Chapter 5
Alizé – twenty-nine / Cillian – thirty-four
Year Six of Marriage
The car hummed to a stop outside the meeting point, set as this quarter’s drop point in Dorchester, Boston.
It was a one-story building with chipped, painted bricks, wet-stained cracks down the walls, and flyers pasted to grime-covered windows.
I actioned the slide of my gun. The familiar click and snap were as humdrum as the act itself, just another necessity in life.
“Let me make myself clear, Liam.” I tucked the firearm into my waistband as our two men up front got out and scanned the area. “If you come with, I want you quiet. You can’t handle that, you park your arse right here, and you don’t move.”
“Come on, Killy.”
I glared at my brother. He was a liability on the best of days, quick to draw a gun or knife and start carving someone up, or as passive as a teddy bear, all depending on his mood. Either way, he did both with a smile on his face, cracking jokes.
The only reason I’d taken his sunshine-crazed temperament along on this drop was that Brody had come down with the flu, and I never came without a second, plus two of our guys inside and another three out, minimum.
That was the way we’d done these drops since a year after the Urabá cartel consolidated Da’s fifteen-million-dollar gambling debt and demanded repayment every trimester at fifteen percent annual interest. When Da didn’t make their second deadline, they kidnapped one of our men and skinned him alive.
After that, we signed the agreement with the French De Villiers, and with most of the repayment amount off our backs, we never missed another payment.
However, Da, being Da, thought himself too clever for his own good.
He tried shorting them once, about a year later, before his shakes got so bad he couldn’t handle the drops anymore.
The cartel cornered him, chopped off two of his fingers, and later burned his brownstone down, along with half the block.
Ever since, we’ve kept up the pretense of a show of force.
“Alright.” Liam lifted his hands in surrender. “O Captain, my captain. Your lead, it is.”
I sighed and joined Paulie the Skipper and Joel, better known as Smiles, outside as Liam jerked the bag of cash over his shoulder.
Midday like this, the large streets in this part of town teemed with traffic and pedestrians, and we blended right into the perpetual activity.
All the background noise served as our cover.
Car alarms going off. Honking, brake squeals, police sirens, the drone of engines along the nearby interstate, and the distant whir of planes shrieking overhead.
I spun my closed knife around my thumb and led us toward the front door beneath a dilapidated awning that hadn’t been updated in over two decades. It was as frayed as my patience, its color as bleached as my outlook on life, and as stagnant in the breeze as my expectations.
A strangled grunt clogged my throat. Fuck, I didn’t want to deal with this today.
Every step cost me, each one sapping more energy than my body wanted to give.
It was like lugging waterlogged limbs forward.
I pressed my tongue to the back of my teeth and took a deep breath.
I needed to find a new thrill, and fast, before the emptiness swallowed me whole.
The moment we stepped inside the building, an arrogant skinny gnat swung his gun at us.
His jeans hung below his rear, boxers on full display.
His shoulders bunched up his oversized sweater with all his neck bling, perfectly placed to strangle him with.
Add in the tattooed shaved head, and it was like he researched “typical gangster look” online and played dress-up.
“Finally, pendejo.” Our contact dragged the words through his nose and let them whistle on the way out. It was so. Painfully. Irritating.
His backup kept quiet, melting into the shadows so that only an outline of his shape told me where he was. It didn’t look like there was a third this time around.
“You know, the Sosas don’t like being stood up. And your white asses almost stood us up.”
Our footsteps echoed every tap of our heels throughout the empty space. A thin layer of dust surged to greet us with each step, twisting the rays of sunlight through the high windows into a ghoulish display of powdered shadows.
“Man, they’re gonna string you up for this. Yeah, they are.” He brandished his revolver, swinging it around like he was about to spritz us with water.
Christ Almighty, these eejits the cartel sent up just got younger and dumber with each passing year. What was he? Eighteen? Twenty at most.
“Ain’t nobody that messes with the Urabá cartel. Certainly not you bitches.”
Original. A real Shakespeare.
With a bob of my head, Liam tossed the bag full of cash a few feet ahead of us. It landed with a smack among a haze of dust.
“You ready to shut your gob and get to business?”
“What’d ya say to me?”
