Fathers

by Matt Rogers

  King looked Alonzo in the eye. He was nearly half a foot taller. ‘I don’t think so, Alonzo.’

  The tech wizard paled. ‘Just keep it away from me, okay?’

  ‘I wasn’t talking about me,’ King said. ‘I’m having a kid within the week.’

  ‘I know. Can’t wait to meet the little man.’

  Little man.

  King had always wanted a boy, and they’d only been settled in Winthrop for a few weeks before they’d scheduled the first ultrasound that confirmed what his gut had told him all along. For five months he’d known they were having a boy. Somehow it still didn’t compute.

  Alonzo said, ‘How’s Will doing? Haven’t heard from him in a spell.’

  ‘You know what he’s like. The definition of a loose cannon. He finds something he wants to intervene on, he’ll do it. Timing be damned.’

  ‘Tell him not to.’

  King rolled his eyes.

  Alonzo said, ‘Right.’

  ‘He doesn’t even listen to his own concerns,’ King said, heading for the door. ‘What makes you think he’ll listen to mine?’

  All Alonzo could do was shrug.

  Out in the corridor King’s phone buzzed. He recognised the ringtone and practically ripped it out to answer.

  Before he could ask anything Violetta said, ‘My waters broke.’

  5

  Life consists of split-second decisions, chances, eventualities.

  If Slater had hit one more red light, or one less, it wouldn’t have happened. Unless he arrived at precisely the right time, he wouldn’t have seen anything. He would have gone about his day, unaware of the whirlwind he’d barely missed.

  But his trip from Winthrop to south Roxbury dumped him right in the middle of it.

  Sometimes he wondered if he was cursed with responsibility, or if everyone saw opportunities to cause trouble and just didn’t act on them.

  The latter made more sense.

  He pulled his Porsche Cayenne SUV into the parking lot next to the United House of Prayer, a mammoth church with a teal blue roof that dwarfed the vehicles neatly lined up beside it. The coffee shop was a couple of streets west, and he planned on walking up Route 28 to get to it. It had turned into a decent day. Still cold, but he’d acclimatised to the temperature, and the sun was out. There was a thick humidity in the air.

  His legs were heavy from the run, which surprised him given the discipline he’d used to control his heart rate. He made a mental note to readjust his training schedule to compensate as he slotted the Porsche into an empty spot. He got out, stretched his legs, let the morning sun spill across his face. He squinted against the glare, then stepped into the shadow cast by the church, getting his bearings. He could have pulled up the brewing boutique’s address on his phone, but sometimes he preferred the old-fashioned way. He spotted the busy Route 28 and started towards it.

  He sensed something over his left shoulder.

  He couldn’t put his finger on exactly what.

  A premonition? Did he hear something? He’d never be sure.

  He turned to check it out.

  Saw the tall skinny boy lingering on the street corner across the lot.

  6

  Violetta finally understood the term “beautiful pain” when the first serious contraction had hit her.

  An hour earlier she’d been hunched over the washing machine in a sundress after cutting her walk short, sprinkling laundry powder in, when a rippling tightness clenched her from the inside. She’d let out a little moan, but overriding everything was the elation.

  My child, she’d thought.

  Now, in the kitchen, there was a warm sensation between her legs, a soft trickle of fluid, and she looked down to see liquid running down the inside of her left thigh. It felt like releasing a full bladder.

  She timed the contractions for half an hour, then called King. He was back within ten minutes, and there was some relief in that.

  He let himself in, crossed the kitchen, and gripped her hand. ‘It’s happening?’

  Her face felt cold as she nodded, and she realised she was probably pale. But she smiled through the discomfort.

  He smiled back, but she could tell he was putting on a brave face.

  ‘Shit,’ he said through his upturned lips. ‘Holy shit.’

