25
W
hat the fuck?” Mikael shouted when he found me sitting in the dark in the living room of his apartment. Just after 2 AM, he got up to fetch a glass of water. “Jeez, man, you need to warn me before you just turn up like that.
I heard his words, but they bounced about in my head before I registered that he was here, let alone what he was saying. The silver cannister in my hand was almost empty, and the blunt between my fingers was nearly burned to a stub.
“Wait,” he stated, confused, looking down at me. I wasn’t sure what he was focused on. Isn’t that your father’s?”
“What?” I mumbled, staring out the window at the view of the city and hills beyond.
It had a better view than Ronan’s apartment, but I liked Ronan’s apartment's location because cafes and restaurants surrounded it. My favorite classic car shop, where my Mustang was restored, was only two blocks away. I guess you could say I had the best of both worlds, flipping between each apartment.
“The canister, isn’t that your father’s?” he reiterated, sitting in the leather chair.
“Yeah, Mom gave it to me when I was forced to visit her in Larsson,” I replied, swigging back the last of the whiskey inside.
“You never mentioned it before?” he asserted.
“Yeah, I forgot about it until I found it later in my bag,” I explained, trying hard not to slur, only to sound worse.
“Give it to me,” Mikky demanded, reaching for the canister.
“There’s nothing in it. I finished it, so if this is a widdle intervention, you’re too late,” I stated sarcastically.
“I have no interest in a widdle intervention, but I just want to look at the cannister,” he replied, so I handed it to him.
“So, are you going to tell me why you’re slumped here on my couch at 2 AM?” he asked as he tipped the canister upside down and, to my surprise, unscrewed the bottom. Then, I took out a tiny plastic bag containing two pink tablets.
“What the fuck? What are they?” I queried, reaching out so he could hand them to me, but instead, he crushed them.
“Your father’s widdle secret kept from your mother. They’re uppers for when he’s working late,” Mikky informed me, “but we’re not having them tonight or any night.” He stood up, walked to the kitchen, and chucked them down the sink.
“I thought he was against drug consumption, unless he’s importing them across the state, of course,” I mumbled the last part. “But they weren’t for his benefit. Fuck, he was always ranting about having a clean club and shit there he was fucking swallowing back uppers.”
Mikky sat back down again and screwed the bottom of the cannister back on, then handed it back to me free of the drugs. “Yeah, well, there were many things you didn’t know about your father,” Mikky asserted, gazing out at the view. “You were a little kid who needed protection, not exposure to the business.”
“Tell me what other secrets he had?” I demanded.
Mikky snorted, amused. “The list is too long.”
“C’mon, give me one thing. Just one,” I argued.
He slid down in the seat as if giving himself time to think of something. “Alright, first tell me why you’re here on my couch drinking your blues away.”
With the aggravated knot in my stomach came the need to drink or smoke it away, so I unscrewed the silver canister, only to remember that it’s empty. “I went for a swim, a night swim, earlier,” I finally said after tossing the empty canister on the couch beside me.
“Where? Did you break into the local community center?” he questioned, probably wondering where this was going.
“No. Wild swimming.” I paused to collect my thoughts as I didn’t want to divulge what happened tonight because it would get Ronan, Riley, and me in trouble.
Due to the lengthened time for me to say more, Mikky lost patience and stood up again, and I thought he was heading back to bed or into the bathroom when he said, “I’ll put the coffee machine on, because I think you need sobering up. So, wild swimming where?”
“Out of town in an isolated location. Anyway, it’s not the point. " Again, I was at a crossroads, wondering how to tell him what I needed to say without telling him that I was with Riley at night in the waterhole.
“I’m struggling to figure out if you have a point,” he yelled over the coffee machine as it ground the coffee beans.
I waited until he sat back down before I confessed, “It’s Annika.”
He grunted, smiling. “You’ve made that claim before.”
“I know it’s her. I saw it in her eyes,” I asserted to convince him. “She had her glasses broken-”
“And what did you do about it? Beat the shit out of the guy who broke them,” Mikky accused me.
