Authors: Julie Hockley
I grabbed my steak knife and slit the cocaine package. I stuck my finger in the powder
and licked it. It was perfect, pure. Bolivian cocaine. As the rest of the table tested
the merchandise, a sense of awe spread around the tables. Seetoo leaned back in his
chair and watched me. We both knew I had made my deci
sion.
It wasn’t the first time I had come across such purity, but the stuff was definitely
hard to come by. Ignazio wasn’t just a great host … he had great connect
ions.
I turned to Spider’s table and noticed that he had already checked the merchandise
and was deep in conversation with Feleti, Ignazio’s second-in-com
mand.
Seetoo and Zhongshu left before the flaming desserts were se
rved.
When the plates were practically licked clean and the girls came back, I pushed my
chair back and met Spider at the
door.
Ignazio was midsentence with the biker boss when he spotted us leaving. He left the
bar to come say good-bye. He and I looked each other in the eyes as we shook hands
and pa
rted.
****
“I need you to arrange meetings,” I told Spider after we were dropped off in downtown
Mont
real.
“I know,” he grumbled, and we parted ways without another
word.
While Spider got people together, I had someone to
see.
Gabrielle—my Montreal girl. She was a dark-haired beauty I’d met some time ago. I
was at a meeting, and she was the eye candy. She now had an apartment in the entertainment
district. It was a small place but expensive, and at least it wasn’t the shithole
she lived in when we
met.
I used my key to open the door and prayed she was out or asleep. I stepped through
the door and listened in the dark. All was q
uiet.
As I made my way around her oversized furniture, the room lit solely by the glow of
streetlights through the window, I noticed for the first time some of her pictures
spread across her tiny little living room. They could have been pictures of her family,
her friends, her world. Who knew? We had never done much tal
king.
“Keith,” I heard Gabrielle call out from her bedroom. She had heard me come in.
Shit.
Gabrielle knew me as Keith because that was what I was drinking the night we had hooke
d up.
I placed an envelope on her kitchen counter and left. The elevator doors closed just
as she was opening her apartment door. She depended on the money I left her every
time, but I couldn’t
stay.
I couldn’t just go back to the way things were, to the man I had once
been.
All I could think about was how every time Emmy fell asleep on me, she would dig her
fist into my stomach and clench my shirt so tight that it stretched the material.
As if she were afraid of waking up a
lone.
Someday, it would be someone else’s T-shirt that she would ruin. She wouldn’t wake
up alone for
ever.
But I w
ould.
A taste of Emmy, and everything else tasted like
sand.
I left Gabrielle enough money so that she would leave her crappy apartment, disappear,
and never have to depend on guys like me a
gain.
****
By the time all the bosses were gathered together again, it was the next night, and
we were well outside the city. They were all seated around a table, while the underbosses
waited in another room. Spider sat by the wall, a few feet behind me. He had been
able to find us an empty windshield factory to stage our meeting. It was common ground
for all ton
ight.
Ignazio and Seetoo flanked me as the room quietly awaited my deci
sion.
Ignazio grinned, while Seetoo gazed ahead stone-f
aced.
“Everyone around this table is going to make more money this year than you have in
your whole lifetime. But the only way that will happen is if you all work together.
From this day on, everyone is now a captain in this Coalition except for one of you,
who will lead and report directly to me. My decision is final and is upheld by the
American capt
ains.”
I got up and stood behind Ignazio, placing my hands on his shoul
ders.
I slid my hand to my waistband, grabbed the steak knife from his restaurant, and plunged
it into his neck, severing his carotid artery. Spider held Ignazio down while he bled
out, and I took my
seat.
“All profit must be handed to the leader of the Coalition for distribution,” I continued,
my hands splayed over the t
able.
Seetoo threw a brick of cocaine—the party favor from Ignazio’s merrymaking—on the
table. Pure, perfect coc
aine.
Bolivian cocaine was indeed difficult to obtain, and I had specifically ordered this
shipment from Peru before it had apparently gone missing on its way to the Port of
Montreal. Ignazio had reported that Somalian pirates had captured the missing ship,
seizing the pure, perfect coc
aine.
Bolivian cocaine had been Ignazio’s mistake. I would have recognized that purity anywhere,
as would Spider and Seetoo. Seetoo knew he had captured leadership before Ignazio
had even ordered the desserts to be brought
out.
Ignazio slumped to the floor, and Spider moved him over. I took my time, looking each
captain in the eye. No one m
oved.
“If you steal, if you take
anything
from the Coalition, you
will
be replaced. If you lie, you will be replaced. If you fall out of line, you will
be repl
aced.”
I nodded at Spider, and he opened the door. Feleti, Ignazio’s underboss, walked in,
looking ahead as he stepped over Ignazio’s body and calmly took his place at the table.
After Feleti had willingly shared Ignazio’s betrayal following Spider’s prodding,
it had been decided that he would live to take Ignazio’s place as cap
tain.
Seetoo’s underboss then came through the door, carrying a couple of clear plastic
garbage bags with almost as many heads as there were men around the table. At this
sight, there was a slight gasp from the captains. All of their underbosses—they each
had one—had been shot through the head and beheaded. The bags were thrown on the t
able.
“Your leader is Seetoo. How you do business, how you make money, who you’re allied
to, this will all change from now on.” I pointed to the bags on the table. “Seetoo
has made his first decision as leader. I will leave him to tell you how he will help
you become richer than you could ima
gine.”
Spider and I left behind a dead, silent room and left Seetoo to take the reins as
leader of the Canadian underworld. We walked through the factory as headless bodies
were being fed to the giant glass ovens by Seetoo’s
men.
