The Amateurs (38 page)

Another explosion.

Alex staggered, his feet starting to tangle. His belly burned and his fingers were numb and his shoulder felt weak and he realized he had his tongue stuck between his lips and was biting it, and then he reached Johnny, the fat fuck’s face gone shiny. The pain was unreal, whirling and sharp, a spinning saw blade in his chest, ripping and tearing, and it took all his strength to lift his arms and clamp them on Johnny’s shoulders, then slide them around his back, to squeeze the man to him like they were dancing, Johnny’s aftershave sharp and chemical, mingling with the boxing-glove stench of his own sweat and a coppery smell from his chest, Johnny pinned with the gun between them, and then there was another explosion, this one muffled, and Alex felt part of his chest rip out his back and fly free and wet, and knew he was going to die.

It was OK. It was for Cassie.

He just had to do one thing first. One more thing.

He had to trust Mitch.

 

 

IAN SAW THE FIST COMING, couldn’t do anything about it, tried to close his mouth but only managed to get his tongue caught between his teeth as the blow hit. His head yanked sideways, white and black bursting. His fingers started to slip, and he made himself hold on, hold on, and he prayed that Jenn understood.

And then he heard the sound of the front door opening and knew that he had won.

“Fuck!” The man rose fast as a snake. With the last of his strength, Ian grabbed his calf. The man spun back, wound up, and unleashed a vicious kick. The foot exploded into his ribs with a crunching sound, and Ian’s grip broke. He flopped back on the floor, strength gone. His eyes were closed, but he heard the man stand up, his fast footfalls down the hall. But he had bought her something. Maybe enough.

For a moment, he just breathed, every inhale agony. Then he heard steady footsteps. He opened his eyes, saw the man standing above him, shaking his head, a smile on his lips. “That was your big escape plan?”

Ian tried to speak, coughed, blood and bile mingling in his mouth. He turned sideways and spit it on the floor. Looked back. “Yep.”

“The money isn’t here?”

“Nope.”

“Well, I give you credit for heart, brother. But you really are a fuck-up, you know that?”

Ian coughed again. Stared at the barrel of the gun. “Yeah.” He smiled through broken lips. “But I’m working on it.”

A finger moved on the trigger. There was a loud sound.

And then there was nothing.

 

 

MITCH’S HANDS WERE SWEATY on the plastic. His brain felt like a prisoner, walled away and forgotten as it screamed and threw itself against the bars of its cage. Every breath felt stolen.

He put the third bottle in the bag, aware of every sensation, the way the zipper grated against his wrist, the cool of the plastic leaving his hand, the pressure of the edge of the bar against his stomach. Victor was smiling, a wolfish, ugly grin. The look of a man winking at you as he fucked your girlfriend.

Then there was a squeak and a scrambling beside him, and his head whipped around to see Alex in motion, a bar stool hanging in the air like it was on wires, the big man surging forward at Johnny and his big chrome pistol. It lasted forever. The chair didn’t fly, it drifted, no kin to gravity, turning slowly, a play of light gleaming off the polished wood back. Alex was a freight train in slow motion, power and energy moving through jelly, shoulder down. The gun drifting lazily as Johnny took a step sideways to avoid the stool.

The sound was incredibly loud and terribly familiar. It jolted him, shook that secret center of him that was all he really was. The part that wore the rest of him like clothing.

A gunshot, just like the one he had heard in the alley, when he sighted down the barrel at the man on the ground and pulled the trigger.

A second blast followed, and a third. They sounded crass, unnecessary. Alex took the shots like a charging boxer tagged by jabs, slowed but not stopped, his body rippling where he was hit. And then he was on Johnny, had the man pinned in a bear hug, and Mitch wanted to howl, to scream his friend’s name.

The fourth shot was muffled, and a piece of Alex’s body blew out the back of him to spatter on the bar.

The moment broke like a mirror.

