by Joshua Guess
“Okay, yeah,” I said, pushing down the frustration. “Do the party. I’ll check in with the team and have…Russel take over your spot.” Eric Russel was third in charge of the dozen or so guys Javier oversaw, and I knew his second, Ray Stein, was already on the team.
“You know this is bullshit, right?” Javier said.
Suppressing the urge to sigh loudly, I tilted my head back and closed my eyes. “I know, man. I got one card left to play. Let’s do this and afterward I’ll have a come to Jesus talk with him.”
“I mean, he knows we have this op, Carter.”
“I know that, Javi,” I snapped. “Maybe he forgot, or maybe he’s just that nuts when it comes to the kid. Whatever, it doesn’t matter. We have a job to do. You take care of Robby, I’ll talk to Russel and make sure everything else goes fine.”
I hung up on him.
The phone rang again in the middle of a dream about the meth lab.
I’d obsessed about it into the night. Sending a group of well-trained men against a cluster of bargain basement chemists wasn’t the most dangerous job in the world, but when piles of money and the drug trade get involved, nothing is sure. Weeks spent casing the place made us sure of a couple things.
They kept to a regular schedule, which was dumb, and whatever cash they made was kept on site. There were security measures, but my people were inclined to creative solutions. I spent my last hour of wakefulness going over the assault in my head. They’d capture the guy going out on their ritual pizza run, get information from him as fast as possible, and if what he said matched up with our suspicions, they’d go.
Security door? Bypass it. Setting up an airlock-style entry seemed smart, but it exposed interior walls made out of wood and sheet rock. My guys would be inside in no time at all.
I drifted off in my recliner to these thoughts, so when the phone woke me my first thoughts were a simultaneous expectation that it would be the all-clear confirmation of a successful run, and a dread certainty that everything went tits-up and my men were dead. The hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash was a tertiary concern at best.
“Hello,” I said through a mouthful of cottony sleep.
“You need to get here now,” Javier said.
I blinked stupidly, trying to get my bearings. “Javi? Where? Did the job go okay?”
Javier exhaled sharply, the sound coming over the line as crackling static. “This ain’t about that. I’m gonna text you an address. You need to get here. This is above my pay grade. It’s Robby.”
My blood ran cold. “Is he hurt?”
Javier paused. “No, he’s…he’s okay, man. I don’t want to say anything else over the phone. Just get here as fast as you can.”
“Yeah,” I said numbly. “Sure. Send the address.”
I dressed quickly, putting my body armor on and deciding at the last minute to slip on one of the two custom suit jackets I saved for special occasions. The black one. It was heavier than it looked and uncomfortable as hell since there was a stab-resistant lining sewn into it. I thought it was warranted, however. If Javier was refusing to talk over the air about something that had to do with Robby, if he was having me leave the house in the middle of the night, there was no telling what I was about to walk into.
The possibilities were endless, and every time I discarded one, another popped up, more ridiculous than the last. I didn’t actually think the kid had been kidnapped or had overdosed or anything, but that didn’t stop me thinking about it obsessively.
Too groggy to think while driving, I punched the address into my phone and let it do the navigating for me. On the empty streets, the trip only took a few minutes. I hit mostly green lights through the center of town. I knew the general area but not well, it being outside of my usual haunts. I expected to end up at a rental house or maybe a VFW, some place Robby would be able to pay for at the last minute.
Instead I rolled up to a small warehouse tucked at the back of a block that looked ready for demolition. The broken sidewalks were overgrown with fragrant Rose of Sharon, the street lights still working—about half—flickered.
The patchy grass and bare dirt around the small warehouse was crisscrossed with fresh tire tracks and strewn with discarded red cups. These were the only signs of the raging party that had surely been taking place not long before.
One of my men, Jeremy, waved me over and held the door. Inside the dim entryway stood Javier, whose arms were tightly crossed over his chest while he stared furiously at the young man sitting on the bench with his head in his hands.
When the door clanged shut behind me, Robby Russey looked up. His pale green eyes, which doubtlessly made him more appealing to girls, were brought into sharp contrast against the bloodshot whites. His skin had a sickly gray pallor beneath the low florescent light. The usually neat riffle of sandy brown hair was clumped and lank with sweat. His entire look screamed fear and worry.
He sat canted slightly to his left, instinctively shying away from the door on the other end of the bench at his right. Something in that room he didn’t want to think about? The possibilities in my head dwindled considerably.
“Who wants to explain to me why I’m not passed out in my chair right now?” I said quietly. “And can I assume your father hasn’t been called yet?”
The first was aimed at either of them, the second solely toward Robby. He flinched, and as angry as I was at the spoiled party boy he’d become, as frustrated as I might be with my inability to convince his dad the boy needed to be brought to heel, that flinch hurt me a little. Robby was already well into his rebellious teenage years when I came into his life, but I’d still spent time with him. Roughhousing in the pool, going target shooting, and more dinners than I could count.
We had never been tight like some adoptive uncles can be. I arrived too late in his life for that, and at too awkward a phase, but there were good times. Plenty of them.