  She’d witnessed him kill dozens of men, and she knew he’d killed hundreds more. He’d lived a life not even seasoned combat veterans could fathom. He’d charged headfirst into danger without a second thought so many times he’d practically become desensitised to it. He’d suffered and rehabbed from every injury imaginable, save the loss of a limb or a permanent traumatic brain injury. He knew pain in all its facets, and the same with fear. He’d been scared in every situation, every way, shape, or form.

  Except this one.

  Uncharted territory.

  So his hand shook as he gripped hers and helped her change before leading her to the front door. As they passed behind the main sofa he snatched a duffel bag full of supplies off the cushion. He’d packed for an overnight stay at the hospital several days earlier, unable to sleep late one night because he was nervous with anticipation.

  Now, as he led her out the door and down the driveway, he pulled his phone from his pocket and tapped the screen once to open the maps application. The directions to the Yawkey Centre Garage — the closest parking lot, attached to the main building of Mass General — were already sitting there, ready to go.

  Through the pain she felt a stab of happiness, like all the pressure of life lifted for a moment on an invisible wave.

  He’d planned every inch of this.

  He noticed her staring at the screen and said, ‘What?’

  ‘Researched parking in advance?’ she muttered, breathing through a contraction.

  ‘Of course.’

  He helped her into the passenger seat of the Dodge, put the overnight bag in the back.

  She said, ‘Call Slater.’

  ‘He won’t answer. He’ll be training.’

  She furrowed her brow. ‘Do you know his schedule?’

  ‘I know that every morning he trains like a demon.’

  ‘Alexis, then.’

  King nodded. ‘Whatever Will’s doing, she’ll tear him away from it.’

  He rounded to the driver’s side, and when he clambered behind the wheel she said, ‘You sure?’

  He shrugged.

  The unspoken truth floated between them.

  With Will Slater, you couldn’t be sure of anything.

  7

  There was really nothing alarming about the kid.

  Maybe the way he loitered gave it away, but that wasn’t enough reason to take notice. He looked around ten or eleven, but tall for his age, at the tail end of a growth spurt that had left him long and thin and lean. He had good genetics, Slater noticed, even under the baggy shirt and thick cargo shorts. There were strong muscle insertions in his exposed calves and forearms. There was a springiness to the way he stood, like he could explode off the mark at any moment, run a forty-yard dash in five seconds. And his eyes were sharp. The irises appeared bronze from a distance. Not crazy unique, not green like Slater’s, whose emerald irises set against dark black skin seemed to catch the attention of nearly everyone who took a glance at him — all the women and most of the men.

  The boy’s face wasn’t as eye-catching, but still Slater took a second glance as he crossed the parking lot.

  That meant he took in more details — the twitchiness to the boy’s gaze, the tension in his legs like he was ready to run for his life, and the bruise under his right eye, the skin darker there than the rest.

  None of those were good signs.

  Slater stopped in the middle of the lot. The big church loomed behind him, spewing a long shadow across the asphalt. It effortlessly encompassed Slater and the tip of the spire’s shadow covered the boy, dulling the glow to those bronze eyes. Behind the kid were two large apartment blocks. Slater put it at a fifty-fifty chance they were t
enement buildings. They were built in Colonial Revival style, perched on a parcel of land overlooking Franklin Park.

  The boy was guarding them.

  Well, Slater thought, not all of them.

  There had to be a hundred and fifty tiny shoebox apartments across the two blocks, most of them home to single parents and immigrants and broken families all trying to get by, to survive another day in this cold world. But, judging by the kid’s demeanour, there was a decent chance one of those apartments was ground zero for a meet involving matters you could only describe as shady.

  At the slightest sign of trouble, the boy would call a number or sprint for a stairwell, and the people he was protecting would scatter into the wind.

  Which wasn’t anything to freak out about. Slater knew all about that world. He could estimate, down to the finer details, what sort of things this boy was trying to protect. The sorts of people he was working for.

  Slater couldn’t have stared for more than a couple of seconds, but it spooked the boy.

