McLaughlin’s had been abandoned for two decades. It had served a short stint as a drafty nightclub in the late nineties, apparently, though Toly hadn’t been witness to that. Someone had used it for storage for a while, until the cops shut down the illegal warehouse setup. It had served as a dumping ground for broken or unwanted appliances, cars, and more than a few corpses. It was a perfect spot for kids who liked graffiti, or kids who liked to shoot up. Its lofty windows were all broken out, its floor long-since gone to gravel and grime, the original concrete buried under a layer of silt brought in with the rainwater that washed in through the gaping old doors and poured in through the busted skylights. It was the perfect, if cliché place for a rendezvous with a madman.
First, Toly pulled into the deserted parking lot of the diner where he and Misha had lunched more than a week ago. The neon was lit, but the inside looked deserted, the lights dimmed, and the only car in the parking lot was Misha’s Cobra, thin streak of exhaust fumes snaking from each tailpipe. Toly left his bike between the building and the dumpster, where it wouldn’t be seen until daylight, and walked to the car. Misha got out and rounded the rear end of it to meet him, dressed in bulky black, beanie tugged low on his brow.
“I was starting to think you wouldn’t come,” he said, and the neon caught the glint in his eyes, traced the faint upward curve of his mouth. A look of glad relief. “Come on.” He clapped Toly on the shoulder and then popped the trunk. “I even laid down blankets. You should get plenty of air.”
Toly regarded the interior of the trunk – there were indeed blankets, and even what looked like a sofa cushion, a bottle of water. His pulse tripped, and his palms itched with nervous perspiration.
The plan was Misha’s, and it wasn’t a bad one. When he’d set up the meeting with the Butcher’s son, he’d pleaded his own ignorance in the murder of the man’s father. He confessed to transporting the body, trading it for cash on the docks, but swore up and down he’d never known the identity of the corpse wrapped in plastic sheeting. He was only the drop man, he’d said, and Toly was the wielder of the knife. Toly who was a thorn in Misha’s side, he’d said, providing his new club with info on the bratva, helping the Lean Dogs target and shatter their trafficking business. He wanted revenge, too, he said, and if the Butcher’s son wanted a pound of flesh, Misha would hand it over, in the form of a captive Toly, in exchange for a truce.
It was all to be a ruse, of course, but they had to make it look real to start. In case anyone was poised outside the cannery with a sniper rifle.
Misha said, “He won’t buy it if your hands aren’t bound.”
Toly nodded. “Yeah.”
“We can wait, though.” He produced a pair of cheap handcuffs, the kind cops used and that Toly could easily get out of. “Here. Pretend they’re latched; hold them together.”
Toly accepted them, grateful for that bit of control. It was not his own, but Raven’s voice in the back of his mind, cautioning him, telling him he was a naïve, trusting fool.
And he wasn’t trusting Misha, not really.
He was only climbing into the trunk of his car, and curling up, and watching Misha smile tightly in reassurance before the lid slammed down.
Christ, what was he doing?
He was ending this. He was putting a bullet in the Butcher’s son, finally, and the guns on his person, that Misha hadn’t seen fit to take away, weighed reassuringly against his skin, his insurance policy. He’d killed three men point-blank in a room full of a dozen others the night he fled the bratva. He could do it again, if need be.
He lay in the close dark of the trunk a moment, Detroit steel vibrating all around him, the grumble of the engine overpowering from this angle. Then, above it, he heard the door slam, and the clunk of the gears shifting, and they were moving. He rolled, even in that tight space, and caught himself with both hands, grateful now for the sofa cushion. Back, a stop, another change of gears, and they were rolling forward, slow, and then a buck over the curb, and out onto the street, the engine roaring; he could feel the shudders of it in his teeth, in the center of his heart.
It took forever, that drive out to the cannery, especially once they hit the old, corroded parking lot and Misha had to slow to avoid potholes that had become canyons over time, wide, deep trenches whose puddles never truly dried out. He hit a few, sending Toly crashing up into the lid of the trunk. He whacked his head and white starbursts exploded in the total darkness around him, vision flickering from the impact.
He had a long time, as he was jostled around, to regret his decision. He wouldn’t allow himself to, though. He’d looked at Raven’s sleeping face hours before, visible only as a series of faint, cream crescents in the gloaming. Peaceful. Trusting. No more fingers and ears in the mail for her after this. No more constantly living under armed guard. It didn’t mean she wouldn’t need to take such extreme precautions in the future – the Abacus fallout would haunt the club for years to come, he figured, and she would always be attached to the club, always seen as a weak spot in the Lean Dog armor, no matter her strengths – wouldn’t have to keep Cass out of school and worry that every drone of the buzzer was a threat keen on raiding her shower drains. His own safety wasn’t guaranteed going forward – could never be – but he could live with that. He’d spent his whole life knowing his days were numbered in some fashion. It was a threat to Raven he couldn’t tolerate; that was why he was here now, locked up in a trunk, ready to play prisoner.
Finally, the Cobra eased to a halt. Toly fitted the cuffs around his wrists, index fingers hooked around the bracelets to keep them in place. It wasn’t a great fit – if he so much as stumbled, he’d drop them, and the gig would be up – but it would have to do. The engine cut off – blissful, ringing silence, ears no longer filled by the growling echo of unleased V8 horsepower – the door slammed, and footfalls crunched across the gravel.
He took a breath, and schooled his features into an unhappy scowl for effect, adrenaline spiking in preparation of what was to come.
When the trunk opened, the soft dark of night, brushed with a haze of ambient city light, was so bright in contrast that he squinted against it. He was dizzy, he realized, as Misha’s silhouette wavered above him; rattled from the ride, maybe even from the blow to the head.
Misha leaned in and whispered, “Alright?”
“Fine,” Toly lied, twisting to get his shoulder under himself, braced to sit up.
“No,” Misha said. “Let me. You have to look like you’re resisting.”
“Right.” Toly went still, Misha gripped the back of his hoodie, and hauled him bodily from the car.
~*~
Tenny hadn’t brought his own bike, so he borrowed Miles’s. He and Reese rode side by side ahead of them, flirting in and out of reach of the rented Jag’s headlights. Devin piloted them deftly along the black, tree-crowded highway at almost ninety like he was out for a Sunday afternoon drive, one hand resting lightly on the wheel, the other playing with the radio. Raven sat shotgun, tapping her nails restlessly on the window ledge.
“I still don’t understand why you let him get a head start,” Devin said. “Why not sit up and tell him you were awake?”
Raven frowned at her ghostly reflection in the passenger window, eyes dark in the glow of the dash lights. “Well, for starters, I’m not his keeper.”
“Except, you are.”
“No. He’s…” She sighed. “I thought he might come back. That maybe he was tired of all of us, and wanted to go for a ride to clear his head. I’m really not his keeper: if he was going to go scarpering off back to the city to meet with Misha, then he was going to find a way to do it, whether or not I caught him at it tonight.”
