Nothing man-made is foolproof. Death is the only untouchable, and a false sense of security could get someone killed.
I put some gloves on, quickly disarmed the system, and let myself in. I hadn’t had to get my hands this dirty since I was a kid. Breaking and entering, stealing, was a method of survival where I came from.
As I prowled through the house, I remembered the rush I used to have at taking things from people who had too much and selling them just so we’d have money to pay to get the heat turned back on.
But this house was no average Joe’s house. This was a cop’s house. A place where, even when I was a stupid kid, I would have never ventured. By the plaques on the wall and the medals, you’d think this was the house of a fine member of the police force. But this police officer was no hero. If you looked hard enough, if you knew where to look, you would find the dirt, like a black light in a motel room.
The fifty-year-old bottle of Glenfiddich in the liquor cabinet, the over-the-top entertainment center, the Rolex watches, and the cocaine stuffed in the couch. I had learned a long time ago that there were no real heroes left—just good actors. And this guy wasn’t just crooked; he was flamboyant.
I quickly got on his computer and linked into a few sunny destination sites on the Internet. The intricate firewall caught my interest, and out of sheer curiosity, I started searching through files, finding his extensive Internet porn collection. I had come across a lot of sick people; but this guy was really messed up.
After bringing his firewall down and turning off the computer, I rearmed the cop’s false sense of security and found a dark corner to wait, away from the motion detector.
When he came home, the fat cop disarmed the system, threw his gun holster on the front bench, and sat down at his computer desk. I watched from the shadows as he went straight for his favored collection, already panting from excitement or from having to walk his fat ass around.
Before he could get too comfortable, I strolled up behind him and placed the butt of my gun against the back of his head. I leaned in to his ear, smelling the sweat stained into his shirt.
“Officer Breland,” I murmured, “let’s go have a seat in the kitchen.”
“Boy,” he said as we made our way down the hall, “you don’t know what shitstorm you just walked into. You ain’t gonna walk out of here alive.”
I bade him to sit at the table, and I sat on the opposite side, placing my gun on the table’s smooth surface, the barrel pointing at the police officer.
“Do you know who I am?” I asked him. I knew he had no idea who I was; nobody did. As far as he was concerned, I was just a twenty-something kid who was getting caught up in something he couldn’t manage.
“I don’t give a shit who you are,” Officer Breland howled.
“A couple months ago, you stormed into my compound and killed some of my guards.”
He scowled and folded his arms over his chest. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
I smiled. “I lost a lot of men that night.”
I took a piece of metal out of my pocket and took care to screw it onto my gun. His complexion blanched a little.
“One of the guards who was shot was unarmed. One of your colleagues ratted you out as the trigger guy.”
“It wasn’t me.” Sweat started to seep through the blubber on his face.
“Come on, now. We both know that’s not true.”
I put the gun back on the table, with the silenced barrel facing the policeman, and kicked my feet up on one of the chairs, lacing my fingers behind my head.
“I was just following orders,” he confessed. “If I wouldn’t have done it, someone else would have, and I would have been killed myself.”
“You and your chumps cost me a lot of money that night.”
“I can pay,” he immediately offered, as I had expected. “I have a lot of money socked away.”
“Oh, I doubt you can afford my price. I’m going to need a lot more than whatever shit nest egg you’ve saved up. Someone has to pay for this.”
While Officer Breland gave this some thought, I watched as his chunky hands started to shake. He knew what I was asking for, and he knew that this could mean his death now or his death later. When he looked at the clock clicking over the refrigerator, I knew he had made his decision.
“I know where you can get more money. A whole lot more money.”
“Boy,” I said, mimicking his voice, “that’s the best news I’ve heard all day.”
Officer Breland and I got in his Chevy, and I made him drive us so that I could keep holding the gun on him.
“They’re moving the money tonight,” he explained. “Shield has them move it around every two weeks until he can use it.”
By use it, Officer Breland meant launder it.
“How many guys does he have guarding the money?”
“No more than two.”
“Just two?” That would have left his money a little too vulnerable.
“Shield doesn’t trust anyone with his money,” he told me. “I only know about it because for the last two weeks, he has been keeping the stash at my folks’ old farm. I inherited it after they died but never did anything with the property.”
I watched every move he made as he said this. He kept his eyes on the road, his hands firmly upon the wheel, his breath steady. He was telling the truth.
“If you get me that money, I’ll let you keep a chunk of it,” I vowed. “You can use your share to disappear before Shield comes after you.”
He took a breath, nodded, and relaxed his grip on the wheel.
We drove to a farmhouse outside Jersey. Up the driveway, there was a cube truck with its headlights on. As we neared the truck and the house, I could tell by the white fumes rising against the dark night that the truck’s engine was still on, but we still hadn’t seen a soul. I bade Officer Breland to park in front of the truck, and we waited there.
There were no lights on inside the house, but I could see flashlights shining through the windows every few seconds. Two distinct beams of lights—two flashlights. This, so far, corroborated Breland’s story that there were only two men guarding Shield’s money.
