Between the Cracks and Burning Doors: Book 2 of The Extraction List Series (9 page)

Nick reached me first. “Dude, we got a problem.”

A sick feeling rumbled in my stomach, like being poisoned from the inside out. “What’s that?”

Alexis piped in, “A man was here, same man as before, Nick said. The policeman.”

My breath caught in my throat. “You didn’t let him in, did you?”

Felix joined in, “Nope. Nick saw him out the window.”

Maureen had taught them well. “So what happened?”

“He had a photo with him. Big one, eight by ten. Close up of a dude’s face.” I already knew what came next. “It was you.”

I took a deep breath, their three faces just staring at me. I had to tell them something. But what? The truth would scare them, and they didn’t need that. “It’s just a misunderstanding. I’ll get it worked out.”

Nick punched me in the arm. “We’re not dumb. What happened?”

I had to remember these weren’t normal children. These children had survived on the streets, meaning a little white lie wasn’t going to cut it. “They think I did something I didn’t do. I mean I did part of it, but not the rest. And not for the reason they think.”

Nick scrunched his face up, like he was processing what I’d said, defining, deciding what to do with it. “Well, you better stop running around at night then. If you’re in as much trouble as it sounds, you better just stay here.”

He didn’t ask what I’d done. “You don’t want to know what happened?”

Nick put both hands on my shoulders, looking down at me with an expression like a proper father would have. “Don’t care. You saved us. Don’t care about the rest of it. Now come upstairs and eat something. And for God’s sake, wash up, you stink.”

I obeyed.

I went in the bathroom and shut the door, staring at myself in the mirror. Officer Keegan had been at the church earlier that morning. He may have recognized me. If he had, why hadn’t he just stayed there and arrested me? Maybe he wasn’t sure yet.

I had to assume he had remembered me—maybe not totally—but he had come back for a reason. Nick was right, I had to be careful.

I couldn’t go out anymore. I’d have to figure out some other way to free more of Maureen’s kids. I’d talk to her later, or send one of the kids over with a letter that night.

Why hadn’t he arrested me?

The question kept repeating itself in my mind. My breath came in short gulps. There had to be a reason.

Or maybe not. Maybe I had gotten lucky. For now, there was nothing I could do but wait.

But the waiting felt like suffocating helplessness, and I imagined myself breathing in shorter and shorter breaths until the oxygen was gone and I was swallowed up forever.

That night, I broke my own word. I was going to send Alexis with a note to Maureen, asking if we could make some other arrangement. Instead, I went myself, convincing myself that the cover of night was enough to keep me safe.

When I showed up at the front door, her voice came out in a whispered hiss. “Are you stupid? Two of those officers are here right now. Get out of here.”

“I can’t. I have to tell you something.”

She paused and shut the door behind her. “Make it quick.”

I took a deep breath. “They’re showing my face around. Keegan came to the church. Didn’t find the kids but was showing people my picture. I can’t be out and about anymore. At least not for a while.”

She glared at me.

“I know, I know, I’m out now, but I had to talk to you. We need to figure something else out. I can’t sell the drugs anymore. Too risky. Especially after last night.”

Her face dropped, and I could tell she knew I was right. “Guard.”

“What?”

“Guard. Guard the girls. Those police guys are only here at certain times. Before and after they’re here, you stand guard. I’m gettin’ more and more times where people are gettin’ too rough and I either have to sweet talk them or throw them out. Having you in the corner keeping watch might make them behave themselves, and I won’t lose any more customers.”

Security. Not a bad idea. Certainly not a
good
one. I knew I’d have to be really careful not to cross paths with Keegan and the other officers. “Deal.” I leaned in to kiss her, but she stepped back. “I guess I’ll see you tomorrow?”

“Get here at eleven. Not before, not after.” She shut the door and I was left standing on the porch alone.

Both that morning and that night, she hadn’t been able to get away from me fast enough. All I wanted to do was be near her. When we were together, I could forget that I still felt the knife in my grasp, and that I still heard the dead men screaming in my ears. But she was pushing me away, and she didn’t need to use her hands to do it.

