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  The feeling rose from within. Harder and harder, I thrust until I stilled and came. I’d have lasted longer if she were younger.

  Leaving my dick out, I kept my legs spread in case I’d make her do it again. “You still know how to suck.” I smirked as she sat back on her heels and wiped my come from her lips.

  “Gordy, can I have some coffee?”

  I waved my hand. “If you drink it from a dog dish.”

  Her dead green eyes came my way.

  “Forget it. I feel generous. Use a cup, one from the sink.” No sense wasting a clean cup on her filthy cock-sucking mouth.

  As she walked to the stove with her thin dress hiked up, small circular pink scars showed on her upper thighs under the fluorescent lighting. I turned to the ashtray and my burnt-out cigarette. That was okay; I hadn’t needed the glowing red end to make her obey, not today.

  I’d lost count of the years since she’d shown up on my porch again.

  No one outside this house knew she still existed.

  Weekly hits of heroin and cigarettes made feeding her less expensive. The hardest part was finding good veins in her used-up flesh.

  “Umm.” The sound of throat clearing caused me to turn.

  Leaning against the archway to the dining room with her arms crossed over her breasts and her complexion pale was my oldest daughter, Zella. Her hair was pulled back in a ponytail, her bloodshot eyes were narrowed, and a cigarette dangled from her lips. The kid in her belly was beginning to show.

  I fucking hoped this one was a boy.

  How many damn daughters could one man have?

  Ignoring my exposed dick, Zella looked around the kitchen and narrowed her gaze at Nancy. “When you’re done with your coffee break, clean up this kitchen. I don’t feel good. I’m going to rest today.”

  It was obvious from the dishes piled all over and beer cans and pizza boxes stacked on the floor and counters as well as empty cartons and containers that Zella rested every day.

  “Too much blow,” I assessed as she moaned.

  My daughter shrugged and rubbed her stomach. “I think it’s the kid. Pregnancy sucks.” She scoffed. “Just like our maid.” Her nose scrunched. “This place stinks almost as much as her.”

  “How’s the rest of the house?” I asked.

  “Fucking mess,” Zella replied.

  I spoke to Nancy. “Since you’re upstairs, it sounds like you have a house to clean today. Do a good job, get the house spick-and-span, and maybe we’ll let you lick our dinner plates.”

  “Only if you’re a good bitch,” Zella said. “And after I spit on everything.”

  “You know, Nancy, if you’re not happy with the accommodations or our bartering system, you could always leave.”

  “I want to stay,” Nancy said. “I’ll clean the house. But...first...can...when..?” The cup in her grasp trembled as she looked from me to Zella.

  “The bitch wants drugs,” Zella said. “Fucking pathetic addict. Earn it. Bathrooms need scrubbing.”

  A sound from beyond the back door caught all of our attention.

  We all turned as a knock rattled the door, reverberating through the kitchen.

  Though the window inside the door was covered with a sheer curtain, it was stained and yellowed from years of cigarette smoke. Yet the silhouette of a person, a short person could be seen.

  “What the hell?” I asked, pushing my dick into my pants. “Find out who’s at the fucking back door?”

  No one should be at our back door. Our backyard was fenced. The gate was padlocked from within and the only other entrance was through an old detached garage that stayed locked.

  “Make your pet go away,” Zella said, tipping her chin toward Nancy. “Even if it’s a neighbor kid, we don’t want nobody seeing your smelly old bitch.”

  “Go. Crawl,” I said, knowing Nancy wouldn’t be seen through the window if she stayed low. When she didn’t move, I added in a more determined hushed tone, “Get your ass downstairs. If you make a sound, you’ll be sleeping standing up because I’ll beat your ass raw.”

  Zella laughed.

  As Nancy scurried on all fours toward the basement door, Zella followed, and after closing the basement door, she turned the lock in the handle.

  Standing taller, Zella nodded and stepped to the back door.

  “Wait,” I said, reaching for a pistol I kept on top of the refrigerator and placed the barrel into the back waistband of my pants. “Ain’t takin’ no chances. Now, go ahead. Answer the door.”

