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Yea, verily, it is once again time to post a free novel one chapter a week! This year’s novel is THE BOUNCER. Enjoy!

26.

For a moment, I was crushed under his weight. I thought I could feel my ribs cracking under the strain, all the breath pushed out of me. Then I was crushed even more as Jill and Ivan jumped on Patsy, making him roar in my ear, a reek of tobacco and beer. I struggled to move, to do anything at all that would improve my situation.

More voices, and Patsy’s roar went up an octave. A moment later and he lifted away from me, throwing Jill, Ivan, and Lisa aside like afterthoughts. I lay on the floor for a second or two, stunned. Then I realized I was covered in something warm and wet—blood.

I scrambled up, patting myself down. Patsy stood in the doorway, blood dripping from his fingers, breathing hard. We all faced him, gasping, and for one leaden moment everyone seemed content to just stare at each other.

Then there were voices in the basement behind him. Jill glanced back at me, an electric arc of alarm slamming between us. If Chewing Gum and the rest of them surged in here behind the big man, we were cooked. We were almost cooked with just him.

“Out!” I shouted, struggling to catch my breath when every inhalation made my chest hurt. “Back! Come on!”

Ivan, Luis, and I backed into the living room. Lisa came next, her gun nowhere to be seen. Jill was last, holding the Glock on Patsy as he stalked after us, snarling. I tried to remember how many shots she’d fired. Too many, I thought.

“Window!” I said.

Ivan turned and trotted to the back, throwing the sash up and glancing outside.

“Clear!” he shouted.

“My place!” Lisa shouted. “I got weapons!”

Of course she did. One by one we ducked through the window, Jill and me last, Pasty coming at a slow, steady pace, bent over to clear the ceiling. Out in the yard where we’d recently buried my father, Ivan leaped up and pulled down the fire escape ladder in one graceful motion, grunting with the effort. He scrambled up, Luis right behind him. I let Lisa go next, and then it was me and Jill facing down the largest man I’d ever seen as he stormed down the hallway. I could see motion behind him, too—Dubsey’s and The Broker’s guys, who couldn’t take any shots at us because Patsy filled the window frame entirely. More than entirely. He hesitated, uncertain of squeezing through.

“Up!” I hissed, pushing Jill towards the ladder. “Third floor!”

She muttered something and shoved the gun into her jeans, leaping up and pulling herself onto the ladder with weird, wiry energy that had come out of a pill bottle. For a moment I just stood there staring at Patsy as he did calculus in his head trying to angle his shoulders through the window. Then I ran and jumped, catching hold of the ladder and pulling myself up with shaking arms and jelly legs.

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Yea, verily, it is once again time to post a free novel one chapter a week! This year’s novel is THE BOUNCER. Enjoy!

25.

Dimly, I was aware of a gunshot. Too far back to be in the kitchen, so it was Lisa. I didn’t think she’d ever fired her weapon outside of a range before.

Patsy was bigger than I remembered. Which was fucking disturbing, since I remembered him pretty big. He shouldered his way through the ruined door and looked around at us with a lack of expression on his flabby, round face. Patsy didn’t seem particularly pleased to be beating the shit out of a group of people on a cold, damp evening. He didn’t seem displeased, either. Patsy struck me as the sort of guy who lived in the Moment quite a bit.

Jill raised the Glock, and Patsy casually knocked it aside. It went off, sending a slug into a cabinet as Jill was sent rocketing into the stove with bone-crunching force.

“Big man!” Ivan shouted. Patsy turned to stare down at the smaller, older man, and Ivan settled into a boxer’s crouch, hands up, feet light. He danced for a second or two, then sent a combination into Patsy’s face—left right, solid jabs.

Patsy flinched back, his wide, crooked nose blossoming into red pain. Ivan pressed his advantage, feinting at a third jab and then landing a solid blow into the bigger man’s side, approximately where a kidney would be on a mortal man.

Patsy reared back with a flicker of annoyance on his face and smacked Ivan in the head, staggering him. I put the automatic up and crouched down, squeezing the trigger. The shot went wide, and Patsy oriented on me, bloody nostrils flaring like a predator who’d caught the scent.

He charged, tossing the table aside like it was made of balsa wood. Something flatlined in my head, and I squeezed off four shots in a blind panic.

And then my whole world became Patsy, and the curious, sweaty smell of him.

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Yea, verily, it is once again time to post a free novel one chapter a week! This year’s novel is THE BOUNCER. Enjoy!

24.

Jill transformed into a Little General, something I’d seen before in scraps. She eyed Lisa Lisa’s diminutive frame—Lisa was actually shorter than Jill—and nodded in approval. Then she looked the men over.

“You ever been in a fight?” she asked.

Ivan grinned. “I grew up here, kid,” he said.

Luis nodded and twisted his neck until it popped. Tony shrugged. “I been chased by a couple of boyfriends and husbands, over the years,” he said. “I can take a punch.”

She considered, then nodded. It didn’t matter. These were our resources, like it or not. “Kitchen knives,” she said, pointing to the magnetic strip over the sink.

“I got hardware upstairs,” Lisa said.

Jill nodded. “No time. They’re comin’.”

Jill looked like a wreck. Bloodied, pale, her hair an explosion of loose curls that had been held back by rubber bands and random ties for so long it no longer knew how to behave in polite society. Her black T-shirt read A GIANT DOG and had been torn almost in half, hanging off of her like a mistake. The bags under her eyes made them look like craters. If you saw Jill Pilowsky walking on the street you’d cross to the other side so the crackhead wouldn’t get their stink on you.

She took charge, though. In the bedroom, we overturned the heavy bed frame and pushed it up over the back door leading out to the yard. In the kitchen, we pushed the table over the door and stacked the chairs behind it. The apartment had never felt smaller. When we’d moved in, me freshly sober and working, the place had felt enormous. After years of bumming on couches and scrounging motel rooms, sleeping in cars and once or twice out in the air, having a place seemed like wealth—even an illegal apartment with no windows. I remembered walking through it at night while Carrie slept, just wallowing in having three rooms. Running water. Appliances.

That had been zero. And here I was, staring up at it.

Now the place was crowded. The ceilings, I realized, were low. It was damp, and dim. It was fucking basement apartment, the sort of place carved out of unused square footage and given to assholes like me who’d be grateful for anything.

“Guns at the front and the back,” I said.

“La Cerdita, old man, tattoos, take the bedroom,” Jill said. Tony and Ivan looked at each other, trying to decide who was the old man in this equation. Tony nodded, and he and Luis followed Lisa to the bedroom. Jill looked at Ivan. “You here with me an’ Maddie.” She looked at me. “You see those lazy fuckers? Those are crooks used to picking up envelopes. Glorified errand boys. No way more than one or two of them is going to come through the back. Guaranteed.”

I nodded. I thought she was right. The Spillaine people—aside from Patsy—weren’t worth much. I wasn’t as sure about the Outfit’s crew. They hadn’t exactly shone with quality in Paradise, but Chewing Gum was one of those ruthlessly competent assholes, so I had to assume he knew how to hire muscle.

“How much ammunition you got?” I asked.

Jill grimaced. “Seven. You?”

“Nine. Lisa’s got a goddamn armory upstairs,” I said.

She shook her head. “They’re comin’, Maddie. Right now. We go for ammo, we get caught on the stairs with our dicks in our hands.”

Ivan was grinning. “Jesus, Mads, I had no fucking idea. You were always so quiet. Head down, one of those day by day motherfuckers.”

“I tried to be,” I said. “Didn’t work out. Genetics is a hell of a thing.”

“Genetics,” Jill spat. “Quit feeling sorry for yourself, Maddie. You got screwed by someone. Bein’ related to them is coincidence. You survive this, start over. Try again.”

You survive this. I kept sinking. Zero was so far above me it was hard to even imagine it. My tiny, shitty kingdom—a job, a family, a place to live—had been reduced to pure survival. Men were coming to beat information out of me, and when they got that information, they’d kill me to settle a debt. An entry in a ledger.

Upstairs, distant, we heard the front door shatter. I felt the impact, and imagined the glass everywhere, the bent and ruined frame. Back when the neighborhood had been populated, the door had been a necessary security measure. The kids had scratched their tags into the glass over the years, making it cloudy, but more part of the place. Now it was gone.

Everyone fell silent. Heavy steps, then. Slow. Unhurried. Unconcerned. The floor above us creaking and groaning.

The basement door exploding inward, slamming into the wall.I could picture it, the old, soft wood, the bent, rusted nails.

The basement steps, old, squealing wood complaining of the load it was now asked to bear. The descent steady, unhurried. I could feel the three of us leaning back, instinctively putting more space between us and the door.

Footsteps, gritty with the basement’s stone floor wearing away beneath them. Closer, and closer. Then a pause, a moment of silence.

The door shook with sudden impact. The frame leaped, and dust drifted down from above. The table bounced.

A few seconds later, another impact. The lock held. The hinges didn’t. One popped free, and the door leaned inward at a skewed angle, shoving the table slightly. I looked at Jill. She looked back at me.

“Uh, guys!” she shouted without looking away. “I think we got an all-hands situation up front!”

With a muffled howl from outside, the third impact did the trick. The table bounced backwards, making us scramble out of the way, and the front door exploded inward, hanging onto the wall by two twisted metal hinges. Chunks of wood flew past me as we all ducked instinctively.

And Patsy was in the room.

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Yea, verily, it is once again time to post a free novel one chapter a week! This year’s novel is THE BOUNCER. Enjoy!

23.

I texted Lisa. Carrie coming. Trouble coming after. Tell everyone to stay in their apartment. Try the cops.

The cops wouldn’t come. Marcus had so thoroughly pissed off the 9-1-1 operators they didn’t even answer when anyone in the building called. And the police had almost forgotten that our block existed; the 293 was supposed to have been torn down years ago. It was easy to forget a single building in the midst of a field of rubble, the collapse of a development deal involving six countries and several banks.

And Abban Spillaine still had relatives with police brass on their collars. The cops wouldn’t come.

Bergen City seemed deserted. Jill drove at speed, blowing red lights and losing hubcaps on the turns, but there were no cops in sight. We had a few close encounters with pedestrians sauntering their way across Kennedy Boulevard, earning our fuck yous and assholes. I watched the city rip past with my hands clenched, heart pounding, joints aching.

“Why is Carrie going to the 293?” Jill asked, her voice slurry. “That’s … that’s dumb.”

I nodded. “Because of the Fuck You Fund. Because of the money.” There was a lesson somewhere in the number of times I’d recently made terrible decisions based on sums of money hidden away in stupid places. I was my father’s son, after all.

Jill cackled. “Fuck you fund. Fuckin’ classic.”

My phone buzzed.

Carrie’s here. Left a taxi sitting on the street, I took care of it.

What’s goin on?

I forced my hands to work. It was too late to evacuate. Everyone in their apt, I tapped out. Bad shit.

I tried to do math, and heard my junior year pre-calc teacher’s mocking voice as she explained why I might actually need math someday. We’d have a few minutes on the Spillaines. Maybe ten, if they were as stupid and incompetent as they’d seemed. Maybe fifteen. Maybe five. Not much. If I could get Carrie away, I could draw them off. Lead them far away, take my medicine. But we wouldn’t have much time, and Carrie was a willful woman. A willful woman who wouldn’t be in much mood to listen to me, and who could blame her? There wasn’t a single person better off for having known me, and that included my daughter.

Hell, that included me.

It was a disease I’d inherited from my father. Dear old Mats, rotting in the yard behind the 293, still alive in legend and myth and the secret books of Bergen City crime families. For years criminals would be trying to track him down to dun him for ancient interest. As much as I wanted to erase Mats from history, this idea made me happy. I wanted my father to be a byword for asshole in Bergen City for decades to come.

Jill turned onto Howell with a squeal of tires and showed no interest in slowing down until we were just a few lots away. She slammed on the brakes and spun the car to a stop, rattling my teeth.

My neighbors were outside. I cursed under my breath as I got out of the car. Ivan, Tony Butageri, and Luis stood together on the top step of the stoop. Lisa stood on the sidewalk, eyes on me. Even Bill Gallagher, who rarely poked his white-haired head out of his dark bourbon-soaked apartment was sitting on one of the steps, smoking an old-school cigarette.

Lisa, wrapped in her tattered pink robe, broke away from everyone and walked over to me.

“What the ever-living fuck, Maddie?” she demanded, full voice. “You’re scaring the shit out of everyone. Carrie blew through here like—”

I pushed past her. “Inside!” I shouted. “Everyone in your apartments. Now. Bad people are coming. Men with guns. Get inside!”

They all stared at me. No one moved.

