Lola on Fire Read online

  Dedication

  This novel is dedicated to

  Lily Maye Youers and Charlie Samuel Youers

  All you have to do is dream . . .

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Part I: One-Inch Punch Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Before

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Before

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Before

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Part II: Nebraska Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Also by Rio Youers

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Prologue

  The Unstoppable Lola Bear

  (1993)

  The car boomed toward Lola, its headlights cut so that she wouldn’t see it in the darkness. The driver didn’t factor in the engine noise, though. Or maybe he did but gambled on her not hearing it above the gunfire. He for damn sure didn’t factor in the streetlight reflecting off the windshield, clear as sun-flash off a sniper’s lens.

  No time to think. An overworked expression, and one that riled Lola. It applied to reflex, not survival. To not think, Lola knew, was to lie down and die.

  She calculated: Four seconds until the car was on top of her. It might not kill her outright but would do enough damage to render her ineffective.

  Four seconds. She had time.

  Tony Broome was taking cover ninety feet away, tucked behind the front wheel of a stationary Buick, which was smart, but every time he inhaled, the top of his head lifted above the hood. Not by much, only an inch or so, but an inch was enough. Lola liked Tony. They’d worked numerous jobs together. He was good people.

  It would take a second to steady her hand, aim, pull the trigger. 0.08 seconds for the bullet to meet its target. Then two seconds to move.

  Lola leveled her pistol, pumped off a shot. The peak of Tony’s skull disappeared in a splash of blood. With that threat erased, Lola turned back to the car. Its engine snarled like a wild thing caged. She would clear more distance by rolling, but it would take longer to reset. So she pirouetted, staying on her feet, her gun hand still poised.

  The car missed her by a gasp, the distance between her and it tight enough to trap a sheet of paper. She lifted details—some crucial—as it whistled past: a 1992 Mercury Sable in reef-blue metallic. A cracked windshield. A dented fender. Paul Mostly rode shotgun (his surname the fuel for many inane gags: Paul mostly doesn’t know shit from Shinola; Paul mostly has his thumb jammed up his ass). He had a custom bullpup M14 across his thighs. Some jerkoff she didn’t know was behind the wheel. He had a cornerstone jaw sprinkled with beard and wore a patch over his left eye. Jimmy wouldn’t usually hire someone with an eye patch. It exposed how desperate he was.

  A good sign.

  Lola aimed and fired twice at the back of the driver’s headrest. The second shot was for insurance, in case the first was deflected on its passage through the rear windshield. The Sable ran out of blacktop with the driver too dead to react. It mounted the sidewalk and struck a steel security fence with a concertina boom. The passenger-side door dropped off its hinges a moment later and Paul reeled out, spitting teeth from his blood-filled mouth. He flailed with the bullpup. Spent rounds glittered like broken glass.

  Paul mostly misses with every shot.

  Lola sighted down the barrel of her Baby Eagle: 9mm, Israeli-made, and decidedly lethal for something so daintily named.

  Paul mostly dies from a gunshot wound to the throat.

  The quickest way onto Jimmy’s property was to vault onto the Sable and over the fence. It was also a guaranteed way to get herself perforated. The crash—not to mention the gunfire—had announced her arrival like a railroad flare. Too many sights focused on that point. Lola could use it as a diversion, though. She knew Jimmy’s property. There were other ways in.

  She skirted the eastern wall where shadow kept her hidden. There’d be men posted here. Two, maybe three. Lola would hear them first—their quick, unsteady breathing in the darkness, in sync with the jitter of their hearts. She paused, listening, then moved on. Tony (another Tony) Marconi stood sentry midway down, trying to look everywhere at once, not trusting his peripheral vision, his hearing, his instinct. Tony M. was a twenty-eight-year-old brute with a skull as tough as quartz. He had black belts in judo and tae kwon do. Lola could drop him with a bullet, but a bullet would betray her location.

  She had to strike silently.

