The Brokenhearted (29 page)

“Okay,” Ford says, standing close behind me and slightly to my right. “See this little lever?” He moves his arms around me and touches the small curved safety latch on top of the gun. “Pull that back until you hear a click.”

I do it, and hear the bullet fall into the chamber. A sound I’ve now heard more times than I would like.

“Now stand firm, feet apart, and bring the gun up in front of you with both hands, right index finger on the trigger.”

I blow a few strands of hair out of my eyes and assume the position of markswoman. He puts his arms around me until his hands rest lightly on my wrists, raising the gun a little higher.

“Close one eye, and bring it level with your open eye so that you see one of the cans just above the muzzle of the gun. After you’ve got your aim all squared, brace yourself for the impact of the shot. You’re pushing the bullet forward with the gun, and the gun is going to push you backward.” He speaks softly, precisely. His mouth is just behind my ear, his breath tickling my neck. I stiffen, pulling away a few inches. The closeness suddenly feels too intimate, the silence around us too complete. I squeeze my lips together and tell myself to focus on the task.

“Okay,” I say, lining up the top can in the pyramid with the tiny raised part at the end of the gun muzzle. I bend my knees a centimeter more. I brace for impact. “Ready.”

“When you press on the trigger, think of it as a squeezing motion. Too hard and fast, and you’ll recoil and lose your aim. Just slowly squeeze until it fires. Arms locked. Take a breath in, then let it out slowly as you squeeze.” His words unspool in my ear, the precision of his instructions calming me, all my focus now in the path between my right eye and the gun and the can.

I suck air into my nostrils and smell his shampoo. Ford always smells so clean.

I release my breath and squeeze the trigger. The gun fires with a deafening pop, and I feel it through my whole body, the impact knocking me backward off my feet. But then Ford’s arms are there, catching me, and I straighten up. I ignore the ringing in my ears—familiar to me from Hades and from the science room—and check the pyramid of cans. It’s completely undisturbed. I haven’t even grazed my target.

“Good,” he says, and somehow I hear him even with the ringing. “Steady your hands and fire again. And this time, hit it.”

I repeat all the steps, really focusing on the
U
in
BUZZ
. When I concentrate, the can almost seems to glow—the background receding behind it and away from it. It’s a little bit like my hearing, I guess. When I focus hard on something, I see it extra-clearly. I squeeze the trigger, staying put this time and letting my body absorb the impact of the backfire. Instantly, the top beer can goes flying off the pyramid, smacking the brick wall behind it, and falling, crumpled, to the ground.

“Yes!” Ford yells. “Again. All cans must die!”

Again I line up my shot, this time aiming for the next row of cans atop the pyramid. And again, I nail one. Again and again, the bullets make contact. With every shot, I get better about leaning into the gun so that the recoil doesn’t send me flying off my feet. When the gun is empty, Ford shows me how to refill the barrel, and I drop each gold-tipped bullet into its casing, plucking them individually from his callused palm.

We go through five rounds of bullets—the entire box—and I do the last five or six shots standing sideways, running, even, once, just for fun, under one knee. The under-the-knee shot doesn’t hit a can, but it gets me a big guffaw and a high-five from Ford.

“I think you’re officially ready to do battle, with or without a gun,” Ford says when all the bullets are gone. He shoots me a funny look, his head cocked to one side. “Not that you waited.”

“What do you mean?” I say, feeling my cheeks go hot.

“Come on, Green,” he says, kicking a few bullet shells with the tip of his boot. “I read the
Dilemma
. What was the crime blotter headline the other day? Something like . . .
VIGILANTE LEAVES CRIMINAL HANGING FROM BRIDGE RAILING
?”

“And you assume that was me?” I protest. “That could have been anyone!”

Ford looks at me with raised eyebrows, his arms crossed over his chest. It doesn’t take long for both of us to crack up.

“I knew it.” Ford grins, pushing me playfully. “Vigilante!”

“Okay, fine,” I admit, pushing him back to keep from falling over. “It
may
have been me.”

“Guess you’ve gotten comfortable working alone,” Ford says, growing serious. “But next time they might be ready for you. I want to help you, if I can.”