“You, uh, you got a real natural authority, Maddie,” Jill said, swaying next to me.

I glanced at her. She was gray. “Fuck,” I muttered. I turned and found Lisa right behind me. “She’s hurt,” I said, feeling something huge and heavy forming inside me, some ball of emotion I knew I couldn’t let out, not now. If I let it out I’d collapse under its weight. I had to keep moving.

Lisa studied me for a moment, the shoved me aside and turned Jill gently around. “Come on, honey, let me see you.” She glanced back at me with an expression of disappointed anger, then knelt down and lifted Jill’s bloodied shirt. “Jesus,” she said. “All right, sweetheart, come on, I got a kit in my place.”

She glanced back at me. “A fucking gunshot, Maddie?”

I nodded. “Bad fucking people.” I looked past her. “Everyone fucking inside! Now!”

Lisa began walking Jill up the steps, but no one else moved. Finally Ivan walked down to the street and over to me, flicking his own cigarette away. “Can’t do it, Mads.”

I stared at him.

“Lydia and some of the girls went to my sister’s,” he said. “Took the kids. The rest of us? You say trouble’s coming to the 293, we’re gonna help you with it.”

I swallowed the big something with some difficulty. “Ivan, I appreciate that, but—”

“I’m sixty and I’m out of shape,” he said with a crooked grin. “But I used to get my head busted in by fucking police every goddamn night. I can still take a punch. Tony and Luis ain’t young either. Bill’s fucking useless, but we couldn’t get him to go. Bottom line, Maddie, if you and Carrie need help, you’ve got us.” He put his hand on my arm. “Go check on ?em. No one’s getting in past us without a fight. This is the 293. This is our home.”

I swallowed thickly, staring down at my feet because I was afraid if I looked at him I’d hug him. “Weapons,” I said, voice shaking. “You’ll need weapons.”

“Jesus, Mads, this is Bergen City,” he said. “Weapons we got.”

.o0o.

The sink cabinet was open and all the cleaning supplies were on the floor. The apartment had an air of sudden motion to it, the sense of someone having been there, disturbed atmosphere. I walked through the dusty rooms. They already felt foreign to me, as if it was already my past. As if I was already moving through a memory.

She was packing in the bedroom. Ellie smiled at me as I walked in, and I reached down to touch her face. She grabbed onto my fingers. With any luck, she would never remember a bit of this, never have a bad dream about the night strange men came and took her.

“You have to hurry,” I said. “They’re coming.”

She nodded, stuffing Ellie’s clothes into a backpack. I watched her strong, wiry arms moving. Her hair was flecked with a hot pink dye; Carrie changed her hair color every other day, and the last rinse was starting to fade and wash out. I wanted to reach out and touch her, too, but I knew my wife. I knew the buzzing, angry energy surrounding her. I knew that if I touched her now, I might end up with some broken fingers.

“You and your fucking family,” she spat quietly without looking at me.

I sagged a little. I focused on Ellie, her found, happy little face. There was nothing to say. She was right. I was a Renik. I thought I’d escaped my parents’ bullshit, but it had found me. And I couldn’t promise it would never find me again, because who the fuck knew what other time bombs Mats and Liùsaidh had planted out there? Who knew how many more times some gangster was going to track me down over an old debt, and old score.

Who knew what my mother was up to right now, ruining Future Me?

I didn’t worry over Ellie. Carrie was stronger than me. She would be fine. She’d damn my memory and go to some meetings and move on, and when Ellie was all grown she’d have some vague memory of a man who’d once been around, who’d once sang her to sleep with she rested her head on his shoulder. Maybe she’d try to find me. And it would break my heart if she found me, but at least I knew she would be safe in the mean time.

Steps in the kitchen. Carrie paused for a split second, then sped up. I let go of Ellie and walked back into the kitchen. Jill and Lisa stood there. Jill looked a little better, more color in her face, less wobble in her walk. Lisa had suited up in her second-hand body armor, gun slung low on her hip. A future law enforcement star.

“There’s a guy just told me he’s coming in to talk to you. Alone, he says, unarmed. Under truce. Says he wants to parley. Says nothing happens until you talk.”

That wasn’t Merlin, who was all strut and shout. “Let me guess,” I said. “Leather jacket, kind of good-looking in a worn kind of way?”

She nodded. “That’s him.”

Chewing Gum.

.o0o.

He stepped into the kitchen with an easy swagger, holding open his jacket to show he was unarmed. Andy Dubsey, big fucking deal in the Outfit. Outranked everyone else involved, as far as I knew. He looked around, eyes attentive. It was a show, and it was also surveillance. He wasn’t stupid.

“Mr. Renik,” he said, pulling out a chair and sitting down. Like it was his apartment. But some people had that knack. They owned every room they walked into.

“This is a fucking mess,” he said, pushing his hands through his hair. “You got anything to drink?”

I considered. Then I walked over to the cabinets nearest the door and opened the topmost one on the left. I felt around on the highest shelf and extracted a half-empty bottle of bourbon. We kept it for guests, and as a reminder. Miguel had suggested it; he said that when he dried out, he’d poured everything down the drain, but then he got anxious. He thought about booze all the time, because he knew there was none there if he broke, if he had an emergency. He got wet again within the week.

But when he dried out again, he poured everything down the drain—except one bottle. And he told himself all he had to do was not drink from that bottle, every day. Every hour. Every minute. And that did the trick.

It worked for me, too. I’d left the meetings behind, but having that one bottle somehow made me rest easier.

I grabbed a glass from the dish rack and poured him four fingers. I set it in front of him, put the bottle on the table, and sat down.

He took a sip and nodded. “Good stuff.”

I shook my head. “No, it isn’t.”

He leaned back in the chair, easy. I figured he wasn’t unarmed—guys like him didn’t get to be middle-aged by actually walking into places bare-assed. I had to assume an ankle holster, a peashooter in his jacket, something.

He bent his arms back and laced his fingers behind his head. “This shit should never have happened. That fucking kid—Merlin,” he said, putting a bit of contemptuous mustard on the name. “If he’d run this little scheme up the pole, he would’ve gotten a smack for his trouble. This isn’t how we do business.”

This, I realized with a start, was an apology. Or the closest I was going to get. I felt a sour feeling in my stomach. Men of fucking honor. Killers and thieves who thought if they drew up a charter and acted correct, all was well.

“The Spillaines ain’t shit any more,” he went on. “They knew they wouldn’t even get a sit-down over this. And they knew bigger fish than they ever were had lines on your pops. Debts going way back, not to mention the Paradise rent. And once they found out your father was under our protection, that should have been the end of it. Getting your family involved was bad business.” He nodded. “This shit has been adjudicated. There was a fucking council, Renik. All the bosses, the underbosses, everyone. Everyone’s fuckin’ furious. Some because your pops is alive—they weren’t amused—some because of the way this shit’s been handled. Bottom line, your wife, the kid—they can go.”

I tensed up. Didn’t say anything.

“The kid—Merlin,” he said again, again stressing the name with a note of contempt. “He overreached, there. The Outfit doesn’t like it. We’re not fucking animals. A world of hurt is coming his way, and I am going to enjoy teaching that little shit some lessons. Right now, you have my word: Your family can walk out of here. Nothing is gonna happen until they’re out.”

He said this in a tone of self-satisfaction, as if this meant something—that he wasn’t a fucking piece of shit, that he wasn’t here to murder me.

I said nothing.

His smile faded. He was done being reasonable, doing the statesman act. “After that, we’re coming in. You’re telling us where your father is, and we’re sorting all of this out. One way or another. You got my word on that, too.” He studied me. “Sorry, boss. You trespassed on Outfit property, you escaped one of our tenants. Hurt some of our people. Busted up my truck.” He shrugged. “Maybe you had cause, but you’re on the hook for that, sorry.”

He leaned forward and drained his glass. “We got a deal?”

“Deal implies negotiation.”

He smiled. A guy who enjoyed what he did. “Do you accept our terms, then?”

I wanted to reach over and pop him in the nose. Then flip the table on top of him and drag him out from under it. take him by the collar and drag him up to the roof, throw him off.

Instead, I nodded. “I’ll walk them down. We’ll have a car. You move back, no one comes near them.”

His smile was cheerful. He was willing to be magnanimous in victory. The big swinging dick in from Kansas City, cleaning up Merlin Spillaine’s mess. “Agreed.” He stood up and looked around the kitchen again. He snorted in amusement. “Nice place,” he said. “I’m sure they’ll miss it.”

He vanished into the dark hallway. A few seconds later Jill and Lisa reappeared, and Carrie walked in carrying two bags and Ellie, who smiled around, red-faced with excitement.

“Okay,” was all she said.

I pictured Carolina Mueller working the bar at Queenies, the most confident woman I’d ever seen.

She brought Ellie over and I kissed her forehead. I didn’t try to kiss Carrie, or ask her where she’d go. Her people, probably, in Pennsylvania, at least at first. I trembled with the effort of swallowing the enormous wad of pain and anger inside me, but I needed to just let her go. I needed her to get clear of this, and then I would be able to handle whatever happened.

We walked downstairs with her. Carrie didn’t show any fear. She led the way, clutching Ellie to her protectively. In the tight vestibule I found Ivan, Luis, and Tony waiting. Ivan had a baseball bat, Luis, the dark bands of ink on his neck seeming to pulse with every breath, had a length of pipe. Tony just stood chewing a toothpick, his eyes locked on the scene outside.

Jill stepped forward and pushed the door open, and we both stepped onto the top step. The empty sweep of the torn-down block opened up around us like a prairie. A taxi waited, lights on. Across the broken-up street, three cars. Merlin Spillaine and five hard cases stood around one, glaring. Chewing Gum and a dozen slightly more polished thugs leaned against his busted-up truck.

Next to Merlin, bending the light, was Patsy. I recognized the enormous thug from my first meeting with The Broker, and he hadn’t gotten any smaller. His bald, hairless white head bloomed out of a baggy black shirt like some sort of mushroom. His arms, longer than they should be, hung loose at his sides. He had some kind of brass knuckles on each hand. And he stared at me like he’d been given permission to perform experiments on me.

Chewing Gum offered me a little salute. “Her fuckin’ chariot awaits, Renik!”

The goons chuckled, jostling each other.

I turned back and stepped aside. “Go,” I said.

Carrie hesitated for one blessed second. She didn’t look at me, but she said “Maddie—”

“Go,” I said, gruffly. “I’ll find you if you want to be found.”

She nodded and swept out. She put her head up and glared around at everyone as she strutted for the taxi. When she got there, she hesitated, hands full of Ellie and bags. Chewing Gum leaned over and smacked a short, roided-out looking guy in a tight white shirt on the back of his head and gestured at her. The short guy winced and trotted over to open the door.

Carrie placed Ellie in the backseat gently, then folded herself in with the bags. Shortie closed the door gently behind her. I imagined she was looking at me as the taxi pulled away, but I couldn’t see.

And then she was gone.

“All right!” Chewing Gum shouted from across the street, grinning. “Get your affairs in order and we can have our chat somewhere far away from these fine people.”

I nodded. I turned and found Jill Pilowsky glaring up at me. She had crusted blood on her cheek, and her hair was a wild mass of sweat and dirt. “You’re not fucking going with him.”

I nodded. “I did what I came to do. Carrie and Ellie are safe. My father’s dead.”

“When they find that out—in about two fucking minutes of beating on you—they’ll just put two in your skull and dump you in the river. To clear their books.”

“What?” Luis Quinones said. I startled. I hadn’t realized Luis had any English at all. He’d spoken about three words since he and his family had moved in, so the sound of his voice was shocking. I turned to look at him. Ivan, Lisa, and Tony crowded in behind him.

“What’s she talking about, Maddie?” Lisa asked.

“Nothing,” I said. “I’ll be fine.”

“The fuck he will,” Jill snapped. “He gets in that car he’s dead. Guaranteed.”

Lisa stared at her, then looked at me. “Then he doesn’t get in that car.”

The three men nodded, looking at each other.

“You don’t understand,” I said. “Those are real gangsters out there. Hard cases. Killers. They’ve pushed a button on me, so they’re gonna take me, no matter what. And if that means they have to kill all of you to do it, they fucking will.”

Lisa looked back at Tony, Ivan, and Luis. Then back at me. “You don’t get in that car, Mads,” she said in a level, uncompromising tone.

I looked from face to face. These people I’d lived with for years now. Said hello to in the morning. Nodded politely at when we met taking out the garbage. Had beers with on the front steps infrequently. Fixed their toilets, their kitchen faucets. Signed for their packages. Ate their food, shared my coffee. Everyone looked right back at me.

