Growing and Kissing (37 page)

“I’m not telling you shit,” said Lennie.

Sean nodded as if he’d expected this. He stepped away from the chair and looked around, rubbing his stubble—
what should I break first?

Then he seemed to decide:
all of it.

The vases were first. He shattered them two at a time, sending shards flying across the room. The bigger ones smashed where they were. The smaller ones flew across the room like baseballs, staying almost in one piece until they hit the far wall. Lennie winced at each crash, but didn’t weaken.

Next were the statues. They lost heads, then legs, then crumbled completely under the heavy iron head of the sledge hammer. Then, finally, Sean stepped up to the piano.

“Shit.” said Lennie suddenly. “Wait! That costs more than my fucking car!”

Sean brought the hammer back. “Where are the drugs?”

“Where are the drugs?” I repeated.

“Malone’ll kill me if I talk!” yelled Lennie.

Sean brought the hammer down in the exact center of the piano and it crumpled into splinters of wood and ivory with a discordant crash. Then he stepped up onto the chair again, his boot next to Lennie’s head, and placed the cold iron head of the sledge hammer on the man’s forehead. “Talk,” he said warningly.

“You two are
fucking nuts,”
Lennie blustered. “You think you’re going to get them back from
Malone?
You got a private army?”

“No harm in telling us, then,” said Sean.

Lennie looked around at the devastation, looked up at Sean’s face, and gulped. But his mouth stayed shut. This could take hours. And we might not have hours. Once Malone split the drugs up and sold them, we were screwed. Kayley was going to die because this asshole was too scared, too proud, too arrogant to tell us what we needed to know.

I was suddenly tired of being the good girl. Malone didn’t play by the rules. Well, neither would I.

“Give me the hammer,” I said.

Sean and Lennie both turned to look at me. “What?” asked Sean.

“
Give me. The hammer.
” The blood was pounding in my ears.

He slowly handed it over. I nearly staggered under the weight.
Jesus, how does he swing this thing?
Lennie laughed.

“Duct tape his legs apart,” I said. I’d started to pant, fear and adrenaline sloshing together through my veins.

Sean gave me a long, steady look...then nodded. He pulled the duct tape from his pocket and grabbed one of Lennie’s legs.

“Wait…” said Lennie slowly.

Sean shook his head. “You had your chance with me,” he told him. And wrapped duct tape behind Lennie’s knee, pulled it to the arm of the armchair and secured it there. He did the same with the other knee, so that Lennie was sitting with his legs wide apart.

I stepped in front of Lennie and heaved the sledge hammer back over my head, like Sean did. For the first time, I really understood the power of it. My heart was thumping like I’d never known it.  “Lennie,” I said warningly. “Where are our drugs?” I focused on the crotch of his suit pants.

Lennie started to pant with fear. “You wouldn’t,” he said, struggling against the duct tape. “You’re the brains. You’re a fucking science nerd.”

“You’d be surprised what I’m capable of when someone threatens my family,” I said coldly. I shifted my weight from foot to foot, preparing to swing. “I’ll count to three.”

Lennie shook his head.

“One.”

Lennie’s breathing hitched.

“Two.”

His eyes were locked on mine, now, trying to reassure himself that I was just some scared civilian. He tried to find that person I used to be. But he couldn’t. Because she’d stepped out for a minute.

“Thr—”

“They’re at the jazz club! Malone’s auctioning them off tonight!” The words came out so fast, it was like he was being sick. “He wants everyone there at ten. I’m going—everyone’s going. That’s all I know!”

I stepped back a step and let the hammer slide from my fingers. Sean caught it before it hit the ground. Then I watched as he duct-taped Lennie’s arms, wrists and head to the chair so he couldn’t move, then finally stuck tape over his mouth so he couldn’t yell for help. He dragged the three heavies into the room and I helped him duct-tape them, as well. I was still nervous and shaky, amazed at what I’d nearly done.

“You weren’t faking, were you?” Sean muttered to me as we duct-taped one guy’s wrists.

I slowly shook my head.

Sean stared at me in amazement...then grinned. “Good for you.”

We finished taping and looked at the four bound men, three of them unconscious and one of them glaring at us in rage. “So we know where they are,” I said. “What the hell do we do now?”

Sean turned to me. “I’ve got a plan,” he said. He reached out and stroked my head. “But I need your big brain to make it work. And it means getting nasty. You ready to get nasty?”

I thought of Kayley.

“You’re goddamn right I am,” I told him.

Louise

We stopped off at some abandoned buildings Sean knew. When we found one that still had glass in the windows, Sean swung his hammer and sent it crashing down in lethal, razor-sharp shards. Then he picked carefully through them, looking for the right shape. “This’ll work,” he told me at last, holding one up. I nodded silently and watched as he wound duct tape around one end to make a safe handle.