“No, I didn’t touch him. This time. Because he revealed that her phone was bugged and all that.” He’s up to date on that saga, so there’s no need to go down that road. “The light shone on her new pair of glasses, and no lenses were in them. I mean…it’s plain glass. I noticed that with the last pair, but her behavior in her room indicated that she needed the glasses to see properly. It’s like it’s all an act. Even when I looked into her eyes tonight, I saw Annika.”
“Tonight? You were with her tonight?” he hit accusingly. “When? She left work late after her shift and ah…caught the bus or did you pick her up?”
“No. I mean…” I trailed off as my words slurred together. “Not tonight.” I had to backtrack when I forgot I wasn’t supposed to be with her.
“Okay, Gunner, you need to speak clearly here.” Mikky found a cigar in the wooden box on the coffee table and lit the end. “You’re not making sense. You think her glasses are fake, but she acts like they’re real in her room even when no one is watching.”
“Yeah, I mean, like she knew the camera was there the entire time,” I could hear my own voice, and the words weren’t coming out clearly enough to be convincing, which only irritated me more. “Everything with her is fucking act. We need to be straight up and ask her if she’s Annika. ‘Cos I’m dying here, man. Being around her, knowing who she is and also knowing that she’s lying every step of the fucking way is killing me.”
“Steady on, Gunner,” he proclaimed in that tone, reminding me of my father. “Just cool it for a sec. We can’t ask her if she is Annika, if she’s doing the spying for us. It’ll ruin everything. On top of that she’s colluding with the fucking police. Did you forget that part?”
“I’m one hundred percent sure she’s Annika,” I stressed.
“Okay, I believe you, but we can do nothing about it now.” He gritted his teeth and blurted what I wanted to hear which pissed me off even more. “I mean…it wasn’t long ago that you said you were eighty percent sure it was her.”
I cringed in frustration. “I knew you’d say that. But think about it. Add it all up. The Larsson police, the fake glasses, the bugged phone-”
“Your attraction to your foster sister,” he added, cutting in. “Your foster sister always made you hard. That was obvious even to me. Not that I looked at her that much.”
“What?” I snapped at him, annoyed, even though he was right.
He shrugged his shoulders. “Instincts. Animalistic instincts. No matter how thick her costume, you’ll find something that intrigues you or looks familiar.”
“Okay, whatever,” I waved my hand dismissively as he smirked, then jumped up to attend to the coffee machine. “It’s your turn. You have to give me some dirt on Dad.”
Even under the influence of alcohol and dope, I sensed his vibe darken, shoulders tense, jaw clench. His back was turned, yet I could almost see his inner conflict.
He returned with two white cups of coffee, which gave him time to shuffle through my father’s secrets. There was nothing he could say that would shock me. I might’ve been a kid, but I noticed the many times the police came to our Larsson house to question my father over some uptown incident. I knew he conducted illegal activities, like I know now. Illicit activities were our norm.
Mikky sipped the coffee and encouraged me to do the same, as the milky coffee flavor washed over my tongue, I thought of Riley in the pool. Naked. Beautiful. Eager to slide over my cock, until I stopped her. When I looked into her eyes, I saw Annika tonight. It had happened before, but not like this. Not in the same way. It was her. Undeniably her.
I wasn’t looking at someone I suspected was Annika, or a girl with similar features that I hoped was Annika. No. It was Annika. She was Annika. I saw the vulnerability mixed with that pretty little smirk as if she knew that all she had to do was smile, I’d crumble into a pathetic ball of dog waste. She knew my weaknesses, strengths, and likes and dislikes because she knew me. I could see it.
Riley Laws is Annika, my foster sister.
“Your father had an affair,” Mikky stated flatly, and I wondered if I had heard correctly. My brain was fixated on Annika, so maybe the words entered my ears wrong.
“Had an affair?” I needed him to clarify.
Mikky took another of his coffees, swallowed, and affirmed. “That’s what I said.”
