Under the Bones

by Kory M. Shrum

  The sliding door opened and five personnel emerged. Two women in scrubs pushed a bed like the one Lucy spent the last weeks of her life in. A third held a long, plastic board that looked like a poorly designed sled. Neon orange with hand-holes lining each side. The fourth and fifth were the doctor who’d been smoking and an officer no doubt here to arrest Lou for pulling a gun.

  A long plastic sled was laid onto the concrete beside King.

  “1, 2, 3.” They lifted him and placed him on the stretcher before transferring him to the white cot. Lou waited until he was pushed through the automated doors into the hospital, but she’d taken a step back toward the shadows.

  The officer peered into the dark, trying to see the woman the doctor described.

  A sharp flash of lightning illuminated the breezeway, defining the pillars and walkway, the east side of the hospital and its meticulous landscaping. A heartbeat later, thunder rolled.

  But the officer didn’t see anyone.

  If there had been a woman, she was gone.

  40

  Lou stepped from the hospital breezeway, alive with cool, electric rain, into the heat of an Italian sunshine. She took a breath, adjusting to the shift, then put King behind her. She couldn’t think of him now, not with an army of men to face and vengeance to be had.

  A dusty room sheltered her. Forgotten furniture sat beneath white sheets. This part of the house was quiet. She slipped out into the hall, following the sound of gunfire. She moved the Beretta to the left hand and pulled the Browning with her right. Two hands, two guns. That was better.

  She turned a corner and found two men beating the hell out of each other. They traded knee strikes to the guts, feral punches to the face. A tooth, knocked loose, sailed across the room and skidded to halt at her feet. She was almost sorry to interrupt the show.

  Lou put a bullet in each before stepping over their dropped corpses.

  Around the next corner—what a maze this compound was—she found men exchanging gunfire across balconies. They popped up and down over the railings like weasels, bullets spit back and forth over the heads of the men fighting in the portico below.

  Lou shot two from behind and as the third was turning, put a bullet in his throat, severing his cry midstream. He slumped, glassy eyed against the bannister. Taking their place, Lou fired across and got two men on the opposite balcony right away. The third went down and stayed down. No matter. Lou stepped into the corner of one balcony and emerged from the corner of the other. She shot the hidden man from behind with ease.

  It was very easy to shoot the other two remaining men. Their mouths came open in surprised Os as they turned to find her suddenly standing over them, guns in hand.

  She surveyed the portico and counted no less than forty men exchanging fire. Bullets whistled through the air in all directions. Others relied on their fists or knives. More than one blade caught the sunlight and flashed it against the walls. One man had a lead pipe as long as his forearm, which he swung into the skull of another. That skull deflated like a basketball on impact.

  But she didn’t see Konstantine.

  Someone darted out of an adjacent room and crossed the portico in a panicked stride. She recognized Nico by her handiwork. His busted nose had crusted over nicely with thick, black blood. She raised the gun but he’d already turned a corner and disappeared. Damn.

  He hadn’t seen her from her claimed balcony.

  What would he think when he saw the ripped jacket on the floor? She’d thrown it there only to frighten him. A loud and clear, I’m coming for you.

  She hoped it had scared the hell out of him.

  Nico. He would be the dessert after the end of a good meal.

  Sweeping the portico, checking one last time for Konstantine, she removed a grenade from her pocket and unpinned it. She tossed it into the densest cluster of men, bodies so entwined it was hard to tell which violent limb belonged to which body.

  The grenade exploded. Throwing men, blood, and dust in all directions. One side of the villa gave way, cascading like a mudslide from roof to earth.

  Lou stepped from the balcony down into the thick of it.

  She moved through the dust cloud, using it as cover. As soon as a clear shape emerged from the chaos, she seized it. She put bullet through bone. Silenced screams with strikes to the throat. She had to reload twice, tossing aside empty magazines in a careless way she’d never dared to before.

  On her fourth reload, the dust cleared and she met Konstantine’s eyes.

