Where I Belong (The Debt Book 2)

by Molly O'Keefe

  It was what I should have done all along.

  “We’re not going to San Francisco,” I said.

  “Where are we going?”

  I looked down at Tommy’s phone and tried to make a list of what I needed. But for this I didn’t need anything. I had it all. Right here.

  I needed me and this phone and the courage to do what I’d never been able to do before.

  “Nowhere,” I said.

  And somehow that I was coming back around full circle to this moment seemed only right. I just hoped it was in time.

  Tommy

  I filled up with gas and decided to get off the 5 and take the scenic route because…well, because it might be my last shot at the scenic route. The 152 went by the big reservoir, and it was a bright blue day, the kind that hurt my eyes. And I realized, with the highway stretched out ahead of me in a long ribbon, that I hadn’t talked to Simon lately. I dug in my back pocket where I usually had my phone, but it was empty.

  Shit.

  The duffel on the passenger seat beside me didn’t have it either.

  Fuck. I’d left my phone with Beth.

  Had she found it? I wondered. And I tried, really tried not to think about what she was doing right now. If she’d gotten off that bed. If she and Pest were curled up in a ball convinced that they were missing me.

  That’s not fair, I told myself.

  She was going to miss me. Just like I was going to miss her.

  It just didn’t change anything.

  I’d imagined leaving the mountain with no way of getting in touch with her. That would be easier in a way. No temptation. Because this, wondering if she had my phone, it was all kinds of temptation. I turned the radio up and rolled the windows down and tried to think about anything but her.

  Which meant—weirdly—that I thought about my mom. That picture of her as a beautiful disgruntled teenager had rattled me.

  Drudging up memories from the bottom of my brain that I hadn’t thought about in a long time. A really long time. The memories so long buried that I’d forgotten they actually existed, but they cropped up like unexploded WWII bombs in the French countryside. I had to handle each and every one of them with total care in fear of explosion.

  Red blankets and ploughman’s lunches. The sound of her voice reading me the first Harry Potter book. We only got about halfway before the book got left behind in one of our ridiculous middle-of-the-night moves, but the memories were some of the sweetest I had of her.

  She’d been a moth to flame for bad decisions. She’d brought men into our lives who’d had no business being there. Then, when they left, she’d stay in bed for days, not eating the sandwiches I brought her. Hugging me at night so hard, like she was trying to absorb me.

  She was quick to anger and quick to laugh, and even as a kid I’d known…something wasn’t right.

  I knew enough about bipolar disorder that it made sense of some of the things she’d do. The manic ferocity of her joy and the bottomless nature of her depression. And I wondered, if she’d been able to stay on meds, if she would have been able to love me better.

  Love herself better.

  And though I didn’t want to, I thought about what she must have been like as a kid. A teenager. In a house all the way up on a mountain.

  I thought a lot about grief.

  After Simon left for college and it was just me in that fucking apartment, just me until I took all my grief and all my loneliness and approached one of the women on the corner and bought my first twisted-up baggie.

  You make shitty decisions when you’re blind and stupid with grief. And you really don’t care who you hurt.

  And I didn’t care enough about Peter to forgive him. Or maybe that was a lie; how the fuck would I know? But I understood Peter.

  Down to the ground I understood him.

  I’d holed myself up in my shitty neighborhood, in my crappy apartment because I didn’t have a mountain to call my own. If I had, I’d be there.

  It was almost—almost—funny.

  The wind blew through the open window of the truck, and it was warm and smelled like highway and dust. It tasted like copper on my tongue, and the sun felt good on my arm.

  The radio, which had been buzzing in and out with static, buzzed back in, and it took me a few seconds to realize, to hear it entirely, but the song playing was Beth’s.

  And I turned it up as loud as it could go until her voice was beating against my eardrums.

  Because that was the fucking key to grief, wasn’t it? You had to keep moving.

  Too bad I figured that out too late.