I nodded. “You all sure?”

Ivan grinned. “About letting these shitheads grab you? Fuck, yeah, we’re sure.”

I stepped back and Jill pulled the front door shut behind her. She turned the deadbolt and glanced at me.

“All right ramblers,” she said. “Let’s get rambling.”

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Yea, verily, it is once again time to post a free novel one chapter a week! This year’s novel is THE BOUNCER. Enjoy!

22

The gun jumped in the old man’s hands and knocked him backward, staggering, while the shot went nowhere near us. Jill and I wasted some precious seconds checking ourselves, then looked at each other in wonderment.

“Slugs,” she said, smiling her can you believe it? smile.

I turned and ran towards the old man. I needed to get that shotgun away from him so he didn’t shoot us in the fucking ass as we climbed through the window.

“Fucking Viking trash like your fucking Da, eh?” Abban spat, breathing hard. He pushed himself upright and leveled the shotgun again.

I dove onto the landing. From below, shouts, getting louder. I pulled the Glock again and fired at the old man, too fast. The plaster wall exploded next to him just as he fired the pump again. He managed to keep it more or less straight this time, but he staggered backwards again, hidden for a moment behind the wall.

Steps behind me. With a curse I twisted around just as a bald head appeared from below. I sent two shells his way, wide on purpose, and turned back in time to see Jill barreling down the hall.

I heard the shotgun pump. I heard the blast. Jill jerked sideways and crashed into the windows, glass shattering everywhere.

I might have screamed. I heard my heart pounding in my ears and my whole body sizzled with sudden electricity. All the noise became muffled, yet perfectly clear and distinct somehow, like some kind of noise cancellation in my head. I lifted my arm and pointed the gun at the stairs, squeezing off three more shots and scattering a trio of Spillaine’s people who were creeping up. I scrambled up and walked back into the hall.

Abban Spillaine was sprawled on the floor, his fancy jacket bunched up around him. He scowled at me and lifted the shotgun, pumping a shell into place. I ducked to my left as he fired and slid into him, tearing up the carpet. I got my hands on the shotgun and pulled it from him as easily as if he was a baby.

“Get,” the old man said between wet, labored breaths, “outta my house, you fucking trash.”

A noise made me whirl back towards the stairs. The shotgun went off in my hands as if it had a will of its own, and a broad-shouldered, dark-skinned guy with his black hair in a long braid went flying backwards, his belly exploding into red. He slammed into two guys climbing the steps behind him and they all disappeared.

I was still for a moment, feeling numb. I stared at the space where he’d been. I heard Mick in my head. You’ll never be able to step foot in this town again.

“Maddie!” Jill shouted, her voice raw, a throaty croak. “Time to fucking go, princess!”

I nodded, but I felt like my body had been immobilized. I thought, yes, this is reasonable, time to go, let’s go, let’s turn and step and follow Jill through the window. But nothing happened. I just sat there.

“Maddie!” she repeated, dragging herself down the hall. She slumped into me, hanging on. “Maddie, come on, man, we got them out. They’re out. Let’s go.”

I turned my head and looked at her. She was pale, and her forehead was dotted with sweat. I looked down and saw the red stain soaking the side of her shirt, the hot blood soaking into my jacket.

A surge of adrenaline burned through me, and everything snapped back. The sound came back, my control came back. I turned, lowering the shotgun, and grabbed her as she almost slid to the floor. “Jesus! Can you walk? Can you move?”

She nodded. “Sure, of course. Maybe. Sure.”

I slipped my free arm around her waist and walked as quickly as I could to the broken window. Time to go in-fucking-deed, I thought. Time to find Carrie and Ellie and get in the car and just drive anywhere, somewhere. We could hash it out in the morning, from an undisclosed location. A fresh start, new names. Mick would lend a hand if he could. Damien would perform services. It wasn’t zero—it was far, far, far below zero—but it would at least stop the freefall I’d been ever since The Broker had appeared in my own kitchen, telling me I owed an old debt, telling me that Mats Renik was alive.

Or had been. As I pushed Jill towards the window, I wondered if anyone would ever find old Mats. If one of those huge, ropy weeds that turned into trees would spring from his shallow grave, hoovering him up as it grew and spread. Or if the developers would finally settle the lawsuits and get their permits and variances and tear down the 293 and there he’d be, an embarrassing mystery for the Bergen City cops.

“Movement,” Jill said, bracing herself against the window frame to stop me from pushing her through. “Movement!”

A gunshot punctuated the last word. I stepped back and she dropped down, regaining some of her sharpness as her face collapsed into a mask of agony at the sudden motion.

We were trapped. Goons on the stairs, goons outside.

Jill reached up and took my head in her hand, turning me to look down the hall where Abban Spillaine was sprawled on the floor, one of his leather house shoes dangling from one toe. “Golden ticket,” she said thickly.

I nodded, even as a small part of me rebelled, said that this wasn’t me. Because it was me, and probably always had been. I’d imagined I could be a citizen. Work a job, go to night classes, buy a shitty house in Greenville past the park, put my kids through some churchy school, retire and spend a few years taking photos of far away places before my marker got called in. But that would never happen. I was a guy who took frail old men hostage. I was a guy who’d killed someone as recently as five minutes ago.

Zero was a far away place.

I ran over to the old man, pulled him up, and pushed the Glock against his temple. I turned to face the stairs, freezing two goons as they stepped onto the landing. A moment later, Merlin Spillaine appeared behind them, stopping in his tracks. He was wearing a tight three-piece suit. It was too small for him, but only just. Like he’d spent some money on it but it was still off the rack, not tailored. I noticed the neck tat, something black and spindly blocked by his collar. Underneath the ink his neck was flushed. His thick, greasy hair was combed back, one lavish curl dangling over his eye.

Abban was light and his breathing was a high-pitched, pinched whistle through his nostrils. I felt like I was becoming an expert on the death rattles of old criminals. “Let the fuck go a me,” he wheezed.

“That’s a mistake,” Merlin said from behind his men. The two guys weren’t anything special. They were flabby, loose-jointed guys with sweaty faces and limp hair. One held a double-barreled shotgun, the other a generic automatic. They stood there, uncertain what to do.

Jill shuffled in next to me.

“You just signed yer own death warrant, boyo,” Merlin said. “You fucking touch my father? You’re fuckin’ dead.”

I wondered what my previous status had been. Before touching Abban Spillaine, was on my way to Employee of the Month? Was Merle planning to send me to an all-expenses paid spa trip? Perhaps we would have been friends.

“Come on,” I said to Jill. I jerked my chin at the goons. “Back it up,” I said.

They hesitated. I looked past them at Merlin Spillaine. I remembered him sitting in my kitchen, kicking all of this off, and wished fervently that it was him under my arm.

I pressed the gun into Abban’s temple. The old man grunted in pain.

“All right,” Merlin said, tapping one of his guys on the shoulder. “Okay. Don’t make it any worse for yourself than it already is, Renik.” They started backing down the stairs. Behind us, I heard someone climbing in through the window.

“I feel a hand on my ass I’m gonna panic like a woman and jostle his arm,” Jill said. “So tell your guys to stay the fuck back.”

Merlin nodded, eyes locked on me. “All right. Pin! Rubes! Keep a safe distance. We’ll have our chance.”

We began to descend the stairs in silence. Abban breathed into my face, whiskey and cigars and possibly animal turds or something rotten, based on the bouquet. Jill wobbled with each step with a goofy grin on her sweat-sheened face, but she managed to stay upright and mobile despite the blood that had soaked her shirt.

“All right,” I said as we reached the next landing. “Y’all give us some room, so I don’t have to push the old man down the stairs.”

It came naturally, this violence.

“You’re fucking dead,” Merlin said conversationally as they backed down the steps. “Your whole fucking family is dead. Your friends. Everyone you know. People you once smiled at on the subway. I’m going to contact trace your whole fucking life and burn you out of existence.”

Now The Broker was writing checks he’d never cash, that was for sure. I’d met a lot of people who imagined themselves gangsters, and you could do a fast initial screening simply by listening. The true threats said very little, and when they offered a threat it was feasible. It was frightening because you could instantly imagine it happening. Some hard case says they’re gonna break your arm, you believe them because it could be done. The non-threats, the jumbo-softies who like to take a deep breath and swell up to an enormous size but were filled with hot air, they promised to track down your old kindergarten teacher and punch her in the mouth.

“You’re not giving him much incentive not to make your dad squeal,” Jill slurred. “I mean, his family’s already dead. Why not make your dad cry a little?”

Merlin’s face went red. “You—”

“And see, now you can’t escalate. What, are you going to kill our family twice? You’ve totally fucked this up.”

As we stepped into the first floor, I glanced around. We had three more of Spillaine’s people behind us—but no Patsy, who I remembered as a sort of moon that had crashed into me a few days ago. The absence of the enormous man and his gravitational tug was worrisome. I felt like he might crash through a wall at any moment like the Kool Aid Man and flick me out int space.

“All right,” I said, jabbing Abban again to make the old man wince. “Over there. Kitchen. All of you.”

“Fuckin dead,” Merlin said as all six of them walked over to the kitchen. “How far you gonna get, Renik?”

I ignored him. With them packed into the kitchen, we had an open lane to the front door. “You steady?” I asked Jill.

“Dead,” Merlin hissed.

“Oh capitan mis amigos,” she said. “I am aces.”

“Check for traps.”

She saluted. “Rolling for initiative,” she said, and walked over to the front door. She seemed steady enough, pulling open the front door and leaning out carefully to look around. She offered me a thumb’s up.

“All right,” I said. “Stay the fuck in the kitchen.”

I began walking the old man backwards. The whole group of them followed, keeping a steady distance between us. Merlin, I noted, stayed behind them, glaring at me, puffed up, eyes wild. The mighty Spillaines. A half dozen thugs, a creaking old house, ancient debts they couldn’t even collect themselves.

“Clear,” Jill said as I passed out through the door. “I’m gettin’ the car. Don’t kill the old man by accident.”

Abban grunted.

I stopped and stood where I was. They crowded the doorway, but didn’t come out of the kitchen. Merlin and I just stared at each other. I heard the car start up, then the crunch of wheels on gravel. I felt the car creep up behind me, then heard the sound of the passenger door opening. Guitars and trumpet spilled out from the shitty radio.

“Old man,” I whispered into Abban’s horrifically hairy ear, “watch who you call trash.”

I shoved him to the ground, lifted the Glock, and sent a trio of shots in the general direction of the house. Then I half-turned and threw myself into the car. Jill hit the gas and I almost bounced right back out again before catching hold of the seatbelt and hanging on.

Everything sizzled with pain. I reached over and shut the door. For a moment I just sat and breathed, listening to the terrifically awful music Jill had located on the radio. She was hunched over the wheel as if it hurt her to concentrate. She was doing about eighty on city streets, and every pothole threatened to send the car airborne.

“Where to, capitan?”

“Home,” I said, shivering with sudden reaction. “The 293.”

She grimaced. “That wise? First place they’ll look.”

I nodded. “That’s where Carrie will be.”

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21.

“There’s a child seat back there,” I said, turning back to the front. “And toys.”

“I didn’t have time to do a background check.”

I didn’t say anything to that. I had to get Carolina and Elspeth, and whatever damage I had to do along the way to that goal was okay. I accepted it. I took it on preemptively. And with Jill Pilowsky as my one and only soldier in this private little war, I had to accept the fact that some serious collateral damage was going to be trailing in my wake.

Staring out at the city as we drove through it, I apologized, silently. But then, the city had taken my family, in a sense. The city had bred the Spillaines. Made them fat and greedy. And maintained the final fading flicker of their power, so they could kidnap a child to use as a lever, and get away with it.

I looked down at my hands. Fists again, knuckles white and creaking. I forced myself to unclench.

The Spillaines owned a sprawling old Victorian-style house up on a hill overlooking the train tracks funneling into Bergen Terminal like black threads. There was a wrought-iron gate around the grounds, but grounds was too fancy a word. Like everything else about the Spillaines, it was spoiled and reduced. The house had once been the grand triumph of some middle-class overachiever, some lucky asshole who made soap or toys or imported tea and made enough of a pile to buy a plot of land and build a ridiculously oversize house on it. A hundred years later the Spillaines bought it, or took it from them in a bust-out, maybe.

The house itself was all minarets and balconies. Every light seemed to be on inside as we drove up, stopping a block away. There would be an alarm system, of course, and cameras, of course. And some kind of guard presence, of course. But they’d put Carrie and Ellie in their own house, which spoke to the reduced circumstances of the Spillaines in general. And my stupidity that it hadn’t been my first goddamn thought.

