20. The Escape
Chapter twenty
The Escape
Eoghan
S he looked at the back seat and shut her eyes. She turned to Sinead and whispered, "There's no car seat."
The agitation in her voice grated me almost as much as the fact that she wasn’t turning to me with her concerns.
Jesus, did she not know her life was at stake?
“You can’t have a kid in a car without a car seat.” She held our son to her chest, and he held onto her in return. The bond of mother and son was obviously strong.
A bond that I was bitterly not a part of.
I grabbed Kira by the arm, and dragged her to the back passenger door.
As my mind screamed for me to have patience, the dire circumstances commanded me to just throw her in the back seat, and damn all the rest.
"Sorry, love, we didn't get a chance to go to Toys”R”Us while we were out. We'll have to make do." Lives were at fucking stake, and if she wanted a car seat with a five point racing harness, I’d get her one. But for now, I fucking needed them all to just get in the damn car so we could go!
"They're inbound," Shiny said, "Sorry Kira, we'll have to do it some other time."
At Shiny's words, not mine , Kira finally acquiesced, stepping into the back seat as I held the door open, the boy on her lap, both her arms tightly drawn around him.
My irritation was palpable, when I got in the driver's seat, with her in the back. Shiny got into the front passenger seat, slumping into the chair, and gritting out, “Chill with the sourpuss, Eoghan.”
In her own way, she was trying to help me. Being short with Kira now, even with the imminent Italian arrival, was not a good fucking idea if I wanted marital contentment.
"The trunk is armored, so are the windows," I said, just to have something useful to say. Something that my wife might actually listen to. "Stay down until we're safe. We'll get a bloody car seat when we stop."
I could have been a bit calmer about it, but overall, not bad.
"How did they find me?" Kira asked. "Did you lead them to me?"
She was accusing me of leading them to her? That was bloody annoying.
She had no idea how many people I had killed to protect her, how many daggers in the dark I had broken, how many sleepless nights I had spent interrogating bastards that were trying to find her. How I would do it all again, if I knew that she’d be alright in the end.
As I pulled the car from the curb, I saw headlights moving into a vacant spot behind us.
Fucking Italians were as amateur as they came. Brute muscle, but not a lot in the brain. Durante’s people were fucking amateurs. Untrained.
"Watch them," I told Shiny, nodding at the rearview mirror.
I didn't need to tell her. She was already doing it, but it felt good to order her around. That's what little sisters were for, after all.
The car got to the curb, and two men ducked out, running into Kira's building.
"Italian," she confirmed. "I see their weapons on their belts."
She didn't know they were Italian, per se. But we didn't need to fucking confirm it either.
I leaned on the gas, still trying to make sure we seemed like we were nothing but a normal family on a drive.
"Any of them glance at us?" I asked.
"Yes," Shiny said, reaching under her seat to pull out a Desert Eagle, charging it, before handing it over to me.
If they were smart - which the jury was still out on - they’d memorize our plates. Or, at least, the make and model.
I pulled a cigarette from my inner pocket, and put it to my lips, before pulling out the lighter and lighting up.
“Eoghan!” Shiny punched me in the arm.
“What?” I said, glaring at her for a moment before sticking my eyes on the road.
I had smoked in the car for as long as I had known her, and she’d never bitched about it before. What now?
“Second-hand smoke isn’t good for a toddler!” Kira said, as Shiny grabbed my cigarette, and said, “You fucking moron.”
“Bollocks,” I said, annoyed, feeling the need for nicotine as I drove away, agitated that everything that could possibly go wrong, was.
If we were in New York City I would use a serpentine pattern to get us to our destination, but in the fucking sticks, there was only one way in and out. Side streets lead to dead ends, and we’d just be wasting gas.
Shiny looked over her shoulder, at Kira. "If anything happens to us, there's a gun under your seat."
I reached into my pocket and grabbed my wallet out, tossing it at Shiny. "Hand her my cards. If we die, Kira, I need you to take my cards and do whatever you need to to save yourself and our boy.”