  Timing her movement, Lola hit him like rain, first across the right wrist, disarming him, then with a punch to the throat that disabled his vocal cords. She brought him down with a low kick that exploded his kneecap. A fourth strike, delivered with bewildering force and precision, snapped his neck like wet bark.

  * * *

  Lola took a breath and felt the blood rushing through her body. She waited a minute for it to slow. There were shouts from beyond the wall—Jimmy’s men on alert, panicked crows with semiautomatics clutched in their trembling claws—and the throaty, wheezy snarl of Doberman pinschers. There were seven of them, named after the seven samurai from the movie of the same name, still on their leashes, judging from their frequent yelps and yowls.

  She imagined Jimmy with his hands nervously flexing, stealing glances out the window, a bluish vein ticking in the hollow of one temple.

  You can do this.

  Lola gritted her teeth. She had no patience for positive reinforcement—a cousin to weakness.

  It’s already done.

  She crept through the shadows toward the rear of the house. Benjamin Chen, her Xing Yi Quan instructor, floated to mind. Shifu Chen was beautiful and ocean-like and always welcome. Lola once asked him—appealing to his passion for metaphor—how to stay dry when caught in a storm. Shifu Chen had responded with a question, and a metaphor, of his own:

  “How do you fly a kite?”

  Lola had waited with everything open, eager for education, for betterment. Shifu Chen looked at her for a second, then made a kite out of his left hand. “You ride the wind,” he’d said, making his hand sway and swirl. “You gauge its strength, make adjustments. In a sense, you become the wind.”

  “Right.”

  “So, to keep from getting wet . . .”

  Lola finished for him, “You become the storm.”

  Another thug she didn’t know guarded the south gate. He didn’t wear an eye patch but may as well have; Lola came up on his blind side and drove the heel of her palm into his face. It was a direct, efficient strike, ninety-eight percent of her internal power funneled into the end of the move. The thug’s face bones caved. Eggshell splintered his brain. He collapsed and foamed at the mouth and his long limbs jangled.

  Lola slipped through the gate. The house glimmered beyond the elms, a contemporary multimillion-dollar structure purchased with blood and wile. Every window was illuminated. Muscle barricade
d the doors. She heard a sound to her right and found cover in the shadows. It was Mickey Grieco, searching the grounds with the help of Katsushiro—one of the Dobermans. The dog caught her scent and pulled Mickey close. Lola took off her jacket, placed it on the ground, and moved. Katsushiro found her jacket and showed all his teeth, and when Mickey picked it up with a puzzled expression, Lola struck from behind. Mickey died quickly but Katsushiro took longer. She strangled him with his own leash.

  Lola pulled her jacket back on and moved toward the house.

  She had sent a message through Carver City’s grimy underbelly, using call girls and bootblacks and crooked cops, but also painting it across the exterior walls of the Steel Tiger, where every mobster and degenerate was certain to see it.

  i’m coming for jimmy and you know why

  get in my way and i’ll kill you too

  * * *

  She left a trail of bodies—human and canine—on her way to the house, most of them on the lawn, Heihachi in the pool, which had turned from aqua to cherry-red. She maintained stealth for as long as she was able but had to switch to the Baby Eagle. That was okay. Let Jimmy hear the gunshots. Let him hear the panic, the screams.

  Lola entered the house through the three-car garage and took a bullet to the shoulder.

  It was Marco Cabrini—the first soldier she’d worked with, a know-it-all motherfucker born into the life—and he’d positioned himself at the far corner of the foyer, in the perfect amount of shadow. Lola saw the zeros of his eyes but too late. Marco fired four times and the third shot found her. She slammed back against the door with a white-hot coal burning into her left shoulder and a new weakness in her legs. Her return fire was lucky in that she only half aimed. She caught Marco in the shin and he dropped shrieking. Lola reloaded and popped one into his skull.