“Just like old times,” Jill said, twisting around to rummage in her bag. “Breaking into some rich asshole’s house.”

I nodded. “Except we can’t cut and run, things go bad. I’m not leaving here without them.”

“I know.”

Her voice sounded small and tired. She came up with two more G21s, courtesy, I assumed, of our reluctant partner Damien, paying off the worst business deal he’d ever made in his life. She handed one to me and I checked it over.

We sat for a few minutes, watching. Jill vaped, filling the car with a sweet smell and a haze, hotboxing us. I counted six guards roaming the exterior. They weren’t very disciplined; there was no schedule I could see. They just seemed to wander, talking to each other, rubbing their hands against the cold, trading cigarettes.

“We come around the back,” I said. “From the track side.”

She nodded. “Sure. Find a way to a second-floor window.”

“Alarm system?”

“These assholes?” She smirked. “The Spillaines are fuckin’ delicate. Of course they’d have some fancy alarm. So, misdirect.” She pointed to the northwest corner of the house. “Basement window there. You’d have to get on the ground and wriggle through, but it could be done, and it’s the obvious place. I chuck a rock through it. Everyone converges there, looking for the idiot who did the obvious, idiot thing. You crack a window in back, no one notices. The alarm’s already triggered, everyone’s crawling over the other side.”

I nodded, slowly. It was a terrible plan, but I was down deep in the seconds, my eyes on my shoes. There was no future to worry about. “All right. Let’s do some recon.”

####

The rear of the house backed up to a narrow strip of dirt that sloped away suddenly and steeply to the tracks running by below. Standing there was dizzying; one wrong step and you’d go sailing out into the nothing. With the wind pushing around me it was easy to imagine, and my heart pounded.

The only way up to the balcony that I could see was an old rainspout held to the house by ancient rusting brackets. I checked the timer set on my phone and slid it back into my pocket. I took hold of the spout and gave it a solid tug; it shook and rattled but seemed to be pretty well attached.

I took a little leap and began to pull myself up. The metal straps groaned and stretched, feeling my weight. Halfway up, one of the straps popped off the wall, sailing off into the darkness as the spout shook and trembled under me. I grunted, straining to pull myself up faster.

Throwing one leg over the railing, I crept onto the balcony. I hadn’t fallen to my death—no doubt I wouldn’t have been the first body to turn up in Bergen City’s shadowy ass—so I was already streets ahead. I pulled my phone out. One minute to go.

I waited. It was peaceful. Quiet, dark. The wind and the open air, New York City a mile away, glittering and tiny. I stood tense and rigid, breathing hard, forcing myself to wait. If I moved too soon, I’d fuck up any chance of seeing my daughter again, my wife. Who was probably not my wife any more, if I knew Carolina and her general tolerance for shit that put Ellie in danger. And thanks to dear old Dad, that was me. I was the danger.

First things first.

I felt my phone buzz in my pocket. A moment later, the distant sound of glass shattering, and then the muffled noise of a keening alarm. I counted to ten, rocking on the balls of my feet. When I heard shouts, I knelt down and tried the nearest window. It wouldn’t budge, so I twisted away and elbowed it, smashing the pane and reaching inside to carefully undo the latch.

There was no change to the alarm. I figured somewhere on a screen a second red light was flashing, but it would be hard to notice. Pushing up the sash, I climbed inside.

It was instantly hot. It felt like the heat had been turned up as high as it would go. I let my eyes adjust to the darkness for a moment—no sense in running blind and falling down the stairs—and counted doors. Six. I turned to the nearest one and tried the handle. It turned easily, revealing a dark bedroom. The furniture was old—a cast-iron bed frame, some heavy wooden dressers—and every fabric had a heavy sheen to it. I was reminded of my grandmother’s house, distant in my memories but vivid in the surfaces I remembered touching—and not enjoying the experience.

I backed out. Down below, the sound of heavy footsteps.

The next two doors opened to similarly empty, dark rooms. The smell of dust and disuse was a story of a too-large house for a dwindling family. The Spillaines might have run the city, once, with distant cousins traveling from the old country to coalesce around Abban’s power base, but they’d shrunk to two men. It was easy to imagine the two of them rambling around this creaking, sinking place, kicking up clouds of dust wherever they went.

Shouts, below. A loud, hollow boom, then running feet. Getting louder.

I threw myself flat against the wall and waited. When you had a Runner at Queenies, some guy determined to get in via brute force, timing was key. If you let him slip past you, if he tore free of your grasp and got inside, it was chaos. You had to hang back like you were waiting on a fastball, ignore your instincts and take one more half-second before you swung.

My brain said move and I waited one more half-second.

A figure turned the corner off the stairs just as I lunged forward, arm out straight. I clotheslined him cleanly, and his feet left the floor as he flipped horizontal and fell on his back with a rattling impact, making the old floorboards jump.

I dropped onto him, smothering the gun in his hand. I wriggled one arm around his neck and rolled until he was on top of me, waving the gun around ineffectively. Up close his dark skin was rough and sandpapery; he smelled like sweet cigars and sweat. I squeezed my arm around his neck as he slapped backwards at me. I listened to his choking attempts to breathe and concentrated on my own—deep breaths in and out.

I stared up at the ceiling. It took me a moment to realize what I was looking at: An attic access trap door, a hinged square. You pull it down, a ladder unfolds and you can get up into the attic space.

Someone had put a clasp and a lock on it.

My new friend began to kick his legs, trying to use his body to throw me off. But he had no leverage. He was a turtle on his back and I was the shell. I held on; the worst thing I could do was let go too soon. Time froze as I waited for him to pass out, and I spent this infinite moment staring up at the attic access and listening to shouts from downstairs.

It was too easy. But it made sense.

When he went limp, I rolled him off me, took his gun, and searched him quickly, just patting him down. I stuffed the gun into my waistband with the Glock and stared up at the trap. It was just a little too high up; stretching myself, I could just barely brush the tips of my fingers along the bottom of the lock.

I turned and pressed myself against the wall again, then leaned out to check the stairs. They were empty, so I dashed across the landing to the three doors at the end of the hall. The first was another bedroom, this one in use—the bed a mess, the smell less dust and more body odor. The furniture was the same old stuff I’d seen in the other rooms.

Down below, the shouts resolved into clear! repeated over and over again, by several voices.

The door at the end of the hall opened to reveal a linen closet.

“Hey!”

I whirled, yanking the G21 from its place against my skin. Jill sat on the window sill, one leg in the house.

I grimaced, shaking my head, and pushed the gun back into my pants. The voices below told me that the guards were about to reset and make a tour of the place.

“Jesus,” I hissed, leaving the final door unexplored and walking back towards her. “I almost shot you.”

She nodded, climbing inside. “I figure that’s how I die, right? Shot in the face by Mads Renik. It is foretold. I got them chasing their tails down there.”

I pointed up at the attic access. “Can you get that open?”

She squinted at it. “You could pop that with a hammer.”

“I don’t have a fucking hammer.”

She sighed. “Give me a boost,” she said, pulling a black bag from her back pocket.

I took hold of her waist with both hands and lifted. She didn’t weigh anything. Under the layers of clothes, there was hardly any Jill there at all. It felt strange to be touching her. We’d never been touchy-feely, even back in school. We’d spent so much time together, and we’d shared so much on a miserably intense intimate level, but we’d done so with a buffer. Always, a buffer.

I lifted her up. She pulled a few tools from her little bag, stuck it under her arm, and began to work the lock.

Down below, there was a gunshot.

We both froze. Shouts and the sound of running feet floated up from below. “Chasin’ their own tales,” she muttered, straining up to the lock with renewed attention. A moment later, it clicked open and she snatched it from the clasp. She took hold of the handle and hung on as I let her down, pulling the trap down with her.

A set of folding stairs slid down, narrowly missing her as she ducked to one side. I pulled the Glock and mounted them, inching my way up carefully. There was a light on above us, along with that sense of presence, of someone occupying a space.

I poked my head up over the opening, and ducked down on instinct as something flashed by where my head had been.

“Carrie?”

There was a moment of silence. Then she appeared, crouching down. She looked like hell—face drawn, hair pulled back in a messy tail. She was wearing the clothes she’d had on the day before, plucked, I guessed, from the bedroom floor under gunpoint.

“Maddie?”

I scrambled up. When I reached the top of the ladder, Ellie was there, giggling, and I grabbed onto her and hugged to me so tightly she cried out, pounding her little fists against me. Carrie grabbed onto me, and for one second, one moment, we were just perfect. We were just everything.

Then Carolina pulled away and slapped me, hard, across the face. “What the fuck did you do?!”

I blinked tears out of my eyes. “Come on,” I said gruffly, “we gotta go.”

I climbed down and held my arms up. Carrie handed Ellie, who laughed and gurgled as if it was all a grand adventure. Jill stood fidgeting awkwardly as Carrie descended, holding one arm with the other.

Carrie glanced at her as she took Ellie back, then looked at me, her face blank. I nodded at the window, and she lost no time turning and heading for it.

“Be careful,” I said, taking Ellie as she climbed out. “Head left. Stay out of sight.”

I handed my squirming daughter through, then froze, the unmistakable sound of a pump action shotgun snapping through the hall.

I turned my head. An old man wearing a red smoking jacket, his white hair a cloud of chaos on his head, stood in the final doorway at the end of the hall. He looked like he’d been asleep. He had a big, crooked nose that looked red and swollen, and ink-black eyebrows.

“Hullo, Mr. Renik,” Abban Spillaine said, and squeezed the trigger.

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Yea, verily, it is once again time to post a free novel one chapter a week! This year’s novel is THE BOUNCER. Enjoy!

20.

It was dark when we got to Bergen City.

Trim had pushed the Ruin as hard as he could, but it struggled to get past sixty miles per hour. It was smoking and shaking, and we were in danger of being pulled over. Which I had expressly forbidden Trim to do, on pain of having his hands broken and then splinted in unusual ways.

There was nothing to do. I couldn’t will the car to go faster, and we couldn’t stop longer than it took to gas up, engine left running because we doubted we’d ever get the Ruin started again. We were in a race.

I’d spent the hours sprawled on the backseat, staring at the fabric peeling off the Ruin’s roof. At first I’d tried to think of what the next move, how we were going to salvage this. But there wasn’t a way. Jill was right—Chewing Gum and his guys knew who we were. They’d no doubt noted Trim’s license plate, so they knew him too. By now they knew the Spillaines had put this in motion to signal their intention to take back their share of Bergen City and get a seat back at the table. I’d spent enough time around Queenies, around Mick’s old guard and the slick new generation of gangsters, to know the Spillaines wouldn’t suffer for it. The Spillaines might pay a price but they’d survive. They were insulated.

Me and Jill and Damien, not so fucking much. And the moment Merlin and Abban Spillaine learned that Mats was dead and we were worthless to them, Ellie and Carrie were dead, too.

My father was my only asset. As long as everyone thought he was alive, Ellie and Carrie would be okay. It was strange that after all this time my father was finally worth something.

Old Stuyvesant Avenue was purple and black, rows of empty old warehouses and dive bars leaking sludgy music. It was hard to believe Bergen had once been an industrial powerhouse, a place where people made things.

“I’m just dropping you two off,” Trim said, running a red light with prejudice. “I’m not even stopping, just slowing down. I’m heading straight to the mall for a terrible haircut and a new wardrobe. My name will be Gustavo Mustache and I will be a Cinabonn manager in Topeka and I will take up the accordion.”

“No one’s pushing a button on you, Trim,” Jill said, sounding tired. “You’re not that important.”

“Pushing a button?” Trim said, aghast. “Oh my fucking god.”

####

It looked like everyone was out on the front steps. It looked like a little mini block party, except we were the only building left on the block. I grimaced, watching them all notice the Ruin pulling up outside the yellow brick. When we came to a stop, I hesitated a moment, staring down at my hands. I didn’t have time for questions, for explanations, for kindness. I sat there with the Ruin shaking and smoking around me, wishing I was invisible. That I was dead. That’s I’d never been.

Miguel had told me, when you hear that dark invitation, when you want to disappear, narrow everything down. Forget about the day ahead of you. Forget about the next hour. Forget the next minute. Just keep moving for one more second, then another.

I took a deep breath and got out of the car, Jill doing the same. As I turned away from the Ruin, Lisa was already there, glaring at me. She was wearing a tattered pink bathrobe and she barely came up to my shoulders, but I was temporarily terrified.

“Jesus, Maddie, you okay?” Her eyes flickered past me for a moment. “Hey Jill.”

