Flicker & Burn: A Cold Fury Novel (4 page)

“Doug, you’d better . . .”

“I’d better what? Do whatever you tell me to do and like it? Or you’re going to stare me into submission with that
cra-aazy
cold fury?” He popped a fist against his palm and said, “Maybe it’s your turn to have your butt kicked. I took a beating for you from that ski-masked freak, Poor Kevin. That was
months
ago and did you even thank me?” I was quiet then, my whole being aflame, and I yanked at the handcuffs as the metal bit into my wrists. “Did you?” he screamed, throwing a punch, holding it inches from my nose. When I opened my eyes, he grinned again. “Made you blink, hard-ass.” Before I could grab his eyes, he turned away, saying, “Nuh-uh-uh. Dougie no lookie.”

“Free me now,” I said. “Whatever this is, it’s over.”

Doug shook his head, strolling the room with his arms behind his back. “It’s over when I say it’s over. By the way, it’s not really an experiment. It’s revenge.”

“What are you talking about? Revenge for what?”

“For not
appreciating
me!” he screamed, punching the air. “For making me your chubby little
sidekick,
always doing the grit work, the endless research, and for what? O-o-oh, lucky me, I get to be Sara Jane Rispoli’s
friend!
I guess I should just whistle Dixie out of my butt cheeks every time you throw me a
scrap
of appreciation, right?”

“Doug!”

“
I
want to be the tragic hero!
I
want to have scary eye-power! When is it
Doug Stuffins’s
turn to drive the boat?”

“Listen . . .”

“No,
you
listen! Maybe I can’t hurt you physically . . . maybe you’re too tough. But there are other ways,” he said confidently. He looked out the window at the tops of buildings extending like a checkerboard to Lake Michigan. “You’ve had an exciting couple of days, I know, but it’s not possible you’ve forgotten that school starts tomorrow? Our junior year, day one?” I’d forgotten, all right. Who wouldn’t, after being attacked by red-eyed zombies? I started to reply when he said, “Start of the school year means Max is back. Have you spoken to your
boyfriend
since he got into town? Actually, the question is, has Gina spoken to you
about
your boyfriend’s
adventure
in La-La Land?”

That stopped me.

Gina Pettagola, my semi-friend, was the unquestioned gossip queen of Fep Prep. Although school had been out for the summer, she kept her finger on the pulse of everything about everyone that was none of her business. Besides movies, Doug loved nothing more than a scandal; if Gina knew of one, he would’ve heard about it. Now he pumped a fist, saying, “Boom, gotcha! Okay, so there’s a rumor flying around . . . really, I shouldn’t call it that since it’s true . . . about how your loyal, honest Max had a fling in sun-kissed California. Wait,
fling
implies something transitory. This was a romance.”

“It’s not true,” I hissed. I’d always had a sneaking suspicion that Max wouldn’t stay with me, and it whispered again now as the blue flame leaped in my gut.

“I didn’t catch her name, but Gina heard she was tall and blond with two big . . . brown eyes,” Doug said. “And apparently, just the cutest little nose you ever saw. Of course she’s back in California and Max is here, but Gina said . . .”

His voice was smothered by pounding in my ears as my heart exploded, because I’d lost Max. My brain bulged with that repressed fear as I watched the back of his brown curly head pull away from a laughing blond girl’s face after he’d kissed her—he didn’t turn, but I knew it was Max. The love I had for him was so strong that it made me weak, and my cold fury weakened too, until something danced and crackled through my bones, into my brain. When I looked up, I saw a different Doug than my friend and confidant; instead, he was a bloated bearer of bad news who made it come true simply by delivering it. I tried to free my arms but was cuffed too tightly, so I put all of the murderous voltage behind my eyes. Doug turned and froze, his face a combination of triumph and horror. He’d succeeded in activating the electricity but now his own deep, dark fear stared back, causing a wet spot at the crotch of his pants. I looked into his mind, seeing a film clip of him aimlessly roaming the Bird Cage Club calling out my name and feeling his terror—his only friend had abandoned him. “No,” he said quietly. “Please . . . oh no . . .”

