Chapter 17
Sam
I’ve found Johnny Four Fingers’ hangout. It wasn’t hard. I just had to follow the overly jacked meatheads to a gym on the wrong side of town. I’m sitting in his office, enjoying the ambiance. There’s a steady sound of dull thudding outside where men are attacking punching bags.
His office has a bunch of faded photos on the wall. Sports teams. Boxing champions. A signed one of Muhammad Ali looks particularly interesting. This is a man who knows how to live a double life. I can respect that.
The door opens and John walks in. He’s wearing a suit tailored to his shoulders, his neck, and his barrel chest, which tells me it’s not off the rack.
This man spends money sometimes. Interesting that his home and his place of business are equally run down, while he occasionally makes himself look good.
He stops dead and stares at me.
“What the fuck are you doing here?”
He’s looking at me like I’m a dead bit of dinner who just got up and started talking to him. I bet most people who have an encounter with Johnny don’t come back for a second one. I’m more persistent than most.
I’m more everything than most.
“You know what?” he says, shutting the door behind him almost too calmly. “It’s good that you’re here. I need to talk to you.”
“Oh? Why is that?”
“Because you’re going to be a father. Get the fuck out of my chair.”
I don’t move. I look at him with a certain kind of surprise, though I shouldn’t be surprised. I have been trying my very best to get her pregnant since the first time I took her. Still, these things can take a very long time, and sometimes never happen at all.
“That’s wonderful news,” I say.
“Yeah,” John grunts. “Get the fuck out of my chair.”
I let him play the big man just a little longer. It’s going to be much more satisfying when he finally realizes that I am not who he thinks I am. I am much more than a horny, smarmy TV star who happens to have fucked a co-ed.
“You’re going to marry her,” he says as I stand up and walk around the other side of the desk.
“Can’t marry her. I’m her teacher.”
“Then she’ll leave school and then you’ll get married. It’s the right thing to do.”
I am putting up something of a fight, without outright saying no, because I want John to think he’s winning. My plan, originally, was to end him in this meeting, but he’s inadvertently made himself useful, so perhaps his children will get to keep their father a little longer.
“You and me are going to go to the house and talk about this with Laura,” he says.
I have to keep myself from bursting out laughing with how well this is going.
He’s going to deliver her right to me.
And he’s going to demand she gives herself to me.
“You know where it is,” he says. “You’ve been there before, right?”
Neither one of us is going to mention how I knew where to find him, the fact that I obviously know his real identity, and the fact that I walked right into the very center of his empire. If he’s smart—and I think he is—he’s probably considering killing me as well.
I drive to the house, following John’s car. We both park outside and I have his escort into the home. The moment I step into the kitchen, Laura goes pale.
She was sitting at the kitchen table peeling potatoes with her sister. Her mom was stuffing a turkey. The small kids were trying to stab each other with common household items. All of that stops as we walk in.
“Daddy!” The little ones rush to John, while I stand respectfully to the side and wait for the greetings to be done.
Laura is staring at me like she’s just seen a ghost. I flick a wink at her just to let her know there’re no hard feelings. She might have run, and she will be punished for that, but I’m not angry at her. She had to give it a try. She was just outplayed by fate and by me.
She looks at John.
“Why is he here? You said I’d never see him again.”
Her mother chases the little kids out of the room and gets all the others down at the other end of the house. I’d say they’ll still be able to hear the conversations, though. This isn’t exactly a solidly built dwelling.
“He’s the father of your baby,” John says. “You two are going to get married.”
“No,” Laura says. “He’s a psycho. You don’t get it.”
“Does he hit you or something?”
“He wants to lock me away in his house,” she says. “He wants to make it so I’m… he kills people.”
“Hey. A man who kills people…” John gives a shrug.
“I’m not marrying him,” she says, standing up. “I’m not doing what either of you tell me to do, and if you keep trying to force me, I’ll make you both regret it!”
“Calm down,” John says. “We’re just going to talk. Get us some beers.”
She gives me a venomous look, but she does as she’s told and goes to the fridge, getting out a couple of beers. She proceeds to shake them and put them on the table in front of us.
“Go off,” she says. “Enjoy your beers, jerks.”