“Hey,” Jill said, slouching against the Ruin—mainly, I thought, to make sure Trim didn’t just drive away in a panic with my father stiff and bloaty in the trunk.

“Maddie!” Mrs. Pinto shouted from the steps. “Where have you been, boy?”

“Come and grab a beer,” Ivan added, holding up a tallboy. “We have just now realized there can’t be any noise complaints if we’re making the fucking noise.”

I nodded, then leaned down towards Lisa. “I need your help,” I said.

She nodded, frowning in concern. “Sure, Maddie, what you need?”

I glanced up. “Get everyone back inside. I need a little privacy.”

She studied my face for a moment, the licked her lips and looked around, stepping closer. “Mads, what the fuck is going on? Real deal, now, fuck this bullshit.”

“Real deal,” I said, “I can’t tell you. Please, Lisa. Just clear everyone out.”

She chewed her lip, searching my face. Then she nodded. “All right. But this conversation ain’t over, Maddie.”

She turned without waiting for a response, and I felt a twinge of affection for her. For all of them. I’d lived most of my life with just Jill, no family or group or community. But I’d found something like that with these cheerful oddballs.

Lisa huddled with everyone. There were a few glances sent my way, but after a few whispered words the group fell silent. A moment later they started to get organized and head back inside.

“You sure about this?” Jill said quietly. “We should check with Mick, maybe. He’s got—”

“Can’t risk it,” I said. “I trust Mick, but do I trust everyone he’s got working for him? Everyone he deals with?” I shook my head. I thought of Mick’s side deal with Brusca. Mick did for Mick, and he had a lot of shit going on I didn’t know anything about. “We keep this tight. You, me, and Damien.” I looked up. “The 293.”

She nodded, dark circles under her eyes making her look like death. I tried to remember if I’d seen her sleep in the car. If I’d seen her sleep, period, at any time over the last two days. Or two years.

Lisa was the last one back inside the building. She turned to look back at us for a moment, holding the door. I stared back at her as steadily as I could until she turned and walked in.

Trim put the Ruin in park but didn’t shut it off. The way it shook and gasped sitting there, the only thing keeping it in motion was force of habit at this point.

“Did I mention the Burying Bodies surcharge? Because there is fucking absolutely a Burying Bodies surcharge,” he said, opening the trunk.

Mats hadn’t traveled well. For a split second I experienced a frozen, paralyzed moment. This was my father. The man who’d called me the wretch and an expensive mistake. The man who’d sometimes acted, with utter plausibility, like he’d forgotten I existed and was not happy about the reminder. The man who’d stormed into our shithole apartments in the middle of the night, singing The Leaving of Liverpool at the top of his lungs, who’d danced me around the kitchen while Liùsaidh got made up in the bathroom, who’d winked at me when they walked out at three in the morning and left me for two days. Two days in which I poured my own cereal and went to school and did my homework and microwaved burritos.

This wasn’t Mats. Not really. This was a prop. This was an old man I’d never seen before.

We wrapped him in the filthy old blue and white checkered blanket Trim had in the trunk, and Damien and I lifted him out of the trunk and carried him rapidly up the steps. Jill held the door, then raced down the hallway to the basement door. We carried him down into the darkness, past the storage lockers and the electrical boxes, past my apartment to the backyard.

It took Jill several tries to push the door open. The jungle of weeds and trees growing back there hadn’t been groomed in years, maybe decades. It was a dense, spongy square of vegetation that was pushing against all four of its boundaries with slow, inexorable pressure.

We pushed our way into the jungle. Jill ran back into the basement and returned with two rusting old shovels, handing one to me and one to Trim. He held it in his hands like it was an extremely large centipede.

“Manual labor,” he whispered.

We didn’t go too deep. With Jill watching the door, we got down a foot or two, just enough to cover him up. It wouldn’t survive the first big storm, but I didn’t think the future was my problem any more. I wasn’t even sure the next week was my problem.

Miguel advised watching the seconds, so that’s what I did.

Mercifully, Trim stopped speaking. We buried Mats in perfect silence. He didn’t seem concerned that someone would steal the Ruin, which had been sitting outside for more than an hour, keys in the ignition, engine running.

####

I heard the door creak open as I was stuffing baby clothes into my overnight bag. I kept moving, gathering supplies. Reducing your life to something you could carry on your back while jumping onto a moving train wasn’t easy.

“Your neighbor’s here,” Jill called from the kitchen. “She looks adorable. Like an angry doll.”

I kept packing as Lisa walked into the bedroom. I felt her staring at me. “All right, just you and me, mijo,” she said finally. “Tell me what’s goin’ on or go fuck yourself. Everyone’s worried about you. Mrs. Pinto’s about to have a fucking stroke.”

I tired to come up with something clever, something smart. Next thing I knew, I was telling her the story. It was the go fuck yourself. Lisa was one of those people, you knew she meant it. It was the fatwa of our people. And I couldn’t lose any more friends. Besides, I needed a favor.

When I was done, she sat there on the bed and stared down at the floor. “Fucking hell,” she finally said, shaking herself. She looked at me. “I’m sorry, Maddie. This is … this is fucked up.”

I nodded, stuffing the wad of emergency cash I’d been balling up into the bag. It wasn’t much, just a few dollars I’d stuck in a drawer over the months, change in my pockets. It would get out us out of the state, once I got a car. Once I got my family back.

She stood up. “What you need us to do?”

I shook my head. “Not us. I need one favor, and then you’re out.” I lifted the bag. “As of five minutes from now, I don’t live here any more. I’m gonna go get my family, and we’re gonna leave.” I hesitated, then looked at her. She was a hundred and ten pounds and had a collection of guns and was gonna be one of those cops someday, one of those cops that busted balls like nobody’s business. I leaned in and put my hands on her shoulders.

“I just need you to go find Carroll Mick and tell him I want to meet for lunch.”

She studied my face.

“He’s gonna be watched,” I said. “Strangers are gonna be there. They’re just going to be sitting around, having drinks, laughing. They won’t look like anything, but they’ll be watching. And listening, so get him alone. Don’t mention my name. Don’t mention Jill. Just tell him his nephew wants to meet for lunch. Then go home and lock your door.”

Lisa nodded. “Okay.”

I swallowed. “Thank you,” I managed to say. She leaned up on her toes and put her arms around me, and for one moment I just stood there and allowed myself to be held, closing my eyes tightly to keep from crying.

“Don’t worry, Maddie,” she whispered. “They’re gonna be fine.”

####

Carroll Mick walked into Pirelli’s in his oversized bowling shirt and collapsed into the booth like an avalanche, mopping his brow with a handkerchief.

“Jesus fucked,” he said, turning his coffee cup over. “I got so many wiseguys up my ass it’s like a goddamn convention. I got Andy Dubsey in my office. You know who Andy Dubsey is?”

I pictured Chewing Gum, all dark competence. “Maybe,” I said.

Mick snorted. “Thief by trade, banks and freight. A fucking legendary earner. Made Kansas City so much money they had to make him management. He’s got KC’s seat at the Outfit’s board. He’s major. And he’s sitting in my office, sweating me.” He pointed. “About you.”

I nodded. “I didn’t ask for this, Mick.”

He nodded, scraping his face with one massive hand. He looked at Jill and then gestured at the waitress. “You’re eatin’ something,” he rumbled.

“No,” she said thickly. “Food just makes me sick.”

“Fuck you,” he said, smiling at the waitress. “Hey, darlin’, let’s get three scrambles here, white toast, sausage, some hashbrowns on the side. And coffee. All the coffee you got, every drop.”

He scrubbed his face again. “Jesus Christ. I got Andy Dubsey in my office.” He shook his head. “It’s like the goddamn pope showed up.” He laughed. “You shoulda seen Abban’s kid. Merlin almost fuckin’ shat himself. Got on his belly to beg for mercy faster than you can say ?grovel.’ Truth is, he’d be in the shit except they’re layin’ off out of respect for Abban.” He sighed. “Don’t doubt for a second he blames you. You really fucked this up sixteen ways, you know that?”

I nodded. “I know.”

He sighed. “Dubs is gonna want his pound of flesh, and the kid is gonna wanna make an example of you. All you can do is hand over Mats and let me beg on your behalf. Where is he? Your Da?”

“He’s dead.”

Mick stared at me, his face impassive. His watery eyes flicked to Jill, then back to me. He leaned back. “Christ.”

I put my hands flat on the table so I’d know what they were up to. “All I need is where they’ve got Ellie and Carrie,” I said. “I’ll take care of the rest.”

He was breathing loudly through his nose. The waitress came and filled up our coffee cups, and we just stared at each other. I knew what I was asking.

“You know,” he said suddenly, “I should of done more. For you. After your shitheel parents left, I told myself I was gonna take you in, make you my protégé. And when the time was right, I would tell you what happened. But your uncle, he stiff-armed me. Said it was better if you got away from our thing, away from the streets. Said your Da had done enough damage with this life, and he wasn’t wrong.” He shrugged. “I thought, maybe it’s better. I’ll keep tabs, help out where I can, but maybe your uncle’s right. You go straight, you forget all about your criminal pedigree.” He sighed. “But maybe I should of done more. Pushed harder.” He nodded. “All right. I got an address. You’re gonna have to move, Mads. Dubs is gettin’ ready to issue some papal bulls, and your name is on fuckin’ all of them.”

I patted the bag next to me. “I’m going straight there.”

Mick shook his head. “Nah, kid, that ain’t gonna cut it. Your girl here is feral, sure, but two of you? The Spillaines ain’t what they once were, but they got more muscle than that. Your family’s under guard. The two o’ you ain’t gonna cut it. You’re gonna need some help.”

“No time to make friends, Mick,” I said. “It’s us.”

Jill suddenly roused herself, clearing her throat and sitting up. “We got friends in this town,” she said. “They don’t.”

“Hmmph. Friends,” he grunted, glancing at her. Then he stared at me again, chewing his lip. I’d known Carroll Mick my entire life. He was a massive man, huge, but it was all soft and loose. You didn’t think he was a threat until he grabbed you and you felt the strength in those arms, and you remembered how Mick made his bones in this town.

“Listen,” he said, reaching out and putting one slab of hand on my arm. “The one you gotta worry over is Patsy. At Merlin’s. You met Pat?”

I nodded, thinking of the chalk-pale mountain who’d introduced me to my walls.

“I seen that man take a shot to the belly and just keep comin’. I seen that fella eat a blade in his back and just keep coming. They say he don’t feel pain, and I believe it. He’s been with the Spillaines since birth. Was kind of adopted, raised like Merlin’s one-eighth brother or something. Which is all my way of sayin’ that Patsy is your real problem.”

The waitress arrived with three heaping plates and side dishes of toast, butter, and hashbrowns. We sat in silence as she delivered them, sliding them onto the table with polished skill.

When she’d gone, smiling, Mick slid his over to Jill and pointed at her. “Eat, you fucking wastrel,” he said, sliding out of the booth. He put his hand on my shoulder. “Gimme half an hour, I’ll text you the address. It’s my going-away present,” he said. “Because you’ll never be able to step foot in this town again.”

I nodded without turning to watch him leave. I picked up my coffee and took a swallow.

Jill picked up her fork and speared a link of sausage, holding it up in front of her face and sniffing at it. “Half an hour, he said?”

I nodded.

She dropped the fork. “Come on. Just enough time to steal a car from the parking lot.”

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“All they had.”

I glanced at the foil package of peanuts in Jill’s hand. “Thanks,” I said. “I can’t believe a random rest stop in Iowa doesn’t have gourmet vending machines.”

She nodded, sitting down on the picnic table next to me and unwrapping the first of three candy bars. “I am already composing a fucking fierce letter of complaint.”

I looked past her to where Trim leaned down into the guts of the Nova’s engine. We’d pulled over a few miles down the road and cut the tracker off Mats’ ankle, tossing it into the trees. Shortly after that, the car had started belching black smoke, and then the shaking had begun. I could see Trim’s weird, pale face illuminated by the light of his phone’s flashlight. Beyond him, like sleeping mountains, a trio of big rigs were in for a few hours of sleep, one cab lit up with the blue flash of a screen, the others completely dark.

“They won’t do anything as long as they think Mats is alive,” Jill said, taking a bite of the first candy bar and leaning back on her elbows. “Ellie, I mean. She’s okay.”

I nodded. She meant to be kind. “Sure. Thanks.” I glanced at the candy bar. “You should eat actual food.”

“Actual food just makes me sick,” she said. “Don’t try to be my big brother, Maddie. That ship sailed a long time ago.”

