Chapter 11 You Know What I Am #3
“Food is food,” Brady said gently. He’d seen enough street kids to know this was reality. It seemed cruel to teach them that sex was a commodity at so young an age, but a body needed fuel.
“Yeah. Wasn’t my favorite, though,” Eric said on a bitter laugh. “So when Jayanne’s cousin came looking for me, terrified because her husband’s boss had assaulted her—was stalking her and promised to do it all over again, well, I figured hey, I did it once, I could do it again.”
Brady should have been prepared. He’d thought he was. But he’d never really said the word, not to himself.
“Killer for hire,” he breathed, seeing it all so clearly.
Eric sagged against him, like the hiding had taken all his energy and now he was sapped. “I prefer assassin,” he said, his swank accent coming back on like a tattered disguise.
“No rock this time?”
Eric grunted. “A gun.”
He proceeded to regale Brady with his first kill, from dumb mistake to dumb mistake to once again catching a scumbag with his pants down. When he was done, Brady felt the beginnings of a smile tugging on his lips.
“You’re lucky to be alive,” he said, shaking his head.
“God, am I ever.” And that was pure Charlie, Southie and all. “But I knew it then. I took the money and learned some more about guns—about the whole idea, really. If I was gonna be a Martin Q. Blank—”
“Who?” Brady asked.
“John Cusack in Grosse Pointe Blank,” Eric said.
“It was either him or Jason Bourne. But if I was going to be an assassin, I was going to be a good one, one who wouldn’t get caught.
One who only killed people who needed killing.
I did research, you know? The people I killed had to be bad—and a lot of them were abusive men, and I honestly have no regrets about them.
I wish I did.” Eric sighed and stiffened in Brady’s arms. “But even if it means you walk out right now, go back to the bedroom to sleep alone, leave me here, I can’t lie to you. ”
Brady could sense the effort it took for Eric to straighten and look at him.
“I killed bad people,” he said soberly, those arctic eyes bruised and vulnerable in the moonlight.
“But I did kill them. And some of them I killed for money—a lot of it. And I grew up poor, and I won’t lie, I’ve enjoyed the shit out of that.
But some of them I killed for free. Because they were hurting people—women, children—I killed one fucker who liked raping college-aged boys.
They were terrified to tell their parents, their girlfriends, anybody.
I-I did that one for free. But you understand?
That thing Ace did? The one that it took you so long to wrap your head around?
That act defines my entire life. So I get it.
I get it if you want to sleep alone tonight.
If you want to forget you and me ever happened.
But… please let me know. Don’t… don’t pull in like a snail in its shell, okay? ”
Oh God. If he’d said that in his cold, aloof, “Eric Christiansen” voice, maybe—maybe—Brady could have done it.
Maybe he could have packed up the remains of his morals, his soul, his pride, and shoved them in his pocket and pulled back into the rear of the camper, then marched out the next day to risk his life—hell, to risk the life of the only friends he had—on a perhaps fruitless quest to make the world a little safer, a little less corrupt, for the innocent and vulnerable.
But Eric’s—no, Charlie’s—voice was pure lower-class Boston. Southie, Brady supposed. And gruff.
Real.
A killer. Yes. Brady wasn’t going to argue—Charlie Grackle was a killer.
But Brady wasn’t a saint. People did the best they could, and Brady had never felt as safe as he did right now, staring into a killer’s eyes.
“I’m still here, Charlie,” he whispered, holding his hand to Eric’s cheek. “Not going anywhere.”
Eric nodded and swallowed. “Good,” he said. His mouth quirked up, just a little. “Because we’re miles into the desert, and I seriously need GPS to find the freeway again.”
Brady smiled back. “Who says I have no sense of self-preservation?”
Eric sobered. “I do,” he said. “But I’m going to try to keep you safe.”
“Same,” Brady promised. He leaned forward and rubbed their temples together. “Can we open the back windows? Open the curtains?”
“Yeah, why?” Eric pulled back.
“’Cause I’m freezing my ass off, and you’ve got a really good comforter.” He took a breath. “And I want to hold you tonight.”
“Same,” Eric said softly. “And don’t worry—the alarm systems are still intact. Now that we’re stopped, I can set an alarm.”
Brady had to ask. “So, uhm, is this thing like an aluminum can just waiting to be filled with holes or—”
Eric snorted softly. When he spoke next, his Southie accent was merely a memory, and the smooth affluent traveler was in its place. “I’ve been a paid killer for twenty years, darling. If you think I haven’t reinforced the siding in the back, you’re sadly mistaken.”
Brady thought he might sleep a little better tonight. “Alarm systems, reinforced walls—you spoil me.”
Eric patted his cheek. “All part of the Winnebago experience, my good sir. I aim to please.”
brADY LAY curled under the comforter as Eric knocked on the Kevlar-enforced panels in the RV.
Then he opened the curtains and the windows, and while the air was brisk, the space under the blankets stayed toasty.
Before Eric crawled in, the lights alerted them to something, and as Eric held up a pair of night vision goggles, he laughed softly.
“What?” Brady asked.
“Coyote. He was very surprised.” He handed Brady a tablet with a 360 night-vision view of the camper, and Brady nodded.
“I may sleep a little,” he confessed. “But I think we should start moving long before morning.”