He strutted forward, body springing up and down on each step, crisscrossing his feet, his pant hems trailing behind his heels.
I rolled my eyes up to the suspended ceiling tiles and shook my head.
“Hey, I’m talking to you, gringo. You got some real lack of respect there.” He twisted his revolver on its side, the barrel still pointed in my direction, and I just wanted to sigh. It was an absurd thing to do with any semiautomatic weapon, and just plain stupid with a revolver.
“Money’s all there.”
“Better be.” The kid kneeled and unzipped the bag. He whistled, hands digging into the bundles of hundred-dollar bills, before righting himself. He cleared his throat and sniffed, dragging a finger under his nose. “Some of it’s missing.”
“Come again.”
“You hard of hearing too? I said, some of it is missing.”
“What an utter gobshite,” Liam muttered under his breath, and I pursed my lips.
“You sure this is how you want to play it?” I asked the shadow. My guess was that whoever was back there was in charge of the mess in front of me.
“Don’t talk to him. Worry about me. I can be your worst nightmare.” The kid thought it was a good idea to get right in my face, spittle and all, gun barrel inches from my nose.
“Whoa, whoa, whoa,” Liam cut in. “We’re all friendly here. No need for any of that. Put the gun down.”
The boy dragged me forward by my shirt, bunching it up in his fist, the muzzle pressed to my chin.
My brother yelled colorfully in the background.
My men drew their weapons, but I was held still, captivated.
On the cold metal against my skin. The twinge of danger pulsing through my body.
The slight shake in the boy-gangster’s hand.
The way his pupils widened and sweat pebbled his forehead.
I liked it. I liked it all, and I wanted more.
“What you smiling at, cucho?”
Was I? Guess I was, and it was all teeth. My blood roared in my ears. My limbs hummed with an ache to act. The room sharpened in clarity and shrunk the dullness I lived in.
I pocketed my knife and slipped my hand into my front pocket. My fingers wormed into my brass knuckles.
“How old are you?” I asked.
“Old enough to fuck up your old ass.”
“So, old enough to know better.”
“What the fu—”
I punched him straight in the face. Metal and knuckles collapsed his nose with one solid crunch. Probably cracked his cheek too. His gun clattered to the floor without firing an attempted shot. Too bad. There was no gumption in this one.
Blood gushed between his fingers, but when he widened them to spew more bullshit, I slammed my fist into his gut. He crumpled to the ground, curled in on himself, and coughed.
“If it wasn’t clear, I’ve had enough of your lip.”
“Jorge’s going to fuck you up.”
There was no Jorge in the top echelons of the Urabá cartel, so best guess, our lurker was just a glorified babysitter who didn’t care all that much about his charge.
I gazed into the shadows. “That right, Jorge?”
“He’s Senor Sosa’s twelfth nephew,” the mystery man said in that same bored tone I knew by heart.
Translation: It was best if I didn’t kill him, but Joaquin Sosa, head of the Urabá cartel, wouldn’t be too broken up if the boy came back a little worse for wear.
That was good enough for me.
“Looks like you overstepped, lad.” I kicked the little shite in the gut.
He spat ichor between red-spattered teeth. “I’ll kill you. You’re dead, man.”
“Oh?” I crouched before him and trailed my finger through the blood dripping down his nose. “How about I do it for you?”
Confusion bulged his bruised eyes, and my lips tugged uncomfortably at my cheeks. He flinched when I picked up his revolver and emptied the cylinder of every bullet except one. They clattered to the ground, the pings echoing in the dead space around us.
“W-what are you doing, man?”
“Cillian,” Liam warned behind me.
I spun the cylinder, clicked it back in place, and pressed the muzzle to my head. For the first time in days, I felt alive. Free. The world was my oyster.
“We’re going to play a game. If I don’t blow a hole through my brains, I get to shoot you.”
“What? No, I don’t—”
I pulled the trigger. The gun clicked, and with it, my high plummeted.
The sparks racing through my body stopped.
The pleasure vanished, sending me back to bland normalcy.
It was all short-lived, like everything else.
I turned the gun on the cartel falcon, or perhaps sicario-in-training. Again, the trigger clicked, no bullet.
“For feck’s sake, Cillian, what’re you doing?”
