by J. J. McAvoy
She stared at it for a moment, then back at me before nodding, stretching out her legs in the rubble. “Our head butler. The day you came, he most likely bowed.”
“Ah, the guy from Downton Abbey.”
“Yes,” she rolled her eyes. “To celebrate, I invited all the men for a large banquet at this very villa. A video was played from all the men who left. To prove their loyalty, they were supposed to shoot themselves. None of them did and so I had snipers do it. The rest of them were warned by Fiorello.”
“You didn’t want Fiorello with you when you moved in?”
She frowned once again and I hated it. “No. He wouldn’t have come, and I wouldn’t force him. He stayed for my father and after my father died, he went back to Italy. I found out Brooks had applied for the force but was rejected a year before he came to me. Part of me believed he could bring my family down and get the credit if he joined. Still, I used my father’s black book, cashed in a few favors, and he was in; my personal mole, working the Chicago police. It took me years, but I did it. Even after the Valero burned down our fields, the Giovannis were still on top. After the gold rush, the feds were on the hunt anyway, so I focused on the crystal and heroin.”
“And Coraline’s…” I couldn’t even bring myself to say it. It was so odd. She was good. She tried her best to be as tough and as bad as us, but she was too good. I liked that about her.
“And Coraline’s illness brought it all back. It made me wonder how things would have been if my father never had it. Would I have gone to UCLA? Who would I be?”
“A cute, sweet, college graduate, most positively still married to me. My life sure as hell would have been easier.”
“You really want me to shoot you, don’t you?”
Laughing, I pulled her to me, wrapping my arms around her. “I can see it. You would actually be as innocent as you look.”
“All I see is you walking all over me and bending me over for sex like your personal plaything.” She pushed back, clicking the safety on before putting the gun away.
Watching her handle her gun made me want to bend her over now. This wasn’t the place. The last thing I needed was for her to get sick again, but the car…
“Why are you looking at me like that?” she asked, to which I just grinned.
Leaning over, I grabbed her legs and picked her up bridal style.
“Liam fucking Callahan, put me down right now!”
“Not until I bend you over in the car. Of which you owe me a new one anyway!” I smiled.
“You stupid, Irish brute!”
TWENTY-SEVEN
“Everything Dies. That is the law of life-the bitter unchangeable law”
—David Clement-Davies
DECLAN
Up the halls, down the corridors, in circles, I ran. She just upped and left, not bothering to speak to a nurse or even text me. I had no idea where she was or where she was going, and what pissed me off the most was the fact that it was my fault. I never should’ve left her alone, but I just needed a goddamn second to breathe, to gather the broken pieces of myself. I should have been with her; I should have never left her side.
“Declan?” My father grabbed hold of me in the middle of the lobby, but I couldn’t meet his eyes. I just stared at all the faces passing me by, some in snow white coats, others in blue scrubs, but most of them were just visitors wandering about. None of them were Coraline.
Where was she? Damn it, where was she?
“Declan? Son? What’s wrong? Speak to me.” He shook me like he did when I was child, forcing me to meet his eyes. They looked just as tired as mine. I wouldn’t be surprised if I now shared the wrinkles he now wore.
“Coraline. She’s gone. I don’t know where she went. The nurse said she checked out.” She’d checked out without me, without anyone in the family.
“Son, she’s at the church down the street. I had Monte follow her….”
I didn’t even wait for him to finish speaking before I broke out of his arms, rushing out the automatic double doors and into the blaring streets. I had no idea what street I was on, my mind was coming undone every moment she wasn’t next to me.
The church my father spoke of was in sight, farther down the road. Pushing through the crowd, I did my best not to run, to stay calm and to think of what I was going to say to her. With each step that brought me closer to the looming brick cathedral, I felt the words drip out of my brain and disappear into some gutter.
I wasn’t sure what to say. I must have been going out of my mind. Like a madman, I’d been running all over the damn hospital, calling her phone over and over again. Now I was standing outside of the intimidating wooden doors of Saint Margaret, unsure of what I could possibly say to her.
Mind went back to the first time I had met her. I was entering Eastside Diner to escape the monsoon that was pouring over the city. The moment I saw her run in, out of breath, dripping wet, and laughing like a madwoman, I found myself unable to look away from her. She had this presence about her and it drew me in.
It felt like a lifetime ago.
Sighing, I grasped the church door and pulled. As the door swung open, I saw her. She stuck out like…well, like a drunk in a church. She sat in the candle lit cathedral with her legs propped up on the pew, and a bottle of vodka in her hand. Not a soul dared to rear their heads. Blessing myself, I walked the aisle, my feet echoing as I hurried to reach her. She didn’t even look up. She just drank.
“I called you,” I whispered to her.
“A lot of people called me. I threw my phone out the window.” Again, she put the bottle to her lips.
That was rational.
“Okay.”
“Okay.”
I was waiting for something…anything. For her to break down like before, maybe even scream, but instead, she sat comfortably in the second row staring up at the cross hanging over the sea of candles.
“Coraline, talk to me. Please.”
“I don’t want to talk. I just want to drink.”