  The sun was setting when I got to the city. I wasn’t sure what I expected. But I pulled up in front of my apartment and there was no one there. No goons out front. No goons across the street. Just the regular men and women that worked the street on this edge of town.

  Don’t get excited, I told myself. They were probably all waiting for me in my apartment.

  Sammy for sure would be waiting to get his hands on me.

  I parked the truck in front, grabbed my duffel bag, bit back the grief over missing Pest more than I thought possible, and pulled from the glove box the big long bowie knife in its serious leather case that I’d bought from one of the gas stations along the way.

  Serious knife for a gas station, but whatever. If Sammy was waiting for me, I wasn’t going easy.

  I took the stairs, my heart beating behind my eyes, sure at any minute I was about to get jumped, but it didn’t happen.

  I got to my door without any drama. Unlocking my door, I took a deep breath, dropped my bag, unsheathed the knife. But inside my place was dark and still. Just like I left it. I closed the door behind me as silent as I could, but the click still felt like it boomed. My back to the wall, I edged through the kitchen, past Pest’s bowl, into the TV room, where the old take-out containers from the bar still sat.

  Fuck, less than a week ago. How was that possible?

  I checked every corner of my place. Every closet. Under the bed. Everywhere. No sign of Sammy or Carissa or anything.

  My apartment was exactly the way I’d left it.

  Empty.

  So. Fucking. Empty. I had a couch. A TV. A bed and a drawerful of clothes. A closetful of work boots. Some books.

  Mismatched plates. A couple of coffee mugs.

  And this stuff… this stuff was nothing. Garbage. Things I could leave behind and never miss. No photographs. No memories. With Pest gone, this apartment could have belonged to anyone.

  No one.

  And it was weird. Alarming actually, that I’d lived like that for so long.

  That I hadn’t cared.

  That I was content being a shadow. Empty and quiet and…waiting.

  Always waiting.

  Fuck that, I thought. Fuck that right now.

  I wasn’t waiting anymore. Not one more minute. I grabbed my bag from outside the door, clipped the knife to my belt, and put on a jacket to cover it.

  And I left to go find Bates.

  13

  Tommy

  Lucy’s Bar was quiet on a Thursday evening.

  The lights and the muted televisions and the bottles of booze lit up behind the bar like they were something special were all so familiar to me and at the same time totally different.

  Completely new.

  It was the adrenaline, I knew. I’d lived on the edge of fear long enough to know when my fight-or-flight instincts were fully engaged. But it had been a while. And the world was safe and dangerous all at once.

  “Whoa,” Lucy said, looking up at me as I came in the door. “What happened to you?”

  I’d forgotten about the bruises from the fight. I touched my eye where the swelling lingered and tongued the edge of my lip where it was still split. Kissing Beth like my life depended on it hadn’t helped a whole lot.

  For a second I was swamped with the idea of my blood on her mouth. That even now she’d be tasting the copper of me on her tongue.

  I shook off
the feeling, narrowing my attention back to the shit at hand.

  “Scrape,” I said. “I’m fine.”

  “Yeah, well you don’t look it. Beer?”

  “No thanks.”

  Her eyebrows furrowed. “Where’s Pest? What’s...?” Her gaze fastened on to me, and she really took me in. “What’s going on?” she asked in a careful voice. “You seem different.”

  I was different in a thousand incalculable ways.

  “I’m not. I just… I need your help.”

  “Okay? Shoot.”

  She leaned over the bar, the Puerto Rican flags on her hands, the beautiful flowers up her arms. She was a work of art, and I hated the idea of pulling her into this in any way.

  But I didn’t have a lot of options.

  “That woman that was here the last time I came in.”

  Lucy went very still. Her face. Her hair even. “What about her?”

  “Where can I find her?”

  “Nope.” She shook her head. Got real busy putting glasses in the racks above the far edge of the bar. “No way, Tommy.”

