30. Twenty-Nine

My head hurt too bad to sleep so I went for a walk. With all the locked doors in the tower, and my limited clearance to explore, I couldn’t go too far, so I went back down to the chapel and sat in the front pew. It was one of the few doors that never seemed to be closed, which was how a church should be.

Sitting in that pew, in the silence of the night, I thought back to the last time I’d been in a proper church. It’d been Mason’s funeral. They held it down at the First Presbyterian there in town. I remember walking up to the casket and telling myself to pretend he was asleep, that he’d wake up any minute and everything would be fine. Except when I got there, he didn’t look like he was asleep. He looked like he was dead. That’s when it really sank in that I was alone in the world without the best half of me.

I closed my eyes, trying to remember the sound of his voice, and then suddenly it was right beside me.

“You always hated going to church,” came Mason’s familiar half-amused growl.

I smiled, eyes still closed. “I hated that the sermons were long, and I had to wait for the food after.”

“Worth it, though. Grandma always made the best spaghetti on Sundays,” he said.

I smiled. “And she made a lot of it. Enough we were eating spaghetti sandwiches on Tuesday after school.”

“God, I forgot about spaghetti sandwiches.” Mason made a gagging sound.

If I opened my eyes and turned my head, he’d be right next to me in one of his nice button-ups and his dress pants. He only put on a tie for Christmas and Easter… and his funeral. “I miss her,” I said. “I think about her a lot.”

“She says the same about you. Always complaining about how ornery you are. Thank goodness they don’t have wooden spoons here or she’d be waving one at me right now.”

I smiled. That was Gran for you. It was thanks to her we’d turned out as decent as we had. “I miss you too,” I said, my throat tight. “Things ain’t been right since you left.”

“Things’ll get better, Boone. They’re always worse before they’re better.”

“That’s true, I suppose.”

A long, deep quiet settled over the sanctuary. I knew my brother wasn’t really there, and I was talking to myself. Maybe I wasn’t even awake. Part of me wanted to believe it, though. I wanted the comfort of my brother’s presence, the familiar ease of knowing I wasn’t alone in the world.

“I met someone,” I told him quietly. “I’m going to marry him.”

“You? Get married?” Mason scoffed. “Someone call the cops. My brother’s been replaced by an alien.”

“I’m serious, you jackass.”

“I know. You two deserve each other. You’ll be all right. Gran says she read it in her tea leaves this morning. She also said you need to quit your drinking and smoking so much.”

I took a deep breath. It’d been over a week since my last drink, and I didn’t have plans to fall back into that habit. It was funny how it took all this to make me sober for the first time in years. Maybe Algerone beating the shit out of me would turn out to be a blessing in disguise. Gran would like that.

“You can tell Gran I’ve been sober for eight days,” I said. “And I’m gonna stay that way. As for the smoking… Well, a man’s got to have his vices. We can’t all be as saintly as you, Mason.”

Mason’s laugh filled me with a strange longing to reach out and touch him, but he wasn’t there. Not really. “You’ll be all right then. You just got to keep on trucking, and you’ll come out the other side of this just fine.” Fabric rustled like he was standing, and still I didn’t open my eyes, not even as the weight of his hand settled on my shoulder. “I’m proud of you, Boone. We all are.”

A loud whirring sound had me snapping open my eyes and looking around for Mason frantically, but the only person in the chapel was a janitor with a vacuum cleaner. Mason was gone, if he’d ever been there at all.

I decided it would be best if I got out of the janitor’s way and showed myself out of the little chapel. On my way back to the elevator, I stopped at the pharmacy to grab a bag of Dum-Dums. A clock near the elevators dinged at my approach. It was three in the morning, the witching hour. I was busy wondering why it was called that as I stood there waiting for the elevator car to come down.

The door slid open, but the elevator wasn’t empty. Shepherd was inside, along with three others. There was a woman with him, close to him in age. She had a baby in a car carrier with a blue knitted hat on. Next to the woman was a young man, closer to Xion’s age than mine. He had two piercings in his lip and tattoos covering his throat and arms. The cold glare he shot my way set off alarm bells in my head, but those were quickly replaced by even louder alarms when Shepherd grabbed me by the shirt and jerked me forward.

“What are you looking at?” he growled in an uncharacteristically deep voice.

I put my hands up. “Easy, man. I’m just out for a walk. I didn’t even mean to bump into you!”

“Well, look elsewhere. They’re mine!”

The thing about telling me to look elsewhere was it only made me want to look at them more. My eyes darted to the people in the elevator against my will, and the next thing I knew, my back was being slammed into the wall, my feet an inch off the ground. The woman gasped in horror, covering her mouth.

The young man stepped forward and lightly put a hand on Shepherd’s shoulder. “Look at him,” he said. “He’s wounded, and he’s trapped here, just like we were. This prey isn’t worth your time, Keras.”

Keras? Who the fuck was Keras?

But as I looked straight at Shepherd, my blood chilled. He looked the same as he had that day we met at the funeral home in Liar’s Corner, the day we struck the deal that eventually led to me getting Xion. The changes in him were subtle, but they were there. The man in front of me definitely wasn’t the Shepherd Laskin I was used to dealing with.

