Dennis Lehane - Since We Fell

“Ssshhh,” Ned said. “Turn around. I want him to see your face.”

He put his hands on her shoulders and turned her so that she was facing Caleb. “My first punch, young man, was to her solar plexus. Hurts like hell but it’s not all that harmful to your health. My next punch will blow up her fucking kidneys.”

“I don’t know anything.”

“Sure you do. You’re the IT guy. You were part of this from the beginning.”

“Brian went rogue.”

“He did, huh?”

Caleb’s eyes danced. His face was covered in sweat and his lips twitched and he looked for all the world to see like the frightened boy she now realized he’d always been. He glanced at Rachel and at first she mistook the emotion in his eyes for empathy but then realized, to her horror, that it was embarrassment. Shame. Pity. He was ashamed because he knew he’d never have the courage to save her. He pitied her because he knew she was going to die.

He’s going to pulverize my kidneys, Caleb. Tell him what you know .

Ned ran the silencer down the side of Rachel’s right temple and then along her neckline. “Don’t make me do this, young man. I got a daughter. I got sisters.”

Caleb said, “Look—”

“There’s no look, Caleb. There’s no ‘Hang on a second,’ or ‘Let me explain, or ‘This is just a big misunderstanding.’” Ned inhaled deeply through his nostrils, a man trying to retain his cool. “There’s only a question and an answer. That’s it.”

Rachel felt his penis stiffen against the back of her left hip. He was hard, this father of a daughter, this brother of sisters. Monsters, her mother had told her and she had learned herself over the years, don’t dress like monsters; they dress like humans. Even stranger, they rarely know they’re the monsters.

“Where’s the key?” Ned said.

“What key?” Caleb said, his entire face quivering.

It stopped quivering when Ned fired a bullet into it.

She wasn’t sure what had happened at first. She registered the slap of the bullet entering flesh. She heard Caleb make a surprised yelp, the last sound, it turned out, he’d ever make. His head snapped back hard, as if he’d just heard the funniest of jokes. His head snapped forward, except now it was covered in a beaded curtain of blood, and Rachel opened her mouth to scream.

Ned placed the silencer to the side of her neck. It was hot enough to burn if he left it there too long. “If you scream, I have to kill you. I don’t want to kill you, Rachel.”

But he would.

No, Rachel, he will . The moment they’re done here. The moment they get whatever it is they want. A key. What fucking key? Brian had so many keys on his key ring that it would take a mathematical savant to notice he’d added one. But if he did have this key they were looking for, that’s where it probably was — on his key ring.

Which was on his person.

Which was sitting at the bottom of Massachusetts Bay.

Caleb’s corpse slipped sideways in the chair and would have slid all the way to the floor, but his shoulder wedged underneath the arm. For a moment, the only sound came from him dripping.

“So the answer you want to give my next question,” Ned said, “is definitely not ‘What key?’”

No matter what answer you give, he will kill you.

She nodded.

“Are you nodding because you have my answer or because you agree that saying ‘What key?’ would be a big mistake?” He took the gun away from her neck. “You can talk. I know you’re not going to scream.”

“What am I supposed to say?”

On the other side of the table, Lars stood. Clearly bored. Ready to leave. And that was far more unsettling than if he’d tried to be menacing. What was happening here was coming to a close. And the period on the sentence would be another bullet to another face, this time hers.

“So here we go,” Ned said. “Only one answer we’re looking for and that’d be the right one. Rachel,” he said with the utmost delicacy and concern, “where’s the key?”

“Brian has it.”

“And where’s Brian?”

“I don’t know,” she said and then, rushing, as Ned raised his gun, “but I have an idea.”

“An idea?”

“He has a boat. Nobody knows about it.”

“What’s the name of it, and where is it moored?”

She’d never seen the name. She’d never thought to look. She said, “It’s moored—”

The doorbell rang.

They all looked at the door, then at one another, then back at the door.

“Who would that be?” Ned asked.

“I haven’t a clue.”

“Your husband?”

“He wouldn’t ring the bell.”

The bell rang again. Followed by a knock on the door. “Mrs. Delacroix, it’s Detective Kessler.”

“Detective Kessler.” Ned tried the words out. “Huh.”

“I forgot my hat, ma’am.”

Ned and Rachel both looked down at the half-fedora Rachel had placed on the table.

Another knock, insistent, the knock of a man used to knocking on doors whether the people on the other side wanted him to come in or not. “Mrs. Delacroix?”

“Coming!” Rachel called.

Ned shot her a look.

Rachel shot him a look back: What did you want me to do?

Ned and Lars looked at each other. Whatever telepathic language they spoke, they arrived at a decision. Ned handed her the hat. He raised his palm in front of her face. “You see the width of my hand?”

“Yes.”

“That’s how far you open the door. And then you give him his hat and you close it.”

She started to step away from him, but he grabbed her arm at the elbow and turned her to face Caleb. The blood curtain on his face was darkening. If this were Haiti, his head would be covered with flies.

“If you deviate from my instructions one iota, I do that to you.”

She started to shake and he spun her toward the door.

“Stop shaking,” he whispered.

“How?” Her teeth chattered.

He slapped her hard on the ass. She looked back at him and he gave her a small smile because the shakes had stopped. “Now you’ve learned a new trick.”

She took the hat and crossed her apartment. To the left of the door, on a hook, was her bag, a mini shoulder bag, brown leather, a Christmas gift from Brian. She put her hand on the doorknob and decided what she was going to do as she was doing it, not giving herself time to think, not giving them time to think. She opened the door past the recommended two to three inches, opened it so that Detective Trayvon Kessler had a clear angle past her left shoulder, could see the hallway that led to the bedrooms, the half-bathroom door, the kitchen bar. She pulled her bag off the hook, crossed the threshold, and handed him his hat, pretty much all in the same motion.

The bullet entered her back, cut her spine in half, spewed the bone chips into her bloodstream as she collapsed into Detective Kessler. The fall kept him from clearing his own gun. Ned kept firing, shot Kessler in the head and the shoulder and the arm. He fell with Rachel. They landed in a heap on the marble floor, and Ned and Lars straddled their bodies. They looked down on them with nothing in their faces and fired into their bodies until their corpses jumped...

“Detective.” She closed the door behind her. “I’d been wondering if you’d come back for that. I was about to call your cell.”

He fell into step behind her as she walked to the elevators. “Heading out?”

She looked back over her left shoulder at him. Brian, Sebastian, and two ex-boyfriends had all told it was her sexiest look. She could see it scored with Trayvon Kessler by the way he blinked at it, as if to deflect it from landing. “Just trying to walk off the buzz.”