“Coraline…”
“You want to talk? Talk to God. Ask him why he’s such a dick. Why does he give with one hand and then slap you across the face with the other?”
She got up from the bench and stumbled forward. I reached to help, but she simply pushed me away, spilling some of the vodka over her hand and over me. Ignoring it, she continued moving towards the altar.
“Did you know only four percent of women diagnosed with ovarian cancer are my age?” she asked. “Slap one. Thanks, Big Guy!” She laughed, drinking at the foot of the cross. “I have stage two, which means both of my ovaries are shot! Because, why the fuck would I need ovaries, right? Oh, and so is my uterus. It’s not like I haven’t been dying for a child anyway. Dying, funny, Big Guy. You’re just hilarious!”
“Coraline—”
“Stop Coraline-ing me! Damn it! If I live…”
“You will live!” I wanted to grab her, but she kept pacing away from me. Watching her pace like that was driving me crazy.
“Yeah, because you’re an almighty Callahan. You see all, know all, are all, right? Every one of you walks on water! You all can do as you please and God simply looks away! Olivia is right, he’s picking favorites, but what else is new? We thought we caught it early, well we were wrong! I was wrong…so wrong…I thought I was pregnant. What kind of idiot thinks they’re pregnant? How did I not know? I didn’t see the signs until I was too far gone! How did I not notice?”
She tried to drink, but her bottle was empty. Rearing her arm back, she prepared to throw it, but I took it from her before she could. Pulling her into my arms, I just held her. I wasn’t sure what to say, or how I could make her feel any better.
“You want to know the icing on the cake?” she whispered, leaning into me. “This church—the church down the block from the hospital—is named St. Margaret of Antioch. She was the saint of childbirth, pregnant women, and dying people…”
She drew in a sharp breath and it was as though someone had stabbed us both.
“You aren’t in this alone. It’s you and me. You and I have cancer. We have cancer. And I swear to you I will never leave your side, but I need you to fight this. I need you to come back to the hospital,” I whispered, kissing the back of her head.
“I can’t. I can’t do the chemo. I can’t knowingly inject myself with poison, lose all my hair, let my bones become brittle, not to mention…I can’t, Declan. I just…”
“You can, because I can’t live without you. I can live without a kid—I truly can—but you…you are not up for debate. You stay for as long I stay, and I plan to live for a long, long time. So please, for the love of me, come back and let’s fight this bitch so we can get back to our lives.”
She is the most important thing to me. She is everything.
TWENTY-EIGHT
“Defense is our best attack.”
—Jay Weatherill
LIAM
“How much is this one boy costing us?” My father sighed, smoking like a steam engine while leaning against my ‘69 Mustang.
I readjusted my gloves. “$58,378.23. But I paid a flat sixty just to get it over with.”
God, I hate the cold. But what could I expect from a winter in Chicago? The past few months had gone by painfully slow, and now, here we were, standing outside and freezing our nuts off for a kid.
“I could think of ten different things to do with sixty grand, and none of them revolved around smuggling a boy over the border.”
Sixty grand was like a grain of sand on a beach for us. He was just bored, so bored in fact, that the man had even taken up writing.
“You didn’t have to come, Father.”
“You are all out of brothers for the time being. I figured we could use the quality time now that you’re weeks away from becoming a father yourself.”
The biggest shit storm that had fallen upon us in the last couple of months was Coraline, and I could hardly blame her. She’d had a hysterectomy, and each day she looked at an enlarged Mel, she broke down. It was finally too much, and Declan took her back to the castle in Ireland. She still had months of recovery to go through, on top of another round of chemo. I would give them as much time as they needed. Declan wasn’t just my cousin, he was my brother, and Coraline was his heart. Neal and Olivia, on the other hand, were one step behind dropping off the face of the planet. After their exile, he and Olivia only spoke to me when they had to while on the campaign trail. I did have to give them credit, they were finally good at something: being sock-puppets. They smiled for the cameras and made us all look good. In a few weeks, they would be home, and I would need to speak with Neal, but for now, I needed to make sure that all the hatches were locked down.
That reason was exactly why we were currently parked right outside the city, waiting under the bridge for my package.
“Are you nervous?” my father asked, handing me his cigar. I waved him off; it wasn’t worth the hassle Mel would give me if I came home smelling of smoke. She was more than sensitive to it now.
“Nervous about what?”
“About your son. I understood why you and Mel didn’t want to talk about it while there was still a chance she could lose him. Your mother and I have tried to give you both some time to let it sink in, but, we’re both kind of shocked you haven’t had more worries. Neither of you have even mentioned a nursery, nor did Mel want a baby shower…”
“She didn’t want a baby shower because we both knew she would have snapped and killed every last one us.” I could just see her now, a baby rattle in her hand, hammering away at some poor schmuck’s skull. And that poor schmuck would have probably been me.
Mel and I had spoken about the baby; we spent most of our evenings talking about him. What we would name him, how we would handle our work and parenting. Mel didn’t open up well to people. It had taken two years of marriage for her to even truly be open with me. Going to my parents was not something I figured she could do just yet.