  He reached for his pocket, fast.

  Slater shook his head. ‘Don’t. Not worth the hassle. I’ll be on my way.’

  It stumped the boy. ‘Huh?’

  ‘I’m not who you think I am.’

  ‘Dunno who you think I am.’

  ‘You’re looking out for your boys,’ Slater said. ‘They’re up there slinging drugs or planning a robbery or a murder.’

  The kid’s eyes went wide and he wrenched a phone out of his pocket.

  Slater shook his head again. ‘Dumb move. I’m not your enemy. I’ve got no skin in the game.’

  ‘Then how you know that shit?’

  ‘I’ve been around.’

  ‘Yeah?’ The boy’s tone was cynical.

  ‘You don’t think I have?’

  ‘You look too clean, man. You ain’t belong here.’

  Slater got the point. He didn’t need to look down to see how the expensive clothes clung to his muscled body. It didn’t gel with the style of the skinny junkies clad in ragged two-dollar tees that roamed these parts. But this kid wasn’t a junkie. Not yet, anyway.

  Slater wouldn’t have stopped for a junkie.

  He knew that much — before you helped a junkie, they had to help themselves.

  He said, ‘I didn’t stop for a reason. I’m not connected to whatever you’ve got going on. Don’t know what your deal is, even though I guessed right. It’d be dumb to freak out your buddies with a false alarm. They wouldn’t take kindly to that.’

  ‘You know me?’ the kid said.

  He was standoffish and terse and hostile, but that was a byproduct of his environment.

  You got friendly in his world, you were dead.

  Slater said, ‘Not personally. But I used to be you once upon a time.’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘Didn’t have parents for very long. Fell in with all sorts of crowds after they left.’

  The boy rolled his eyes at the sanctimony, but he tucked the phone away. ‘This the part where you tell me to do something else, man? You gon’ tell me how you changed your life, stopped being a gangbanger, became a saint? That’s how you got them clothes, huh?’

  Slater smiled as he reflected on his life. ‘No, kid. That’s not how I got these clothes.’

  The boy shrugged. ‘You gotta point?’

  Slater said, ‘Not really.’

  ‘Then move it along. Or I make that call you don’t want me to make, yeah?’

  Slater didn’t respond, but he didn’t move either.

  He’d saved a kid once. In Macau. Her name was Shien. But those were egregiously different circumstances. She’d been snatched off the street, forced into a limousine, and he’d seen it and reacted instantly. A split-second decision: act or don’t.

  This here…

  This wasn’t in the same hemisphere. All he had to do was turn and walk away. There were thousands and thousands of kids roped into the life he knew this boy lived. He hadn’t a hope of saving them all. He probably hadn’t a hope of helping this one either. In every likelihood he’d only make things staggeringly worse. All it would bring was trouble, at perhaps the most inopportune time of his life, when his brother-in-arms was set to become a father.

  So there were at least a dozen reasons to walk away.

  Slater rattled them off in his head as he stood there.

  Then he walked toward the boy.

  8

  Alexis had thought about decompressing with a couple of hours of trash reality television while Slater was gone.

  She didn’t, though.

  As much as she hated to admit it, his approach to life had rubbed off on her. She liked that it had. If she felt in any way pressured to do what he did, she never would have enjoyed it. But he’d never forced her to do anything she didn’t want to do, only led by example, and she knew it was voluntary when — alone in the empty house — she changed into running gear, mounted the Predator Curve Treadmill in the corner of the living room, and took herself through a gruelling interval workout. She ran half a mile in three minutes and ten seconds, decelerated to a three-minute bout of walking, then repeated that circuit eight consecutive times. Her heart rate skyrocketed during the intervals and steadily inched its way back down over the walks, giving her just enough rest time to make the ordeal somewhat bearable. Her fitness watch told her she’d burned eight hundred calories as she stepped off the curved treadmill once she was finished, but she figured she’d churned through more than that. Curved treadmills were non-motorised, powered by the propulsion of each footfall on the fast-moving belt. It took some getting used to, but she’d quickly mastered it, and the natural movement taxed her body hard without putting any pressure on her joints.