“Agreed,” Eric said softly. “I’m going to text Jai for some details about our friend the ugly flower before I go to sleep. I’d like to know who found us.”
“Hopefully he took a picture,” Brady said, but he felt a moment of squeamishness. He may not have liked most of his coworkers, but he hadn’t wanted to see them dead.
But then, that hadn’t been his choice, had it?
Still, as Eric sat in bed, Brady wrapped around him to keep him warm while he texted Jai. His phone on a battery, he steeled himself for the picture Eric showed him.
“Shit,” he said, scrambling to sit up.
“Shit, what? And go back to where you were.” Eric’s voice took on an injured tone. “I, uhm, liked having you there.”
“Okay,” Brady muttered. “Fine. Have it your way. But you guys should know, that’s not a deputy of the Southern California Sheriff’s office.”
“He doesn’t look like a professional,” Eric said contemplatively.
Brady eyed the corpse—and there was no doubt it was a corpse, since its neck was very much…
askew. “Not a professional law officer,” Brady muttered.
“But he is a professional meth dealer. Not a manufacturer—one of those guys that’s smart enough to sell other people’s product, because he likes—erm, liked—his skin unbarbecued.
Arlen claimed we could never get enough evidence against him to bring to the DA, but… .”
He paused as the implications of this guy trying to kill him aligned themselves on his mental railroad track, along with four fuckers who had met a guy in a bar and taken a side gig to their planned bank robbery.
“Arlen’s obviously crooked,” Eric said.
“Well, yes,” Brady said. “But not just on the take from the people on the phone, whoever they are. He’s on the take from the drug dealers in the town, and probably from the thieves and the mobsters and all the other people Ace and company have been picking off.”
“And now,” Eric said, obviously making the same connections, “he’s calling in markers.”
“Great,” Brady muttered. “We’re not only being chased down by crooked cops, we’re being chased down by all the scumbags they’ve been on the take from. That’s awesome.”
“Well, it’s something everybody else should know,” Eric muttered, typing quickly. He pressed Send and then added more to it and pressed Send again.
In less than a second, his phone started to buzz—repeatedly.
Eric stared at it, replying where he could, and finally slumped back against the pillows. “Shit,” he said, his voice rusty.
“Shit what?” Oh, Brady didn’t like what this said at all.
“Well, tonight after we all left, a guy approached Ace from the desert side of the house—somebody Ace had apparently let go when he could have killed the guy. The guy said Ace’s garage was being watched from the freeway.
Ace said okay and then proceeded to rewrite the plan.
It’s better,” he admitted, “but we’re moving out an hour before dawn. ”
“That’s it?” Brady blurted. “They’re not… I don’t know, running?”
Eric let out a sigh. “You grew up around working people, Brady. What do you suggest they do?”
Brady wanted to cry. He got it. The house, the garage—they were… well, home. Everything he knew about Ace and Sonny told him that they wouldn’t run unless the place was on fire, and even then, they’d come out shooting to get as many fuckers as they could.
“I didn’t want this to happen,” he whispered. “I—our plan was so simple. Go in, steal the phone, drive to LA. But we’ve got the entire department and the people they should be putting in jail trying to kill us, and people I’m starting to care about are going to get hurt!”
Eric wrapped his arm around Brady’s shoulder and squeezed.
“Brady, you took an oath, you believe in law and order and in helping people. I get it. But just because these people haven’t gone through channels doesn’t mean they don’t feel the same way.
You know this already. We’ve all got a personal stake in not letting that phone go free.
In not letting Arlen Cuthbert get away with whatever he’s doing.
In not letting child-exploiting monsters get away with it.
So don’t worry about Ace and Sonny. The thing about this group of people helping us?
They’re all volunteers. They wouldn’t be involved if they didn’t want to be.
You probably think that taking you to bed made me feel obligated.
You couldn’t be more wrong. I’ve killed lovers, Brady, do you get that?
I found out my last lover took on a contract to kill good people—people fighting the good fight, if you know what I mean, and doing it on the side of the law, mostly.
I had to kill him. He wouldn’t have stopped until they were dead.
So being in my bed doesn’t guarantee my help.
Being on the side of the innocent—that’ll do it. ”
Brady knew he was staring and couldn’t stop.
“You… you, uhm… what?”
Eric swallowed. “He was going to kill them. I told him not to take the contract, because if nothing else taking it after I said no would make me fair game to our entire community. He said, ‘We all have to die, darling,’ and as it turns out, he was fucking right.”
On the one hand, this was appalling—in a lot of ways—including the betrayal of a lover, which for all his aplomb, Brady knew had to hurt.
And on the other hand, it was reassuring.
Because it meant Eric was not bullshit. It meant when he said he cared about right and wrong, he meant it.
Brady may have to get used to how he meant it, but he could say the examples Eric had given so far had been pretty convincing. That some men need killing.
Maybe Brady was broken in the same place, he thought, but he hadn’t known it before.
Or maybe realizing that his department had been planning to kill him and write it off as his own incompetence had broken it for him.
All he knew—all he really knew—this cold winter night in the desert, was that the man next to him, providing warmth, comfort, and safety, was not the worst thing the world had to offer.
That maybe, in a perfect world, one that hadn’t broken him, Charlie Grackle might be the best.