Between the Cracks and Burning Doors: Book 2 of The Extraction List Series (12 page)

But not that morning. The purpose of that meal was to bring joy to a group of people who had suffered more than anyone had a right to. That morning, I found myself laughing as the children each tried to impress Dom with a story. Of course, he always gasped at whatever feat of triumph they claimed, high-fiving them or shaking their hands.

Nick sat next to him and the smile never left either of their faces. Nick had the expression of someone who was reunited with the only person he’d ever loved, who’d ever offered any comfort returned to him.

With a start, I remembered that the woman on the TV had a press conference planned for that morning. I threw my fork on my plate and flipped on the small set that sat on the kitchen counter.

Her voice roared. In my heart, I knew that something had changed.

“I promise you, I will fight for this. This bill was supposed to help the children who needed it most, and no one needs it more than those who are flooding the streets, forced into gangs because they have nowhere else to go. This was going to give them somewhere to go.”

Nick piped up, “What’s she talking about?”

I hushed him.

The woman was cut off, replaced with a tall gray-haired man that slightly resembled my father in the tone of his voice and the way he threw back his shoulders.

I immediately knew he was trouble.

“The children of gangs are beyond help. We can’t have them tainting the progress we make at the boarding schools. Unfortunately, gang children have become criminals. We wish we could have reached them in time, but there comes a point where we must choose to save the children we can, and make sure they are not corrupted by those we can’t.”

My stomach leaped into my throat.

“Our police will be on high alert, their primary mission to cleanse the streets of gangs and the children that they have unfortunately brought into their lifestyle. When this bill passes and becomes law, we can’t afford to waste our resources. We will make D.C. safe again. That is all.”

The microphone clicked off.

The children were all talking to me as I slammed the apartment door closed. I ran out into the street, not sure where I was running to. Maybe I was just running from them or the situation that I created, from which I had no escape. Where would we go? Living between the walls of a basement was no life for a child. But it was only a matter of time before Dom’s parishioners would find out that he was in jail and why. Even the church couldn’t be our refuge anymore.

“Beyond help?”

The anger tingled through my skin as I thought about the gray-haired man. The woman on the television had come up with the idea of the bill, but it was the people in the government who would eventually decide what to do with it. Whoever that man was, he had destroyed the hope that the woman had given us, and all that was left in his wake was silence.

I think inside I knew where I was heading, but I didn’t know on the surface until I was standing on her doorstep. Maureen opened the door ever so slightly, saw it was me, and quickly rushed me inside. “You have to come with us.”

She folded her arms across her chest. “What in the world are you talking about? It’s too early for non-specifics.”

It was hard to concentrate when she was standing there in a silk blue shirt nightgown that barely brushed the top of her knees.

“The bill. It was passed, but not for gang kids. If we turn over the children, they’ll throw them in jail. We have to go.”

Maureen sucked in her breath. “Go where?”

“No idea.” I sat down on her stairs and rested my head in my hands. She sat down next to me. I felt her hand hover over my back, but she took it away before it fell. “I don’t know what to do. Dom’s life is over as he knows it. I managed to fuck that right up. And for what? The kids are screwed anyway.”

“Don’t say that. Something will turn up. You just need to keep them safe for a little longer, that’s all.” She sighed. “I know I’ve never told you, but I do admire what you’re doing.”

I looked at her. “Really. I told myself I was giving them an alternative to foraging through garbage to survive, and I was. But you…you’re going to give them a chance at a life.”

“How?”

“Don’t know yet. But you will.”

With that, I wrapped my arms around her. I half expected her to pull away, but she didn’t. She stiffened for just a second, but I didn’t let go, and finally she leaned her head on my shoulder. We just sat there, listening to the clinking dishes in the kitchen and the street traffic outside. For that moment, I let myself think that maybe we would figure it out.

I knew something was wrong when I saw Dom standing on the porch as I ran up the street and back to the church. He had shut the door behind him, and his face had stiffened into an expression reserved for emergencies. “Nick’s missing.”