  She fetched a workout towel from the linen press and wiped her abdomen, her arms, and her forehead.

  Endorphins flowed.

  It called back to a quote by Musonius Rufus that Slater had read to her early in their relationship. He was an avid reader of stoicism, and she usually let his endless musings roll off her, but this one had stuck.

  ‘If you accomplish something good with hard work, the labour passes quickly, but the good endures; if you do something shameful in pursuit of pleasure, the pleasure passes quickly, but the shame endures.’

  Reciting it to herself had single-handedly directed her athletic pursuits for months.

  Her phone chirped on the sofa. She slung the workout towel over her shoulder, picked it up, and answered.

  King asked, ‘Are you with Will?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Please tell me he’s not on a long run.’

  Alexis couldn’t resist a smirk. Will’s “long runs,” conducted at a Zone 2 aerobic pace that he tracked on his fitness watch, often ran upwards of three or four hours. Every now and then he’d collapse at their front door having run a full marathon after getting carried away. Then within thirty minutes he was refuelled and recharged and ready to crack on with the day. Twenty-six miles had become a casual challenge in this period of downtime.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ she said. ‘He already got that out of the way this morning. Now he’s picking up a new coffee machine. Ours broke.’

  ‘You’re not getting it fixed?’

  ‘The shop had one available. I don’t think he wanted to wait. He’s a fiend for caffeine.’

  ‘So are you.’

  Alexis smiled. ‘Guilty.’

  Then the smile fell off her face. ‘Do you … need him for work?’

  She’d never had a problem with Will laying his life on the line. That’s how they’d met, after all. It was in his DNA, and if he suppressed it then he wouldn’t be the man she’d fallen in love with. He would be incomplete, a bad replica of his true self. But it had been months — over half a year, she realised — since he or King had enacted any sort of vigilante justice, and it would take some getting used to if they were diving back into it.

  And at a time like this? she thought. Then she realised. Of course not.

  King stil
l hadn’t answered. He seemed nervous, hesitant. Fighting hostile men in combat didn’t even make him nervous. So…

  She said, ‘It’s happening?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Jason…’

  ‘Meet us there?’

  ‘Are you already on the way?’

  ‘Uh-huh,’ King said. ‘Her waters broke.’

  ‘I could have picked you up.’

  ‘Figured it was better to just go.’

  Alexis stifled a laugh, but the tail end of it eked its way out like a small motor kickstarting.

  King heard it. ‘What?’

  ‘You sound terrified.’

  ‘I am.’

  ‘That’s not the Jason King I know.’

  ‘Wait until you and Slater have a kid,’ King said. ‘I’d like to see how composed he’ll be.’

  Alexis pressed her lips closed tight. She hadn’t once mentioned to King or Violetta that she and Will had been trying for a baby for three months without any success. It didn’t seem right to let anyone know. It would only amplify the pressure on them to get the result they wanted, as the stress that already surrounded the repeated failings was likely contributing to the problem. She knew what needed to be done. Keep her mouth shut, take her mind off it, and let it happen naturally. Maybe the fact she was worrying incessantly that it would never happen was the very reason it wasn’t happening.

  King said, ‘You there?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said.

  ‘You cut out.’

  She hesitated. ‘Oh, sorry. Must be a bad line. Look, I’ll get hold of Will. We’ll be there very soon.’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘What did you used to tell me?’ she said. ‘“Nerves can be either fear or excitement.”’

  ‘Something like that.’

  ‘So? Are you excited?’

  ‘Still shitting myself.’

  She laughed. ‘Just pretend you’re battling for nuclear launch codes with hardened mercenaries. You know … doing something less stressful.’