  “I need to see her.” I stepped to the bar, leaning halfway over it, and as she kept putting glasses up, I grabbed on to her hand, forcing her to stop. She looked at me wide-eyed, and I realized this was the first time I’d touched her, in all my years of coming here, even that night when she’d invited me back to her place. I’d never touched her.

  And I didn’t feel anything, not now. Touching Beth had burned my nerves, and unless it was her under my hand, I was pretty sure I’d never feel anything ever again.

  I lifted my hand from hers, and she stepped away from the bar.

  “Why?” she asked and pointed at my face. “That scrape you got into, was it because of her?”

  “No,” I said. “But I need to see her. Talk to her. Or the guys that did this are going to come back, and they’re not going to take it easy on me.”

  “Tommy,” she sighed. “Why’d you go get mixed up with this shit?” “I’ve been mixed up with this shit my whole life. Since I was a kid. All of this”—I gestured to my face, the bar, the fucking knife on my hip—“was only a matter of time.”

  Lucy hung her head for a second and then looked up at me, her eyes dry and fierce. “They run shit out of that club the Moonlight Lounge.” I didn’t know anything about clubs, and she took one look at my face and muttered, “Hermit,” under her breath. She grabbed a napkin from the bar and a pen from the knot at the top of her hair and drew me a map. “I don’t know the address exactly, but it’s around here.”

  She pushed the napkin back over to me. “Be…be careful, okay? And come back.”

  If you can. She didn’t even have to say it; the words were written in the air above our heads.

  “I’ll see you soon,” I said, and I took the napkin, tucked it in my pocket and went back out into the cooling air of my city at twilight.

  The Moonlight Lounge was a warehouse on the edge of the cool side of Market. The bricks were painted black and there was no sign, just a red velvet rope and a bouncer in a suit at the door.

  I didn’t recognize the bouncer, so that was a bonus, but when I got through the line up to him, he took one look at my beat-to-shit face, the dark circles under my eyes, and the beard I hadn’t bothered to shave for a few days and shook his head.

  “No way.”

  “I’m here to see your boss.”

  “You don’t know my fucking boss,” he said, staring out at the street.

  “Why don’t you tell whoever is on the end of that earpiece in your ear that Tommy MacNeill is here to see Bates.”

  That made the guy’s eyes widen for just a second, and then like he was a thug extra in some shitty movie about a bodyguard looking after a president, he lifted his wrist and talked into the sleeve of his jacket.

  I barely stopped myself from rolling my eyes.

  Suddenly the heavy door behind us opened and it was Carissa standing there, wearing a glittering green dress and a frown. She was so beautiful I couldn’t look at her too long.

  “Jesus, Tommy, really?”

  “Hi, Carissa.” I waved at her.

  “You armed?”

  “I don’t have a gun.”

  She rolled her eyes and flicked her fingers, and Bouncer was frisking me. Yanking my knife off my belt.

  “This is all he has,” Bouncer said, and Carissa held out her hand and he put my knife in it. She slid it out of the leather holster, rubbed her thumb against the edge as if testing its sharpness, and then sheathed it again.

  “Come along,” she said with a sigh as if I were a toddler being particularly troublesome. I followed meekly, towering over her.

  Though it was early, the club was half full of young beautiful people, the shine of sweat and glitter all over them. The club was going for that old speakeasy vibe, and to my totally not cool eye, it seemed to nail it.

  “Why are you here?” Carissa asked, yelling over the thrum of the music.

  “I’m not waiting for Bates to send Sammy to come finish the job. I had enough waiting for a beating at St. Joke’s.” She looked at me a long time, careful and still and unreadable.

  “You fucked her,” she said, her face suddenly hard, the beauty cracking around a rage that burned white-hot.

  I blinked, wondering how she knew.

  “Don’t bother lying, Tommy. I can see it on you.”

  “I’m not going to lie,” I said quietly. “I’m just here to make things right.”

  After a moment she laughed. “You don’t know?”