“And he’s still alive?” I joked, then it dawned on me what I just said, and I backtracked. “Wait. Forget it. Fuck, did she kill him?”
“I don’t think she knew about it. Or at least, she hadn’t let on that she knew about it. It was when you were quite small, two or three, I think,” he filled me in. “I didn’t know about it until he confessed one day years later over a whiskey at the end of the day, as we often did.”
“Wow,” I declared, struggling to find the words. I thought it was impossible to shock me with anything Dad did, but an affair was something that I didn’t see coming, because he seemed so in love with my mom. Also, Mom was hardly someone you wanted to piss off – hell hath no fury…and all that.
“Yep,” he nodded and sipped his coffee again.
“Was it with one of the girls in the club?” I asked him. Dad had the same rules as Mikky: we must stay away from the staff, including the dance girls and the girls in the back rooms.
Again, he hesitated as if deciphering what pieces of information to tell me, then dryly said, “No.”
“Do you know who it was?” I pushed because he couldn’t let it drop without giving me more details.
“One of the reasons he spoke to me about it is because she wanted money from him to keep quiet after the affair ended, so he hired her up in an apartment and gave her all the material things she needed,” he explained evenly.
“She was bribing him?” I found it hard to believe Mom didn’t know about large sums of money being transferred.
“No.”
“Really? So…” I was confused.
“She was young and her family cut her off when they found out she had an affair with an older, married man and a club owner,” he said carefully, giving me only tiny bits. “She was also pregnant, unwed, with his kid, but we’d never know.”
“Never know?” My head was so stuffed that it started to ache behind my eyes.
“If the kid was his. There was never a DNA test done because she died in a car accident when she was four months pregnant,” he said flatly.
My entire body tensed at his words. There was a common theme among businessmen of the underworld. If they wanted to get rid of someone, killing them off to make it look like an accident was easily arranged.
“Sorry to taint the perfect image you have of your father,” he stated before draining his cup, then patting me on the shoulder as he stood to leave.
“Have you told Danny Lam that her family might be suspects for my father’s death?” I proclaimed.
“No,” he placed his empty cup on the bench. “It wouldn’t be that family. They might be proud, but they’re poor and wouldn’t have the ability to organize it. Besides, there are about fourteen years between her death and his murder, so why wait that long? Anyway, I’m heading back to bed as it’s too early for a conversation this deep. Alright? I hope you’re not upset to discover your father wasn’t as faultless as you first thought.”
I stared out at the sea of black but could only see the reflection of a young man, older than his years, with scarred, black tattoos scribing the deep-set emotions that words could never describe. Maybe I didn’t know who my father was, and maybe Mom didn’t know who he was.
But for him to cheat on my mom with a young woman was a reality that I was struggling with.
“Are you alright, Gunner?” Mikky asked from the kitchen, and I barely responded because my head was stuffed with thoughts about my dad. I thought he’d left to go back to bed.
Why sacrifice your sterling reputation on the altar of a fling with some random chick he stumbled across somewhere?
“Huh?” I didn’t bother looking up because I was methodically going over events in my head, searching for signs of his hypocrisy.
Asserting the importance of loyalty to the family, then cheating or declaring the importance of a clear head while running the business by banning drugs on the club’s premises, but then secretly taking uppers. I mean…I didn’t fucking care that he did that shit. I cared that he preached one thing, then did another.
“Are you okay?” he repeated, as if he were concerned about what I would do with this new information.
“Yeah, I’m fine,” I assured him, but then a thought occurred to me. “You don’t think Dad organized the death of that girl to make a problem go away?”
He stalled, dithered as if stunned by my gall to ask it. “He was never in the business of eliminating innocent young women, Gunner,” he answered smoothly and with conviction. “He might not be an angel, but he had moral standards on many issues.”
“He didn’t have enough moral standards not to get killed, though,” I mumbled out of his earshot, as my devotion to what I thought was a powerful and shrewd reputation of my father slowly peeled away. “Complete fuck up.”