“Oh yes . . . ,” I said with gleeful hatred, nailing my eyes to his with the need to slit his throat pulsating outward in waves, matching my heartbeat.

My body jerked against the handcuffs, a loud rattling began, wooden at first and then glassy, and then the universe split and cracked as the wall of windows exploded.

The shock broke my gaze from Doug’s and he dove beneath the control center, sending books and computers flying. Bound to the chair, all I could do was wait to be cut to pieces, but instead the force blew the glass outward. I watched translucent shards spiral through the air like icy razors, glinting in the moonlight before falling onto the El tracks and surrounding roofs. The Currency Exchange Building was an ancient skyscraper occupying an odd slice of real estate that, throughout the century, had been boxed in by other buildings and the train several stories below; very little glass would reach the empty nighttime sidewalk and whatever did would be blamed on myriad urban accidents. I inhaled deeply, feeling the cold fresh air scrape at my lungs, overcome by an exhaustion that was like being filled with cement. Slowly, Doug climbed out from under the control center and said, “Remind me not to mess with you about Max.”

I looked at the debris covering the floor and used every ounce of energy I had to say, “What the hell . . . just happened?”

“You generated a tsunami of electrical current,” Doug answered, looking around in awe. He knelt down, unlocked the handcuffs with clumsy hands, and said, “Which you then used to try and slice me into meatloaf with your crazy eyes.”

“For the last time, stop calling me crazy.”

“I wasn’t. I really meant your eyes. They were glowing.”

“Please don’t say red,” I said, staggering to my feet.

Doug shook his head. “Blue, like your normal color but with light behind them. It was pretty terrifying, but damn . . . it was
awesome.
”

“Great. My evolution as a circus freak continues. I was perfectly aware of what I was doing, by the way.”

“Which was what, exactly?”

“To put it bluntly,” I said, as teensy pops of enervating voltage jumped along my spine and faded away, “I was killing you because you deserved to die.”

Doug, always analytical, even with peed-in jeans, asked, “Why?”

“What you told me about Max. Part of me is sure he’ll dump me someday, and you tapped into it and made it real. And then, when I was sure it was over between Max and me—like I’d been sure my family was dead—all of the love I had for him was turned into murderous hatred for you,” I said with a shrug. “You deserved to die.”

“You know I made it all up, right? To get the electricity flowing?” he said. “The stuff about Max and some girl in California? It was all nonsense.”

“Yeah, I know now. Good job with that.”

“Ugh, thanks,” he said with a ripple of fatigue, drawing a hand over his face and sighing. “God, listen . . . all of that shit I talked was to activate cold fury. It definitely has to be rolling before the electrical part kicks in.”

“Like ‘big-nosed geek’?”

“Right,” he said sheepishly. “It wouldn’t have occurred to me if you weren’t always bringing it up. Your braces too. I never notice them unless you’re eating, like, corn or something.” He sighed and said, “You know I . . . well, what I mean is, I love being your partner in this thing . . .”

“I know. I love you, too, Doug.”

He blushed, looking at his shoes, and then kicked away some books and papers. “What’s this?” he said, lifting the silver ice cream cone dropped by the creature. I’d placed it on the control center for his analysis, and explained how the thing had slurped at it before trying to run me down. Doug held it to the light, reading,
“Soy belleza . . .”

“And beauty is me,” I said.

He rolled it between two fingers. “Reminds me of a one-hitter . . . the little metal pipe thingies used to smoke dope? My dad used to leave them all over the house.” He looked inside it at the pink, sticky residue and sniffed. “It smells like a chemical.”

“It was soft serve.”

“There are tons of chemicals in Mister Kreamy Kone concoctions,” he sighed. “Delicious ones.”

“Track it down online, figure out what it is. It could lead somewhere.”

“Give me twenty-four hours,” he said. “By the way, your eyes aren’t glowing anymore. But when the electricity was flowing, man, you should have seen them. They were also projecting these little beams of gold light.”