I was pretty sure when I opened the door, I would find a body inside. Robby had his father’s impulsive anger, but lacked the self-control that made Tom a success. Nature or nurture, the cause was immaterial. It didn’t change anything.
“Anyone?” I asked.
“I think he should show you,” Javier said, barely-restrained fury in his voice. “I’ll just wait outside.”
And he left through the door I had entered. I turned to Robby. “No more foreplay, kid. Let’s see what’s so bad that you’d call me before you own dad.”
“I told Javi I should show you alone,” Robby said in a wavering, distant voice. “He said if I had the guts, I should. I think…I don’t know. He’s so angry. I don’t think he wants anything to do with me, Carter.”
I was half right. There was a person behind that thick metal slab.
Only she wasn’t dead.
6
The room was a catastrophe. Heavy fumes from dozens of abandoned cups created a miasma of booze stench I could barely tolerate. They littered every surface, and the floor was a mixture of lonely red cups, cigarette butts, random trash, and even a few articles of clothing. In short, it looked like the fallout from a party thrown by a rich kid with no one holding him to account.
Except sitting with her arms wrapped around her knees, face obscured by a sheet of hair, was proof the kid did have at least some idea he had limits.
“What is going on here?” I asked, trying and failing to keep the knife edge out of my voice. “Tell me everything, Robby. ”
The boy—no, he was an adult. The man looked up at me with his haunted eyes and as soon as his mouth began to tense in the first fractions of a second needed to shape words, I knew what he was going to say.
“It got out of hand.”
I saw the girl look up out of the corner of my eye, the words causing her to stiffen. In turn, the motion caused me to look over at her.
There is a phenomenon that doesn’t have a name but almost everyone experiences at some point in their life. It’s the idea of certain familiarity. Sometimes it’s mistaking someone
for another person. Less often, it’s someone you know to be dead. You see a face that fits the parameters and some dark recess of your brain lights up, maybe from bad wiring or possibly a sad kind of hope. When this second kind of recognition happens, it has unpredictable results.
When I was in the military, I saw a soldier nearly lose his mind when he was convinced a friend who’d died in a helicopter crash was in the same airport.
She looked up, and I saw everything at once. Her face was already bruising on the left side—Robby was right-handed—and badly swollen. The other side was remarkably untouched. Whatever tumblers and gears rested inside my head were in perfect alignment. Or perfect misalignment, depending on your point of view.
The flash of recognition struck me in the heart. It was Hannah. My daughter. The reaction wasn’t rooted in logic or reason, only the sheer brute force of a father’s love.
If I’d slept longer, maybe my self-control would have endured long enough for my intellect to catch up with my instinct. Five, ten seconds would have done the trick.
Maybe if I had put in fewer hours over the last weeks in my vain attempt to create some down time, I would have been better rested overall. My mind sharper.
Maybe, maybe, maybe. None of those things happened.
Instead I read the damage on her face, the bad tears in her clothes as if she’d been slung by them, the furious eyes burning holes in Robby, one of them through a narrow slit where the tissue swelled it nearly shut.
All my tired brain could do was compute this data, however mistaken, and proceed to the natural conclusion. When it did, something in me broke. A reservoir long ignored which didn’t just burst. It exploded.
The world went white.
In my confusion, I lost more than self-control. Every minute of training, every constraint I’d internalized, every etched-in habit was gone, yes, but in that moment I literally lost my grip on reality. It all blurred into that white-hot fury, deadening all other memory and sensation.
The mental feedback loop was powerful. The initial glitch that made me think this girl was Hannah even though she was older than Hannah had ever been but younger than Hannah would be now propagated like a single crack in a pane of glass. The initial damage wasn’t severe, but the few seconds of anger acted as an external force on it, causing the problem to spread.
Exponentially. Which is to say, the more it increases, the more it will increase.
In that blazing rage, I felt pressure on my hands and arms. Something pushed at my shoulder briefly. My jaw ached from clenching it, the muscles and tendons in my neck straining against the collar of my shirt.
When I finally began to come around, I was standing with my fingers buried deep in Robby Russey’s neck. They formed deep indentations right where his arteries were. He was very dead. The part of my brain partitioned off from the rest, the little bit responsible for coldly cataloging and analyzing information, recognized that Robby had probably gone unconscious within ten seconds. The lack of blood flow to his brain probably led to cerebral ischemia. Though he’d died awfully fast for that.
Still, he was dead. No way around it. Maybe my attack caused a previously unknown condition to rear its ugly head, and death was the intersection where they met. All this went through my mind in a flash, the facts and possibilities unfolding instantly.
I was still breathing hard, a ragged wheeze escaping my throat. I let Robby drop bonelessly to the floor and tried to get control of myself.
From behind me, a voice said plaintively but with perfect clarity, “Please don’t kill me.”
Struggling to compose myself, I turned to face the girl.
Rather than the overwhelming fear I expected since I’d just murdered a man in front of her, I saw wary caution. The tense readiness of a spring waiting for the right moment to release its energy.
“I’m not going to hurt you,” I said. “I know that’s maybe hard to believe considering what just happened, but it’s true.”
