by Joshua Guess
My real apartment didn’t look like anyone lived in it, usually. I didn’t have a lot of stuff. It was a small one bedroom with one recliner in the living room, a TV, and virtually no other furniture. The bed, a twin with a nice mattress. There were no pictures on the walls, no personal touches except one small, silver-framed photo atop the unused fireplace. It rested on the mantle above me as if watching my every move.
My home was sparsely decorated. It’s not that I had no interests, but since my career as one of the bad guys started I knew it was likely I’d have to go on the run quickly. Even the picture was a reprint.
I stripped to the waist and removed the custom body armor clinging to the thin film of sweat between it and my skin. Sure as I was the Franklin brothers wouldn’t be a problem, it paid to be ready for anything. My cheap, somewhat ill-fitting suit was excellent cover for the armor, which cost roughly the same as an older used car.
My reflection in the cheap mirror mounted on the wall caught my attention. At thirty-four I was in better shape than any point in my life. My skin looked perpetually tanned thanks to my half black, half Italian mother. Dad, may the devil poke his sorry ass with a pitchfork for all eternity, was long dead and all Irish. The only thing I got from him were light gray eyes and a casual disregard for social norms like obeying laws.
I ran a finger along a couple of the scars twisting through the hard, flat muscles lining my belly and chest. I worked like a bastard to stay in shape, which went against my nature in ways I preferred not to think about. Before my life had fallen to pieces and Tom Russey saved me, I was a model for coasting through life and had the gut to show for it.
As much as I wanted to put on a pair of basketball shorts and surf the internet, duty called. With a sigh, I pushed away the sudden memory of how the knife in my belly felt, or the grazing bullet across my chest. Those were pleasant recollections compared to others I could dredge up. I was dressed again in less than a minute, sans armor, and carefully replaced my holstered pistol.
The drive to the Russey house was only a handful of miles as the bird flies, but Louisville at rush hour is as congested and irritating as any other city. The stop and go of traffic just getting to the Snyder—what locals called the Gene Snyder Freeway—was enough to test my cool up to the red line. I wanted to get this debrief over so I could go back home, put on some casual clothes, and spend the evening in the warm summer air. When it wasn’t winter, the city didn’t go a week without some kind of festival or tiny celebration somewhere. I was a fiend for them.
This week was a small strip of pubs all working together to host a concert series. The music I was mostly indifferent to, but since coming to Kentucky I had developed a fierce love for barbecue of all kinds. The catering was being handled by three different places specialized in it. One of them even won a national cook-off with their recipe.
Not drooling on my suit at the thought was hard work.
As always, the reality of my job, of the things I’ve done, began to worm its way back into my consciousness as I approached the Russey house. I helped build it, in a management sense. Designed the security, planned the panic room, greased the palms of the right contractors to keep their mouths shut about additions outside the norm. Like me, it had every appearance of normality. It was the house of someone with a steady, even flourishing business that made them what most would consider wealthy, but without ostentation. Like me, it didn’t draw attention.
And like me, the inside held a lot of dark shit the outside world never saw.
The house sat on several acres of land outside the city. The next closest home was three hundred yards away, though Casa de Russey was screened in by trees on all sides with only the long driveway creating a break in them. I parked in my usual spot and didn’t bother knocking as I went inside.
The younger Russeys knew not to slam into me. At seven and nine respectively, Alex and Sarah were old enough to understand my title as head of security. They knew I always carried a gun. One chipped baby tooth was enough to teach the lesson.
Which was why I crouched a little as the pair of girls hustled through the living room to throw their arms around me.
“Hey, little monkeys,” I said, giving them a squeeze.
Alex gave me a wet kiss on my cheek, which I dramatically wiped off with a shrugged shoulder. “Eww, gross! Girl germs!”
She giggled in that deep, belly-laugh way only small children can manage, and punched me in the ribs. The Russey children weren’t known for fucking around any more than their dad was. Sarah was more subdued, letting go quickly and haring off to whatever game or book she’d abandoned to say hello.
“She’s getting to that age where she’s embarrassed to be treated like a kid,” said a voice from the doorway leading to the dining room.
“Myra,” I said, nodding at her as I stood and swept Alex up onto my left hip.
Not being from the south originally, I had to work on stamping out some preconceived notions earlier in my life. Long before I met Tom Russey, I had my illusions about classy southern women cleanly eradicated. It wasn’t about a Georgian drawl and iced tea on silver trays, no matter what the movies tell you.
Myra Russey had the character, strength, and grace all the stereotypes called for, but in every other way she was outside them. She was tall, for one thing, just an inch shy of six feet. Her bearing was straight, shoulders back, but she was also farm-girl muscular. At forty-two, the only signs of age were laugh lines at the corners of her mouth, the faint etchings of incipient crow’s feet at the corners of her eyes, and a few wild gray hairs poking out of the loose knot of hair on the back of her head.
I didn’t smile at her. I liked Myra just fine, but she knew perfectly well what I was, what her husband was, and she hated that. “Is he in the office?”