I nodded, staring off into the gloom and shivering in the cold. “I think I’m divorced. No matter what happens here. Either way, I can’t see Carrie sticking around. And she’ll take Elspeth. And I can’t say she’d be wrong. My mother’s still out there, and who knows what other delightful prizes my father has left as my inheritance.”

She digested this for a moment.

“You hear from her?”

“No. Don’t expect to.” I laughed, a sudden bark. “I get a text from Lisa every time Marcus calls 9-1-1 again or when Ivan gets into it with the Bekvalacs over noise at night, but nothing from Carrie.”

Jill chewed silently. I swallowed and fell silent, thinking about the ruin of my life. I’d been so proud of my progress—a job, a family, my GED. No more hangovers, no more angry nights brawling. Now it all looked so small, so fragile. So easy for my father to just blow away like dust. I’d never really had anything.

“You hear from them a lot, huh? Your neighbors.”

I nodded. “We’re kind of close. Fuck that, we are close. We’re in this weird building all by itself. Nothing in sight for two blocks. They keep shutting off the power, the water, because they forget we’re still there. The cops won’t come any more because the kid keeps calling them. And we all know the letter’s coming any day now, where they tell you they’ve finally sold the building and the project’s back on and we have like a week to get the fuck out, and fuck all we can do about it.” I sighed. “Sometimes it feels like a family. Sometimes I stop and I think, we’re all just neighbors.” I swallowed hard. “Sometimes I think, you’re all I’ve got.”

There were several excruciating beats of silence.

“That’s a fucking shame,” Jill said. She balled up the candy wrapper. “I’m sorry for it, Maddie—I am. And I’m here, right now. But just because your wife is gonna leave you doesn’t mean you get to call me in like a goddamn relief pitcher to make you feel less lonely.”

I nodded again, sliding off the table and pacing, the gravel crunching under my boots. “I know that.” I looked over at Trim. “He any good with cars? Every minute here is a fucking nightmare.”

She shrugged. “That heap is still running, isn’t it?” She turned to study him. “Damien is a custom model, sure, but he knows some shit. He’s gotten us this far.”

I said nothing. I thought of my daughter and clenched my fists.

“Come on,” Jill said, sliding off the table. “Might as well get some sleep while he works on the car.”

I nodded and followed her back to the car, nodding at Trim as we approached. Jill took the back and I took the front, each of us stretching out on the wide, unbroken surface of the old-school seats, like two cheap sofas in a car.

I stared up at the tattered cloth roof and couldn’t imagine falling asleep.

####

“Maddie.”

I blinked, opening my eyes. The darkness had a different tone to it, a deeper, more solid. It was quiet.

“Someone’s here,” Jill whispered from the backseat.

I glanced at the driver’s side door and saw it was unlocked.

“Trim?”

“No idea.”

I took a deep breath, filling my lungs with oxygen. The best thing to do was take the initiative. It happened, sometimes, when I was working the floor or the door—some asshole thought he’d been disrespected and decided to follow me to the bathroom, and I’d find himself trapped in a vulnerable position. So I’d learned, the hard way, that when I heard someone come into the bathroom at Queenies, quiet and stealthy, it was best to be first through the stall door.

I reached up over my shoulder and found the door handle. I pulled until it clicked and the door sagged open behind me. I slowly raised my leg and braced one foot against the steering column, pushing myself into the door. It creaked open an inch, then another. I slid down onto my back and rolled under the car, reaching up to gently close the door with one hand.

I rolled onto my belly and scanned around. By the rear passenger door, I saw a pair of black pants and steel-tipped boots. A second later I heard a ring tapping against the window.

And then, a gunshot.

The rear windshield shattered, and the boots skittered back from the car, disappearing from his view.

“Jesus, kid!”

The boots returned, joined by two other pairs. I backed out from under the car just as someone grabbed onto my ankles and dragged me free, scraping me raw on the rocky dirt.

I rolled himself over and launched myself upward, crashing into what felt like three hundred pounds of someone. I landed a solid punch on the big guy’s crotch. He was short and barrel-shaped, wearing a motorcycle cut and leathers. I was rewarded with a soft, wheezing exclamation. He staggered back and sat down on the ground, hard.

I whirled and found a gun in my face.

“Settle down, Renik,” Chewing Gum said, holding up his hands. He looked like a bookie—rings on his fingers and that thick-skinned look you got from sitting under fluorescent lights all the time. He snapped a thick wad of pink gum with a horrifying open-mouthed technique that would have seen him denied entry at Queenies on principle alone. He leaned over and looked past me to where the big guy was still sitting, doing breathing exercises with a wide-eyed enthusiasm. “Jesus, Milky, have some fucking pride.”

Four of them. Chewing Gum just stood there with casual authority, relaxed and unconcerned. Two other men I might have recognized from Paradise. One had a gun pointed at Jill, on her knees between them. Our eyes met, and then she glanced at Chewing Gum.

“How’d you find us?”

He smiled. It was an easy smile, an automatic and meaningless expression. I’d seen tons of guys like him, Smilers. They were always happy, always laughing. But it didn’t mean anything. There was no joy there. It was just for show.

He gestured, and I looked past him at the trio of trucks slumbering away. The black truck, busted up and dented, sat next to them. “The Outfit and the Teamsters are cozy, in case you hadn’t noticed,” he said jovially. “Our brothers on the roads been bird-dogging y’all the whole way. Now, come on. Where’s your Da, kid?” He turned to glance at Jill and winked. “Good to see you again, sweetheart.”

Jill looked like she was contemplating the thought process of a man who would flirt while a woman was on her knees with a gun to her head. I thought it pretty likely that Chewing Gum hadn’t had a voluntary date in a loooong time.

He looked back at me like he could hear my thoughts. “Come on, kid. You can’t pay the toll and we can’t just him walk out on his arrangement, okay? We’ll let you and sugartits here skate.” He spread his hands and grinned, the immense wad of gum appearing in flashes behind his too-white teeth. After a moment he sighed and grimaced, cocking his head. “You should know, if I gotta put more effort into this, it’s … not gonna go well for you.”

I was impressed. I’d met a lot of criminal middle managers, and few of them had this guy’s slick cheer. Most of them went straight to beating the shit out of you. I got the impression that this guy didn’t like wasted effort. Or breaking a sweat.

I took stock. The fat one, Milky, was still on his knees cupping his balls, breathing steadily and staring straight ahead as if he could see Death on the horizon, coming for him, as if he’d just now considered his mortality and didn’t like the general concept. The skinny guy with the hardware in his hand was focused on Jill, staring at her in an intent way I didn’t much care for.

There was a window. There was always a window. Guys like Chewing Gum controlled situations by simply asserting they were in charge. And there was a window between that assertion and any sort of action, a moment when someone like Chewing Gum would wait to see what happened and hold his fire.

I reared back and kicked Chewing Gum in the stomach.

He sailed backwards into the Blue Ruin. I used my moment of surprise and spun, charging at Leathers, grabbing onto the gun with both hands and shoving it upwards as I crashed into him. We both went down to the ground, the gun dropping and skittering away. I grabbed blindly at the cut and took hold with both hands, shoving the man down and straddling him. Letting go with one hand, I brought my fist down twice, pain lancing up my arm as I made contact with bone.

I rolled away and scrambled to my feet. A moment later, the skinny guy slammed into me, cursing. I clipped the Blue Ruin as I went down, pain exploding in my side. I reached up and got my hands on the guy’s face, pushing my thumbs into his eyes. One thing I’d learned working the door: If you gave an inch, they would swamp you. You had to push and shove and never let up. You had to overwhelm them and never let up.

The skinny guy screamed. A moment later, a gunshot ripped the air, and everything stopped. I stared down at Skinny, then slowly pushed myself up. Skinny rolled up into a ball and cupped his hands over his face.

Chewing Gum had a shiny chrome automatic in his hand. He stood over us with a deeply bored expression on his face, then winced a little, one hand going to his belly. I sincerely hoped I’d caused some kind of internal bleeding. “Now, you don’t want to do any of that,” he said. He sounded kind of amused, as if getting kicked in the stomach was just part of his usual day, and winked at Jill, whose superpower had always been the ability to charm leathery old men. “I got what the grown-ups call latitude when it comes to delivering you alive or dead, so the next time one of you moves without my permission I’m just gonna shoot you. Okay? Just gonna shoot you and see what happens. Okay?” He nodded, grimacing. “Now, where’s Mats Renik?”

I swallowed. Over at the other end of the rest area, one of the big rigs roared into life, the engine settling immediately into a loud chugging as the driver prepped to get back on the road.

I thought furiously. They wouldn’t think of the trunk right away, because they didn’t know Mats was dead. They’d think of it eventually, though.

“Let me help clarify things,” Chewing Gum said, regaining some of his weird, dark cheer. “No one gives a shit about you two. No one cares if you live or die. But there’s a profit and loss on Mats Renik, and the more effort I have to put into retrieving that piece of shit, the less profit there is for me. So I’m looking to be efficient rather than elegant. Bottom line, if I don’t hear some good news in the next few seconds, I’m going to pick one of you randomly to shoot in the head. If that doesn’t inspire the other person to help me out, then fuck you both.”

He said this with a blank lack of emotion. I believed, in that moment, that he truly didn’t care about us beyond how much trouble we were going to be for him. We both stared at him. Chewing Gum’s face flowed into a deformed smirk and he shrugged as if to say that’s all I got.

I closed my eyes. I had no good choices. If I handed over Mats’ body, word got back to the Spillaines and that put Carrie and Ellie in danger. If I stayed mute, they killed me and eventually searched the Ruin and Carrie and Ellie paid the price anyway. So that meant I had to make a move, which was probably going to end terribly, which brought us right back to the start again.

Still, nothing to lose. Miguel used to preach the higher power stuff. You weren’t always in charge. You had to accept your powerlessness. When all your choices were bad, he’d say, just pick one.

Chewing Gum sighed. “Fine. Let’s take a walk.”

Hands slipped under my armpits, and I was pulled to my feet. I opened my eyes and stared straight ahead as we were marched back towards the black truck. It was in sad shape from the accident, the passenger door caved in, the finish scraped. The noise of the rig got louder but everything else seemed to recede from me. The moment was approaching. I was curiously impressed with Chewing Gum.

Why walk us to the truck?

Because Chewing Gum was smart. And experienced. And lazy.

Because he didn’t want to have to carry us there after putting a bullet in our heads.

I didn’t look at Jill. I didn’t have to. After all these years, after all the bitter voicemails and angry moments, I felt her. I felt my connection to her, a thin spider line that had survived all the years. When we reached the truck, they turned us around and Chewing Gum mimed at us, pushing the palms of his hands down towards the ground. Kneel.

With the roar of the rig’s motor around us, we knelt. I stared at the Ruin a few hundred feet away and waited for the moment. I would have one chance. I knew Jill would move when I did, I didn’t even have to wonder about that. But if we were going to rush them, we needed the—

Behind Chewing Gum, the Blue Ruin’s trunk noiselessly opened.

It lifted up slowly, like in a dream, and a silhouette crept out. A skinny silhouette shaped just like Trim. As Chewing Gum made a little speech about how little he cared what we did, I watched Trim creep around to the driver’s side door and climb into the Ruin.

“Last chance,” Chewing Gum said, ostentatiously checking the gun over.

I watched the Ruin begin to creep, the brake lights flashing. It turned towards us and began to move. Under cover of the big rig’s rumble, the car moved in disorienting silence, a shadow growing larger while Chewing Gum counted to some random number in his head before shooting one of us.

The rig’s horn blasted. The driver leaned out of his cab and shouted something. Chewing Gum tried to ignore him, but after a few seconds he turned and threw his hands up in the air. “What, for fuck’s sake?” he shouted.

The Ruin plowed into him.

It wasn’t going faster than twenty, twenty five, but it knocked him over with some prejudice. I dove to my left and rolled on the rocky ground. The Ruin smacked into the black pickup with a hollow bang that briefly cut through the noise, bouncing back with the familiar sound of the engine stalling. I wondered if the Blue Ruin had somehow been designed to stall at the slightest discomfort, if that had somehow been a selling point for the engineers.

When I got to my feet, Jill was already pulling open the rear passenger door. I sprinted for the car as Trim hunched over the wheel, the starter once again grinding like it was made of glass and pebbles. The big guy called Milky surged up, gun in hand, and I swerved, throwing myself at him. I knocked him down as he squeezed the trigger, the sound of the gun cutting through the noise. I landed on top of the fat bastard and pushed my knee into his arm, pinning it to the ground.

Milky howled. Behind us, the big rig slapped into gear and began to rumble towards the exit.