Keras growled, flashing his teeth at me, but eventually he released me. “If you tell anyone you saw us leaving—”

“I won’t,” I said quickly, staying pressed against the wall. “I didn’t see anything or anyone. I was just out for a walk because I couldn’t sleep.”

That answer seemed to satisfy him. He snorted and took a step back, pausing to adjust his jacket. He gave me one last warning glare before putting his hand on the woman’s back and guiding her past me.

The young man lingered a moment, pausing to pick up the bag of Dum-Dums I’d dropped. He held it out to me without meeting my eyes. “You dropped this.”

I stared at the man, unable to shake the uneasy feeling that something was wrong with him. I just couldn’t tell what it was.

“Eli,” Shepherd—no, that was Keras—barked, and the young man’s head shot up. “Come.”

Eli picked up my hand, shoved the bag into it, and rushed to follow Shepherd. He glanced once over his shoulder before they all disappeared around the corner.

“Well, that was fucking weird,” I muttered.

It wasn’t until later, when I was settling back into bed, that I realized who I’d run into. Those people must’ve been whoever he’d done all this for, the people he said I was keeping him from by not turning Xion in.

But who the hell were they?

I tried to shake the strange meeting from my thoughts as I made my way back to my room, but my night was only about to get more tense. Algerone was waiting for me outside the door, a familiar black gun case in hand.

“I was wondering when you’d show up,” I said, thumbing my keycard.

Algerone put the case down next to him and we stared each other down.

“How’s your head?” he asked eventually.

“Better, but not a hundred percent. Don’t worry, though. I can make the shot.”

“I know you can. That’s why I gave the job to you.” He kicked the case toward me. “But you’ll be needing this.”

I put my foot on the case to stop it from sliding further. Inside was my trusty McMillan TAC-50 sniper rifle, which I’d been using on jobs for years. We were old friends, and I knew that gun inside and out.

“You know that’s an old model,” Algerone said. “And it has more firepower than you need. I could get you a top-of-the-line FN Ballista if you’d like. The best one on the market.”

“No, thanks. I like a good old-fashioned American-made murder machine, even if it doesn’t have all the bells and whistles. You can keep your European shit.”

His lips twitched down into a brief frown. “I’d like to put this hostility behind us, Boone.”

I cocked my head to the side and arched an eyebrow. “You beat me half to death, kidnapped me and my men, and tried to bribe Xion away from me. We aren’t exactly going to be besties after that performance.”

He nodded and stepped forward. “That doesn’t mean we have to be enemies.”

I grunted as I bent over to pick up the gun case. “I have a gun and you’re still breathing. I’d say that means we’re not enemies.” I pushed past him and slid my keycard through the lock. The lock popped open.

Algerone put his hand on the door, holding it shut. “Like it or not, Xion is my son. I have a right to get to know him.”

“The only rights you have are the ones written in the damn constitution, Lucky.” I spat his nickname like a curse. “And if you haven’t gotten the message yet, Xion’s not for sale. No matter how much money or expensive junk you offer him, he ain’t interested.”

His jaw clenched and released. “What do you want me to do then? What could he possibly expect from me that I haven’t offered?”

“Time,” I replied, and he jerked like I’d shot him in the chest. “He needs time to get to know you. Time to forgive you. Time to learn that you’re not going to throw him away like he means nothing to you the minute his existence becomes inconvenient for you. Trust doesn’t happen overnight, and you’ve got an uphill battle if you want it from him. I’m not the one in the way, Al. You are. Stop demanding he love you and learn how to love him.”

He glanced away. “Love is not something I’m capable of. Not even when it comes to my children.”

“Then you’ll have to settle for his trust, which is going to be just as hard to earn.”

He closed his eyes, sighed, and took his hand off the door. The lock had re-engaged, so I slid my keycard through it again. This time, when the light turned green, he didn’t stop me from pulling open the door.

I slid the gun case inside and paused. “Just so you know, I asked him to marry me tonight. He said yes. We’re going to be family, like it or not.”

Algerone lifted his eyes from the floor and said flatly, “Congratulations.”

I snorted and shook my head. I didn’t know why I expected more from him. While I knew we might never like each other, he could at least pretend to be decent to me, especially if he wanted to build a relationship with his son. I had no plans to stand in the way of that, but ultimately it was up to Xion if he wanted to maintain contact with his father.

“Boone?”

I grunted and turned around to lean on the door frame. “Yeah?”

Algerone took a deep breath. “Thank you for taking care of him. I… I’m in your debt.” He winced slightly as if saying it were painful.

I could’ve said something smart, or made a dig at his stupid decision not to be involved from the start, but I decided to be the bigger man for once. “You’re welcome.”

He buttoned up his jacket and walked away. Maybe there was hope for him yet.

I closed the door and slid the gun case to the middle of the room, unpacking the pieces of my rifle one at a time. Humming an old marching cadence, I cleaned the gun inside and out until the surface was polished spotless. Then I laid out a photo of my target, Kevin Calcin, while I counted my bullets. It’d only take one to do the job, but I brought plenty just in case.

An hour before dawn, I rose, gun case in one hand and pockets full of Dum-Dums, and I went down to meet my driver in the garage. In two hours, we’d be in Louisville. In six, Kevin Calcin would be dead. In twelve, I hoped to be on my way home to be with the man I loved.

One more job. One more shot, and this would all be over.