21. Mina

TWENTY-ONE

mina

There’s so much blood. I’ve never seen so much blood in real life. And somehow this feels different than Matsumoto, because this time there are consequences I have to think about. Some people deserve to die, yes, but most evil people have someone who loves them. A mother, a wife, a child.

When you take a life, you aren’t just taking that life, you’re taking lives of innocent people who had nothing to do with any of it. Except that even though they’re dead, they still walk and talk and look like you and I. They still pass you on the street, offer pleasantries, drive in rush hour traffic, and buy overpriced coffee. But they aren’t truly alive, not anymore.

The conference room is locked. Brian bangs on the door. “Open this door!”

“Brian!” I hiss. “He’s just a scared little boy. You think he’s letting the boogeyman in?”

Brian fires shots into the door and kicks it open.

When we enter the room, the boy is hiding under the table as though we can’t see him, trying not to cry too loud. But of course we can both see and hear him. I look out the floor-to-ceiling windows, for a moment distracted by the view. You could almost reach out and touch the fireworks, and you can just make out lights from the parade below.

The kid’s sniffling from under the table draws me back.

“I have to get him out of here,” I say.

Brian puts a hand on my arm. “No. I have to call a cleaner.”

I don’t have to ask what he means. I’m not an idiot.

While Brian usually does his own clean up, it’s a lot of bodies, a lot of blood, and there’s no way we can clean it up with a parade still going on outside. Plus we didn’t prepare for this. It was supposed to be a clean job from a distance. And there are emergency vehicles all over the place down there. Police, fire trucks, ambulances. It’s a big outdoor event with explosives after all.

Except our fireworks won’t be going off tonight. We were supposed to be well away from things when the building blew, and now there’s this mess.

A burst of bright green and purple light goes off just outside the window, and the boy cries harder.

“Hey, I need to order pizza for a large party,” Brian says into his burner phone. A pause. Then he speaks again. “There are 18 of us.”

I mentally count them up in my mind. But he’s right. Eighteen. Really there are 21, but only 18 of us are dead. Everyone but me, Brian, and the boy.

“A lot of pepperoni, yeah.” Brian disconnects the call.

I don’t want to know what pepperoni means. I pull out chairs from the table and sit on the floor, motioning the boy to come out. He shakes his head furiously at me. He thinks we’re going to kill him, too.

“If we wanted you dead, the table wouldn’t stop us, kid,” Brian says, which only makes the boy wail more.

“Nice,” I say, glaring up at him. Brian has no bedside manner and has clearly never spoken to a child in his life.

“It’s okay,” I say in a soft voice like I’m trying to coax a kitten out of a tree. “No one wants to hurt you.”

I motion for him to come out, and when he finally does, I guide him over to the far side of the room and sit him so he’s facing me and one of the massive floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the fireworks display.

“I-I wanted to see the f-fireworks from high up. M-my dad said I could c-come.” With all his crying and sniffling it’s hard to make out his words.

I’m so angry. I know this kid’s dad is one of the bodies outside this room. Why would you bring your kid to some secret crime meeting? But he’s young, and they probably would have talked in code.

“Are we going to have pizza?” he asks me, guileless brown eyes looking up into mine through his tears. He looks so much like a tiny version of Brian that it makes my heart hurt.

“No, sweetheart. We’re going to wait just a while, quiet like little mice, and then I’m going to take you to someone who can take you home.”

“Is my daddy coming, too?”

I can’t stop the tears. He’s just so young. I don’t think he fully understands what’s happened, and that his dad isn’t going anywhere with him ever again.

“No, he can’t.”

“But why not?”

“Take him to the executive suite,” Brian snaps. “I need to think so we don’t miss anything.”

I’m about to snap back, but when I see his face I realize he’s lost inside his own head, probably in memories of his own childhood trauma. I quickly nod and take the boy out into the hallway. I try to block his view, but there’s so much blood and it’s impossible to maneuver over and around bodies without him seeing things.

Anyway, he’s already seen them.

He cries out when he trips over an arm, and then he’s sobbing again.

I get him into the executive suite and we sit on a black leather couch facing the window. I try to distract him again with fireworks, but the boy has lost interest in the one thing he was so excited to see.

He was going to work with his daddy, going to see big loud lights in the sky. And now this. He gets up, pacing restlessly back and forth. Finally he stops and stares out the window.