“You think Seetoo can do it?” Spider asked me as we were on our way to di
nner.
I shrugged. “If he doesn’t, it’s his
head.”
Ignazio was the fifteenth man I ki
lled.
****
I flew back to Callister, leaving Spider to iron out the details with Seetoo and get
my drug shipment back from the M
afia.
The last place I wanted to be was Callister because I knew that being so close to
Emmy and not being able to see her would be more painful than getting my fingernails
yanked out one by one. But Carly was now refusing to fly or travel anywhere, and I
had to talk to her about the m
oney.
By the time I drove up to our Callister hideout, I was fuming. It wasn’t the fact
that Carly didn’t want to travel when she was barely pregnant or the fact that I’d
had to reschedule a meeting because I had to make an extra stop in Callister; it was
the fact that she was making me come back to Callister, forcing me to be so close
to Emmy, dangling a damn carrot in front of my face—and it was the fact that she was
doing this to me because she was pregnant, because she wanted to be pregnant, because
she thought it was okay for us to act like we were normal people who could have families
and love and be loved uncondition
ally.
By the time I raced into our private parking lot, punched the elevator button, and
stomped down our carpeted hallway, I could feel every clenched muscle in my
body.
Tiny was sitting on the couch watchin
g TV.
“Where’s Carly?” I asked
him.
“Lying down.” He thumbed toward Carly’s bed
room.
Of course she was. Because that was what normal pregnant people did. They lay down
in the middle of the
day.
I stormed into my room and felt like flinging my bag against the wall. But I didn’t.
I set it down calmly, rationally, like the leader of the underworld ought to be
have.
And then I saw the bed where Emmy had woken up after Rocco had hit her over the head
in the cemetery. And then I saw the chair in the corner from where I had watched her
sleep, worried over her, worried about how I was going to handle everything. Carly
was torturing me, practically pushing me to the brink of my emot
ions.
I slumped on the chair and sank my head into my hands. I turned my head and watched
over the city, my eyes making their way toward the direction of Emily’s slum of a
neighbor
hood.
I didn’t know how long I’d been staring out the window when I heard the door
open.
“I’m sorry I made you come here to meet me.” She was blanched and struggled to make
it to the bed to sit. I thought pregnant women were supposed to
glow.
“I didn’t tell Spider about the money you asked me to get,” she tol
d me.
“Th
anks.”
“It’s not like Spider and I talk much these days,” she said. “I was able to get a
good amount of your money rele
ased.”
I turned my eyes back to the
city.
“Are you going to tell me what you’re planning to do with all that money?” Carly a
sked.
I didn’t answer
her.
The only sound came from whatever show Tiny was watching o
n TV.
But Carly finally ripped through the silence. “It feels like we’re falling apart,
Cam. You and Spider. You and me. Spider and me. We hardly speak anymore. And you’ve
been so secretive. It’s like you’re trying to shut us out of everything, and I don’t
know
why.”
“I don’t need to report on what I do with my personal f
unds.”
“I was hoping you were going to tell me that you had found a way to go get Emily
back.”
I flipped my eyes to her. “That’s not going to ha
ppen.”
“Why
not?”
“Because Emmy is better off without me.” I knew that Carly had never approved of my
plan to fake my death and release Emmy from me. But the fact that Carly was bringing
this back up again made me a
ngry.
“Emily isn’t the porcelain doll I thought she was,” Carly continued, unscathed by
my determination. “I’ll admit that she’s innocent, even a little naïve. But there’s
something about her, about how we all change when she’s here. It’s like she’s a light
at the end of a dark
road.”
Carly was an alien to me now. The lovely words coming out of her mouth were not those
of the sarcastic, angry, bitter Carly I knew and loved. Yet despite all the borderline
bullshit religious crap she was insinuating, I knew what she was trying to say. Emmy
brought us—brought me—
love.
But I could only bring her
pain.
“Having Emily here, it was like everything felt right for us. Like things would finally
get better somehow. Like maybe we would find a way out of all this blackness,” Carly
persi
sted.
Why was Carly so intent on rehashing this? She was losing it, losing her grip on rea
lity.
“There’s no way out, Carly. I figured that out a long time ago. Emmy wouldn’t change
that for us. She would just get jammed, like we are. This is our life. Live with it.
Emily isn’t coming back. The day you get that in your head is the day we mov
e on.”
All of a sudden, Carly winced, from the outside in. She held her breath and clenched
her teeth. Then she shut her
eyes.
Redness seeped through her beige p
ants.
When she opened her eyes, she shot up from the bed. I could see her start melting
as she put her hand to her soaked pant leg, touched it, pulled it away, and stared
at the blood on her doll-sized hand. She started shaking her head, her eyes filling
with every shake. When she looked up at me, she was already unconscious. I caught
her before she slumped to the gr
ound.
****
Doctor Lorne was used to getting woken up in a panic, even if it was in the middle
of the day. Everything for us was always a matter of life and d
eath.
Tiny helped me carry Carly to my car, and he called Doctor Lorne as we sped out of
the city. Doctor Lorne was sobered when we got to his farmhouse. Carly was starting
to wake up as I carried her into Doctor Lorne’s fully operating emergency
room.
“You’ll be okay,” I whispered to her, though I hardly believed it my
self.
She stared at the ceiling as Doctor Lorne bent over her, and a nurse directed me out
of the
room.
Doctor Lorne’s farm had been built in a conclave on his property. While I felt like
a gofer every time I came here, at least it was buried and away from prying eyes as
we dragged bloodied bodies out for Doctor Lorne to
fix.