Mitch had the last bottle, felt the heft of it, light for so much death, but heavy enough in his hand. He turned to Victor, saw his mask crumbling. The man stood directly opposite him, a dark shape against the rows of glowing bottles, whiskey and tequila and vodka and gin standing side by side like soldiers. He thought about jumping the bar but saw Victor’s hands moving, realized he must be going for a gun. Thought of dropping to the floor, into the safety of a child hiding beneath a bed. Thought about rushing to help Alex, and turned to do it, only to see a twisting mass of bodies, Alex and Johnny, spinning and sliding and falling. Tumbling toward him. Somehow Alex, shot more than once, had kept hold of Johnny and yanked him toward the bar, the two of them embracing like lovers.

They slammed into the bar beside him, still scrabbling, Johnny red-faced and furious, spit flying from his lips as he yelled, a grunt of effort and pain, struggling to get his arms free. A moan wrenched from Alex at the impact. His skin skim milk. Mitch couldn’t believe the man was still standing, that his reserves of strength and fury and shock had given him the power to hold on, to drag Johnny here. Some part of him wondered why, what the point of the gesture was, whether it was a plan or just a reaction.

Victor’s hand behind his back.

Alex slumped, Johnny starting to push away from him. His friend’s head lolled, eyes wild. Staring. Staring at Mitch, and then lower. His lips moved, nothing coming out at first. Then a sound. A plea. The words more gasped than spoken.

“Do it.”

His eyes staring at Mitch but not. The will draining from his friend’s body like oil from a punctured drum. Johnny started to push himself free.

He looked where Alex was staring. To the bottle in his hand.

Words in his mind.

Ian:
Apparently, if you’re the kind of evil fuck who makes chemical weapons, you make them in two parts.

Alex:
No wonder you freaked when you saw me drinking.

Jenn:
Guess the Thursday Night Club isn’t done yet.

Victor’s hand swinging around, a blur of something black in his grip.

And for a moment, it all made sense. Every step of the confused dance that had brought them here. Every wrong move. A pattern that he had never suspected, like something had been conducting them toward this moment, playing each of them like an instrument, point and counterpoint, building to this crescendo.

Mitch turned at the waist, the bottle in his hand held parallel to the bar. His mind split, part of it cool and focused, the rest of the world gone away, nothing but this motion. The other part screening moments from his life. His father teaching him to ride a bike down leaf-shaded streets. Sunlight and Jimi Hendrix and the spray of water as he leaned back in a friend’s speedboat smashing the waves of Lake Michigan. The first snow of a forgotten winter, walking past the bookshop on Broadway as soft faint white fell around him. The cello curve of Jenn’s sleeping body in the moonlight.

He spun and hurled the bottle at the bar back with everything he had. It wasn’t just his arm that threw. It was his whole life. Everything he was, everything he had ever hoped to be, put into one perfect motion.

It could have flown a mile. Could have sailed into the limitless night and blown by the moon.

Until it hit the wall of shimmering bottles above Victor’s head and exploded, plastic and glass cracking and shattering, the force of the motion driving everything against the mirrored wall an inch back and then rebounding, the geometric precision of liquid spattering in perfect globes, a slow-motion film of a bottle hit by a bullet, the invisible immutable rules of the world taking over, a shower of spray rebounding, an arc like a dying sprinkler.

And through it all, his mind still showing the things that had made up his life. His mother fussing over his prom tuxedo. His ’86 LeBaron with the crooked-smile bumper. The kick of the pistol in his hand and the primal joy he had been afraid to acknowledge.

The night the four of them met.

Right here, at this same spot in this same bar. The recognition each had felt in the other, that strange glow of assumed camaraderie that came from nothing but some inner certainty that here were friends, that whatever was to come, however they might fail one another, they shared this sense of newfound completion, of being made whole.

Mitch was laughing as the liquid rained down on them all.

L
ATER, Jenn Lacie would spend a lot of time trying to pinpoint the exact moment.

There was a time before, she was sure of that. When she was free and young and, on a good day, maybe even breezy. Looking back was like looking at the cover of a travel brochure for a tropical getaway, some island destination featuring a smiling girl in a sundress and a straw hat, standing calf-deep in azure water. The kind of place she used to peddle but had never been.