  “Don’t know what?” Lots of things I imagined, but there was something particular she was talking about and I was starting to get pissed. She started to laugh. She laughed so hard, she bent double at the waist, holding on to her knees. Looking for one ridiculous minute like the kid I’d grown up with.

  “Fuck off, Carissa, this isn’t funny.”

  “But it is! It is. Tommy the hero. Except you don’t need to be here. Your girl? She saved you.”

  I blinked, an empty vacuum in my chest. “What…is she here?” I stepped back, looking around like I could find her in this place. And I could, I knew it, I could find her anywhere.

  “Come on,” Carissa said, and she led me around the crowd to the stairs that led up to the second floor. There was a man at the bottom of the steps, black suit, no neck.

  “Bates has a type,” I said.

  “Remember when you volunteered to work for him?” she asked. “In the jail cell.”

  “Vaguely.”

  “It never would have worked.”

  “Because I have a neck?”

  “Because, you, Tommy MacNeill, have a little too much honor.”

  She led us through a foyer, shadowed and small, and I felt my testicles try and climb up into my body. Everything about this scene said danger. Every single animal instinct I had left in this world wanted me out of there. Now.

  But still I followed her, to an arched doorway that opened up into an office.

  A fucking office, with a man sitting at a desk, working on a computer like he was an accountant or something. But when Carissa walked in, he looked up immediately, like he’d scented her on the wind. Or he’d grown accustomed to the flash of sequins in the corner of his eye and looked up whenever they were there.

  It was Bates. A little bit older, but still the same ice-cold face. Pale gray eyes. Same black suit. Same bowel-tightening threat of danger and power.

  “This is a surprise,” he said, leaning back in the chair.

  “He doesn’t know,” Carissa said, crossing to a drink car set up in the corner. “Would you like something?” she asked, one eyebrow raised.

  “Me? No.”

  Without asking Bates, she poured two glasses of club soda, put a lime wedge in each and walked one over to Bates.

  “You said you didn’t work for him,” I said. Hating that Carissa was serving this man anything.

  “She doesn’t,” Bates answered, taking the glass and setting it down
on his desk. Carissa kept the other for herself, taking a big sip while watching me. “I take it you’re here to explain why you didn’t fulfill your obligations to me.”

  “I am.” I’d worked on this speech on the way over, but now that I was in this luxurious gangster office, I was stupid with nerves. “I picked up Beth and I drove her out to the rehab facility and she was going to go, but then her mother was there.”

  “Dr. Abigail Renshaw. Not quite what she seems, is she?”

  I blinked. “No. She isn’t. She abused Beth for years.”

  “I am aware of that,” Bates said. “Now.”

  “I couldn’t hand her over. Not to her mom. Not after everything she did.”

  “But what about what she did to you?” Carissa asked, and I turned to look at her, standing beside a door leading to a different room.

  “What do you mean?”

  “The thing with your grandfather?”

  “How do you know that?” I asked, and she shrugged like it didn’t matter. Like the most painful parts of my life were simply gossip for her. Maybe I’d been wrong about Carissa; maybe our past had damaged her. Just way down deep where you couldn’t see it at first.

  “You don’t want to hurt her, but she must have hurt you,” Carissa said.

  “Dos that matter?” I asked, looking back at Bates. “I mean, is that part of the debt?”

  “No,” Carissa said. “It’s just a question. I just… I want to know, I guess, if you’re still so desperate for love that you’ll hurt yourself to get it.”

  I gaped at her.

  “Carissa,” Bates said like he was chastising her.

  But she held up her hand, walking across the room like she was in charge, not the dangerous gangster at the desk. “Are you here sacrificing your life for some girl who doesn’t deserve it? Just like you did when we were kids.”

  “No,” I said.

  “You’re not sacrificing yourself?” she asked. “Because Sammy is in the building and—” “She’s worth everything,” I said. “She was then and she is now. I don’t regret a single fucking thing I’ve done. Not for her. Not for Simon or Rosa or you.”