by Zoey Parker
His voice trailed off, and the man holding my arms down looked up at the one in the suit, concerned. “What is it, Frankie?”
“Shh,” the one called Frankie answered tightly. I could feel him straightening up behind me, his hands no longer on my hips. “You freakin' hear that?”
The one holding my arms cocked his head to listen, but my panicked breathing must have been too loud for him to hear anything. He grunted, “Quiet down, you stupid broad,” and smacked the side of my head lightly with the barrel of the gun he'd been holding on me. It wasn't hard enough to hurt much, but it did stun me into silence.
That was when I heard what they were listening to—the loud growling of machines, steadily getting closer. At first, I had the absurd thought that it sounded like chainsaws approaching, and I was worried that even worse people were on their way to hurt me. Then I realized that the sound was the angry roar of motorcycles.
“Fill yer hands, you freakin' mooks! We got company!” Frankie snarled. He backed away from my exposed bottom, giving it a hard smack. “Get lost, you dumb skirt. Forget you ever saw us.”
Before I could do much more than back out of the car and straighten up, five motorcycles revved up the street toward us, their headlights glaring as they screeched to a halt. It was too dark to see the faces of the men riding them, but I heard one of them call out to the others. “Remember, we take Frankie alive! Waste the other two!”
Does that voice sound oddly familiar, or...?
Everything seemed like it was moving in slow motion around me. I saw the two men in track suits level their guns at the bikers and open fire—a quick series of flat pops and cracks that sounded like a string of fireworks. The bikers fired back, and when the car door next to me was peppered with bullets, the same voice called out again. “Watch out for the girl! We ain't here to drill civilians!”
My heart felt like it was smashing against the inside of my ribcage and trying to get out. My mouth was full of a coppery taste like blood, and electricity seemed to crackle in my veins. I had never felt so terrified in my life, and I was certain that each moment I felt this way would be the last thing I ever felt. I kept expecting one of the bullets to hit my head and I wondered what it would feel like, or if I'd even feel anything at all before dying. What if it doesn't kill me? What if it paralyzes me for life? Oh God, please just let the shooting stop! I can't take anymore tonight!
I saw a bullet hit the big-eared guy in the side of his neck and everything snapped into focus. I realized that I was lucky these men on the bikes had chosen to intervene, but I could still die in the crossfire if I wasn't careful. I threw myself on the ground and crawled under one of the cars as the bullets continued to fly, smacking the side of the car and chipping the pavement near my face.
I saw Frankie's pants and shoes as he crouched behind the car. His hand reached into his pocket and produced a cell phone, dialing it with shaky fingers. He had to yell to make himself heard above the shots. “Jimmy! Yeah, it's me! I'm outside Billy's place. Those freakin' bikers just rode up outta nowhere, they wanna kidnap me or somethin'! Mick an' Dumbo are tryin' to hold 'em off...”
A shotgun blast went off, and the big-eared man dropped to the ground right in front of me. His entire face was a bloody mess, and one of his huge ears was hanging off. I clamped my hand over my mouth as I stared into his scrambled brains, afraid I might be sick.
“...shit, they got Dumbo! You gotta send some guys right now!”
Suddenly, I saw a bullet ricochet off the ground next to Frankie. The phone dropped from his fingers, and a moment later, he crumpled to the street next to it. A round red hole had appeared just above his left eyebrow and was already starting to seep. His eyes bulged at me for a second before the life left them.
I heard a clip of ammunition click into place, followed by an enraged scream. “Eat shit an' die, you goddamn cocksuckers! I'm comin' for ya!” I could hear the third man's shoes slapping the pavement frantically as he rushed them, firing his gun wildly. The shotgun boomed again, and the man fell onto his back. He twitched twice, then remained still, blood pooling beneath him.
The silence that followed was deafening. The first sound I heard was the voice of the biker again. “Alive, Boomer. Was that too big a word for you? Did you need me to spell it?”
The one called Boomer responded with a grim chuckle. “Hey, I'm a bomb guy, Nic, not a kidnapping guy. You want someone blown up, I can help you. You wanna do duct tape an' chloroform, ask Ditch. That's how he gets most of his dates.”
Wait...Nic? Did he just call him Nic?
Another voice spoke up, reedy and nasal. “Go get fucked in a canoe, Boomer.”
“Pffft, best offer I've had all night.”
“We get one of these high-ranking suckers alive, we can try to trade him for Growler and put an end to this bullshit,” the first voice said. “We keep leavin' 'em dead, and this war's just gonna go on and on. We can't afford that.” I saw a pair of boots walking toward me. I was certain I'd seen them before, and now I knew where.
“Now what are you doin'?” the nasal voice asked plaintively.
“I'm gonna go make sure you didn't ventilate some innocent woman on top of it all,” the first voice answered. “The way tonight's going, that's all we fuckin' need.”
The boots stopped in front of the car, and their owner bent down to peer beneath it. For the first time in since Christmas, I stared into Nic's face. His eyes widened, and his eyebrows raised so high they nearly touched his hairline.