“Yes,” Myra said. Just that one word, precise and contained. Yes to my question, without warmth or emotion of any kind. It was possible to boil down the complex concept of resigned tolerance in a single word. Myra Russey proved it.
“I’ll head that way, then,” I said, putting Alex down. The little girl stuck her tongue out at me and tried for another punch, but I dodged.
I had been this way countless times to go see the man himself. The first time, though, he had come to me.
3
Three years before Tom Russey would come and save me from a slow death, I had been happy. Eight years and some change before the day I stood in front of the Franklin brothers and told them coldly how I would reduce them to paste was the last day of that happiness.
At twenty-six, the world was my oyster. I was stationed at Aberdeen Proving Ground doing administrative work. I had a knack for it. I never yearned for promotion. Some people are just weird in that they take joy in doing a boring job well. I did, anyway. I loved going to work on base, making the office hum along smoothly, and heading home to my girls.
My wife and I married at sixteen. Rosa got pregnant just after we turned fifteen, but it was never in question that we’d stay together anyway. It wasn’t storybook love. That’s horseshit. Real love is built on shared experience and surviving the day to day.
As kids we met when she joined our baseball game and knocked a line drive straight into my face. We were ten at the time.
“Sorry,” she had said through tears, streaking clean lines through the dust on her face. Then she’d scowled at me. “You should have been watching the ball, though!”
It was far from love at first sight, but after that I spent as much time with her as possible.
Our parents weren’t thrilled when she got pregnant with Hannah, but the general atmosphere of skepticism about our seriousness to stand up and take care of each other faded over time. I worked my ass off at any job I could find, saving up every dime. I enlisted at seventeen. With my regular income, though not spectacular, Rosa was able to go to school.
We lived in varying states of bliss until the week I had to go out of town. I was asked to prepare and give a presentation on administrati
ve efficiency, which was definitely as boring to my audience as it sounds. The trip was a short one, just a long weekend at a conference, but it meant missing a local soldier appreciation night off base.
“You can still go,” I had said as I finished packing my bag. “Stephanie will be happy to watch Hannah and give you a night out.” Hannah, hovering around the same sort of nine as Sarah would later approach, stood against one wall of the bedroom with her arms crossed.
Like Sarah, she hadn’t wanted to be treated like a kid. “If mom is going, I want to go.”
“Sweetie, that’s not up to me,” I had told her. Rosa wasn’t quite glaring at me, but it was close. “And it’s not my fault. I have to go.”
“I know,” she had sighed. “I was just really looking forward to a night out together.”
I didn’t tell her how much I had been, too. One, because it would have only made her feel worse, and two because she already knew. College paid off for Rosa, who ran a small business from home. She worked as a coder for several start-up websites, mostly doing troubleshooting on stuff that hadn’t gone live yet. It paid well enough that we could afford to live off base. Rosa liked where we were, though, and I was happy if she was.
She said it made her feel safe, which goes to show you that time and circumstance will conspire to show us how wrong even the brightest of us can be.
“When I get back, we’ll find a night and go out,” I had told her. “Two nights. One for just me and you, and one for us as a family.” The look of satisfaction on Hannah’s face at this was eerily beyond her years.
I hugged them and kissed them and said goodbye. The last thing I said to my wife was that I loved her, which was the second to last thing I said to my daughter. I made sure to tell her to mind her mom, and both of us knew the odds were even at best.
Then I left. I did my presentation on a Saturday, the day of the little gathering I missed out on. I called Rosa and she told me Hannah had talked her into going, and they were taking our friend and babysitter, Stephanie. I imagined the small park decked out with folding chairs and card tables, the latter festooned with a periodic chart of pot luck food meant to show the soldiers and their families how much they were appreciated. There would be the inevitable unclasping of cases, battered guitars brought out to join the crickets as night descended. With them the easy burn of fine spirits in bright red cups.
It would be relaxed and warm and worth remembering. Or, in my case, imagining.
In all the years after, I hoped that was what it was like for them. I hoped that night was one with dancing fireflies and children racing to catch them. I wanted with an almost primal force for my wife and daughter to have warmed their bellies with rich, wonderful food without worry for how bad it was for them. To have recognized the gift such nights are and squeezed every second of pleasure from it.
I know at least one man did. An officer, off duty as all the soldiers in attendance were. I know he idled away those soft hours of fading summer heat not just with food, but with a great deal of bourbon on top. I know this, though no one will ever admit it, because around the time I was laying down in my too-chilly hotel room, he was crashing into my wife’s car, killing everyone inside.
“Come in, come in,” Russey said through the office door. “Christ, you don’t have to knock when you come in the house, why bother with my office?”
I smiled faintly as I closed the door behind me. “What if I barge in and you’re looking at porn or something, Tom? You think I want to see that?”
Tom Russey’s office was spacious, though none of it was wasted. The walls were lined with shelves he and I had built together. On them were books, as you’d expect, but also files and reference material, virtually every piece of information about our business. The desk was walnut, stained dark, and the leather rolling chair he sat in was patched and frayed at the seams. Russey wouldn’t part with it, citing how being broken in was more important than appearance.