  He leaned against a doorway. A kitchen stood behind him, the barest hint of a gleaming work surface and white cabinets.

  His face was destroyed, the meat of his cheek lay open, revealing muscle and bone beneath. Blood clung like a bandana over half his face, making his green eyes seem even brighter.

  Fear reared up inside her, clogging her throat and nose, setting fire to her insides.

  She raised her gun and aimed. A flicker of doubt flashed in Konstantine’s eyes before she shifted her aim to the right and took out the two men coming at him.

  Seeing him had stopped her, but she wasn’t done. She remembered herself. Using the last of the dust to shield her, she moved methodically to shoot down the few men still struggling to escape the cloud. She gave herself over to the task, pulling the trigger whenever a target emerged. A vital organ. A skull. The side of an exposed throat—all the temptation she needed.

  “Se seite con me!” Konstantine called out over the firefight. “Vattene prima che ti uccida!”

  Men ran in every direction. They scurried like rats through the portico, out into the sunlight. Car doors slammed shut. Tires spun in the dirt.

  Lou found the second grenade in her pocket.

  Some of the men had regrouped in the east corner of the portico, they were working their way toward Konstantine. They became her new target. She pulled the pin and threw.

  1…2…3…4…BOOM.

  Dirt and brick and bodies were thrown into the air like confetti. The water main burst spewing a geyser ten feet into the air. A severed forearm with a serial number tattoo splattered against the walkway three feet from Lou.

  The men who hadn’t run at Konstantine’s first warning, ran now.

  All gunfire ceased, the cacophonous choir replaced with screams.

  The spraying water settled the dust from this second explosion more quickly. Lou stood in the rain shower and turned in a slow circle, guns up.

  Corpses lay heaped in nearly every corner of the portico, thrown about as carelessly as a child’s toys. The water from the busted main ran red, washing away the spilled blood from the flagstones.

  She was soaked from head to toe. But no one remained. Except Konstantine.

  She turned her gun on him.

  “Wait!” he said, lifting his hands in surrender.

  Watching his deformed cheek flap with his efforts at speech disturbed her. But she didn’t lower her gun. All that was left was the wreckage, the bodies and the unspoken words between them. She was too close to finishing this to quit now.

  He licked blood from his lips. “You are angry about the room.”

  “A room without shadows that electrocutes me into compliance. What’s there to be mad about?”

  “I can explain.”

  She put a bullet into the wall beside his head.

  He flinched. “My face hurts. Can we—”

  She emptied the rest of the clip into the same wall. So much for saving bullets.

  “I was afraid of you.” He licked his lips and more blood smeared across his tongue. His teeth were red with it. “I want us to be allies. More than allies. But you are your father’s daughter. Your father—”

  She took a step toward him, jaw tight. The gun was trained on that piece of flesh sitting between his eyebrows.

  Konstantine’s eyes fluttered, but he kept his position. His voice was stronger now. His own anger rose up to meet hers. “Your father was a good man but he was a fool.”

  A cold fire burned thro
ugh Lou’s chest. The gun jumped at the end of her sight.

  “The world isn’t black and white. It isn’t us and them. This side, that side. He was played by the system he served.”

  “And Padre Leo was the Pope. And your mother was a saint. ”

  He looked down at his feet. He took a slow breath, collecting himself before meeting her gaze again.

  “We must be better. We can’t see the world as they saw it.”

  “How is building a room like that better?”

  “I never wanted to use it.”

  “It seems very functional for a room that was never supposed to be used. And that fucking straitjacket!”

  “I didn’t buy the jacket. That was Nico.”

  “Okay, just the padded room then. Got it.”

  Konstantine’s breaths were ragged. “I began building the room when you tried to kill me in June. But it was only meant to keep you from hurting me. It was never designed to hurt you. The current in the floor was only if you refused to be reasoned with. If every attempt to speak was met with violence. If I’d wanted to hurt you, or kill you, I wouldn’t have picked electricity and a padded room to do it.”