Watching Doug push a broom, cleaning up glass, I realized how correct he’d been to try and discover the source of the electricity. If I was forced to shuttle between the remnants of the former Sara Jane, ignorant but happy daughter and sister, and the emerging Sara Jane, counselor-at-large, it was vital to understand what was contained in my brain. Everything nudged me back to the notebook, and now so did that word Doug had uttered—
gold.
Chapter one (
“Nostro”—
Us) refers to the Outfit in general and the Rispoli clan in particular, especially an ancient ancestor, an Egyptian tribal leader with gold-flecked eyes.

I understood then that the notebook was not just a repository of old secrets.

It was also a living document where I’d find traces of me.

I ONCE WATCHED A NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC
program with my brother, Lou, when he was in his large-animals-that-eat-other-large-animals phase.

With a combination of awe and horror, I witnessed an anaconda swallowing a deer, and then a seventeen-foot python gag down a startled antelope. In both cases, their respective dinners were enough to satisfy each reptile for days. And then came
Carcharodon carcharias,
or as generations of terrified beachgoers and moviegoers know it, the great white shark. As the segment began, Lou elbowed me and said, “Pay attention. This monster is
never
satisfied.” And he was right. The twenty-foot-long floating predator ate tunas, seals, porpoises, manta rays, charming dolphins, inattentive dogs, paddling people, other sharks, surfboards, and then, following a quick nap, started all over again.

After blowing out the windows earlier in the day (it would be open-air living until they were replaced), I locked myself in the office/bedroom with the notebook on Sunday evening. Hours and chapters later, I put it aside, thinking of the Outfit as a great white shark.

First, there will never be enough money to satisfy its greed.

Second, it’s a monster that, through a chilling combination of bland anonymity and appalling brutality, is more terrifying than any red-eyed ice cream creature.

Its hunger for cash means there will never be enough things to steal and fence, never enough businesses to defraud and extort, and never enough people to betray, exploit, beat, and kill. I read about schemes and tactics great and small, mundane and murderous. One was the “Wedding Party”: Outfit thugs consult the newspaper, pick a wedding reception in a ritzy neighborhood, and hold it up at gunpoint, making off with cash and gifts. There was the “Brick Job,” an act of brutal, simple extortion where, unless a certain amount was paid, a victim is put into the trunk of a car loaded with bricks and driven wildly around a parking lot, being crushed, battered, and cut to pieces by the heavy, sharp stones. Consistent Outfit income was supplied by juice loans (desperate suckers pay astronomical weekly percentage rates on cash loans), street tax (a huge monthly fee paid in order to run a business without interferences such as arson or death), bleeding a business (the Outfit forces itself in as a partner and then slowly liquidates the business for cash until there’s nothing left), and the old standbys of drugs, hijacking, gambling, car theft, and prostitution. I learned that the Outfit financed casinos in Las Vegas and Atlantic City, but over the decades had invested much more into the ownership of politicians and law enforcement (I can’t believe the names I read—mayors, governors, cops and FBI agents, senators, congressmen, foreign heads of state, two former U.S. presidents) in order to protect its businesses.

The Outfit’s monstrosity is very good for business.

It’s rooted in the pathological ease with which it kills.

It will kill to eliminate competition, kill non-payers and underperformers, and, like the great white shark, kill its own out of insatiable hunger.

The Outfit places no value on people other than as potential, disposable ATMs. It follows no code of moral conduct, has no sympathy or empathy, and is loyal only to self-enrichment; if its members ever had souls, they sold them long ago, stole them back, and fenced them again. I paused at this conclusion, uncomfortably recalling the thrill of inhuman power I possessed (or which possessed me) while in the grip of the electricity, opened to the chapter entitled
“Nostro”
(“Us”) and flipped to a section that discussed the Sicilian village of Buondiavolo, where my family had come from. In 1906, a team of researchers traveled there to investigate a legend: the remote village was inhabited by ancestors of an ancient, blue-eyed Egyptian tribe that had once been the preeminent fighting unit of Alexander the Great’s army. According to folklore, the tribe’s chief claimed that his people’s power came from eating gold—that over the centuries, the rare salts contained in the precious metal had infiltrated their blood and brains, endowing successive generations with otherworldly powers. I moved on, reading:

There was a rumor of an even more mysterious property to the phenomenon (ghiaccio furioso). Supposedly, there was one family in particular known for its blue eyes flecked with the same gold as their Egyptian ancestor. These people were capable, in times of extreme pain or passion, of emitting a charge or spark from that fearful gaze, with the gold serving as an emotional-electrical conductor. While the research team did not witness this attribute, it did note several volatile electrical storms happening in Buondiavolo. It was also noted that every home, without exception, bore a lightning-scarred weather vane.

I lowered the notebook, thinking of the weather vane atop our house on Balmoral Avenue.

The night Grandpa Enzo died, I came home to the news in a swirl of wind and rain. My dad, clearly traumatized, opened the door just as a bolt of lightning destroyed a tree. The rest of the evening, while the household mourned and an emotional storm churned within my father, lightning repeatedly struck the old weather vane. Now I wondered,
Was it the storm or my dad?
Also, the sentence that read “a rumor of an even more mysterious property to the phenomenon” confirmed that cold fury and electricity were interrelated. Those who bore gold flecks in their eyes conducted electricity “in times of extreme pain or passion,” meaning
after
cold fury had kicked in.

So now I knew how it appeared. I wondered, then, if its purpose was anything other than lethal.

Rereading the page, I found the thread of an answer in the first paragraph. “Alexander . . . absorbed the tribe into his army, making it an elite unit, the first to engage difficult enemies.”

I flipped to the chapter entitled
“Metodi”
(“Methods”), and traced the page with a finger until I found frighteningly similar words. A note scribbled in the margin read, “Daggers is the first line of defense against our difficult problems.” The chapter discussed notorious Outfit guys with names like Harry “The Hook,” Jimmy “The Bomber,” and Eddie “The Axe,” all of them small potatoes compared to Nicky “Daggers” Fratelli. The others’ nicknames were self-explanatory, and while it seemed as if Fratelli’s was too, it actually had nothing to do with his use of knives; it referenced the fearsome gaze he affixed to his victims, as in “shooting daggers.” The chapter explained how he would start an argument, escalate it to a confrontation, and, when he was nice and pissed off, immobilize the poor mope with his terrifying glare and then coolly murder him.

Funny,
I thought with horror,
Uncle Nicky seemed like such a sweet old man.

He’d been Grandpa Enzo’s second cousin, a frail, elderly, soft-spoken presence at holidays and birthday parties when I was little. Even now I can see his watery blue eyes dotted with fading flecks of gold as he patted my head and slipped me a twenty-dollar bill. He was an old man by that time, an Outfit veteran past his prime and, as I learned from the notebook, known far and wide for his infamous “Look,” which froze adversaries like rats in a headlight. Of course I realized he was using cold fury—the ancient ghiaccio furioso of our ancestors. The notebook explained how from 1959 through 1983, on Outfit orders, Uncle Nicky murdered four hundred and thirty-three people in eight states and four countries—a gag-inducing average of twenty-four corpses a year. It was enough to dry out my tongue, but the next passage made me feel as if I’d mainlined Novocain:

And although Daggers never revealed his precise method for pushing a button, it was clear Ben Franklin had nothing on him: every one of his “clients” met their maker through the tried and true procedure of electrocution. In fact, most of them were found with their eyes burnt out of their skulls and . . .

I lowered the notebook. The Outfit had used violent death for punishment or profit, or both, for a hundred years. Sometimes killings were secret (bodies dumped into the Sanitary Canal), other times they were staged as grisly spectacles to maximize public shock (victims riddled with bullets in barber chairs). However, despite the existence of every possible depravity in the Outfit, it still wasn’t easy to find members willing to kill. It required a rare individual for whom murder was abnormally easy—guys like Uncle Nicky. Thinking of it now reminded me of my English lit teacher, Ms. Ishikawa, mesmerizing us with tales of ancient rulers who dealt with their most problematic enemies by deploying select groups of killers to wipe them out. Was it possible all of those rulers located their own personal Uncle Nicky, or battalions of Uncle Nickys, through sheer coincidence? Or was there a connection?