Russey grinned at me. He was starting to go to seed, though still had the powerful frame of a former boxer or wrestler. To me he looked like a healthier Tony Soprano, bald patch and all. “Might be the most action you’ve had all year, kid,” he said to me. He was twelve years older but looked closer to fifteen or twenty. His youth had been unkind.
Comments like this were as close as he ever came to my love life. He knew better than to do more than graze the surface of certain issues.
“Franklin boys give you any trouble?”
I sat in the chair across from him, lounging back and crossing my legs. “Nah. Told them I’d see if we could sweeten the pot for them, but I think it’s still pretty likely they’ll buy us out anyway. They don’t like being on the hook to us.”
No longer smiling, Russey scratched the salt-and-pepper stubble lining his chin. “How close are we to being ready with the next phase?”
The restaurant was the first step in a larger plan to make a truly stupid amount of money. Our effort to make it a destination for a certain class of people ensured regular visits by various businessmen and women, government officials, investors, and the like. The amount of information to be had by recording people while they talked over lunch was staggering. It was my idea. Information brokering can bring in a steady income, but capitalizing some of what you gather can, with the right pressure and finesse, rake in truckloads of cash.
“That depends,” I said after a measured few seconds. “Amanda needs to hire some more people. We’re getting ready to run the same setup on twelve new locations, Tom. With the surveillance we’re already running, it’s stretching her too thin. It’ll be a short-term hit to our cash flow, but it’ll make us ready for the next step.”
Besides the obvious advantages that came with inside information, our setup at Tre Fratelli gave us many others. We didn’t often pick up damning information from the people we eavesdropped on, but listening to them let us identify who would be useful, which was when Amanda and her people took over. Every nightmare you’ve had about someone hacking your phone, your computer, and watching you do the things that make you feel guilty? Amanda made them real. Information gave us leverage. Blackmail goes a long way when you’re just looking to make an investment here, have a zoning permit passed there.
Phase two expanded the operation to more locations, this time without the owners even knowing we were doing it. That was thanks to the construction company owned by Russey Limited. A company made possible in part by our investment in Tre Fratelli.
“Give her whatever she wants,” Russey said. Then, after consideration, “Within reason. I assume you’ll pay for it out of petty cash?”
“Yeah,” I said with a smirk. “That should cover it.”
Petty cash wasn’t actually petty, but it was cash. What we didn’t make legally—and the legal cash was an ever-growing majority of our income—went into that fund. Keeping the two absolutely separate was vital. We might cheat to get ahead with our above-board business, but there was no way to prove it. That money was perfectly clean.
When Russey hired me, it was to transition him away from purely criminal and into legit businessman. My job was more than that, but even though the illegal parts of the business were shrinking, overall income continued to rise.
Russey spent a decade and a half running anything he could find. Drugs and guns were the simplest examples. He’d gained a reputation as the best fixer in the Midwest. He brokered deals and took percentages. Hid crimes. Made sure juries voted the way he wanted. If there was money to be made by helping a criminal, he did it.
And he passed those skills on to me, adding a new dimension to the arsenal I had already built.
The one thing Tom Russey never had was the ability to organize. To take a big, complicated mess and turn it around in his head to make it work while tracking all the pieces. He’d saved up a couple million dollars, but living under the radar grew more difficult with the money he lost laundering it.
Good as he was at the mechanics of committing crimes, he needed someone e
lse to make the big picture designs. He wasn’t stupid; never think it. Russey was smart and clever, which are two different things. It’s just that not all marksmen are built to be snipers. Russey was strong in the near, the immediate.
I was the long-range expert.
“I still want to make the offer, though,” I said. “If we can keep the contract going, it’ll only help us.”
Russey nodded sagely, still scratching at his stubble. “And if they say no?”
“Then we let ’em buy it out and part friends,” I said. “The older one knows better than to open his mouth once we’re no longer working together. The twins might need a reminder now and then, but…”
Russey’s smile was that of a predator. “But you’ll have Amanda watching them. You’ll have every call they make, every text they send, won’t you?”
I winked at him. “Yeah. We can’t keep the microscope on them forever, or even all the time, but if they start looking to sell us out, we’ll know before it becomes a problem. We’ll deal with it.”
The last I said in that same dead voice. Though he hid it quickly, I saw the involuntary shiver hit Russey. He’d killed his fair share, but like most people the act bothered him. He could shoot a man in cold blood, even get rid of the body, yet the haunted look in his eyes made it obvious how often he lost sleep over those memories.
I was different. In his eyes, I was really two people. One was the friend, the confidant. That man had been shattered pieces given a purpose and slowly put back together. That Carter was kind. He was the sometimes funny uncle who hugged Russey’s kids and wrestled with them in the pool.
The other could, without changing expression, step forward in the middle of a sentence and cut a man’s throat if that was what it took to catch him off guard. That Carter could slip into a house in the middle of the night and bind a man to his bed without even waking him to terrorize him into doing as he was told.
I harbored no illusions about my place in the world. I knew Russey was afraid of me, of what he helped me become. The key was making sure he was afraid enough not to ever try to remove me without being so out of his mind terrified that he decided it was worth the risk.
