Lola on Fire Read online

  She loved you, Brody, Renée had said. The kindness in her eyes had been deep. As had the honesty. It would have broken her heart to run away. But she did it to keep you safe—to move the target away from you.

  Sympathy rose above all other emotions. It was unexpected, and disconcerting. Brody ran his hands through his hair and tried to recall the anger. A cold and dependable sentiment. But it had diminished. The size of a coin.

  * * *

  He checked the back window, scoped the tree line. His mom joined him minutes later.

  “There’s a car out near Crandall’s place,” she said. “About a mile from here. I think it’s Eddie the Smoke.”

  “Is he dangerous?”

  “Not directly. He used to be a paparazzo. Now he’s a cross between a private eye and a stalker. He follows people, and watches them.”

  “And he’s got eyes on us?” Brody asked.

  “Right. And if we move, he’ll follow.”

  “So we just stay here?”

  “You got it.” Lola managed a dry smile. “If you weren’t here, I’d take Eddie out, then hit the road. I’m not sure where I’d go; I’ve run out of lives. But I’d find a way . . . somehow.”

  “Am I complicating your plans?” Brody cocked an eyebrow.

  “If I run,” Lola explained, “Jimmy will come after you, and I can’t allow that to happen.”

  “Then take us with you,” Brody said. “Me and Molly. We’ll all start again—look out for one another.”

  “I care too much to subject you to this life.” Lola shook her head. “That’s the reason I ran away last time.”

  “You care?”

  Lola didn’t reply, but she lowered her eyes. A glimmer of emotion.

  “So what do we do?” Brody asked, letting it go.

  “The only thing we can do,” Lola replied. “We wait.”

  She returned to her station. Brody crouched in front of the window and looked across her acreage. He saw movement, but didn’t panic this time. It was more deer, at the edge of the tree line, a mother and her fawn. Brody studied them through the scope. They made him smile.

  Satisfied the coast was clear, he left his window to join Lola in the spare room. She was curling twenty-five-pound dumbbells. Three sets of ten. Her biceps rolled behind her shirtsleeves, straining at the fabric. She was a year older than Renée, which put her at a spirited fifty-one. Brody watched her, feeling a jab of pride—this accompanied by the now-familiar sting of having been deceived.

  “Hey,” she said, setting the dumbbells down beside her exercise bike. Brody thought she might drop into a plank position, or start doing push-ups, but she stayed on her feet.

  “Hey,” Brody said. His gaze shifted around the room. Another unloved space. He lingered for a moment on Blair’s photograph, then looked at the rifle in the window. “All clear out back. I think you’re right; no one’s coming that way.”

  “Probably not.”

  He took in the view: one hundred yards of open driveway, flanked by ash trees, curving east for another seventy yards or so toward the road. The horse arena was to the right of the driveway, and the barn—owlfeather farm painted above the doors in yellow letters—was to the right of this. He saw a strip of Big Crow Road, and then it was flat country all the way to the horizon.

  “You think they’ll come in cars?” Brody asked. “Or on foot, using the trees for cover?”

  “Cars, I think,” Lola said, joining him at the window. “At least until I hit their tires. Or take out the drivers, if they’re not behind bullet-resistant glass. They’ll get as close as they can, though, then they’ll use cover.”

  “It’ll happen quickly.”

  “Yeah, and it’ll be over quickly.” Lola sighed. “One way or another.”

  “At least you won’t have to hide anymore.” Brody ran his finger along the buttstock of the rifle. His other hand was clenched, drumming lightly against his thigh. “I had to come. You know that, right?”

  “I know that.”

  “I knew I was bringing a war.”

  “You didn’t bring anything that wasn’t already here,” Lola said. “Why do you think I have all this hardware?”

  Brody nodded and looked down at the rifle between them. “What kind of gun is this?”

  “It’s a Mark V DGR,” Lola replied. “DGR stands for dangerous game rifle.”

  “Dangerous? That’s perfect for Jimmy.”

  “It’s bolt-action, so it’s slower than the MMR, and it only holds four rounds—one in the chamber, three in the drop box.” Lola reached beneath the rifle and ejected a compact magazine. Cartridges glittered inside. “I can switch this out quickly, though, and the .300 Weatherby mag will stop anything that comes down the driveway.”

  “I remember when you used to bake muffins,” Brody said.

  “Yeah?” Lola clicked the drop box back into place. “I still bake muffins.”

  “Chocolate chip?”