We watched as the flashlights flew around the house, from window to window. The officer looked at the clock on the radio. “They should have been done loading up the money by now.”
Breland’s inherited farmhouse was tall and slim, like a box of Kleenex that had been turned on its side. It had a façade of old bricks that were the size of a speed limit sign and bulged out. The bricks on the house reminded me of a bulletproof vest under a too-tight T-shirt. A few feet ahead, at the end of the pebble driveway, there was what was left of a barn. The roof had already caved in, and the structure hung on its side as though it had had too much to drink and was close to being cut off by the bartender.
“Nice place,” I sneered.
“My parents were assholes. I’m taking pleasure in watching their place fall apart one piece at a time.” His glare was stuck to the barn in the back. A glare that I recognized all too well. A glare that echoed that of a boy who had been beaten up more times than he dared to recount.
When the lights were focused on the side door and grew, Breland and I stepped out of the car.
A dark-haired gangly man came out, rump first, with a flashlight tucked in the back pocket of his jeans. He was bent over a red can of gas that he was pouring in zigzags. A second man followed him out. He was bigger and older, and he was carrying a wooden crate while holding his flashlight between his teeth, lighting his arsonist buddy’s way out.
“What the hell are you doing?” Breland shouted. I let him go a little as he marched toward the men who were planning to torch his childhood house of horrors.
The firebugs stopped short, crowded on the small cement stoop in front of the side door.
“What the hell are we doing? What the hell are you doing? Here?” demanded the older of the two men.
“Shield sent us over here to see
what was taking so long,” I answered calmly.
While his young friend held on to the gas can and hadn’t moved an inch since we’d been spotted, the big guy put the crate on the ground.
“Who the hell are you?” he asked and kept his eyes on me as he reached to the gun holster looped against his chest.
I stretched my arms over my head and yawned. “Where are the other guys?”
“What other guys?” the kid wondered, his brows furrowed.
He’d confirmed that there were indeed only two of them. I shot them both in the head before the old guy ever got a chance to pull his gun out.
Breland and I went to the bodies. I ordered him to pull the bodies inside the house while I opened the crate. It was loaded with cash. A couple hundred thousand dollars worth of it. Then I walked to the back of the truck, where the men had left the door up. There were at least another fifty more crates in there. Whatever Shield was planning to do with ten million dollars, it was big money for him. And while it was probably not his only stash of cash, he was definitely going to miss this.
From the glow of the headlights, we could still see the boots of the dead bodies that were inside the entrance. Breland was still winded from having dragged the two men.
“Do you smoke?” I asked him with a smirk.
He glanced at me, glanced at his childhood home, chuckled, and pulled out a gold-plated Zippo lighter. He lit it, and without hesitation, threw it onto the trail of gas. The house was engulfed in seconds.
I told him to load the last crate into the back of the truck and followed him. He reached up to pull the doors closed, and I fired two shots—one for each of his knees. He screeched, falling face-first into the back of the truck. I shut the door and locked him inside with the money.
I drove away with Breland and the cash, leaving behind two of Shield’s men dead and Breland’s car, fingering him as the escaped culprit. When Shield went searching for Breland in his tidy bungalow, he would find that his man’s last Internet search was for flight destinations in South America.
I could still hear Breland howling in the back when I pulled up to the junkyard. Tiny was standing next to my car, waiting for me. He opened the back and pulled out Breland, dragging him to a pit in the sand. He threw Breland in the pit and moved to the side.
I watched Breland coil in pain and smiled.
“You have your money,” he yelled. “What else do you want?”
“That unarmed guard you shot,” I explained. “He was fourteen years old. He was harmless. Just a kid.”
“I was just following orders. I didn’t know he was a kid.”
Tiny handed me a box, and I took a breath. That kid wasn’t just any kid. “He was my brother. His name was Rocco.”
I lit the match and threw it into the pit, lighting up the gasoline that Tiny had already poured in there. I walked to the truck, pulled out a couple money crates, and threw them in with Breland. He would die a rich man.
I got in my Audi and left Tiny to clean up.
Like the man who had ratted him out, Officer Breland had paid for what he had done to my kid brother. While my spree of payback was far from over, this one small kill had refueled me. But I wanted, needed more.
Breland was the fourteenth man to die at my hands—fourteen, which was how old Rocco was when he was murdered. Every time you take a human life, something—a darkness—grows inside of you, pushing you out, until eventually there’s nothing but that darkness left. The only time I had felt the darkness recede and make room for me again was when I was with Emmy. Without her, the darkness was creeping back like the venom that it was.
****
When I drove up to our plane, I was an hour early, and Spider and Carly weren’t there yet. I got on the plane and ordered the pilot to take off. Then I called Carly.
“I need you to liquefy my personal funds,” I told her after she had answered a groggy hello.
“Why?”
“Just do it, Carly.”
Once upon a time, she would have been taken aback by the harshness in my voice. But this harshness was all I had to offer these days.
“When do you need it by?”