Then I took him somewhere
I
knew, a small patch of woodland where my Mom used to take me when we first moved to California. We tramped along the well-worn paths for over an hour before I finally saw what I wanted and crouched down. “This is it,” I said.

He crouched down behind me, his big body dwarfing mine. “You sure you’re ready to do this?” he asked, looking at it over my shoulder.

I thought of Kayley again and nodded.

***

We held hands as we walked down the street towards Malone’s jazz club. I hoped that the guys watching us didn’t see that my knees were shaking, that I was only barely able to keep going even with Sean’s hand to cling to.

There were a
lot
of guys. Guys lounging in doorways, guys sitting in their parked cars, one or two even up on the rooftops. Malone had gathered all of the city’s major dealers together and they’d all brought their own security. We were up against an army.

“What if they just shoot us?” I whispered.

“They’re going to be too fucking curious,” he told me.

The club was closed that evening—Malone had given the whole place over to his meeting. When we neared the door of the club, the security guys weren’t even bothering to hide their guns. One of them held up his hand for us to stop while another called someone on the radio—presumably Malone himself. After several seconds, we were waved forward...and made to pass one by one through the metal detector. Sean had left his hammer at the mansion, since he didn’t want to lose it. When the detector didn’t beep, the guards led us inside.

A table had been brought in at one end of the huge room and stacked up on it was our crop, the plastic-wrapped packets gleaming in the spotlights. Malone—off his couch for once—was leaning against it, scowling. Men with guns surrounded the other three sides of the table. The rest of the room was full of dealers: respectable-looking guys in suits, weasley-looking guys in bright shirts and leather jackets, a few who looked Italian and one or two who could have been Russian. Everyone wanted a piece of the crop.

Malone was holding up a packet. “You’ve all tried a sample,” he announced in that deep bass rumble. “This is premium shit and it commands a premium price. We’ll start with ten packs.” He hefted them. “What am I bid?”

Immediately, the dealers began to yell. “Three grand!”

“Thirty-five hundred!”

“Four!”

“Five!”

I gritted my teeth. Despite my fear, the rage was building inside me, clouds of roiling black smoke shot through with red fire. At these prices, Malone could have easily afforded to pay us
six
hundred thousand dollars and
still made hundreds of thousands of dollars for himself. We really had made the quality crop we’d promised...and we weren’t going to see a cent of the money. Not unless we could pull off our miracle.

After a while, Malone called a break, told the dealers to have a beer and a smoke from the sample packet he’d opened and swaggered over to us. “What the fuck are you doing here?” he asked. “If you’re gonna appeal to my better nature...I ain’t fucking got one.”

Sean stepped forward. “Talking’s not my thing,” he told Malone. “This is.”

And he ran at Malone, shoulder-charging him backwards into the table. The table crumpled under the combined weight of the drugs and the two muscled men, its legs collapsing and the packets avalanching onto the floor. Sean only got in one good punch before he was hauled off Malone, but it was a good, meaty crack to Malone’s jaw that looked like it had all of his anger behind it.

The guards hauled Sean upright...but, as soon as he was on his feet, he grabbed both men and cracked their skulls together. Then he was free and diving at another group of guards, punching one and head-butting the other. He opened his mouth and screamed like a Viking berserker, wild and terrifying, his eyes wide and every muscle hard as iron.

A space cleared around him. Malone’s guards were taken by surprise—no one had thought that Sean would be crazy enough to go on the attack, when he was unarmed and so obviously outnumbered. And no one wanted to be the one to go toe-to-toe with
The Irish
. That gave Sean an advantage and he made the most of it, grabbing guards and throwing them, smashing them down on tables and causing as much chaos as possible.

Most of the dealers backed the hell off—this wasn’t their fight. A few tried to grab the fallen packets of weed.

Sean was like a tornado in a confined space, hurling chairs and tables at his opponents. At one point, he hurled a chair directly at the bottles behind the bar, bringing them down in an alcohol-soaked rain of glass. The guards pulled out guns...but put them away again at a gesture from Malone. “Alive!” their leader spat, touching his lip and finding blood there. “I want the fuck to suffer!”

Sean screamed a battle cry and tackled two more guards, bearing them down to the floor and unleashing a flurry of punches. But by now, Malone’s guards had shaken off their surprise and were surrounding him. In seconds, Sean would be overwhelmed.

But with everyone watching the crazy Irishman, no one was watching me. I started to sidle closer to Malone.

Sean had a man on each arm, now, and one trying to grapple his legs, but he was still managing to move, twisting those broad shoulders to hurl off his captors, kicking away the man on his legs. As soon as he escaped one pair of hands, though, two more grabbed him. Eventually, he was pinned: six men had his arms and legs and another had his arm across his throat.

That was my cue to step right up to the distracted Malone and slash the piece of glass right across his chest.