“That’s enough,” John says.
“You promised me that I was never going to see him again. Now you want him to marry me? No,” she says. “Never. Not in a thousand years.”
“You’re acting like a child,” John says. “You don’t want to talk? You can go to your room.”
She storms out.
“She’ll come around,” he says, tapping the top of the beer. He waits for a moment, then cracks the beer and shoves it to his mouth, sucking up all the foam from going everywhere.
I follow his example. I was planning on killing this person just a few hours ago, and now it seems he’s going to be family. I did not expect to find a kindred spirit in my pursuit of Laura, not in the form of a heavyset man running one of the most brutal criminal rings in the country.
“Did you see that guy in the gym the other week?”
“I consulted on the case for the police.”
“Oh, yeah? They didn’t catch him, did they? So are you bad at consulting, or…”
“Or what?”
John smiles. He doesn’t ask the question that is lingering in the air between us. Or did you do it. That’s what he really wanted to say. But he doesn’t need to. Because he knows.
He knows in the same way I know a string of crimes stretching from California to New York belong to him.
We share a beer, and then another, and then another.
The house comes slowly back to life. Dinner gets cooked and served, and I help eat it.
Laura’s family is a truly lovely, vibrant collection of people.
I don’t often feel connected to those I meet.
Usually they just feel like a series of either obstacles or advantages.
“You’re not such a bad guy,” John says as the evening is winding down. “You’ll be a good son-in-law. I might even have some work for you.”
And just like that, I am plugged into an entirely new network.
I thank him and his wife for dinner and go out to my car.
Which isn’t there.
Laura must have stolen it. She must have taken the keys from me somehow.
Or… no. She never came near me.
Then it occurs to me. The little kids. She must have sent them out to get the keys out of my jacket when it was over the chair. She deployed them like a couple of tiny commandos. I chuckle to myself. How absolutely adorable.
“What’s the matter?” John comes out onto the porch.
“She’s stolen my car,” I tell him.
“She’s really mad at you,” John laughs.
Laura
Lights are coming up behind me, fast.
So I guess he’s found me. Makes sense that he has a tracker on his car.
I never thought that I could actually get away with this.
I just wanted to do something to show this asshole that I really am going to be a huge fucking problem for him if he tries to keep me captive.
Nothing is going to be as easy as he thought it was going to be.
Does he expect me to pull over? I don’t fucking think so. He can’t make me. That’s the fun thing about cars. They’re really hard to stop unless you’re the police, and even if you’re the police it’s still not that easy.
So I keep driving. I make him chase me around town in circles. I go around a roundabout six times in a row, just circling. I hope this is driving him insane, literally.
My phone rings. I answer it.
“Yeah?”
“Pull over, Laura,” he says, using his stern teacher voice. “This is getting silly.”
I hang up on him and keep going. I’ve got enough gas to do another two hundred miles, and I think I’m going to do all of them.
I keep going for another mile or so, at which point I start to notice other cars showing up. One passes and gets in front of me. Then it starts to slow. I can’t pass, because another car is suddenly behind me, taking up the whole opposite lane like a mad person.
I am boxed in with nowhere to go, and brought to a relatively slow and reasonable halt. The second I stop, Sam is at my door. He opens it, takes his keys out of his ignition, and waves the other cars on.
We are left on a country road late at night, because I had the smart idea to head out of town, maybe even out of state.
“What do you want?” I ask the question with my arms folded over my chest.
He smiles at me, very calm, very pleased.
“You are quite the handful when you want to be,” he says. “And when I think back to how well behaved you were the first time we were together… have I spoiled you, Laura?”
“No, you’ve just put me through enough shit that I’ve lost patience with you. Coming to my house? Getting on my stepdad’s good side? I don’t know how you even did that. And getting me pregnant?”
He lets me rant until I run out of things to say.
Then he steps in, slides his hand behind my head, and grips my hair firmly.
“You’re not going to get away from me,” he says. “Not ever. And that’s a good thing, because it means you’re always going to have me. And our baby is going to have a father, and a grandfather who will do literally anything for them.”
He didn’t choose those words at random. He said them on purpose, because they mean something. Because John must be… I stop myself from thinking too deeply about it.