  “You built the room because you were afraid I wouldn’t stop trying to kill you?”

  Her rage rose and crested. Rose and crested and with each punishing wave her arm trembled. Her whole body shook.

  “Yes. It may come as a surprise to you, but I don’t want to be murdered.”

  Too bad. She wanted to kill him. She wanted to wrap her hands around his throat and squeeze the light out of those infuriating green eyes. And yet—and yet…

  He could have killed her at any time. He could have killed her months ago on Ryanson’s boat when she was nearly unconscious with blood loss. He could have killed her in her own damn apartment. There were a hundred opportunities over the last few days. And it wasn’t like she didn’t have enough guns lying around for him to manage it.

  But he had never so much as pointed a gun at her. Could she say the same? No.

  It was more than that.

  Her father had been a fool. She’d thought so herself a thousand times. When she learned how Gus Johnson had sold him out. Chaz Brasso had ordered the hit. Both men from his own department. His so-called friends. He was a fool for not seeing how power hungry the men around him were.

  And a fool about Lucy, the sister he abandoned until he needed her to save his own kid.

  Thinking all of this felt like a betrayal. To love him, but to also see the fault in him…

  It hurt.

  Konstantine saw her struggle and lowered his voice, speaking gently. “I’d hoped to never use that room. That isn’t what I want for us.”

  He straightened himself, pushing off the doorway that had held so much of his weight. He took a step toward her. “Whatever I may be to you—now, or later—I’m not your enemy.”

  Lou lowered her gun.

  And a bullet slammed into her upper arm. The force of it knocked her to the ground, into the water. Fire ate through the meat of her arm into her shoulder joint. It set her whole left side ablaze.

  Fucking bastard.

  She was going to kill him.

  She sat up, seeing the stream of blood pouring down her arm, mixing with the small flood still pooling from the ruptured water main.

  But by the time she pulled her gun and trained it on the doorway where Konstantine had just stood, it was empty.

  A gun went off again and a guttural scream full of animalistic rage rebounded through the portico.

  Her eyes were drawn to a flurry of movement.

  Konstantine and Nico were locked in battle. One, two, three rapid fire punches slammed into the side of Nico’s face and he went to one knee. His gun fell from his hand and splashed in the water. And Konstantine was already lifting his foot to stomp him.

  He rolled away and the boot came down in a puddle of water. Nico pulled a knife and slid it into the meat of Konstantine’s calf.

  He howled and pitched forward onto his hands and knees.

  Right.

  Konstantine couldn’t have put a bullet in her arm from that angle. Nico must have emerged from the basement, spotted them talking and shot her. It’s her own damn fault for letting Konstantine distract her, letting her anger get the best of her. If only she could’ve forgotten about the damned terror room for five minutes, she would’ve remembered the real threat.

  No point in crying over fuckups. It was time to fix it.

  Lou tore the belt off her pants and buckled it tight around her shoulder. It limited her movement, but it would also keep her from bleeding out.

  Konstantine ripped the knife from his calf and buried it in Nico’s shoulder. He used his good leg to kick Nico back into the adjacent wall. But he only rebounded, as if on a spring board.

  Konstantine screamed. Nico had his thumb in one of Konstantine’s old bullet wounds, probing deep. Fresh blood bubbled up around the thumb as Konstantine seized the wrist, trying to rip the hand away.

  Arm secure, Lou was up and moving just as Nico twisted his grip and wrenched another scream from Konstantine’s throat.

  One hard kick to Nico’s side sent him sprawling off of Konstantine. Lou had her hands around his neck, hauling him up before he’d fully landed.

  Slipping to the balcony above, she kicked him once, twice. He coughed and spat blood onto the floor.

  When he whipped the knife toward her own legs she jumped up in time to feel it catch the bottom of her boot. She twisted the wrist, took the knife and tossed it over the railing.

  Then she hurled him over the railing after it.

  He didn’t even have time to scream before his body hit the wet stones of the portico.