  Unlocking the bolt and then the chain, Zella opened the door inward. From around her head and shoulder, I saw our visitor wasn’t a kid but a woman dressed all in black. She wasn’t much, short and puny with yellow hair pulled back too tight and red lipstick. She was wearing large dark sunglasses.

  “What are you doing in our backyard?” Zella asked.

  “Miss Maples?”

  “Mrs. Keller.”

  “You’re married?” the woman asked.

  “Was. He died.”

  That wasn’t true, but it was her standard answer.

  “It happens,” the woman replied with no sympathy. Her head moved slightly side to side, appearing to be looking behind Zella. Truthfully, with the dark glasses it was difficult to tell. “This house still belongs to Gordon Maples.”

  “Yeah, my dad...What do you want?”

  “I’m looking for information.”

  As I came up behind Zella, I scanned the woman up and down. The black sweater she wore fit tightly around small tits and she had a tiny waist. Not skinny like Nancy. This woman was well proportioned with curves, just small. She couldn’t have been one hundred and ten pounds soaking wet. Her pants were pleated at the waist and hung to the exact top of her black shoes or boots with pointed toes. It was like they were made just for her—expensive.

  “What kind of information?” I asked.

  “The kind I’m willing to pay a lot of money for.”

  I noticed her neck seemed odd on one side, wrinkly.

  “But if you’re not interested...”

  I reached for the door and opened it wider. “Show me the money, and I’ll tell you what I can.”

  The woman removed her sunglasses. The side of her face matched her neck, weird and wrinkly. It was like she was half old and half young. The young side wasn’t too bad to look at. I started to wonder about her pussy—was it half and half too—when she spoke.

  “Mr. Maples, if you have the information I need, I will pay generously. I suggest you refrain from trying any bullshit on me. I know what I want, and I will get it. It’s best to remember that I’m not a patient person.”

  There was something about her I couldn’t identify. Even though she was small and disfigured, she had a haughty air, like she might have money. “How much money are we talking?”

  “That depends on what you can provide.” She peered around us. “Is there anyone else home?”

  “No,” I answered.

  The woman nodded. As she did, a dark-haired man stepped from our garage. He was tall and big, as if he was a body builder, but his clothes were wrong for the neighborhood. They looked like he belonged at one of the fancy clubs downtown. Instead of wearing working men’s clothes, he wore a cream-colored sweater, black jeans, and shiny black boots.

  Zella and I both took a step back. “Wait,” I said. “How did he get in—?”

  The woman raised a gloved hand to silence me. Her speaking returned my attention to her face. “This is my associate. You will let us in and we’ll talk.”

  “And if we don’t?”

  The man lifted a revolver as the woman put out her hand. “Give me your gun, Mr. Maples.”

  “I ain’t got—”

  The man moved his finger to the trigger.

  My gaze met Zella’s, mine silently admitting our disadvantage. Exhaling, I reached for my pistol and placed it in the woman’s small gloved hand.

  Once she had it secure, she replied, “To your question, Mr. Maples. If you
don’t let us in, you will both die—today.” She shrugged. “If you do let us in, you could have a nice payday.” She grinned, reminding me of the joker in DC comics. The skin on the wrinkled side pulled tight. “I’m all about choice,” she went on. “What will you decide, Mr. Maples? I’ll give you until five.”

  The tall man spoke, “Four, three, two—”

  I opened the door wider. “Come in.”

  As they stepped into the kitchen, their eyes feverishly scanned the counters of trash and dirty dishes. The woman’s nose twitched.

  “I-I was about to clean,” Zella said.

  The woman lifted her non-gloved hand to her nose. “You may be used to this stench, but I won’t spend another moment in this filth.” She turned to the tall man. “Get the car. We’re all going for a ride.”

  This was kidnapping 101. All the daytime talk shows said to never go with a stranger. For the first time in my life, I wasn’t confident that I was the perpetrator in this new situation.

  Zella’s eyes met mine. “I-I need to stay here.”

  “Come in the living room,” I beckoned. “It’s cleaner. We can talk there.” I nodded to Zella. “Get them...water or something. Coffee?”