“I know you and Mom want to be included more,” I said, “but Mel’s just not good with being personal, you know this. She’s working on it and I can’t push her. We’re thinking of naming him Ethan Antonio Callahan.”
“Ethan?” He grinned, turning to face me.
“Yeah.” I grinned in return. “I wanted something Irish, and she told me to fuck off, that his last name was Irish enough. She kept reading off Italian names, I kept asking if it was a name of an appetizer or entrée. We went down a line of ‘E’ names and Ethan just popped out at us. Feel free to pass it on to Mother so she can start embroidering sweaters and monogramming silverware. Hopefully that will keep her off the baby shower thing.”
“About that…” he trailed off.
“Please tell me you didn’t. Please, for the love of God, don’t tell me Mother is going forward with it.” Pushing off the car, I turned to him.
He continued to smoke, trying his best to not meet my gaze.
“Are you kidding me? I’m doing all I motherfucking can to just make it through the next couple of weeks. She’s going to think this was me.”
“Aww, the poor Boss is afraid of his big, pregnant wife?” He laughed, throwing his cigar on the ground.
“Says the man who probably tried to talk his wife out of this and failed. And I’ll let her know you called her big.” As if he could stand up to his wife either. We were both fucked, and the moment I got the chance, I was throwing him under the bus.
“Your package is here.” He nodded towards the van driving through the small creek towards us.
Peering up at the bridge, I spotted the guns waiting as the older van pulled up right in front of us. I hated dealing with human traffickers; they sickened me. The shit we did was of each person’s own free will. We didn’t hold the needle to their veins or the powder to their noses. It was all on their own accord. Traffickers were sick and they deserved everything that was coming to them, but they still knew how to get a body. And I needed this kid.
The four men pulled the small boy out of the truck. Both his hands were bound, a blindfold over his eyes. The poor kid must have stood at my hip. He fought and struggled against the men, with tears rolling down his face. They held onto the collar of his torn, filth covered shirt.
“I told you he was not to be harmed and that he was to be informed of where you were taking him,” I said.
“He alive, ain’t he? Lucky too ‘cause we got another offer for him. It’s gonna cost you another ten. Or we’ll take him and walk.”
Why people chose to test my patience was beyond me. It was like they wanted me to repeatedly prove I was willing to beat the shit out of them. My father glanced at me with a sickening grin on his face that could have only been matched by mine. I nodded and he knew what this meant.
“Let the boy go and you get the money we settled on, along with your arms,” I said.
They smiled at each other before grabbing the boy again.
“No! No! Déjame ir. Let go!” The boy cried, trying to fight.
Sighing, I pulled at the stacks in my jacket and threw it at one of their chests.
“That’s the half I owe you,” I told them before throwing another ten towards him. “And that’s the ten. Now hand over my package.”
They were all enjoying the fact that they had just stiff-armed a Callahan. They dropped the boy like a sack of potatoes onto the ground. Walking over to him, I took off the blindfold and ropes.
“Who would have thought that the legendary Callahan had a thing for exotic young boys?” one of the men said. “We can make this a continuing business venture.”
“Hold on a second,” I said before looking down. “You are safe. Estás a salvo,” I whispered to the boy on the ground. His brown eyes were wide, shaken, and nothing but a reflecting pool of fear. I enjoyed the look on adults—on men—but for children who didn’t even have all their teeth, it pissed me off.
“I’m taking you to your mother,” I said. “I promise, take a seat in my car.” He looked at my father then back at me.
&
nbsp; “You take me to my mama?”
“I promise.”
Nodding slowly, he took my hand and walked the three feet back to my car, my father simply opened the door for him and used his body to shield the window. Our eyes met right before I took off my jacket, throwing it on the hood and allowing them to see the two guns at my back. He simply pulled out another cigar, the man was always packing.
“What the fuck is this, Callahan?” They yelled, unleashing all their guns as two of my cars boxed us in. One by one, my men came out, guns all pointed at them.
“This, my friends, is what happens when you try to cheat me. When you insult me. Each one of my men is just itching to take your heads off. I would suggest you drop your weapons.”
Their dark eyes gazed over at the nine barrels pointed at their faces before letting gravity take hold of their guns; they dropped them at their feet, holding their hands up in surrender.
Crossing my arms over my chest, I stared at the last man on the right, still holding my money in his hairy hands. Reaching out, the little man handed me all of it before heading back in line. Strolling over to my jacket, I dropped the money and started to whistle. I pulled out my knife and gun before turning back around.
“Strip,” I demanded.
“Fuck y—” Before he could finish, I threw my knife right into his nose. His body fell back as he suffocated on his own blood, desperately gasping for air, crying in pain until he couldn’t cry anymore.
The rest of them started to take their clothing off.
“I have no respect for you pigs, but I was willing to let that slide for business. Then you come to me, late, ungrateful, and disrespectful. It hurts me.” I sighed, loading six bullets into my revolver slowly. I enjoyed watching them panic while I did this. “And when I hurt, somebody else gotta feel my hurt. It’s what makes my world go ‘round.”
Smiling, I shot at the first man in the groin. He screamed so loud I’m sure he popped a vein in his neck.
“Do you feel the world spinning?” I grinned.