“He’s dead, isn’t he?” he says, not bothering to look at me. The boy suddenly looks far older than the five or six he surely is. Of course he knows what dead is. Maybe he didn’t fully understand yet that everyone was dead, maybe he didn’t want to understand, but how would he have been shielded from such knowledge, surrounded by violence at such a young age?

“Yes,” I say. “But you can’t say that. When I take you outside, you can’t say that. Promise me.”

He looks at me, his lip quivering. He’s trying to be brave and stop crying. He’s only five, and already he thinks it’s not okay for him to cry. His dad just died, for fuck’s sake. I think I’m crying more than he is now.

“Okay,” he whispers.

I turn and watch out the door for the cleaners. It feels like a lifetime passes before the elevator doors finally open. Ten large men all wearing black T-shirts, pants, and work boots. Several covered in black tattoos. They bring in buckets and mops and cleaning supplies, and rolls and rolls of plastic wrap and duct tape.

They peer with interest at me and the boy, but I hear Brian say “They’re with me.” And they quickly get to work.

Half the men go back downstairs to handle thirteen and the lobby. Brian goes with them. I shut and lock the executive suite, not trusting myself and the boy alone with these men.

The clean-up is faster than the time waiting for them to get here. They’re efficient and have coordinated this down to a science. Suddenly the boy rushes past me and out the door into the lobby, I follow to try to stop him, but it’s too late.

Plastic wrapped bodies are being carried to the waiting elevator. The boy watches each one as it passes, and I know he wonders which of these plastic mummies is his dad. He can’t even say a proper goodbye.

When they’ve gone, Brian returns, wearing his own set of clean gloves. He goes into the executive suite and comes back out a few minutes later, grinning like the Cheshire Cat.

I give him a questioning look and he just raises his wrist to reveal the new watch stacked on top of the one he was already wearing. “Special delivery.”

“You were going to let that just blow up?”

He shrugs. “I’m still expensing it to the client.”

We go down to the thirteenth floor together with the kid. Brian picks up the bomb, and checks for any other evidence the cleaners might have missed. The bodies of the guards are gone and the bullet holes have been filled—like it never happened. But apparently bomb removal isn’t a part of their job. Either that, or Brian wanted to keep that bit of evidence himself.

When we get inside the elevator, he wipes off each button.

“What about the stair railing? I think I touched it,” I say.

Brian shakes his head. “You and hundreds of other people. Nobody ever cleans those, so no one’s fingerprints will stand out. Besides, no one knows what happened here tonight.”

That’s so gross, that nobody ever cleans the railing in the emergency stairwell. I try not to dwell on that thought.

Brian looks down at the boy, suddenly remembering he’s here. And this kid has instincts only living with criminals can create.

“I-I won’t tell anyone,” he whispers.

Brian nods and looks awkwardly away from the kid.

When we get down to the main floor lobby, Brian says, “Get him to someone who can help him and then meet me at the car.”

I usher the boy outside into the warm muggy night. All of this has happened and the parade is still going on. It’s so surreal. I hold the boy’s hand as we walk toward the parade, the loud fireworks still popping and exploding above us as the atmosphere shifts from one of blood and death and loss to a summer carnival energy.

“Are you hungry?” I ask.

The kid nods, so even though I know Brian would be pissed, I stop at a food cart and get him a corn dog and a soda. I get one for myself as well. Then I give him ten dollars. I don’t know why, but he might want an ice cream or something. Or a sparkler.

I get down to his eye level while he bites into the corn dog and say, “Do you see that fireman over there?” I point, because the last thing I want to do is direct him to police.

He nods.

“Finish your corn dog, and then go tell him you’re lost, and he’ll help you get back home to your mom.”

“I don’t have a mom,” he says with his mouth full.

My chest tightens at this. My God, what have we done to this child?

“Who do you live with?”

“My daddy.”

Fuck.

“The fireman will help you. Just tell him what you told me, okay?”

“O-okay.”

And there it is, that brave face again where he’s trying not to cry. It takes everything I have in me to turn and walk away, to push through the crowd and walk the few blocks to the waiting car. Brian already has the engine started, when I get there.

To his credit, he doesn’t say anything about the corn dog. He just takes a sip of my drink and backs the car out of our parking spot.

“Everything go okay?”

I just nod, and he pulls out on the road to take us back to the house.