  The man handed the woman his gun, its barrel still aimed our direction. “I’ll have the car behind the garage in two minutes.”

  The woman pointed the gun our way and tilted her head toward the backyard. “We’re all going.” When Zella reached for my hand, the woman added, “Now.”

  Reid

  Present day

  The unmistakable odor of ammonia assaulted my sinuses. My entire body flinched to get away, yet there was nowhere to go. Coughing and wheezing, I rapidly blinked as the world around me came into focus. “Motherfucker,” I muttered as I tried to make sense of the ache in my chest.

  Shit.

  Shaking my head, I lifted my hand to the source of the ache as beyond the windows of the moving SUV, scenes of Chicago flew by at rapid speed. Even breathing hurt as I closed my eyes and laid my head back on the seat.

  My scalp alerted me to the fact someone one was fisting the front of my hair and pulling my face upward. I blinked once and then twice as Mason’s stern expression came in and out of focus. “Fucking stay awake,” he growled.

  I reached for his hand and pushed it away from my hair. “Let go. I’m awake.”

  I was.

  I wasn’t sure when I’d been asleep, but the ten-thousand-pound weight on my chest and vise on my temples, along with the green-eyed stare, told me I was definitely awake. Again, I rubbed my fist over my chest. “Did a fucking horse kick me?” I looked down, noticing my sleeve. No longer light blue, it was saturated with red. My opposite hand went to it, feeling the stickiness. And as I lifted it, the elbow refused to bend.

  “Leave it alone. We’re getting you back to the tower. Dr. Dixon is going to need her own fucking wing. Hell, along with the obstetricians Sparrow wants to move in, we’ll need a surgery unit.”

  Surgery?

  My gaze moved up to the man driving. I couldn’t place his name, but I recognized him. He’d been on the sidewalk outside the house in Englewood. After...and then...the girl...a man...gunshots.

  It was like a puzzle where each piece slid into place.

  I sat straighter, the interior of the SUV spinning unsettlingly around me as a wave of nausea competed for attention. “Fuck, I was shot.”

  “You always have been the fucking genius,” Mason said. “Yeah, you were shot. Your arm was grazed. A little more than grazed, but the slug didn’t lodge, and we were able to bandage you up enough to stop the bleeding. It was the second slug that hit its target—your fucking chest.”

  Groaning, I laid my head against the seat. “I told you we wouldn’t need vests.”

  “And you’re damn lucky I didn’t listen to you. Hell, Sparrow is already pissed, but there’s no way I’m telling Lorna you were shot.”

  I looked up to his unsympathetic expression. “Good. Don’t tell her.”

  “Man, you look pale as shit, and that’s saying something. There’s a chunk of flesh missing from your bicep, a few bruised or cracked ribs, and you’re going to have a giant-ass bruise on your chest. My sister may not be the savant you are, but she’s not dumb. She’ll definitely pick up on the clues.”

  My thoughts were on the injuries he mentioned. Since I didn’t respond, Mason went on, “I’m not telling her. You are. She’ll take it much better coming from your not-dead lips.”

  A moan came from my throat as the SUV bounced over something on the roadway. “Slug,” I repeated. “You said slug. The man, he had a long gun. Was it a shotgun?”

  “Yeah. And at that range...we need to tell Patrick that his upgrade of our vests was a good investment. Thankfully, the slug didn’t penetrate the vest, but it gave you a swift shock. Phillips” —Mason tilted his head toward the driver— “passed his CPR test. If you weren’t going to the tower to get your ass chewed, your arm fixed, and your chest healed, I’d tell you to buy a lottery ticket. Today is your lucky day.”

  I rubbed my chest. “The vest is gone.”

  “Again,” Mason said, “CPR is best performed on your skin. Without further tests, we think the impact of the slug caused your heart to get out of rhythm and the stress caused it to stop.”

  “You’re saying I died?”

  “I’m saying your heart stopped and was restarted.”

  I closed my eyes. “Shit, aren’t you supposed to have life flashes before your eyes or visions or something when you die? A light or pearly gates?”

  Mason grinned. “Speaking from experience, I’d take a shock to my heart over third-degree burns.”