When I crawled in bed that night, I studied her face in my head, trying to find some clue as to why she was pulling away from me. When she looked at me, she didn’t see the blood from the men at the warehouse, or my father’s bones. Or maybe she did, but she knew she could look at herself and see the man on her floor with his throat slit open.

We were both killers, forced to defend our own survival. No one but each other would ever understand the emptiness, the hollow spot inside where the before-time used to be. The time before we had taken life, when we were still innocent, or could at least pretend we were.

We could both exist by ourselves, and had for years. She’d been alone since she was fourteen, and I’d been alone my entire life; maybe not physically, but close enough. Sure, we survived, but couldn’t things be different? Better?

I fell asleep thinking I could still smell her, and hear her voice drifting through my ears.

Staying inside all day had been easy when I didn’t have the kids. But with them there, I had to hear questions all day, which meant I had to lie from sun up to sun down. Between the lies, though, I got to know the children. Not as chores I needed to deal with, things that could get me caught, but as people. I began to notice how Alexis crinkled her nose every time she laughed, or that Felix was afraid of the dark, and wouldn’t go to sleep unless Nick or I stayed awake beside him. He’d try and keep his deep brown eyes open for as long as he could, and I would watch his eyelids slowly give way to slumber.

I’d never given so much as a second thought to fatherhood, but I found myself a dad anyway. On television, kids always seemed to be dripping in some sort of fluid, snot or otherwise. Either that, or they were screaming at the top of their lungs, somehow possessed with an operatic ability to hold a note for minutes on end. Not these kids. These ones were miniature adults, more acquainted with the world than I was. It occurred to me that maybe they were more qualified to take care of me than I them.

I wondered how the woman on the TV would handle them. Being a parent in normal circumstances was probably hard enough. I could picture her sitting in a chair in her entryway, clutching a pillow in her hands, staring at the door, and willing it to open to reveal her daughter on the other side.

The next Wednesday, I heard footsteps as I walked onto the front porch, but it was too late. I was already closing the door behind me.

Keegan stood at the foot of the stairs, with the benign smile of a neighborhood grocer.

We both knew our meeting was much more significant than that.

“Going out?” He nodded with his hands in his pockets. My days as a drug dealer had taught me to be leery of men with hands in their pockets.

“Need some milk.”

Keegan stared at me as I inched down the stairs. I kept one eye on his face and the other on his buried hands. “Little late, must really need some cereal, huh?”

“Something like that.”

Keegan laughed. “Son, why don’t we just stop all this?”

“You’re not my dad.”

“No, I’m not. I’m afraid the infamous Ben Foley held that title.”

I froze. He knew exactly who I was. When he had found out didn’t matter, just what happened next. I knew if he was going to arrest me he would have done it already. Or maybe he just liked playing with his prey before he swallowed it whole.

Keegan sat down on the second church step and patted the wood next to it. I wouldn’t have sat, but his hands were now visible. I sat down too, but kept a few feet between us. “Look, I know who you are. But I really don’t care that you killed that guy. Or your mother. They probably both deserved it. At least your father did. Met him once or twice. Real mouthy toward my guys. Told one of them how he had to beat some sense into his bastard son all the time.”

“I didn’t kill my mother.”

Keegan laughed. “You missed what I said. I don’t care.”

“Then why are you here?” I tightened my hands into fists and rested them on my knees.

“Simple, you have something I want.”

I scoffed at him. “I don’t have anything. Literally, nothing.”

“You have something much more valuable than money, or anything else that the Catholic is letting you guard in there.”

I steadied my face. He couldn’t have known about the kids. Nick, certainly, but not the other two. “What do you want then?”

“I’ve been showing your face around town, getting a little intel and whatnot. You seemed familiar to me that first time we met, but I have to admit, I was curious. My gut told me there was more to your story.” His voice was smooth and steady, the voice of a man who knew he had the upper hand. “So I watched you for a few days. I knew whatever you were up to when I saw you leaving in the middle of the night had to be interesting. After a little persuasion, people were all too willing to tell me that they had seen you around.” He grinned, rubbing his chin with his hand. “You seem to have a relationship of sorts with one Maureen Black. If that’s even her real name.”