“Jesus, man, estás loco.” Sosa’s nephew trembled, the chip on his shoulder patched up.
“You don’t know the half of it.”
I pulled the trigger a third time at his shoulder.
Click. A fourth time at his arm. A fifth at his leg.
Bang, the shot rang out. He screamed bloody murder and squeezed his fingers over the rush of blood out of the new hole in his thigh.
Smiles threw me a cloth. I wiped down the gun and tossed it in the kid’s lap, who keened in pain.
“Pirobo malparido, gonorrea triple hijueputa, you shot me.”
“Let that be a lesson to you. Respect is earned, not given. Your uncle should’ve taught you that.”
I got up to my feet and dusted off my legs. The shadow man still hadn’t moved an inch except to light a cigarette that flared in the dim lighting.
“If you don’t want him dead, tie off his leg. Or let him bleed out. Not my problem.”
The man huffed a laugh. “See you in three months.”
I would rather not, but such was life.
Without a word, we filed out the door and back to the car. I settled against the backrest as each took their seats, the car wobbling with the movement, and stared out the bulletproof window at everything and nothing at all. Liam gabbled up a storm, rattling away in his corner like an old boiler.
With three and a half more years of these drop-offs, we’d finally be free of my father’s debt.
It nearly put my father, my brothers, our men, and me in our graves back then.
We’d almost lost everything to Angus O’Leary’s coping mechanism: our lives, our businesses, our fucking integrity, and our hard-earned respect.
For six and a half years, I’d been rebuilding it all by dipping our toes into a bit of everything until we’d become the jack-of-all-trades in the Greater Boston area.
Clubs, bars, pharmaceuticals, transportation services, forgeries, utility services, car and parts, etc.
Think of a business sector, and the O’Learys owned a piece of the pie, all over the table.
Diversifying had been amusing, a way of adding new flavor to a sterile environment. Now that had become mundane too. There wasn’t much novelty to look forward to. It was always the same tasks, the same products, just more of it.
“Oi, you listening to me?” Liam snapped his fingers in front of my face, and I swatted them away. “Finally. There you are. Thought you needed a new set of batteries.”
I grunted with a roll of my eyes.
“You want to tell me what the bloody hell that was? A gun to your head, Killy. That’s not acting the maggot. Tell me you knew where the bullet was when you pulled that trigger?”
I glared at him deadpan.
He tugged on his scraggly hair. “Jaysus. Do Brody and I need to be worried about you again?”
“Oh, don’t go doing my head in.”
“Cillian, I’m serious.”
I waved him off. As long as Brody and Liam lived, there was no point in worrying. If they died…well, who the fuck cared at that point?
“It was nothing. It’s always fecking nothing in our lives anyhow.”
“What? Getting shot at not good enough for you anymore?”
“You ever wonder where this is going? The debt’s almost paid. And then what?”
“We keep making money.”
“That all?”
He shrugged. “I happen to like money. And pussy. Unattached pussy.”
“There’s more to life than money.”
“Not for us,” he stated plainly, as if that reality didn’t burn. The O’Leary brothers were all cursed to remain bachelors for the rest of our lives. No wives. No lovers. No kids. No legacy beyond this pit.
My phone buzzed. I swiped away the notification from the concierge of my apartment building.
Considering the date, it was most likely the delivery of a new parcel of divorce papers from the De Villiers by twenty-four-hour courier.
In the next hour, I would also receive an email with the same attachment.
Same as it was every two weeks. If I knew anything about the woman, it was that she was persistent and wasted a lot of paper.
I turned back to the window, catching sight of a motorcycle dealership with dirt bikes on display. Now that was exactly the type of high I needed, and there were a few off-road trails not far out of the city.
“Pull over, Paulie. Drop me off here.”
Our car veered to the curb as the driver behind us honked in loud bursts.
“Want us to wait, boss?”
“No, I’ll find my own way.”
Liam eyed the shop and scratched his head. “You know, you’re not as young as you once were.”
“And you have enough cheek for another arse.”
He scoffed. “Just come back in one piece, alright?”
“Have so far, haven’t I?”
“Aye, you have. Just…don’t forget a helmet.”
The rest went unsaid, but we both knew what he meant. What happens when you don’t come back?