I shrug, trying to look noncommittal. I don’t want to tell Ford that the reason I work alone is that I can’t bear seeing anyone else I care about get hurt. Ford is strong as steel, but if he took a bullet, he would bleed just like anybody else.

“You think about it. For now, let’s go look at the bullet holes, vigilante.” He pulls me by one arm toward the center of the room, and I scoop up a couple of cans. The bullet holes are almost all directly in the center of each one, a clean hole right through the middle of the U in
BUZZ
.

“Amazing aim,” Ford murmurs, squinting through one of the cans out both bullet holes to the other side. “He’d have loved to know you.”

“Who?” I say, my eye caught by two sets of initials carved into the smooth top of the log he set the cans up on.

“The Hope.”

“How do you know he would have liked me? Maybe he would have hated me.”

Ford shakes his head. “When I was six years old, I used to come out here with my older cousin and a few of our rug-rat friends. We’d ride our dirt bikes down the runways, set up little jumps and stuff. There was this guy. Real sad-looking kind of dude, but strong. He could lift a car over his head. I saw it once. He used to train in here. He had a burlap bag of sand he set up, threw a rope over one of the rafters. Nothing fancy, but it was good enough to box with. He let me watch him, even taught me a little bit about throwing a punch. He used to set beer cans up just like this, for target practice. He had a few other guys who came out here sometimes, and later there was even a girl who came too. They used to have these long meetings where they’d light a fire in a metal drum and talk about all the things they would do to change the city.”

I’m listening to Ford, watching the muscles in his face move as he tells his story, his eyes darting around the room but looking inward, at his past. All the while I’m half-conscious of tracing some initials scratched into the log I’m leaning up against. RF + TH, two people in love enough to dig their initials into wood. For a moment, I wish Gavin and I had done the same.

“I was too young to really understand. But later, after he disappeared, I saw his picture in the news, once they finally identified him, and I realized The Hope was the same guy I used to punch a bag of sand with in this place.”

“So he was definitely real,” I muse, more to myself than to him. Gavin believed in him too.

“Of course he was
real
,” Ford says sharply. “The city was turning around, Anthem. People believed in each other again, once he got the worst of the crime off the streets. People started talking about a new government, about making things better for everyone, even for the South Side. Don’t you remember it?”

“I wasn’t born yet,” I say.

“I was a little kid, but I remember,” Ford says, turning to face me. “And now it’s happening again.”

I look at him blankly.

“People are talking about what you’re doing, Anthem. You’re helping break the cycle. It’s not that different from what he did,” Ford says, his face flushed.

I shake my head, suddenly feeling frustrated. Until now, I thought Ford was the one person who understood what I’ve been doing, and why. “I’m not The Hope, though. I’m nothing like him. I’m doing this for Gavin, for revenge.” I pause and give Ford a sharp look, then pick up a Buzz Beer can and throw it as far as I’m able. It hits the back wall. “I thought you knew that.”

“Maybe that’s what’s driving you now,” Ford says. “But I know you see what’s going on in this city.”

“I guess,” I say, not at all certain I see what’s going on very clearly at all. When someone close to you has died, it’s like wearing a veil. Everything I’ve seen has been filtered through my grief. I turn away, wishing Ford would stop talking about saving the city. As if I’m all it takes to make this place better. As if I can singlehandedly take down The Boss and the whole syndicate. As if I’m some kind of savior or hero. Because I’m not. And I don’t feel like a motivational speech.

“So The Hope taught you how to box?” I ask, wanting to change the subject. “And then you became a pro?”

“Something like that,” Ford says, looking away. “It isn’t worth talking about, trust me.”

“Why not?”

“I had to make a lot of compromises.” He stops to pick up a few more cans, stacking them back up in a pyramid on the moldy airplane seats. “A few guys high up in the Syndicate were willing to pay me a lot of money to box for them, and I did it, until I couldn’t do it anymore.”

“Box for them? What does that mean?”