I chewed my words, as I fisted the steering wheel. I did not want this to be a discussion. I needed her to follow my orders.
“You can find your way to the home of Jericho Vasiliev. Aoibheann is with him and she will help you. Her number is in the wallet. So is Dairo’s." I swallowed the lump in my throat. “One word from you, love, and you’ll have half the city’s killers running to your aid. Use them.”
I tensed as Shiny pulled out all my credit cards, and handed them to Kira.
“I won’t need them,” she said, as Shiny held my cards towards her, turning in her seat. Kira made no move to grab them.
She cradled our boy on her lap, leaning down to be lower than the windows, protectively covering our boy, who seemed delighted to be in the car but not strapped into a seat. The boy liked his freedom. He was a chip off the old block.
And his Mum had some secrets. What was her escape plan, if things went sideways?
"Take them anyway, wife ," I growled, agitated that she had even more secrets, even now. I needed to pry them from her, one by fucking one. But not yet. Not in front of our child. And certainly not in front of the judgmental eyes of Shiny Flanagan. Then, softer, I added, "Just in case, love. Take them."
She reached out and placed the cards in her pocket, and I let out an audible breath.
“You know my pin.” It was the same as it had always been.
When I watched her nod in the rearview mirror, my heart fluttered, just a little. Because she remembered something. Maybe I lived in her mind as real and concrete as she had lived in mine.
"How did they find me?" I could feel Kira's gaze boring into the side of my head, and again, it was an accusation against me.
I had no earthly clue. I looked at Shiny and lifted my brows in a silent request for her to give an answer before I inadvertently found myself in the dog house again.
"Social media," Shiny said as she pulled an M4 out from under her seat and laid it across her lap. Her vigilant, light eyes scanned the passing landscape. "That woman who called the cops on you went viral. Apparently one of her friends leaked the footage for some internet clout. Everyone is calling her a Karen."
Ah, the internet. What a fucking cess pool.
I glanced at Kira in the rearview mirror and she was blushing.
I winced, remembering that day. I’d lucked out and recognized the copper’s name, and appealed to a sense of family, while also giving him a substantial bribe.
"No one thinks you're at fault," Shiny said. "But the videos where they didn't blur you out... well... someone recognized you. They would have found you, even if Eoghan wasn't here.”
Was Shiny trying to stick up for me? About bloody fucking time.
“How did you find out about it?” Kira narrowed her eyes, trying to poke holes in the story. She might trust Shiny more than me, but she didn’t trust her completely.
The most distrustful people in the world are people with their own secrets, after all.
“I got a tip from one of the fighters jaw-jacking at the gym,” Shiny said.
Her husband ran one of the most prominent MMA gyms in the United States. It was in neutral territory in the city, attracting fighters from all over. Italians, Russians, foreigners, and others came to train. Though, that didn’t stop him from doing the odd work for me, since his wife was under my protection.
If Dairo was my right hand, she was my left. Slightly less useful, and twice as annoying, but still necessary in the grand scheme of things.
"Where are they now?" I asked, as we wound our way through the city, past the bridge that had been the home of her artwork for the past three years. Her life, the one I wasn't a part of because she did not want me there.
I winced.
"We'll come back for your paintings," I said, quietly. "I'll have someone collect them."
"No," she said, holding Cillian to her chest with a sweet possession that made me love her more. "They... they don't matter."
"Of course, they do," I said, shaking my head.
Her paintings of our boy, and the image of us, in Hayez's The Kiss .... the faces she had sketched into her notepad. As I had sketched her, she sketched me. Two sides of the same fucking coin.
Eyes that I stared at in the mirror every single fucking day. Each one, a testament of love. A moment of honesty in my lying wife.
"Incoming," Shiny said, tilting her head towards the glass, into the side mirror.
I wasn't sure how she could tell they were Italians. Maybe it was the make and model that I had been too distracted to pay attention to. Maybe it was something more mystical than that. But she knew.
I gunned the gas, my fists clenched, as I made slow twitch adjustments to move along the winding street. Small, slow corrections to hug the road as we drove.