My suspicion was grounded in the past, but the answer existed in the present, online.

I flipped open Doug’s laptop and tapped tentatively, reading about the Macedonian Empire where it all began with Alexander the Great recruiting my Egyptian ancestors as his specialized corps of killers. I searched forward in time, using keywords—blue eyes, gold flecks, family of assassins—and tracked them through the ages. The Ptolemaic Dynasty (305 BC–30 BC), led by calculating Cleopatra, left behind proof of my family that made me gasp. I looked at a hieroglyphic image of a cunning assassin wielding neither spear nor knife, but a deadly pair of gleaming blue eyes. The same held true with a rice paper scroll from the Yuan Dynasty (1271–1368), where a platoon of soldiers stood cowering before just one of Kublai Khan’s men; he stared them into submission with a gaze as cold and blue as a frozen lake. I moved on to recent history, pausing at the Battle of Stalingrad (1943) between the Russian and German armies. The Russian premier, Joseph Stalin, sent in a select corps of soldiers called the
,
which swiftly and brutally ended the conflict. I pasted the term into a translator, and when the words popped onto the screen—Blue Lightning—I’d finally read enough.

Cold fury ignited the electricity.

The voltage powered an inhuman ability to kill without remorse.

Taken as a whole, my ancestors were history’s hit men.

I opened my tiny office window and let the midnight air whisper over my prickly skin. Nunzio staked his (and our) claim in Chicago as counselor-at-large, but it was obvious that, like the great white shark, we served a deadlier purpose. The term came to me from a movie—
Natural Born Killers
—and I shuddered. I understood genetic predisposition (thanks, health sciences class) and imagined an ominous cluster of cells floating through my body, searching for a place to fester. Just thinking about it felt like I’d stepped from a cliff in total darkness. The intense crying jags I used to experience had long since dried up, displaced by a dry sense of doom. What I’d discovered made me plummet again and fantasize about falling forever. I crossed the shadowy dance floor and stepped outside to the terrace. Looking at buildings that stretched away like tombstones, I wondered how Nunzio, Enzo, and my dad had resisted the urge to kill.

And then it occurred to me—maybe they couldn’t stop themselves.

Using cold fury to unwillingly preside as counselor-at-large was one thing, but electrically shape-shifting into a ruthless hit man was another, and I wondered then how long it would take until
I
morphed into a teenage version of Nicky “Daggers” Fratelli?

“What are you doing out here?”

I turned slowly, the breeze whipping hair at my face. “I’m a murderer, Doug,” I said softly, hearing my words blow away.

He looked around. “Where’s the body?”

“I mean it. I’m a murderer. It’s there, in the notebook.”

“I think someone’s read enough scary secrets for tonight,” he said, extending a hand. “Come on, back to bed for you.”

“No, goddamn it . . . it’s too much! It’s too goddamn . . .” I screamed, shaking violently, punching at the air. There were no tears, but none were necessary; I was choking on rage, babbling with frustration. It rattled Doug worse than when I’d blown out the windows, and he eased me to the terrace floor with an arm around my quivering shoulders. It wasn’t just the threat of being a natural born killer but also my constant sense of loss or loneliness, with loneliness being the sadder and grayer of the two. Loss means that someone beloved is irretrievable, and as bad as that is, a person can eventually accept the fact of permanent absence. But loneliness is terrible because it’s specific, open-ended, and alive. You want precisely whom you want, no one else, and it’s torturous because they’re out there somewhere but you can’t be with them—you can’t even
find
them—and that’s when you realize that the hollow isolation in your gut will never go away. Of course, it’s only made worse by the never-ending paranoia of being just about to have your brain pulled from your skull by an ice cream creature. As hard as I run, they’re always waiting around the corner.