“Jesus fucking Christ, you have got to be kidding me.”
My breath quivered, and I did my best to force a smile. “Hi.”
Nic stood dazed for another moment, then reached out to me. I took his hand and gingerly slid out from under the car, standing up. He looked me up and down, still confused. “What...what the hell are you doing here, Lauren?”
“Um, nice to see you too, Nic,” I joked lamely. Despite the circumstances, I still realized that I was happy to see him. I'd long since convinced myself that I never would again. But he didn't look happy to see me at all. In fact, he seemed furious.
“Seriously, what the fuck is going on?” he demanded.
“I just, y'know...I was on my way home from an audition and...”
“And you were, what, walking? In the middle of the night? In this fucking neighborhood? I thought you were smart! What the fuck is wrong with you? Do you know how goddamn dangerous this city is? Do you know what kind of bad shit can happen to you out here?”
The bikers behind Nic were standing around awkwardly, and seemed to be even more confused by his outburst than I was. I momentarily believed that he was upset about having to see me again after what he'd thought was a one-night stand, and my heart sank, feeling as though my fears about his lack of feelings for me had been confirmed.
But as I looked into his frenzied eyes and saw the concern there, I realized that wasn't it at all. He was frightened and didn't know how to express that except through anger. He hadn't known I was under the car while he'd been shooting at it.
Before I knew what I was doing, I had placed my hand on his upper arm, and I was staring into his eyes in what I hoped was a reassuring way. “It's okay, Nic. I'm here. I'm fine.”
Nic's eyes remained focused on mine and he seemed to relax a bit. “That's not the point,” he said, but his voice was already much calmer than it had been. “Anything could have happened to you. Jesus, don't you read the papers? There's a goddamn war going on out here. You could be in a lot of danger, especially since you know me.”
Actually, I didn't read the papers—too depressing—but I had still seen a handful of lurid headlines about rumors of a gang war. If Nic and his Reapers were involved in that, no wonder he was so worried.
“I barely know you though,” I said.
But I'd love to fix that, I thought.
Suddenly, I heard tires screech and saw three cars turn onto the street. The glow of their headlights washed across Nic's anxious face as he turne
d to look at them. The other Reapers were already starting to skitter back to their bikes nervously. “Come on, Nic!” the one with the nasally voice cried out. “We can't fight 'em all. We gotta go!”
Nic grabbed my wrist and pulled me to his bike, tossing his helmet into my hands. “Put that on and hop on,” he hissed urgently. “We need to get you out of here fast.”
I complied, clicking the chin-strap into place and hitching up my skirt as I climbed onto the back of his treasured Lola for the second time. As I did, the cars came to a stop up the block and I heard their doors opening, as well as the clicks of guns being racked.
“Blast 'em!” a voice behind us called out, and just as the bike roared to life between my legs and jerked forward, a hailstorm of bullets hit the ground around us.
Nic gunned Lola's engine and we accelerated like we'd been fired from a gun too. The surrounding buildings were a blur, the cold night air was shoving me backward like an implacable hand, and the only things I could focus on were my arms locked around Nic's waist and the tail lights of the other Reapers ahead of us. I stole a peek over my shoulder and saw that the cars were trying to follow us, but they were already falling back, unable to keep up. A couple of the men in the cars were leaning out the windows to shoot at us, but they couldn't aim properly and their shots went wild. One bullet hit a street lamp ahead of us and the lamp shattered, raining sparks down on us as we zoomed past.
After a while, Nic pulled ahead of the other Reapers and signaled for them to stop. We'd lost the cars at least eight blocks ago.
“Looks like we're good,” Nic told them. “She needs someplace safe to go, so I'm taking her to the West Side Garage. You guys run into any more problems tonight, let me know.”
“What are we supposed to do?” Boomer asked.
“You can go tell Bard how badly we fucked up the Frankie extraction,” Nic answered. “If we're lucky, maybe he had a backup plan, or at least a name and location for someone else we can grab.”
“You got it, Nick,” the one with the nasally voice said. He gave me another confused look, then rode off into the night with the others.
“What's the West Side Garage?” I asked.
“Besides a garage on the west side, you mean?” he asked, smiling. I had missed that smile so much, and I was happy to see that he was starting to relax, even if my heart was still pounding from the assault and all the gunshots earlier. For a moment, I actually imagined that I could hear the baby's heart beating in my abdomen, too. I knew that was technically impossible—even if a fetus has a heartbeat at eight weeks, you'd need an ultrasound to hear it—but even so, I was certain that I could.
Jeez, pregnancy is weird. I mean, not almost raped by three strange guys weird or surviving two gun fights in one hour weird, but still...
“It's a Reaper safe house,” Nic continued. “We've had to set up a bunch of them over the past couple of weeks.”
“What happened to your apartment?” I asked.
A momentary shadow of sadness passed over Nic's face. “It's not safe there anymore,” he said. “Let's go.”