"Kira, I want you to get on the floor with the boy." I was calculating where the safest place in the car would be. The floor was armored as well, to protect against bombs and the like. Even if they shot out the windows, Kira would be somewhat safe down there. And if she draped herself over our son, then he'd have an extra layer of protection, and that was what mattered.
As the car behind us sped up to meet us, I swallowed.
"I love you," I said, to Kira. To my son.
There was dread in the pit of my stomach, and I wished I had a moment to turn around and kiss them both.
"Awww, I love you too, Eoghan," Shiny said, her voice dripping with sarcasm.
"Shut the fuck up, you eejit." I punched her in the arm, and she punched me back.
"Why the fuck did I bring you of all people?" I asked.
"Because I'm the most useful soldier you have," she gloated.
"No, you're thinking of O'Malley," I corrected, trying to bruise that damned ego of hers. It didn't work, though.
"Please" She rolled her eyes.
"Please," I mocked, just as the first shot rang out.
"Fuck!" I growled.
"Fuck!" Cillian echoed, and I groaned.
"Eoghan!" Kira chided, as Shiny snickered.
Christ, was I meant to be a parent right now as well? I had too much going on. I was driving the car, trying to get away, and now I'd have to watch my language as well.
Shiny undid her seatbelt and opened her window. With a stabilizing hand on the headrest, she leaned out, her rifle slung around her neck. The butt of it rested in the pocket of her shoulder as she fired off several shots, hitting the bumper and the front of the car behind us.
"There's three of them," she said, when she climbed back into the car, closing the window with a push of the button.
"Well, that's less than ideal," I said in irritation.
"Maybe we should have brought more people," Shiny said, like a fucking brat. "If you weren't pretending to be fucking Cyrano."
"Cyrano?" I said, annoyed, because her choice of words was less than apt. "It's Don fucking Juan, you uneducated pleb. As written by Erik Claudin."
"Wah-wah-wah," she said, as she leaned back out the open window, pulled her rifle up, and fired. This time, her aim was true and she hit the driver in the head. The car swerved off the bridge and into the embankment of the winding river beside us.
"If you’re going to insult me with the fucking classics, then you should get it right!"
"Oh, sure!" Shiny said, as she fumbled for another magazine, struggling to get it into the well, as we took a sharp turn onto a side street, the tires squealing as we drifted over the asphalt. "Tell me, Kira. Did his stupid fucking disguise do the trick? You can tell me. Did he really fool you?"
Kira said nothing, looking away, and I smirked.
Oh, she had been fooled alright. And worse yet, she had liked it. She had liked every reminder of the husband she'd thought she had left behind. She had missed me, as I had missed her.
Shiny looked appalled as she looked between us. "Good God, it worked didn't it? You didn't recognize him?"
The cars behind us squealed as they tried to keep up with my erratic driving. As Shiny readied to lean out the window again, I turned, pulling a 360, landing us on the other side of the road going in the opposite direction. Shiny almost fell out of the car, smacking her head on the top of the window, before getting herself together to fire off another shot. But she missed. Fucking typical.
I shouldn't be so hard on her, of course. Trying to shoot out of a moving vehicle, even if it was moving at a steady rate, was like trying to surf and hit a two inch target with a fucking lawn dart. But I needed her to be good at this job - a job we did not adequately train for at Green Fields Enterprises. I had to make note of that and tell Dairo that the men had to learn how to effectively shoot out of a vehicle. Surely that was something that those morons in the British SAS would know how to do.
She had one magazine left before I had to hand her my pistol, which was something I didn't want to do. I didn't want an entire side of the vehicle to go without a weapon, just in case. It was not good to have a weak side, after all.
With the two cars still hard on our tail, I felt the tension sweeping up my arm.
Shiny's prattling didn't help.
"Un-fucking-believable," she said with a roll of her eyes. "You idiots were made for each other."
"Hey!" I said, glaring at Shiny for just an instant before turning my eyes back to the road. "You don't talk about my wife like that."