I brought my fist down into Milky’s jowly face, feeling a thrill, an old, familiar sense of exultation. As a kid, orphaned and alone, I’d surveyed the ruin of my life—my shitty room at Uncle Pal’s, my public school debut—and I’d taken comfort in trying to destroy it further. A furious orgy of destruction. Punching a hole in the wall gave me five seconds of this peaceful, suspended sensation, like my own internal gravity had been turned off. The worse things I did to myself, to others, to anything, the better I felt.

It never lasted.

I’d spent a long time trying to turn that part of myself off, but after all these years and all those meetings and all the work it came roaring back like a sponge dipped into water, expanding to fill me and take control of my limbs. I smashed my fist into Milky’s face and felt everything click into place for a second. A puzzle piece fitting perfectly.

A footstep behind me made me whirl around. Chewing Gum crashed into me like a linebacker, driving me backwards into the pickup. My head bounced on the metal, adding a dent to it and filling me up with a screeching ringing noise that resolved into the mating call of Jill Pilowsky as she leaped onto Chewing Gum and slapped at him with her bare hands, a rain of blows that confused the shit out out of him, making him curl up with his arms over his head for protection.

The sound of the starter grinding sent me crawling back to Milky. He’d been the one driving on the highway, and sure enough I found the keys to the black truck in his front pocket. I tore them free and hurled them as far as I could throw.

Skinny was on his feet them, with Chewing Gum right behind him. They both charged from different angles—and then two shots rang out, splitting the darkness.

We all froze. For a moment it was just breathing and the grind of the Ruin.

“Fuck me I need cardio,” Jill said, breathing hard. She gestured with the gun. “Assholes to the left, Mads to the right.”

Behind her, the Ruin’s engine caught with a belch of black smoke. I decided to found a cargo cult centered on that car, which was apparently unkillable.

We backed towards it. Chewing Gum and the skinny guy watched us with their arms half-raised. Chewing Gum didn’t look particularly scared. Or amused. He stared at me like he intended to make me regret the last twenty-four hours.

I climbed into the back seat of the car. Trim leaned over and pushed the passenger door open, and Jill backed gracefully into the seat, keeping the gun on our new friends.

“Hit it,” she said.

Trim hit the gas. The Ruin sounded like a thunderstorm on the horizon and shook like a nervous kid at a school dance, but we moved. Jill lowered the gun and leaned over to pull the door shut, some fragments of glass raining down her from the shattered window. She swiveled and pointed the Glock backwards, aiming through the absent rear windshield as Chewing Gum and his two minions shrank.

“Jesus Christ,” Trim said, his voice shaky. “I thought this was going to be a fun bring-a-corpse-back-to-Jersey jaunt. I need to renegotiate my rates.”

“Sure,” Jill said, staring into the wind. “Doesn’t matter. The fucking Outfit knows who we are. We’re all fucking dead anyway.” She turned her head to look at me. “What now? Where to?”

I nodded. “Home.”

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18

Trim said nothing when we climbed out of the Ruin. As I helped Trim carry Mats back to the old car’s trunk, I pictured Liùsaidh’s note. A final fuck you to the old man. He’d hidden funds from her, and she’d cleaned him out, and he hadn’t known. He’d died thinking he’d gotten one over on her. And she was out there laughing at him.

No one said anything as we loaded Mats up and get in the car. Trim took his keys back with a minimum of attitude, which saved his life.

We moved down the road, dust swirling around us. I turned and looked back; the stolen truck was hidden from view. When Trim took the first left and the car waddled up onto pavement again, I sat forward and scanned the horizon, looking for signs of other vehicles.

“They’re looking for a guy and a girl in a stolen truck,” Jill sneered. “Not three assholes in a off-brand Skylark.”

Trim’s eyes widened. “Off-brand—? First of all, woman, this car is forty-seven percent Buick Skylark thanks to the junk yards of New Jersey and their generous donations after a series of accidents that were all in no way my fault. Second of all—”

I reached an arm around the head rest and pinched Trim’s ear between my thumb and forefinger as hard as I could. Trim stiffened and went silent for a moment.

“If you’re going to kill me,” he said in a choked voice, “I am duty bound to remind you that I’m driving the car you’re in.”

I nodded. “Shhhh,” I mumured. “Okay?”

“Friendo,” Trim said with a sigh, “people have been threatening me because of my excess charm and toxic levels of charisma since grade school.”

I released him and leaned back.

“You’re the same guy,” Jill said, staring out the side window and chewing her thumbnail. “You can tell yourself you’ve changed, but you’re still the angry guy who wants to smash everything. You’re still him, baby and sober chip and whatever else.”

“Of course I am,” I snapped. “That’s the fucking point. I’ll always be that guy. I’ll always want to smash people in the face. I’ll always want to get high and break some shit. I’ll always have my father in my head. That’s the point, Jill, for fuck’s sake.”

We drove for a few minutes in silence. As Trim navigated onto the highway and the traffic picked up, I felt my phone vibrate and found a new text from Lisa.

You alive?

I hesitated a moment, looking up at Jill, then looked down and tapped out, yeah. Heading home.

A smiley face appeared on the screen along with the animated ellipses indicating she was typing. Your Old Uncle Mick was here looking for you.

I frowned. Mick has my number knows where I am.

Said to tell you there’s a construction on Kennedy Avenue, come up Stuy when you get in.

I blinked. This was Mick telling me that Bergen City was being watched—the outfit had figured out who’d come to break old Mats out of his gilded cage and were waiting on us. I pictured Chewing Gum, the guy in the leather jacket—Andy, they’d called him. He seemed sharp. Management. Someone with some experience. If they knew who I was, I needed to sneak in the back way. Old Stuyvesant Avenue was a crumbling old access road that had been left to ruin after the new freeway access roads had been built.

We were going to have to sneak our way in. There was nothing protecting Elspeth the moment The Broker and his ancient father discovered that Mats was already dead, and my inheritance was a sour note in my mother’s handwriting.

I pocketed the phone. I studied the back of Jill’s head, her hair pulled into two tails held by rubber bands. She would help if he asked, I knew. No matter how angry she was, no matter how I’d disappointed her, she would always help if I asked. Which made it a heavy ask.

I looked away. Who else? Mick, maybe, I thought. The old man didn’t have much in the way of influence or muscle, but he still had some pull in some places in the neighborhood. And he’d always been kind to me. But Mick had always deferred to Abban Spillaine and doubted there was anything more than the occasional head’s up delivered via Lisa Lisa’s texts.

And Mick had lied to him. Not they’re dead, but they’re gone.

I thought of Carolina. She was the toughest woman I knew and I hadn’t heard from her since they’d taken her and Ellie. I suspected I didn’t really have a wife any more, and acid spread outward into my limbs, my chest. The Spillaines had taken everything from me overnight and given me a corpse in return, and I was going to find a way to make them pay for that.

Jill turned to look past me, then resettled herself. “How much gas you got?” she asked Trim.

“Half a tank,” he said. “Why?”

“We’re being followed.”

“How do you know?”

I didn’t doubt her. In all my time with Jill Pilowsky, every house we’d robbed as kids, every scrape we’d gotten into—every bar bill we’d run out on, every fight we’d picked against overwhelming odds just because we didn’t like some guy’s smug happiness in the dark light of our own misery—she’d never once been wrong about something important, something tactical.

“Black truck nightmare back there? Seen it in Paradise.”

I thought of Chewing Gum, his leathery confidence. The way everything he did made it clear he considered himself the only real person in the room, the rest of us cattle to be herded, eaten, or ridden.

I twisted around and stared out the back window. An enormous black truck loomed two cars behind them. It’s windows were tinted to an illegal level. I remembered it, too, now that it had been pointed out to me.

“If I have to jump a drawbridge or drive the Blue Ruin into the back of an 18-wheeler,” Trim said, adjusting his mirror, “there will be a surcharge, and it will be significant.”

Jill shook her head. “This guy’s good. I am impressed. I just wonder how they found us. It’s been eighteen, nineteen hours. We could be anywhere.”

“They knew the general direction you were headed,” Trim offered. “Spotters, maybe. You said they had law enforcement on their side.”

I closed my eyes. Stupid, I thought. You’re so fucking stupid. “The ankle bracelet. The invisible gate.”

“You’re fucking kidding me,” Jill snarled. “We never took it off.”

I nodded. “We never took it off. More than just an invisible gate, then. A tracker.”

“Why’d it take so long to find us?”

I opened my eyes and scrubbed my face. “I didn’t get a signal in that field, did you?”

She shook her head, chewing one nail.

“Dead zone,” I said. “Once we got back to civilization, some tower picked up the signal. Bam.”

Jill turned and stared past me. “They don’t know he’s dead.”

I nodded. My father would apparently continue to fuck me over from beyond the grave. I wondered at the malignancy of my parents, their selfishness. My father assuming I’d come to Paradise to save him after letting his son believe him dead for fifteen years, after abandoning me to the system and Uncle Pal and a bottomless vein of angry bitterness, seemed like the final insult. Now I knew better. I would never escape the long shadow of Mats and Liùsaidh Renik.

I thought of Carolina. I’d worked hard to convince her I was a changed man. Sober. Steady. But I wasn’t any of those things, not really. I was a Renik.

It was time to start acting like it.

“Hang on,” Trim said, slamming on the bakes and steering the Nova into the breakdown lane as horns dopplered past us. I sailed forward and smacked into the back of the front seat, grunting and pushing myself back. The Nova rocked to a stop and stalled.

“Fuck,” Trim said, cranking the ignition. “Come on, Rue, come on Rue,” he muttered as the started coughed and wheezed.

I watched the black truck shoot past us, brake lights popping. I tracked it as it cut over to the breakdown lane up ahead. As I watched, the brakelights flickered, and the reverse lights came on.

“Oh, shit,” Jill muttered. “Trim, baby, get this shitheap into gear.”

“Calling Rue a shitheap will only slow things down,” he hissed, pumping the gas pedal as he turned the key again.

“You’ll flood it,” I snapped.

“Hey! I’ve been massaging this shitheap into life for two decades. Go fuck yourself!”

“Gotta move!” Jill shouted. The black truck was picking up speed, hurtling backwards towards us.

Trim turned the key, lifted his foot off the gas, and the car roared into sputtering life, a burst of black smoke erupting from under the hood. He slammed the gearshift into drive and jerked the wheel, barely avoiding an oncoming car as he swerved into the lane and floored the gas. As we accelerated past the black truck, it swerved towards us, slamming into the side of the car and sending us careening into the middle lane.

Jill leaned over and came up with the Glock. I leaned forward and put my hand on her arm. Our eyes met, and I just shook my head. The last thing we needed was more attention, more police, more problems.

She made a face and nodded. “No fun, Renik. No fuckin’ fun.”

I turned and tapped Trim on the shoulder. “Big rig up ahead,” I said.

Trim nodded. “Don’t touch me literally anywhere, and yeah, I see it.”

The Nova picked up speed, making a grinding noise and shaking slightly.

“Fucker has ruined the alignment,” Trim seethed.

“Just get ahead of the truck,” I said quietly. My eyes flashed to the sign as it sped by: EXIT 1/4 MILE. I turned and looked back, picking the black truck out of the crowd of cars behind us. The Nova accelerated until it was shaking violently, passing two other cars before creeping past the truck. It veered into the left lane, earning an irritated blast from the truck’s horn.

“The exit’s coming up in a few seconds,” I said, gripping the sides of the headrest with both hands. “Take it. Take it fast. If you can clear the bend before the truck rolls past, they might miss us.”

Trim nodded. “If we fuck it up, we’re off this nice busy road with all these witnesses.”

“Gotta keep them off us,” I said. “Right now, the Spillaines think Mats is still alive, that we’re bringing him in. That protects my daughter, my wife. Word gets back to Bergen that my father’s dead—”

“I get it!” Trim snapped, all traces of snark gone, his knuckles white on the wheel. “Hang on!”

The exit raced towards us. Trim turned the Nova and we hit the deceleration ramp without decelerating, forcing him to jerk the wheel as the curve came up almost immediately. The tires squealed and two hubcaps went flying off. I was thrown against the opposite side of the car while Jill clung to the handholds on the door with a grimace.

A moment later we were around the bend. The road straightened out and the highway vanished behind a copse of trees and a sound barrier.

Trim let up off the gas a little and the car stopped shaking. I twisted around in the back seat and stared out the back window. I counted, one, two, three, four.

The black truck appeared, sun flashing off the chrome.

I turned around and found Trim’s eyes in the rear view. Trim nodded and the Blue Ruin accelerated. It felt familiar, this sudden camaraderie. I’d experienced it sometimes at Queenies with a new hire—things got tense, and you found yourself relying on someone you didn’t know or necessarily trust—or like—and just fell into a natural rhythm. I didn’t think I’d ever like Damien, but I suddenly understood why Jill trusted him.

