so they can’t ram me, but there’s headlights up ahead. I should have known. Martin wasn’t going to just leave us to die without some kind of plan B. I don’t think they figured on me, though. I weave around the oncoming truck, gripping the wheel so hard it creaks. The front tire hits soft shoulder but I wrestle the car back onto the road, a dazed Eve lurching this way and that in the seat behind me. Eve has the shotgun.

  “You know how to load that?”

  She shakes her head.

  “Push the lever on the top. It opens in the middle. Stick the shells in the holes. They can only go in the one way. Don’t touch the triggers.”

  As she fumbles with it, I drive. There’s two packs of them hot on our tail, and they’re catching up. The Toyota’s little motor is screaming, but it’s built light, to save weight for gas mileage. She holds her own, especially on these winding roads where the big lumbering trucks have to slow for turns. I don’t. Eve snaps the gun closed.

  There’s a flash behind us. They say you never hear the one that gets you. That’s because the bullet goes faster than the sound, and the crack comes after the back glass shatters. Something spins and bounces on my lap. They hit the rear view mirror, knocked it right off the mount and popped a hole in the windshield, a spiderweb folding across my vision. I weave in the road as they fire again, more flashes, more pops. The mirror on Eve’s side shatters into a million pieces, and falls away into the night. Another crack and her window blows out.

  “Get down,” I bark at her, pushing her down into the footwell.

  It doesn’t matter. For bullets a car like this might as well be made of tinfoil. There’s no cover from a bullet in here. I see a flash. Headlamps, this time.

  A Mercedes. It’s fucking Martin, weaving around the two trucks.

  I can’t outrun them, but I can’t outdrive them. I can’t outdrive Martin, not in that. Fucking German engineering.

  I pull Eve back against the seat. She winces, clutching her hand.

  “Seat belt!” I bellow, and she doesn’t even blink before she yanks it on. I fumble at mine and take a sharp turn one-handed, the wheel straining against my wrist. I burned my hand somehow and I don’t even realize it until now, when the
wheel starts to slide in my palm and grinds against the burn, sending lancing agony up my arm.

  Martin swings wide. He’s trusting in the speed and handling of his machine. I can’t slow down in a sharp turn, have to put more power to the drive wheel to keep from losing control. He might be overcorrecting, he might be doing it on purpose, but the end result is the same. The big Benz side-swipes the little Toyota and then we’re bouncing and the cracked windshield is full of sky, then dirt. For a single gut-twisting moment I think we might roll but she stays upright, jounces down the hill into a dead field, crashing through more cut corn stalks. Fucking corn. Martin’s Mercedes grinds to a stop and he surges out, gun in hand.

  I draw the shotgun out of Eve’s hands smoothly, in a single motion, but the seat belt catches my leg as I kick the door open and I go down. I squeeze one trigger. Martin is already down, but his driver’s side door window shatters along with the shocking report of the shotgun. I have another shot. I roll, free my leg, touch off the other trigger, punch a dozen holes in Martin’s door but he’s not there. He was moving around the other side. Eve is out of the car. Moving around the front, crawling. Good girl. The engine block will give her some cover, the bullets will go through the car but not the solid aluminum block of the engine. There are some shells on the floor. The box I was carrying split open sometime, maybe during the crash, maybe before. I grab a handful, shove two down the shotgun’s throat and get up.

  At some point, I hurt my leg. Can’t worry about that now. Martin is over there somewhere. I can’t see him.

  I guess if this was a movie, wind would blow, the soundtrack would come up, and we’d face off, staring each other down for a moment before firing the climactic shot of our duel. Instead, Martin looks startled when he sees me and starts shooting wildly, and so do I.