She laughed. "But I can talk about you like that?"
"Just not in front of our troops." I grumbled, as I turned down a small town main street, where there were cars stopped on the side of the road, one trying to parallel park.
"Fiiiiine," she said, annoyed.
"How about you concentrate on trying to kill those bastards, instead of getting on my arse?" I griped, again.
I knew I had little control of Miss Shiny Flanagan. Or was she Shiny LeBlanc now, since she'd married our MMA trainer? I wasn't sure. They'd had a wedding, but I never stopped calling her Flanagan. So there was that.
"Hang on!" I warned, before I came to an abrupt, screeching halt, forcing the Italians to skirt around us or risk impacting us from behind. They took the bait, blasting past us and stopping half a mile down the road in front of us, as I had already turned and brought us out of the little town.
"You alright?" I called back to my wife, who had been silent through our exchanges.
"I'm fine," she said, quietly.
"I'm running low on bullets, Eoghan," Shiny said, and I pushed my pistol towards her. Damn.
We hadn't packed to take on a squad-sized element. We were only packed to handle maybe one or two enemies at the most. But three fucking cars? That was a lot, even for Durante.
"Kira, I need you to get under the seat and find the damn gun that's there," I said.
"Damn gun!" Cillian echoed.
Strictly speaking, I did not like that he was learning my foul language but at the same time, I also liked that he seemed to pick up everything I was saying. Like a chip off the old block.
Kira didn't respond. Shiny tried to shoot again outside of the window but only managed to land a hit into the right side of one car, killing the passenger, and spraying the inside of the vehicle with blood. But the driver was unharmed, and still chasing us.
"How big is the bounty on my wife?" I asked Shiny, wondering who the fuck was working so hard to try and catch us that they'd drive through the blood of their own mates to get to us!
"Oh, you don't want to know," Shiny siad.
"I do want to know."
"Half a million."
"Christ alive!" I groaned. "Can Durante even afford that?"
I had attacked him ruthlessly for the past two years, hitting him where it hurt most, in ports that he didn't know I knew about. All thanks to my secret consiglieri. I had crippled him in every possible way, so much so that there were rumblings of deposing him as the head of the Cosa Nostra. Replacing him with none other than his own daughter, or possibly a far off cousin who was less competent than a monkey trying to type out Shakespeare.
"Who knows?" Shiny said. "But I'm running low, Eoghan."
"Jesus, you couldn't shoot the broad side of a barn," I said.
"Well how about we switch, and I'll drive while you fucking try to shoot something as someone drives like a fucking suicidal road runner?"
"I have had it with you, Shiny, I swear to God!"
I faintly heard the whirring sound of a window coming down, then three distinctive shots. Pop. Pop. Pop.
The two cars behind us swerved, the inside of them covered in blood, like the heads of the drivers had exploded.
One more pop, and the two cars seemed to halt in their tracks, as though their engines had completely seized up. One car crashed into the side of the mountain, and another ended up in a ditch.
I was struck dumb as I watched my wife calmly raise the window back up before she put the pistol that had been under the back seat on safe, dropped the magazine, and then pulled back the slider, catching the bullet that had been in the chamber in mid-flight.
"What the fuck?" Shiny said, and I couldn't have said it better. “What the hell was that?”
"Black is the color of my true love's hair,” I said, as I felt Shiny and Kira’s eyes grazing my skin. “Your eyes despair, your lips deceive.”
“What the fuck are you talking about?” Shiny said, turning in her seat to look at our passengers, before turning back to me. “You really are bat shit crazy, you know?”
“I have you now, and you’ll never leave,” I said with a slight chuckle, feeling the small seedling of joy that grew in my chest. My family was back. The world was right, even as the world around us might burn. Even as bullets riddled our car as we limped down the road.
I pulled to the side, letting the car idle as I turned in the seat to my wife who held our boy against her chest, her purple hair covering her face as she averted her gaze from me.
“We're going to have to have a long discussion on why you know how to do that."