I stopped at the bottom step. “He can’t be.”

“He ran off after you. I tried to stop him but I couldn’t move fast enough.” Dom rubbed his abdomen where it was still swollen. “I couldn’t get there.”

“Where would he have gone?” I tried to think. I searched my brain for a sound, a tiny voice that had come from behind me while I was on the way to Maureen’s house.

I couldn’t find one.

“I don’t know, I just saw him run in your direction and he hasn’t been back since.”

The earth no longer felt steady and silver dots pulsed in my vision. I spread my feet apart to keep myself from toppling over.

Dom saw. “Take a breath. We need to think about this.”

A sinking feeling spread across the surface of my brain. I didn’t need to think about it; I already knew. There was only one answer.

I searched every alley between the church and Maureen’s place. I found rats scurrying among the garbage, homeless men cowering in the corners with the hoods of their tattered coats draped over their heads, but no Nick.

Where would he want me to find them?

I thought of the police station. Maybe Keegan would force me to turn myself in to save Nick. But then I would never tell him where his friend was buried. No, there had to be another place, somewhere that would help him remind me that he could destroy me at any time.

Then I had it.

The warehouse.

The sun had started to set by the time I made it to the back of the familiar warehouse where I had almost killed three men. I say it that way on purpose. I take ownership of it. Yes, they would have killed me if they could have, but they had teetered between life and death under my blade, and there were no two ways to spin it: they were my victims, and mine alone.

The blood was still there, reminders of where they had fallen. The same weak bulb hovered above me as Keegan stepped into the dim light, one hand on Nick’s shoulder, the other one on the gun that was for the moment resting in his holster. “Cain, so good to see you. I was so glad to see that your priest friend had gotten home safely. I hope he is healing well.”

Nick’s eyes widened. Normally, I would have expected him to try and wriggle from Keegan’s grasp. The fact that he wasn’t even trying meant that he was just that scared. “Let him go.”

Keegan grinned. “I would love to! But you’ve forced my hand. I need some way to reason with you. Apparently, your friend’s incident wasn’t enough,” he said with a chuckle. “By the way, been getting calls at the station asking about him. I couldn’t every well lie to the good people. So your friend may be getting some angry visits here in the near future. Extremely unfortunate.”

I wrapped my palms around my knives. I saw the muscles in Keegan’s hands contract around his gun. “Really, Cain, I’m giving you an opportunity here. Just tell me the truth. This can be over.” His free hand tightened on Nick’s shoulder.

I stepped closer. “Tell me, what if I do tell you? If you think Maureen killed him, then what?”

“What’s done is done. Every man deserves a proper burial. That’s all we want. Nothing more, nothing less.”

I would have been more inclined to believe him if he had said he would at least beat her up or burn her house down. But when he claimed that no harm would come to her, I immediately knew the truth. The only thing keeping Maureen alive was my keeping my mouth shut. “Let him go.”

He withdrew his pistol and stuck it to Nick’s head. “Suit yourself.”

I knew he would pull the trigger before he did. His finger had pulled it halfway down when I threw my knife. I flicked my wrist and launched it into the air. The blade landed in the flesh of Keegan’s shoulder.

When he dropped the gun, the trigger depressed, firing a bullet into one of the boxes in the warehouse. Nick ran toward me and threw his arms around my waist.

“Wait outside.”

When I got to Keegan, he was in a heap on the floor, clutching his shoulder, blood leaking out between his fingers. I pulled the knife out of the bone. The crunch made Keegan wail.

I pushed him to the ground and held my knife to his throat. I was about to press down when something swept over me. It was a heavy feeling, something like sadness. As Keegan looked up at me, with complete utter fear in his eyes, I hesitated.

As much as I wanted him out of our lives, I didn’t want to kill him. I just wanted it over. That’s all. I wanted him dead, but I didn’t want to be the one to take his life. I was tired of taking lives. Each one made me better at it, and I didn’t want to become an expert. As much as I wanted him punished, I didn’t want to do the punishing. “I’m going to tell you one more time.
Leave us alone.
If you so much as breathe near Maureen, Dom, or Nick again, there isn’t going to be any more chances. I’ll cut your throat from ear to ear.”