“Take me home, country roads,” Trim sang out. “Hang on!”

He steered the groaning, protesting car into a sharp, illegal left, bumping up and over a meridian to pop onto the highway on-ramp heading back towards the road. Jill and I bounced on the wide seats.

Behind us, the black truck followed, appearing to swallow the curb under its wheels. I stared at it as Trim tried to coax more speed out of the Blue Ruin. It was the story of my life, trying to get back to zero. The depths had a peculiar gravity to them that kept sucking at my heels. My parents had used me as a stepping stone, pushing me down into the shit so they could escape, and I’d been trying to get back to baseline ever since.

Jesus. I’d almost made it. Almost.

I watched the truck slowly creep up on us like doom.

“Don’t get pulled over,” Jill said. “Don’t forget we’ve got a surprise in the trunk.”

Trim nodded. “Pray for Mojo, kids, because this next bit is fucking-A dangerous.”

“What are you thinking?” I shouted over the roar of the engine as Trim accelerated and slotted the car into traffic.

“Seatbelts,” Trim shouted back. “I am thinking about the seatbelts and how I’ve been buying inspection stickers from a guy down on Baldwin Avenue for thirteen years so who knows if they still work!”

I looked at Jill. She shrugged, looking bored. I turned and spotted the truck behind us. With no other cars in-between, it began to make rapid progress.

The car slowed down.

“What are you doing, Damien?” I asked without taking his eyes off the truck. “What are you doing, man?”

“Hang on!” Trim shouted. I thought he sounded happy.

The truck surged towards us. When it was still three or four car lengths behind, Trim slammed on the brakes.

With a noise that sounded like metal tearing in half, the Blue Ruin shuddered and shimmied to a stop, a trail of black rubber on the pavement behind it. It stalled, again, with a sound that resembled a sigh, an exhalation.

The truck swerved to the left, almost dancing on its tires for a few feet as it fishtailed sideways. A moment later a rusted green van smacked into it, spinning it back into the lane behind us.

Trim turned the key, and the starter made a distinctly unhealthy whining noise.

“Stay calm,” Trim said, voice shaking. “Everyone just stay calm.”

“Don’t flood it,” I said again, my voice a whispered rasp. I watched through the rear window as someone tried to open the passenger-side door on the truck, which had been warped by the impact.

“Stay calm!” Trim repeated. “Come on, come on!”

The starter whined, and the driver-side door on the truck opened as three people emerged from the green van. I watched as a burly guy in a leather jacket—of course a leather jacket, I thought, of fucking course—climbed out of the truck. He was bald, but sported an epic set of muttonchops that frizzled out from his face like electricity in hair form. He was wearing enormous mirrored sunglasses that made him look like a cartoon character, something with a round, barrel-shaped body and enormous, blank eyes.

He glanced back at the truck and began advancing on us. As I watched, he reached into his jacket and left his hand there.

“Must go faster,” I whispered. “Must go.” I cleared my throat. “Pills, you might want to have that cannon handy.”

Jill twisted around in the seat and brought the gun up in one hand. “Got it. Trim?”

Trim had leaned forward to press his forehead against the wheel. “Come on, honey,” he whispered. “Come on, you’re making me look bad in front of my friends.”

He turned the ignition off and waited two heartbeats with his eyes closed.

I watched Muttonchops get closer, his hand still buried in his shoulder.

Trim turned the key, and the Blue Ruin coughed back into life. I turned in time to see him sit up and look at Jill, grinning. My eyes went over her to the passenger side window, where Muttonchops appeared, leaning down to peer in. Jill glanced at me, then spun around, bringing the Glock up.

“Oh, shit!” she gasped, and squeezed the trigger.

The window shattered, and Muttonchops dropped away. Trim slammed the car into gear and hit the gas, and I was thrown back by some angry physics.

“Hot damn,” Trim shouted over the rush of wind pouring in through the shattered window. “I am good at this!”

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Yea, verily, it is once again time to post a free novel one chapter a week! This year’s novel is THE BOUNCER. Enjoy!

17.

We parked in the trash-strewn lot. The drive back had underscored just how far we’d gone in the darkness, and how far from any sort of civilization. It was about half an hour of steady driving before our phones woke up, hitting a signal and chirping with updates. I ignored them all while Jill got the maps up on her phone and began to navigate.

We walked down the Mine Road to the same spot where we’d stood just a few hours before. My whole body was thrumming with combined exhaustion and anxiety. Every snap of a twig or rustle of wings in the darkness made me jump. We had no idea what the place was going to be like. Crawling with an army of goons? The Outfit setting up a mobile command center run by Chewing Gum, smiling as he snapped into a cell phone and took tips from a universe of snitches and assets?

When we got to the overlook, Paradise looked about the same. Our blanket and ladder remained on the fence, surprisingly, and the front gate now had a truck parked in front of it to restrict access. Based on my jumbled, hazy memories of the night before, I expected more damage, but I couldn’t see much of anything in the fading afternoon light.

“Wait for dark?” Jill said. “We got like an hour of sunlight left.”

I checked the sky and did some probability calculations involving how long I thought we could rely on Trim to stay with the body before he wandered off, chasing butterflies or something. Then I scanned Paradise again.

“No movement,” I said.

She nodded. “Maybe the army of shitkickers are all out on the road, looking for us.”

I studied the place. It was possible. We’d made a lot of noise and scraped a lot of shit on our way out, we’d made them look bad, and as far as they knew we had Mats and were motoring back to Jersey. There wasn’t any hint of movement, no sign of life. The tenants of Paradise weren’t eager to leave—being inside those gates was the only thing keeping the wolves at bay—and it was the treaties between the families and the syndicates and the gangs that kept it that way, not any number of local hicks with long guns. And if they were behind on their rent, they were wearing an ankle bracelet. My guess was there weren’t a lot of staff on hand.

And I didn’t have a choice. Going back to Bergen City empty-handed wasn’t an option. If my shitbag father had money hidden in his shitbag house, I was going to get it and try to buy back my family.

I nodded. “Wait for dark.”

We settled ourselves, taking turns watching the town. We didn’t talk. I was in no rush to pick up our last conversation, because there was only one way for it to go. Paradise was a still life. As the minutes ticked by absolutely nothing happened. No guards patrolled the area, no one left their house, no cars approached. When it was still twilight, I turned to Jill.

“Let’s go.”

We went in the same way, since they’d left our gear in place. Getting up over the fence took more effort this time, because every muscle in my body ached. I landed on the other side and twisted my ankle a little, falling on my ass.

“Mediocre.” Jill hissed merrily.

We jogged to the nearest house and hugged the walls, making our way through the yards—familiar now—to the rear of number 83. The back sliders were still sagging open as we’d left them. The blue light of the television still flickered and glowed. I hesitated just a moment. In the distance, a car horn, making me freeze.

Jill made a noise of disgust and stomped forward, slipping into the house. She was swallowed by gloom.

I jogged after her, hitching my stride a little, pain shooting up my leg. I pushed through the narrow opening in the slider and found myself back in Mats’ filthy kitchen. The silence and stillness of the place crowded in and suffocated me.

The smell was worse.

“You really think your pops had money hidden in here?” Jill said doubtfully, poking at a paper takeout bag dissolving under a greasy leak from whatever it contained.

I nodded. “My father would have had a backup plan. He could have a million dollars and he’d still be begging you for a loan. In Mats’ mind, money always flows to him, not the other way around.”

She shrugged. “Okay. If I’m stuck in the world’s worst retirement home, maybe I have an insurance sum, a go bag. Where should we look?”

I shook my head. “Fucked if I know.”

Jill reached up and gathered her hair into a bun, a casual display of niche expertise I found momentarily fascinating. Her eyes roamed the kitchen, and she began walking slowly, stomping one foot on the tile every few feet. When she’d made a complete circuit, she looked around again.

“Not under the floor on ground level,” she said. “Cement slab, no basement. He would’ve needed a jackhammer to carve out a bolthole. Walls, maybe,” she said, looking around. “Fuck, could be in the goddamn freezer. Sometimes the best hiding places are the stupidest.”

This I knew to be true. I was a man who’d spent two years stuffing wads of cash into a jar under the sink.

Outside, a truck roared past, engine as loud as an airliner. Probably souped up to roll coal and make as much noise as possible. The headlights swept the place and we stood very still, listening to it fade away.

Jill sighed, then wrinkled her nose. “Fuck. Only thing for it is to start looking.”

We looked. I started in the kitchen, she hit the living room. The cabinets were mostly empty. I found a salt shaker, some peanut butter, and a box of saltines, some roaches, some spider webs, and a collection of ant traps, some soy sauce packets, some plastic cups, and an empty plastic pitcher. In the fridge, some beers. In the freezer, some ice. Under the sink, nothing but dry rot and a trap that had been leaking since approximately ten years before.

I moved on. In the living room, Jill was pulling up carpet. I took the stairs up to the second floor, which had two bedrooms and a bathroom. The hallway was filled with trash—empty boxes, swollen black plastic bags, clothes tossed into damp piles. One bedroom had been used as storage, filled with more and more boxes. I stepped in, finding a narrow lane between the towering canyons of cardboard.

I remembered, suddenly, when the Quinones family had moved into The 293. The previous occupant of their apartment, Mr. Ludlow, had lived there for forty-seven years. By the time I’d arrived, Ludlow hadn’t left his apartment in five, and it was considered kind of lucky that he’d died on the first floor, collecting the mail. Otherwise he might have ripened in his big easy chair for days, weeks.

The day of the move-in, I encountered Luis on the stairs, and we’d smiled and made vague gestures at each other. My Spanish was restricted to insults, and his English was restricted to sitcom catch-phrases. He managed to make me understand that he wanted some help, so I followed him to Ludlow’s old apartment. I stood in the doorway for a moment, stunned.

The place was filled with crap. Boxes. Bags. Piles of magazines. Newspapers. Figurines and bric-a-brac, palettes of canned goods and 12-packs of paper towels. There was a narrow lane from the bathroom to the bedroom, with branches heading to the sink, the stove, the sofa, and the bed. Everything else was the hoarded wealth of Mr. Peter M. Ludlow, deceased. I generally had a good opinion of our landlord, Carmine, because he’d been good to me. But in that moment I cursed the motherfucker’s name, because standing there I knew I was going to have to help Luis clear it all out or not be able to sleep that night.

It took all day to shift everything out to the sidewalk. During the long trips up and down the stairs, Luis and I worked out a passable vocabulary of words and expressions that proved to be quite useful. I had dinner with the raucous Quinones family that evening, understanding nothing but enjoying myself immensely.

Now, I looked at all the boxes piled to the ceiling and the idea of searching through them was impossible.

And unnecessary, I thought, because there was no way Mats would hide anything someplace he’d have to work to get at. It was his emergency fund, his Go Money. He’d have it ready, at hand, someplace he could grab in a moment’s notice. Someplace a snooping guard wouldn’t think to look.

I paused, blinking. I thought of the old apartment, desolate and empty in the wake of my parents’ non-death.

The Master was dense with cheap furniture and a thick carpet the unfortunate color of urine that was stiff and crunchy under my feet. My parents had always been disinterested in housecleaning. As a kid, I’d been the one to take out the garbage and do the dishes, wash my own clothes. Mats never seemed curious about how his dishes were cleaned; he just placed them carefully wherever he happened to be and accepted as a minor miracle that they would later be found neatly stacked in the cabinets again.

I walked through the room to the windows, where heavy gold drapes hung, making the room dark and forbidding. Using the flashlight on the phone, I examined the hems. The sight of the thick, amateurish thread made my heart rate skip up a few beats. I picked at it with my thick fingers and bitten-down nails, slowly working it free and opening up the hem.

After a few minutes of work, I extracted a thin yellow envelope, folded in half, from the hem. I stood for a moment, staring at it. Behind me, I heard Jill walk into the room just as another pair of trucks rocketed past outside.

“Whoa,” she whispered. “Your dad was a straight up hoarder, Maddie.”

I nodded, turning. Her eyes dropped to the envelope in my hand.

“Okay,” she said. She sighed, pushing her hands into the pockets of her black jeans. “He was more broke than you thought.”

I nodded. I unfolded the envelope and slid my finger under the seal, opening it up. It wasn’t empty, I realized. There were two pieces of paper inside. I fished them out. One was a money band, gold and white, reading $10,000.

The other was a piece of torn-off notepaper. On it, written in my mother’s huge, showy handwriting, was

THE CELEBRATED GENIUS ?

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