“Yesterday.”
“Fine,” she answered abruptly. “How much?”
“As much as you can get me on short notice.”
She paused as the plane’s engines roared and pulled us into the air. “Where are you?”
“Plane.”
“Is Spider there too?”
“The two of you will have to catch the next flight out. I don’t have time to wait.”
“I’m not going. Spider was on his way to meet you. A couple more minutes wouldn’t have hurt,” she snapped.
“Call me back when the money’s ready.” I hung up on her and turned my phone off.
I looked through the window as daylight brought the New York landscape back to life. Pastures looked like tiny soccer fields below … and I immediately thought of Emmy.
The first time I saw Emily Sheppard, Bill had just passed away, and she was just a kid. She was on a soccer field in the middle of a game—this gangly, whitewashed, redheaded kid. I sat in my car, amazed. I had never seen a worse soccer player in my life. She was fast but tripped so many times over the ball or her own feet that her teammates practically burned a hole through their lungs to try to outrun her so that she would be nowhere near the game ball.
And then it had started raining. The field became a sodden mud pit. The girls were sliding everywhere, the coaches had their coats pulled over their heads, and the refs were trying to keep steady on their feet. But Emily was unaffected and seemed more determined than ever. The muddier the field got, the steadier she became on her feet. She found the ball, kicked, and scored just as the ref blew his whistle to stop the rained-out game. While the crowd ran for cover inside the school, Bill’s sister stayed behind to help one of the assistants gather up all the balls and lug the nets back into the school.
On that rainy afternoon, I drove out of the parking lot shaking my head, with a smile on my face. Bill’s sister was not the rich snot I had expected her to be.
Soaring daylight followed me into San Francisco. When I got to the apartment, I sent one of my guards to take word to Shield that I was in California, ready to meet.
I didn’t have much time before Spider would be in town too, so I threw my stuff in a room and headed back out. I drove across the bridge into Oakland. I turned into the employee parking lot for the Port of Oakland and inched my way through the lanes, searching for the right Burgundy minivan. When I found it, I parked the car a few spots away, checked my watch, and waited.
I had done my research, knew everything about him on paper, but I needed to see him for myself. See from my own eyes what kind of man he was.
I watched the cargo be lifted from the ships to the docks and wondered what Emmy was doing.
CHAPTER THREE: EMILY
FISH TALES
I found myself staring at the glow in the dark stars that were stuck to my ceiling, left behind by the student who used to occupy my broom closet. I counted them, as I usually did whenever I couldn’t sleep. The stars had started peeling off, and once in a while I’d find one on the floor. One was missing since I’d last counted.
Funny, I hadn’t found any on the floor lately.
I imagined Meatball would be glowing in the dark soon too if he kept eating the plastic stars.
The house was darkened and quiet except for Meatball’s snoring. The last thing I lucidly remembered was flushing the shards of a pregnancy test down the toilet, but the rest—petting Meatball, brushing my teeth, drinking a glass of milk after brushing my teeth—I could only remember as though I had been watching the automated me from a distance.
When I had left the clinic, it was early afternoon, and now it was almost dawn the next day. How did it get so late? I wasn’t even sure if I’d slept at all or if I had been blankly staring at the plastic stars all day and night.
As soon as a bit of light from thos
e rooms in the house that had the luxury of windows started poking through my curtain door, I couldn’t wait to get outside and take Meatball for a walk. But the minute my feet hit the floor, I ran to the toilet.
When I was good and empty, I resurfaced to find Meatball sitting, quietly, by the bathroom door. He didn’t even go totally nuts and spin around in circles when I asked him if he wanted to go for a walk.
The nausea had disappeared just as quickly as it had come. Yet I still needed to climb out of the cloud of lethargy that had taken my brain hostage. For the first time in many weeks, I grabbed my running shoes at the door.
But instead of taking me for a walk as he usually did, Meatball stayed to my side, so closely that his fur rubbed into my pant leg. This made it very difficult for me to run. So we slowed down and took an extra-long walk, one that took us out of the slums and into the suburbs.
We came to a park outside an elementary school, where houses and patio sets backed onto the green space. I could tell that the houses were new builds by the lack of weeds and the wisps of trees that were planted on every third lot. Exactly the same tree in exactly the same spot over and over again. I felt like I was in Legoland. The leaves had already started to change color, and the air smelled full, like the final give-it-everything-you’ve-got round of explosions at a fireworks show before everything goes dead silent.
While we snaked the pathway, I was humming some nonsensical tune under my breath and cramming my brain with as much useless detail as possible. Like the number of houses that had a birdhouse in their backyard. There were five. Like the number of picnic tables in the park. There were seventeen.
It must have been still quite early in the morning because the park was empty, except for a toddler who was playing in the sand by the climbers, while a woman who I assumed to be his nanny watched him from a park bench. Meatball had a leg up, so I stopped by the chain link fence, watching the little boy. He went up the climber, ran around, and went back down the slide. But when he reached the bottom, he tumbled off.
He started to cry.