My stomach rose into my mouth. They were after a murderer, the murderer just happened to not be me. “What do you want with her?” My fists felt slick with sweat, and my fingers slid against each other.

“My brother went into her house and never came out. Last time we saw him was when we dropped him off there.”

Steady breaths, in and out.

“She’s got quite the reputation. Not the first time she’s hurt a customer. Doesn’t take a mathematician to figure out she just went a little too far this time. Billy’s got a bit of an anger problem, especially with the females.”

Don’t forget to inhale.

“We just want to bury the body. That’s it. We just want to bury him right.”

I didn’t believe him for a second. “What does that have to do with me?”

Keegan’s grocery store grin returned. “Well, we know she couldn’t have moved him by herself.”

I paused. I needed to choose my next words carefully. “Can’t help you.”

“Can’t or won’t?”

“Both.”

Keegan rose from his seat. “Maybe you don’t understand. If we don’t get answers from you, we’ll have to get them other ways.”

I kept my voice steady. “You can’t hurt her. Too many witnesses.” Maureen lived in a house with as many as twenty people at any given time. There was no way they could get to her. And if they arrested her, she’d talk. Or the girls would. Maureen told me once that she kept all her customers’ addresses on file. That way, if any of them caused a problem, she knew just where to find their wives.

“Who said anything about her?”

I stood. “Go ahead and try.” I pulled one of my knives from my pocket and snapped it open.

Keegan backed away, but only a couple steps, mocking me. “Whoa, cowboy. Look, I’m not about to try to fight you. I saw what you did to those guys in the warehouse. I’d like to keep all my extremities.”

I kept the blade pointed directly at him.

“Speaking of the warehouse, I did you a little favor. I cleaned up your mess.”

“What do you mean?”

“That woman, and all those men you…encountered…they positively ID’d you. But I had a little chat with her. She won’t be talking any time soon. Suddenly couldn’t remember what you looked like.”

I paused, trying to ignore the flushed feeling that had broken out across my skin. Keegan was right. He
had
cleaned up my mess. Sure, they were there to buy drugs from me, but the exchange never took place. All it looked like to an uninformed eye was that a maniac attacked three men, and traumatized the woman unfortunate enough to have witnessed it.

I snapped the blade closed. “See, I’m a good man to have on your side, Cain. We can either be friends and help each other. Or we can be something else.” He turned and started walking toward the road, in the opposite direction of Maureen’s house. “I’ll let you think about it. Don’t take too long though.”

Then he disappeared down the street.

Maureen greeted me with a grimace and slammed the door behind me. “You’re late. I don’t like late.”

“Sorry, I—” Before I could even finish my sentence she started pushing me down the stairs toward my new post. “We need to talk about something.”

“Nothing to talk about.” She wore a royal blue dress with a red belt synched at the waist, and a red scarf around her neck. I started to open my mouth to tell her she looked beautiful, but she positioned me against the wall. “This is your post. Don’t leave it for the rest of the night. Got it?”

“Are you mad at me or something?”

“Shut up and stand there.” With that, she marched back up the stairs and slammed the door.

I found myself alone, but not alone. All the curtains were shut on the girls’ rooms, if you could even call them rooms. “Areas” is more like it. Sheets rustled against themselves and I could hear the soft scraping. The creaking of bed frames filled the hot basement air, which smelled of old sweat and new sex. At one point, my hands slammed against my ears trying to drown out the guttural moans of men and the breathy sighs of the young girls that lay all around me, letting themselves be taken, having their innocence stolen along with their bodies.

Maureen called them Courtesans, the epitome of female elegance and power. But all I saw was a gilded, tapestry-ridden palace of rape and manipulation. Sure, they agreed to it, but consent in order to avoid starvation on the streets didn’t sound that far off. I couldn’t understand how Maureen didn’t see that what she created was just a fantasy, built with curtains paid for by peddling drugs to the desperate.