The illusion that she was my long-gone daughter faded the more I looked at her. Same coloration, similar enough features to warrant a second look, but no more than that. She looked like Hannah the way an impressionist painting looked like something. She captured the idea of Hannah; the details were vague.
“So I can leave?” the girl asked. “I can walk out of here?”
I glanced down and to the side, in the direction of Robby’s body. “I won’t stop you. And I won’t come after you. But the whole reason they called me here is because of what he…did to you. I don’t need the details,” I said quickly. “If they woke me up and made me drive here, I know it was bad. Bad enough to maybe warrant killing you to cover it up.”
The words hung in the air, heavy and growing more dense. They seemed to suck all the other sound out of the room.
She didn’t appear fazed, which could have been an artifact of the truly shitty night she was having. “You said you won’t do that, though.”
I nodded. “No. I won’t let any of the others, either. After what I just did, just about everyone I know is going to want to kill me. You, too, if I can’t figure out a way to get you out of here.”
I chewed the inside of my lip as I tried to work it out. I could go out the door and shut it behind me, then order the others to leave me here. They’d do it, too, but that would only delay the problem. Once people realized Robby was missing, I would be the first suspect. The girl would be the second.
The pieces began clicking into place one after another. The enormity, the pure monstrous nature of what I’d done began to sink in. Robby was a bad kid, I knew that. Some of the stuff he got up to bordered on sociopathic behavior.
And maybe what he’d done to the girl, the beating he’d given her and maybe worse, called for justice. I could just be fooling myself, trying to paint the kid worse than he was to avoid feeling as terrible as I should.
It didn’t really matter. Either way I had just declared war on Tom Russey and the operation I’d built for him. Everyone on the payroll would be gunning for me, including the men outside. A cascading set of probabilities opened up in front of me, and survival hinged on a few key pieces of information.
I met the girl’s eyes, which were studiously avoiding the body on the floor. “Do they know who you are?”
The answer was in the slump of her shoulders, the drop of her mouth. “Yeah. After he…after, they took my wallet and pulled my ID out. Grabbed my phone, too.”
“Son of a bitch,” I breathed. I was angry at myself—taking information that way was one of my rules. When you had a potential problem, you got all the data you could and fired it off to our tech people. Amanda would already have someone drilling into the girl’s background, hacking their way into her life.
“How bad is this?” she asked.
I closed my eyes for a second, then forced myself to tell the truth. “It’s pretty bad. What’s your name?”
“Kate,” she said. “Kate Silva. Robby and I went to school together. He was a senior when I was a freshman.”
Fissures began to form in her self-control. Maybe the shock was wearing off and the reality had begun to sink in for her, too. I was impressed. I had years of experience and training to draw on. She didn’t. Keeping from falling apart into a complete mess showed a toughness I’d have killed for at her age.
“Kate, I need you to listen to me, okay?”
At the sound of her name, Kate’s entire attention focused on me. “Okay.”
I crouched down and put my back to the door. It was thick enough I didn’t worry about my words, softly spoken, drifting through. “We’re both in trouble. Whatever Robby did, you’d have been the one to pay for it even if I hadn’t done what I did. He was a messed up kid with too many people cleaning up after his mistakes. I wouldn’t have let my people hurt you, but it may not have been my call to make. I have a boss. Robby’s dad.”
Her eyes slowly widened as she took this in. “He bragged about being connected. You’re…the mob? Or is the word mafia?”
“Neither, really” I said. “We’re more criminal businessmen than anything, but that only matters because it gives a father who will be very angry a lot of dangerous resources to come after us with. We’re a little short on options.”
Kate paled. “You think they’ll kill me?”
“I don’t know,” I admitted. “I didn’t recruit people so damaged they’d feel right about murdering a teenage girl, but they’ll for sure kill me. And they definitely won’t stop Robby’s dad, who absolutely will kill you. Or torture you, to get information about me. I know the man well enough to understand how he’s going to react.”
Now she did look terrified, but there was nothing unreasoned about it. Being scared as hell was very fucking reasoned. Kate had the bad luck to go to what she expected to be a fun party and catch the eye of the wrong spoiled dickbag.
“Kate, you can leave if you want. Like I said, I won’t stop you. If you do, I’ll still try everything in my power to keep them from coming after you. But I won’t be able to protect you. If you stay with me, let me hide you, I promise I’ll do what it takes to make sure they can never hurt you.”
“My parents are out of town,” she said numbly. “They won’t be home until Tuesday.”
I waited for her to say more, then realized she was going into shock. “What does that mean, Kate? Are you coming with me or not?”
She focused a little, looking at the door behind me. “What are you going to do?”
I grimaced. “Either way you choose to go, I’ll have to take the fight to the whole organization. No getting around it. I’d feel better about putting you in a safe house. If you were out there on your own, I’d constantly worry they’d find you.”
She ran a hand over the thick, dark hair framing her face. “Why? You’re a killer. I watched you kill him. Why would you even care about me?”
There were any number of responses to that, but I settled on honesty again. “Because you didn’t ask for any of this,” I said. “You’re innocent. And because I just fucked up in the worst way. Unforgivably. The fallout from that will land on you, too, if I don’t take steps.”