  I couldn’t recall seeing any rerun reels of the important moments in my life.

  As my head ached, I tried to recall. We’d killed that piece of shit and then stepped onto the porch. It was then that the world went dark. Maybe my lack of ‘life before my eyes’ meant it wasn’t my time, or maybe that my destination wasn’t accessed through pearly gates with streets of gold, but someplace warmer. I had a twinge of guilt, knowing there were two women waiting in that paradise for me. Could there be a man too? “Your father was a patriot in the true sense of the word.” I hadn’t been able to reach Walters again, but I wanted to talk to him more about my father.

  “...I guess this is where you are meant to be,” Mason continued to talk.

  “Lorna. When I die, she’ll be my last thought.”

  “Well, you’re alive so be ready to face her.”

  “And tell her we went to Gordon Maples’s house? She never told me what he did.”

  “He fucking confessed,” Mason said. “I don’t care what fucking bullshit Nancy told her.” His green eyes went to the front seat as he lowered his voice, “Maples deserved to die.”

  “I’m not arguing. I just don’t know how to tell Lorna that we went there without bringing up the memories that she won’t want to face.” I leaned forward and wheezed. “Fuck, I feel like I was kicked by a mule or maybe a Clydesdale.”

  “Like I said, you’re going to have a nasty bruise, and there’s a good chance you have a few broken or cracked ribs from the compressions.”

  My gaze went to the rearview mirror. The driver’s eyes met mine. “Phillips, thank you.”

  “Doing my job, Mr. Murray.”

  I wasn’t certain that saving people with heart compressions was part of his job description, but if it wasn’t, we needed to update our Sparrow employee protocol. Pain shot from my chest as I exhaled. “Shit, so much for in and out of his house. My mind is still choppy. What the fuck happened?”

  The SUV exited the highway and entered the city traffic.

  “Maples is dead,” Mason said.

  “Yeah, I remember that. Gutted like a fat fish.”

  “In hindsight, we should have cut off his dick.” Mason scoffed. “...If we could have found it.”

  I reached for my chest. “Don’t make me laugh.” My gaze met his. “We fucked up.”


  Mason shrugged. “There will be more cleanup than we planned, but it’s getting taken care of. It will. Sparrow made some calls. The incident on South Morgan will go into the books as gang retaliation. Seems as though a shipment of over a hundred kilos of heroin was inadvertently delivered to the wrong house. Instead of being an upstanding citizen, Gordon Maples asked around, looking for the most lucrative avenue of sale. Word got around, the intended recipient wasn’t happy. Soon the police will find half the stash in the attic.”

  “Attic?” I asked, recalling that was where Mason had said they’d slept.

  He nodded. “Yeah. It was a lot smaller than I remembered.”

  Scenes replayed in my head. There was Maples tied to the dining room chair as he watched his insides become his outsides moments before he took his last breath. And then we were leaving. The girl was across the street and there was a man. “What about the girl?”

  Mason exhaled as he sent a text message. “He gave her a code. When I tried to get rid of her and the baby, Maples fucking told her to take the baby to Mrs. Stephens. I heard it, but I was too focused on him and on wanting to make him suffer. I should have known.”

  “I was there. I heard that and I didn’t think anything of it.”

  “It was a code. Now, I can see it. The way she responded. I fucked up.”

  “How would we know that?” I asked.

  “We should have been paying better attention. We didn’t. Neither one of us did for the same fucking reason. Sparrow is going to ream us out and we deserve it. We weren’t thinking like soldiers for Sparrow or for any other regime.”

  “The Order would have left me.”

  “Be glad we’re not in the Order,” Mason said.

  “You’re right,” I said. “We made this personal.”

  The SUV turned and began to descend into the tunnel that led to our parking garage.

  “It’s me—my fault,” I said. “I’m the one who wanted to find him, to make him pay. Sparrow can be pissed at me. What is he going to do, fire us?”

  Silence settled over us as the SUV continued underground toward the garage. It was a construction marvel that Sparrow had this tunnel created beneath some of the highest-rent towers in Chicago. It ran over three city blocks long, making it impossible to know from the entrance to which building it led.