And of course, there was the time after. And all the days yet to come.

There was never just one picture, one clear moment. Everything came in juttering fits and starts, all of it snarled, one circumstance leading into another. Untangling it would be no simple feat. But it seemed important to try. That was her work now. Her tribute.

Tonight, though, the moment she kept coming back to was the flash of a second when Ian was on the ground and their eyes met. When she had realized what he was doing. When they committed to the right thing, even if it was hard. Yanking open her front door, sprinting down the steps, abandoning him there, that had been hard.

There had been crazy adrenaline, an energy unlike anything she had ever known. She had run with everything in her. She’d wanted to look back but hadn’t dared, just leaned into it, legs flying long and free as she sprinted toward Clark. There would be people on the street, and cars. Even if the man followed her, she knew she could make it.

It was when she heard the muffled crack from behind her that she almost screwed up. She’d known what it was. What it meant. Ian had gone all-in.

The feeling that climbed from her belly to her lungs to her mouth was raw and horrible, a recognition that life had stakes, consequences, and that they were playing for them. And with it, a furious anger at the forces that had come into her life, into her house, that had killed her friend. The rage made her fingers tremble, and for a moment, she wanted more than anything to stop. To hide behind a parked car and wait for the man to chase her. To turn from prey to predator, snapping a hard kick into his belly that dropped him to the ground. Then kick him again and again and again, kick until her toes were broken and there was nothing left to kill.

But there was the look in Ian’s eye. He hadn’t given his life for her to attempt an action-hero ending. He had played by the rules of the game, accepting the ultimate penalty to give her a shot to secure the most important outcome. And she had to play by them too, or she truly would betray him.

Besides. Ian was gone, but it might not be too late to save Mitch and Alex.

So she ran. Arms pumping, lungs burning, heart screaming, she ran. She might have run all the way to the police station if she hadn’t almost tripped in front of a cab cruising for partygoers.

Detective Bradley told her it had been the right move. That she had saved lives, the innocent men and women, cops and EMTs, who might have gone into Rossi’s without a warning.

She supposed he was right. But like most truths, it was comforting only to a point.

Bradley had been dubious, then interested, and finally incredulous as she told him everything. She spilled it all with a manic intensity, knowing that the faster she could get him to move, the more chance her friends had. Praying that even though she had been delayed, she might still be able to hold up her end of the plan and bring the police screaming down on Victor.

Because the alternative was too terrible to consider.

As Mitch had predicted, she had really had to sell Detective Bradley. It was the details that won him over. She told him everything, every step of the robbery, the murder in the alley, the discovery of chemical weapons, their response tonight. Inch by inch, she watched the screens behind his eyes lift as he began to believe.

The details worked. But they took a long time. And just as she was wrapping up, another cop came in the room. “Detective—”

“I’m busy here—”

“I know, but it’s about that restaurant. Rossi’s.”

Jenn had been leaning forward, forearms on the table, eyes locked with Bradley’s like a conspirator or a lover, but at the mention of the restaurant she jerked upright. She stared at him, knowing what he was going to say, dreading it. Until the moment she heard it, until a stranger spoke it, it wasn’t true. Alex and Mitch were strong and clever and good. They might have found a way without her.

“Dispatch got reports of gunfire. Multiple shots. That’s your restaurant, right? From the body the other night?” The cop continued, his lips moving, facts spilling out, but Jenn didn’t hear it, not another word.

They were gone. Her friends were gone.

Something had almost swallowed her then, as she realized with utter certainty that she was the last surviving member of the Thursday Night Club. It was panic, but of a different sort than she’d been suffering. A black and consuming loneliness, and a suffocating sense of failure. Everything in her wanted to collapse at that moment, to put her head down on the table in the dingy interview room and sob.

Later, she would remember that moment as maybe the one that saved her, that gave her a chance. Because instead of giving up, she told Detective Peter Bradley he had to hurry. That there might still be men there, dangerous, armed men. Men with chemical weapons. In calm, clear tones she told him not to let anyone go inside, to clear the streets and guard the door. That if there were men inside, they were armed.