I stepped away from Keegan and retrieved the gun from the floor. I could still hear him howling from his wound as I left the warehouse.

“He was gonna kill me, I know it,” Nick said as he clung to my hand on our way back to the church.

“I know.” Maybe I shouldn’t have been so honest, but I figured after all Nick had seen we were past the point of sugar-coating things.

“What are we gonna do?”

“Not a clue.” Again, maybe I should have told less of the truth. He looked at me with wide, panicked eyes. “All I know is we have to get to the church.”

We ran the rest of the way, and by the time we got there sweat was pouring from both our brows. When Dom opened the door, I could tell he knew what was coming.

“Dom, we have to leave.”

“I know.”

I sent Nick downstairs to get the children ready. They didn’t have many belongings but I figured they would want what little they did have. Dom and I went upstairs and shut the apartment door behind us. When we were alone, he spoke. “I made a phone call while you were gone. My brother, he’s got a big farm in Cuba. He said all of us could stay there as long as we need to. All of us.”

I exhaled with relief, but I still felt guilty it had come to this. “Dom?”

“Yeah?”

“I’m sorry.” I didn’t know what else to say. There were no words that I could tell the man that would have made up for destroying his life. However, he didn’t make me try. He just nodded.

“I know.”

Dom explained to me that we would need to figure out a way to smuggle the children down to the coast of Florida by that Friday. Once we got to a certain dock, a boat would be waiting for us to take us across the border to his brother’s farm. That gave us three days. “I just don’t know where we’re going to get a car big enough to fit all of us.”

Panic swept over me suddenly and I realized I didn’t either. There was only one thing I could think of, and I didn’t like it one bit. “I may know a way.”

The man at the hardware store across the street had helped me out on more than one occasion. He had known that I had stolen two knives from him, but let me walk out of his store anyway. And when Keegan was showing my picture around the neighborhood, he claimed he had never seen me.

There had to be a reason.

I had passed by his store numerous times, enough to know that he had a supplies van parked in the back. I walked through the rear parking lot one more time just to make sure and stepped inside his shop.

I found him hunched over a desk in the back, a lamp barely illuminating the paper in front of him. “Hello, Cain.”

I nodded.

“Hello, sir.” When I got closer, I realized he was painting little wooden soldiers: a row rested on a paper towel to the side of his desk. The one he was working on had a blue uniform on, and I noticed he was carefully adding little yellow buttons. The detail on the faces was near perfect. Despite their size, I could see their tiny eyes looking straight at me, pupils and all. “What are those for?”

“They’re for you.”

I stared at him.

“I may spend a lot of time here in this shop, but I notice things. Like how those kids keep going in that church of yours and never come back out. Except for that one that couldn’t wait to get back in earlier today. Figured they might like some toys.”

I stepped closer.

“And you’re not gonna turn me in?”

“Course not. You’re doing a good thing. Besides that, I owe your mother.”

My heart climbed into my mouth and attempted to claw its way out. “My mother? How do you know my mother?”

I wondered if he knew she was dead.

“She was a good woman, your mother. I went off to join the military, long time ago. Made the mistake of not marrying your mother before I left. Never even asked her. Such a coward.” As he talked, his eyes never left his tiny soldier, and his brush never stopped moving. “By the time I got back, she’d met your father. I’d visit now and again, until one morning she opened the door with a black eye.” He sat the soldier down to dry next to his comrades. “I told myself it was none of my business, that me comin’ by would be doing her more harm. But I was just doing the same ol’ thing, playin’ the same move. I was a coward.”

Finally, he turned towards me. “Sometimes, I’d still pretend that you were mine. Sounds silly now, ‘specially since you’re a spittin’ image of him, but I did it all the same.”

I felt a tickle on my cheek and realized a tear was inching its way down my face. I didn’t want to tell him. “I’m sorry to tell you this, but my mom’s dead.”