  Something cracked on impact. Lou peered over the railing to see the leg bent. From the knee, it twisted off at an unnatural angle.

  But Nico wasn’t giving up that easy. He tried to drag himself to sitting, slapping at the water as if to find his gun. Lou had relieved him of it on the balcony and left it there as she traveled down to the main level through the shadows.

  Her boots now uneven on the bottom, sent ripples through the water.

  Nico found the knife in the water.

  Lou kicked it away.

  He spotted a gun dropped by someone two or three feet to the right. He clawed for it. Until Lou brought her boot down and crushed the hand. Something snapped.

  She pulled her own gun and trained it on his face.

  “Konstantine!” Nico screamed, his face red, veins popping in fury. “We were supposed to be brothers! Nostro padre lo voleva!”

  Konstantine dragged himself across the portico.

  “He gave you everything.” Nico’s teeth chattered. “Everything that was mine! You owe me! At the very least you owe me my life!”

  Lou arched an eyebrow. “You can lock him in a padded room. Since that’s what you like to do to people who try to kill you.”

  Konstantine’s stood hunched, his pained body folded in on itself. “No.”

  He trained the pistol at Nico’s face and fired four times. The first bullet punched a hole clean through the skull. The other three only widening the first.

  The gunshots echoed through the portico before being swallowed up by the rushing water.

  For a long time neither of them said anything. They only stood over Nico’s body and watched his blood darken the water around him.

  Nico’s eyes remained open, seeing nothing.

  “So we’re not enemies?” she said at last. She lifted her mangled boot and scowled at the scarred sole. Bastard.

  “No.” Konstantine fingered his wounded cheek, hissing. “But if you still want to kill me, please do it now. My face hurts. Unbearably.”

  “I’m not in the mood.” She bent and seized Nico’s collar, hefting his soaked body. He’d make a good meal for her six-legged friend. “Maybe next time.”

  Epilogue

  King stepped out from beneath the green awning and into Jackson Square. He sipped hi
s coffee and watched a man paint a Bob-Ross worthy landscape to a stop-clock, while a popular rock song blared from the boombox beside him. The cluster of bystanders hovered around him clapped on enthusiastically.

  It’s a beautiful day, Robert.

  “Yes, it is,” he said to Lucy. A woman walking her French bulldog gave him a wide berth and long sideways glance.

  Crazy or not, everything reminded him of Lucy. Standing in the square, watching the street performers charm the tourists. The sight of a red balloon, released, floating up into the blue sky. The smell of pralines or jambalaya. Sunlight filtered through trees dancing on the pavement.

  He plucked a fresh beignet from the bag and shook the excess powdered sugar off before plopping it into his mouth. He spotted Piper across the square at her army-green card table. She was reading the palm of a teenage girl, maybe seventeen, eighteen years old. Her black hair was pulled up in a messy bun on the top of her head and she laughed and blushed at whatever Piper said.

  Piper caught sight of King and waved. He waved back.

  He took his time down the narrow streets, walking east toward Melandra’s. His leg was giving him grief.

  The bullet that hit his lower left side and lodged in the meat had been removed cleanly, but not without cost. The nerves were damaged and his left leg remained weak. He couldn’t walk without a limp now and a tingling sensation that ran up and down his entire left side.

  He stayed on top of his physical therapy though. Walking. Stairs. Stretches. Anything to keep him from having a permanent limp. The doctor said he’d have full use of it again in eight or nine weeks. King suspected that full use would be similar to his full use of his shoulder. It would hurt him from time to time, but he didn’t need daily Vicodin for it. Yet.

  Only time would tell.

  King stepped inside Melandra’s Fortunes and Fixes, and breathed deep. It was morning glory and patchouli incense today. The air hung thick with it as several candles flickered from their pedestals. It was so nice entering the shop and not hearing the banshee wail of the skeleton that Mel used to keep by the door.

  The storeroom opened and there was Mel, wearing her dark blue jeans and a black tank top.