  She holstered her pistol and examined her shoulder for an exit wound. It was there, a raw pocket of exposed tissue beneath a hole in her jacket. Lola nodded grimly, recalling an axiom of her grandfather’s: Entry wound bad. Exit wound good. She smeared blood and sweat from her brow, readied her gun, and pushed deeper into the house.

  Then Jimmy came at her with a flamethrower.

  * * *

  Jimmy Latzo had always been a crazy son of a bitch. Lola used to think it was all for show—to color his reputation—but the more she got to know him, the more she realized that he was hardwired that way. Or perhaps it was a short circuit, some synapse in his brain that struggled to connect to a considered response. Either way, Jimmy was a loose cannon. He once took a chainsaw to a man who’d cheated him out of $3,600 in a poker game. It wasn’t the money—$3,600 was a piss in the ocean for Jimmy. It was the fact that he’d been cheated, that somebody thought he’d be stupid enough not to notice. On another occasion—shortly after Lola started working for him—he roped a snitch to the back of his Cadillac and drove him through the city streets, like some outlaw from the Wild West being drawn by a horse.

  Jimmy had butchered, bribed, and hair-triggered his way up through the ranks of Carver City’s criminal empire. He had crooked cops and politicians dangling from strings and would make them dance to whatever tune he was playing. He always got what he wanted.

  With one exception . . .

  Lola smelled the diesel first, so out of place in Jimmy’s pristine house. A warning light flashed in her mind and she made the connection at the same moment she heard the click of the ignition charge. Jimmy had bought the flamethrower eighteen months ago—a reconditioned M2, World War II era. He sometimes wore it to business meetings and when addressing subordinates. “Burn, bitch,” he squealed now, and a thirty-foot jet of flame squirted across the living room. It set fire to the silk drapes and the sectional sofa. It lapped across the walls and ceiling in red and orange tongues. Lola hit the deck and rolled. The hole in her shoulder limited her speed and movement. She felt her skin prickle in the heat.

  Pain bolted through her. She watched fire purl across the ceiling. Crazy bastard, she thought. But that was Jimmy. He wouldn’t blink an eye at burning his house to the ground if it meant she would burn, too.

  “Fucking bitch!”

  Lola dived and rolled again as Jimmy lashed another rope of fire across the room. She positioned herself behind a pony wall with antique vases displayed on it, each of which exploded in the heat. Flames curled around and over the wall. Her clothes caught in several places and she doused them with her gun hand. Jimmy triggered another ignition cartridge. She heard him cackle before a third cord of flame scorched the air.

  Her lungs contracted. She felt a tight collar of panic, as alien to her as an exoplanet. How do you fly a kite? she thought, the heat pushing down on her like a predator pinning its prey. She ran multiple scenarios through her brain, along with probable outcomes. Six seconds. Lola latched onto this with all the fury in her soul. Six seconds of burn time in that old M2. That’s all. Blisters bubbled across the backs of both hands and she felt her jacket melting into her skin. She covered her mouth and nose against the burning fumes and calculated. Jimmy had fired three bursts, totaling four seconds.

  Two seconds remaining. Then he’d be spent.

  Flames snapped at the walls and rippled across the ceiling. The living room was a furnace. Above all else, Lola knew she had to break cover and move. Her body could ignite at any moment.

  She sprang from behind the pony wall, pushed through a window of flame. Fire crawled up her back and caught the tips of her hair. In that lunatic moment she heard two sounds clearly: the strings of Jimmy’s grand piano snapping with odd melody, and Jimmy’s whooping, victorious laughter. He squeezed another thread of fire toward her, thinking she had nowhere to go, but she hit the double doors leading into the dining room.

  The heat blast pushed her to the back of the room. It pushed her free.

  * * *

  Lola yanked off her smoldering jacket. She slapped at her hair and legs. Her pants had burned away in places, revealing patches of reddened skin. There was small comfort in knowing that it could’ve been worse.

  It was a long way from over.