Ford sighs, searching the ceiling as if deciding if he should go on. Then he does. “There are cage fights every month or two in the South Side. Big events. Lots of betting, thousands of bills changing hands depending on who wins. These two Syndicate guys sponsored me. At first, it was fun. I was pretty good.” Ford shrugs. I interpret this to mean he was actually
really
good, and that he’s just being modest. “I was only sixteen. I was living with my uncle and my cousins, my parents both passed away by this point, both overdosed on droopies. We were so poor, me and my uncle. He works construction and was in a serious dry spell, work-wise. And fighting was a way I could make a lot of money. Just one fight a week, and we could all eat. We could pay the rent. Even save a little.

“I got sucked in. At first, I was winning a lot, but . . .” he stops, pressing his lips together as if trying to swallow the rest of the story.

“But?” I put my hand on his forearm for a second, then quickly take it off when he looks at me. “But six months into it, they realized they could make a lot more money betting against me.”

“Betting you’d
lose
?” I ask, mystified. “But they were your sponsors. Isn’t that, like, against the rules?”

Ford grimaces as if the memory physically hurts him. “Yeah. Very. They’d bet against me, and since I was the favorite for a while, a ton of money was on me to keep winning. They asked me to throw a fight or two, and they cleaned up.”

“So you were losing on purpose?” I ask, trying to keep up.

He nods. “I threw a dozen fights for them. Maybe more. I was drinking a lot, taking Pharms to cope with the humiliation. It wasn’t really them asking me so much as threatening me. If I didn’t throw fights, they said they would start hurting people close to me. Hurting my family, what little of it I had left. My uncle, my little cousins.”

Ford stops to kick a can. We both watch it sail through the air and bounce onto the ground.

“Eventually, I couldn’t do it anymore. It felt too dirty, you know? So this one night, I was up against this kid who couldn’t have been more than fourteen, who shouldn’t have been competing at all he was so young, and I just kept punching, totally raged out on him. I won. I gave the kid a concussion. And my sponsors lost. A lot. Enough so that they threatened to kill me.”

“And that’s when you dropped out of boxing?”

“Right. Because they would have killed me if I showed my face in there again. So I’ve been laying low ever since. Just waiting.”

“Waiting for what?”

“Dunno.” He shrugs, moving closer to me, his voice barely above a whisper. “Maybe for a way to do something real. Something more than keeping Jax in food and formaldehyde. Something bigger. With someone better than me.” He stares at me, his brown eyes soft and unfocused, their usual playfulness gone. Then he leans toward me, slowly, slowly.

I feel myself leaning in too, my eyes closing. I want to feel the heat of his arms through his sweatshirt, wrapped around me. To feel the clean warmth of him . . .

But then my phone buzzes with a text, and the spell is broken. I pull away from Ford, my face on fire as I dig for my phone. It’s from Serge.

The LandPusher is out of the impound lot. Heading north on Oleander.

Oleander. Gavin’s old street. The scene of their original crime.

“Car’s on the move,” I mumble, jumping up, my face still warm, my heart racing, guilt flooding my veins. Even though Gavin is dead, it still feels like a betrayal. “I need to find it. To see if Rosie’s inside.”

Ford nods. “This time I’m coming with you.”

I open my mouth to say
No, it’s not safe, I can’t take that risk,
but there’s a hard determination in his jaw that tells me I have to give him this, that if I refuse, he’ll find a way to follow me. I let out a defeated puff of air and nod.

I text Serge back, telling him to let me know where the car ends up and that I can be there in half an hour.
Nothing happened,
I tell myself. And nothing will ever happen. My heart is a machine. A biological experiment under my strict control. And I intend to keep it that way.

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

.....................................................................

CHAPTER 36

We leave Floyd Sherman Field with our bulletless gun and an awkward silence between us. Outside, we’re all alone for miles, just us and a heavy half-moon hanging low in the sky. The air smells like burnt plastic, like imploded skyscrapers. A waist-high thicket of brown weeds bends in the cold wind.

Searchlights crawl through the clouds miles away, beamed down from a few low-flying helicopters in the far south. A police investigation. Nothing unusual. “It’s far,” Ford says after we walk a few minutes. “Let’s take my car.”

Behind a demolished wall of cinder blocks is Ford’s car. It’s a boxy Halcyon, ten years old at least, the maroon paint job hidden under a layer of sooty dust. The kind of car a grandmother might drive, all ugly lines and wide leather seats.