Chapter Seventeen
Nic
For a civilian who'd survived her first firefight, Lauren seemed to be holding up pretty well. Frankly, I wasn't sure I was as calm as she was.
I had been counting on successfully kidnapping Frankie Caserta. He was one of Giovanni's most loyal capos, and I was certain that if we could abduct him—maybe even carve a few pieces off of him and send them to Big G, like he'd done to Growler—we could finally end this stupid war and stop looking over our shoulders. It was a tricky plan, and I guess I shouldn't have been too surprised that Boomer, Ditch, and the others weren't able to handle something so delicate. Even with a smart guy like Bard calling the shots, the average Reaper was more of a blunt instrument, myself included.
But finding Lauren there was something else entirely. Even with everything that had been going on with Giovanni, I'd been thinking about her a lot. When I looked under the car and saw her there, I almost convinced myself that I was hallucinating.
Knowing that she could have caught a stray bullet during the fight with Frankie and his guys made me sick with fear and made me hate myself for the danger I'd put her in, even though I hadn't known she was there. And when she was on the back of my bike while the other gangsters were shooting at us, it made me hate the Bonaccorsos even more than I'd imagined possible. I wished there were a way for me to exterminate them all at once, so they could never hurt anyone ever again.
But first, we had to try to get Growler back, if he was even still alive.
And before that, I had to make sure Lauren was safe tonight.
We pulled up a block away from the West Side Garage, and I shrugged off my cut and folded it up. Then I walked Lauren and my bike the rest of the way through a series of back alleys.
The garage wasn't much to look at and it didn't even have a sign that was clearly visible, but that was the idea. It just looked like some nameless local repair shop lined with battered cars, like a dozen others in every neighborhood in the city. It was run by a family from Ecuador, and to make it seem even less conspicuous, Reapers were forbidden from getting their bikes repaired there or even being seen on the same block wearing their cuts to keep up the camouflage. But if anyone followed the paper trail far enough—which no one ever did—they'd find that Bard owned the place as a silent partner.
I produced a heavy keychain I'd been carrying around since the beef with Giovanni started and unlocked one of the thick metal doors downstairs, stashing Lola in a large supply closet that had been converted to a storage locker for a couple of Reaper bikes. After that, I led Lauren up the rickety wooden back steps to the small apartment above the shop, keeping an eye out the entire time to make sure we weren't being watched.
The apartment was the opposite of the one I'd crashed in near the Devil's Nest. The Ecuadorian family kept the place spotless and tastefully decorated, with cute ceramic animal figurines and a lot of frilly pink edges on the furniture. They mostly did this to keep up appearances—if the police or anyone else came by to check the place out, they wouldn't believe a bunch of bikers had been hanging out here, and the family would use their broken English to explain that they keep the extra room in case their South American relatives ever decide to visit.
Again, Bard had made the rules of using this place extremely clear. No leaving anything laying around—no weapons, no clothes, no porno mags, not even a book of matches from a bar. No clues that any Reaper had ever been here. Bard made sure we never got sloppy about this, and anyone who got careless got taxed hard.
Lauren hadn't said anything since I'd told her where we were going, and I figured she must have been in shock after everything she'd been through tonight. She kept staring at me wide-eyed, and it was hard for me to meet her gaze.
I gestured to the mini-fridge in the tiny kitchenette. “There's stuff to drink in there,” I said, “and there's a bathroom if you need a shower or anything.”
She nodded quietly, still staring. “Okay, Nic. Thank you.” She slipped into the narrow bathroom and shut the door. A moment later, I heard the water running. I exhaled wearily and fell back into a plush chair with flowery pink cushions.
I was afraid of the intensity I saw in Lauren's eyes, and afraid that I wouldn't be able to hide my own feelings, either. I'd been through so much since that first shoot-out with the Bonaccorsos, and I hadn't had the most stable lifestyle to begin with. One friend was dead, another was being hacked to pieces somewhere, we had a massive criminal organization on our tails, and I was becoming increasingly convinced that these were the last days of the Reapers.
So the absolute last thing I need right now is to go all gooey and fall in love, especially with someone who isn't part of this life and can't begin to understand it.
But what was she doing there? I had never allowed myself to seriously believe in God or fate or anything like that. But tonight, somehow, the only non-Reaper who I'd been able to really car
e about in years—the only one who could erase the pain of Kong's death for me all those weeks ago, if only for one night—had suddenly appeared in my life again like magic. And weirder still, in a city full of gangs and random violence, she'd been attacked by the same goons who had it out for the Reapers.
Part of me actually wondered whether the Bonaccorsos knew about her connection with me somehow, and had singled her out. It seemed a little paranoid—but not impossible. They could have been watching me that night at the Devil's Nest when they bushwhacked Growler. Maybe they took some pictures, did some digging, and figured out who she was and where she'd be tonight. She was an actress, after all—no, an “actor,” she hates being called an actress—and determining her identity would have been easier than it would for most people.