  “Bitch!”

  The double doors Lola had crashed through burned like phoenix wings, keeping Jimmy at a safe distance. For now. There was another entrance into the dining room—an arched opening that led to the front hallway. Lola pushed herself to her feet and staggered through it just as Jimmy reached the hallway from the living room side. She raised her gun and fired awkwardly, managing two shots before Jimmy let loose with the flamethrower again. Lola retreated into the foyer. She tumbled over Marco Cabrini’s corpse, half pulling him on top of her as the air crackled.

  “It’s all over, Lola,” Jimmy cried. She saw him at the far end of the hallway, bordered by flame. He shimmered, appearing taller, smokier, closer to the devil he was. “No vengeance for you. Dumb fucking skeeze.”

  She’d get off a shot, but her right arm was underneath Marco, and even if she could aim with her left—if she didn’t have a goddamn tunnel running through her shoulder—how accurate would her shot be? Jimmy flickered and swayed. He didn’t look real.

  Six seconds, she thought.

  “I mean, I’m Jimmy fucking Latzo. I don’t lose. You fucking know that. And guess what, baby doll . . . you tried to bring me down—fucking end me—and I brought you down. The unstoppable Lola Bear. I’m going to go from legendary to godlike.”

  And if he killed her, he probably would. It didn’t matter that his army was torn apart and his house in ashes; killing Lola Bear would add considerably to his résumé.

  Six seconds.

  He started down the hallway with fire boiling around him, looking for all the world like some madman spat from hell. Lola watched him advance, her mind whirring. She needed time to clamber from beneath Marco Cabrini, steady her aiming hand, and put a bullet through Jimmy’s heart. Her having that time depended solely on whether those fuel tanks were spent.

  Jimmy stopped at the threshold between the hallway and foyer, twenty feet from where Lola lay
. She saw his face clearly, his pig-mouth drawn downward, his eyes alight. He winked and aimed the flamethrower at her.

  The house burned behind him. Windows shattered and chunks of the ceiling fell. Smoke mushroomed.

  “You could’ve had everything,” he said.

  * * *

  Jimmy ignited another cartridge and a bright pilot flame sizzled at the tip of the flamethrower’s muzzle. Lola got ready. She pushed with her strong shoulder, easing herself from beneath Marco’s corpse. With equal effort, she raised the Baby Eagle. The sights wavered. Jimmy still shimmered.

  He roared maniacally and hit the firing trigger, but instead of a long strip of burning fuel, there was only an anticlimactic dribble of fire. His expression collapsed. “Motherfucker,” he gasped. He shook the flamethrower’s wand and jiggled it up and down, like rattling a spray paint can to eke out the last few squirts.

  Nothing.

  Lola looked at Jimmy down the sights of her gun. She got to her feet and stumbled closer. She didn’t want to miss.

  “You’re out, Jimmy.”

  “Out,” he repeated numbly.

  “Out of fuel. And shit out of luck.”

  Lola pulled the trigger.

  * * *

  She shot him where it wouldn’t kill him—not right away—but where it would cause excruciating pain: in the gut. She imagined the bullet ripping through the soft mass of his stomach, spilling acids and bacteria, then barreling on to his colon, perhaps his spleen, before lodging in his kidney.

  Jimmy screamed brilliantly, falling to his knees, then onto his back, where he rocked this way and that on the flamethrower’s tanks. Lola stood over him, the gun targeting his face now.

  “You couldn’t let me have that one thing,” she said. “You had to take it away.”

  “You don’t know it was me.” Blood bubbled from Jimmy’s mouth. The tendons in his throat were as tight and thick as bass strings. “You don’t know shit, honey.”

  “But I do.”

  The fire had spread down the hallway, jumping between the walls and ceiling, snapping across the floor. Something in the living room came down with a spectacular crash. Sparks flashed like lightning in roiling clouds of smoke. Lola blinked and spluttered. She’d have to do this soon.