“You still wear that damn thing?”
At his inquiry, I look down the front of me, where I’ve mindlessly pulled out the chain ordinarily tucked inside my shirt. The one I’ve been skating the attached key along, back and forth, back and forth, in habit. “Always.”
The key to a secret place.
It’s the only thing I have left of my true home. My family. The life from before, as I refer to it, but I don’t dare say what it was that broke my childhood into two halves. Couldn’t, even if I wanted to, since I don’t remember most of it, anyway. A blackness that sits on the edge of my memories like a damaged movie reel. But there are these snapshots. Picture frames inside my head that appear and disappear. And I know things, details about that night, from the snippets I’ve read in local newspapers. Except, there’s a strange and inexplicable detachment to them that doesn’t seem to trigger any light inside that dark stretch at the back of my mind. Like I’m reading about someone else’s tragedy instead of my own.
It’s weird.
I remember my real father, the one before Russ, looping the oversized chain over my head and tucking the key in my shirt. In the visual, I see his lips move, but I can’t hear what he’s saying to me, and I don’t dwell on it too much, for fear of my brain changing the narration to something else, entirely. Could’ve been the crazy mutterings of a fool, for all I know. I was certainly old enough to remember that he wasn’t running on all cylinders toward the end. Something I could see even as young as eleven years old, when my suspicions about his mental wellbeing had me second guessing everything that came out of his mouth, no matter how benign. That night, he left a kiss to my forehead, and it was the last I ever interacted with him.
For some reason, I’m able to recall my old address, based on some pneumonic device I must’ve learned as a child. Twenty-nine, three-five-two, Magnolia Lane, in Veilleux. And I remember my last name, Pierce, but everything else about that night is sketchy, half-drawn images that I can’t make out.
Tucking the key back inside my shirt, I return to the task of stirring the stew in the pot.
“Ever wonder what it goes to?”
Wearing a frown, I twist to look back at him. He’s never mentioned, or acknowledged, the key--I’m guessing, because doing so would kick off the slew of questions he’s avoided this whole time. Ones I’ve asked so many times over the years, they’ve practically become a chant. Most times, my probing has been met with a stern face and silence.
Typically silence.
Sometimes I dream of my old house, the few vestiges my brain has tucked away, and a red door that leads to a secret room. Whether it’s real, or something I made up, I don’t know. It’s vivid enough, though. From the small imperfections in the wood, to its black cast iron hinges and lock. I’ve often wondered if it actually exists. And if this key belongs to it.
“Do you?” I ask, giving the soup another stir.
It’s not as if I hit him with the hard questions. Just the long, empty gaps in my memory that need filling in. Like, how he knew my dad. And why he brought me here and raised me all these years? What was in it for him?
The most I’ve gotten out of him is that my father, who worked as a shrink, saved his life, somehow, though Russ won’t tell me the details. Still doesn’t explain why he’d leave his whole life behind, though. People don’t just up and abandon everything. I don’t care how good the doctor is.
“Nah.” He tips back the bottle of beer, guzzling about half of it, drowning all the answers in one swallow. When he’s finished, he sets the bottle back on the table and stares off for a moment. “Can’t change the past. Can’t visit the past. No point in dwelling on it. Best to move on.”
As much as my gut twists with the urge to smack him, he’s right.
There’s nothing for me in the before, and who knows what opening that can of worms might do. Who knows what the hell lurks in that dark stretch waiting to lash out at me, when I least expect it? Maybe it’s better I don’t know. Especially now, when I’ll have to carry on alone.
Alone. In this cabin.
“Promise me one thing, kid,” he says over my thoughts. “Don’t go looking for answers that aren’t there. Sometimes, shit just is, right?”
“Right.”
5
Thierry
There’s no passion in killing for money. You get in, you do the job, you get out. No enthusiasm, or pride, in the work. Nothing like a personal vendetta.
Kills for money come in two flavors: eliminate, or intimidate. Some are meticulously crafted to look like accidents, or cover-ups. Others are meant to send a message, and those are probably the most creative of any, but still don’t quite measure up to the high of exacting your own personal brand of revenge.
I was eighteen years old, the first time I killed a man. He was one of three who raped my mother in front of me, and when I finally wrapped my fingers around his throat, long after the nausea and shock of what I intended to do with him had worn off, an inexplicable intoxication settled over me. A buzz of fervor and anticipation.
I didn’t want to begin, for fear of it all ending too soon.
And that was, perhaps, my most passionate kill. One I savored, and still, even now, I think back on it to remember what made it so very personal to me. It was perfect. So perfect, it garnered the unwanted attention of Julio, who saw a spark of enthusiasm in a truly fucked-up kid. One that, over time, would eventually dull to apathy and indifference.
Some say revenge isn’t worth it, that it doesn’t change anything, but whoever came up with that ignorant token of wisdom was either too scared to go through with it, or never gave thought to the alternative. The idea of the person who’d ruined your fucking life walking around free and clear, as if it never even happened. Killing even one of those men who ravaged my mother was the most reckless and thrilling thing I’ve ever done in my life, and no assassination I’ve carried out since then has ever given me the same feeling of satisfaction.
However, this one might just be alluring enough to make the five-hour drive back to Louisiana worth it.
In the front seat of a sleek black Audi, I blow cigarette smoke out the cracked window, and study the file given to me by one of Julio’s halcones, informants he hires to act as the eyes and ears of the streets. The man in the photo, whom I’m to transport back to Louisiana, is Ramón Castellano, a close associate of the up and coming La Familia Reynosa cartel, rivals to the Matamoros cartel. His bodyguard, I’m to kill quickly and efficiently, along with another cartel member, a trafficker who goes by the name of El Viejon.
I swap Castellano’s picture for another from the file. The scars on what I’ve determined is the bodyguard’s face tell me he isn’t a man who goes down easy, and that an element of surprise has to be swift and precise, but what makes this particular job a bit more gratifying than the others is El Viejon. Seems the old man likes young girls. Real young.
I toss aside the first picture and lift his from the stack. With deep set eyes, a cleft chin, graying hair, and a thick mustache, he looks like he could be anyone’s papá, but it just so happens the guy has a thing not only for sex, but torture.