  “You know it.”

  They both smiled. It was strained, but mostly pleasant. Brody turned his attention back to the window. The ash trees shook their beautiful yellow leaves in the clear morning light. The goats bleated in their pen.

  “You have an alarm?” he asked, remembering the shrill tone that had filled the house prior to Hudson’s arrival.

  “My early warning system,” Lola said. “It’s rigged to a sensor at the bottom of the driveway.”

  “So why bother watching the front?” Brody asked. “Why not just get into position when you hear the alarm?”

  “If Jimmy attacks, he’s going to come hard and fast. Every second is critical. I want to be behind that rifle, and ready.” She drew an invisible line from her right eye to the point where the driveway curved. “And for your information, I’ve also been watching both sides—”

  “If?” Brody cut in.

  Lola stumbled on her words and looked at him. “Huh?”

  “You said if Jimmy comes. If.” Brody frowned. “You think he’s had a change of heart?”

  “No, I don’t. It’s just . . .” More stumbling. Her eyes danced left and right, then settled on her boot tops. A wisp of hair had worked itself loose and fluttered across her brow.

  “You’re not telling me something,” Brody said.

  “Okay.” She nodded, folded her arms. “But before I say anything, you have to understand that I’m hardwired to analyze a situation and consider all possible outcomes. This means looking seriously at worst-case scenarios.”

  “And?”

  “Jimmy’s a goddamn pit bull. He has a small brain and a short fuse. Which makes me wonder why he hasn’t attacked already.”

  “He’s putting his pieces into place,” Brody said.

  “Even that’s too smart for him,” Lola said. “But yes, he’s making moves, somehow, some way. He’s waited a long time to get his hands on me, and he won’t want to screw it up.”

  “What are you thinking?”

  “Best-case scenario: he comes here hotheaded—hoping to take me by surprise—and I shoot him dead.” She patted the top of the rifle as she might a dog. “Real dead this time. Then you and Molly can live here with me. You can feed the chickens, ride the horses. We all live happily ever after.”

  “Worst-case?”

  Her eyes dipped again. “Jimmy gets smart, and he uses Molly to bait me out.”

  A cold feeling flooded from the pit of Brody’s stomach. It went down his legs first, then it hit his heart, his throat, his brain. He gasped—every breath was a thin effort. Frost flowers bloomed across his mind. His mom reached for him but he knocked her hand away.

  “That can’t happen,” he hissed. Their earlier conversation recurred—Lola asking where Molly was, and if he’d considered that she might be safer here, with them. Was this his fault? In his endeavor to do something absolutely right, had he in fact done something terribly wrong? He shook his head and pointed a trembling finger at his mom. “That cannot happen.”

  “Take a breath, Brody. Calm down.�
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  He nodded. His gasps lengthened into short breaths. The cold feeling was replaced by a dull nausea.

  “Listen to me,” Lola continued. She reached for him again, this time taking his hand and squeezing reassuringly. “It probably won’t happen. Jimmy has always been predictable, and holding Molly hostage doesn’t fit his MO. He has the cruelty, but not the cunning.”

  On this last word, Brody’s eyes snapped to the bulletin board. He shook off his mom’s hand, stepped around the rifle, and tapped Blair’s headshot.

  “She has the cunning,” he said. “And I think she might be running the show.”

  “You know her?”

  “Yeah, that’s Blair. She was the one who suckered me into this whole thing.” He spoke through clenched teeth. “She’s . . . slippery.”

  “And deadly,” Lola said, looking at the photograph. “Blair Mayo. She’s a two-time state boxing champion. She also has distinctions in kung fu and Krav Maga—”

  “Krav what?”

  “Maga. It’s an Israeli self-defense system. Incredibly brutal. As if that wasn’t enough, she’s the first female to win the Western Penn 3-Gun since I won it in 1990.”

  “Jesus,” Brody said. He recalled her coquettishness, the way she’d sucked on her straw—Dee-fucking-lish—and batted her eyelashes. A masquerade, obviously, but it was still a stretch to connect that Miley Cyrus version of Blair to the John Wick version his mom had unveiled. “I can’t even . . .”

  Lola pulled her cell phone from her pocket, opened her browser, then tapped on a series of links she’d bookmarked—stories from The MMA Report, East Coast Boxing, The 48 Gun Club. They featured various action shots of Blair: firing a semiautomatic pistol; throwing leather in the ring; hoisting a trophy after winning a kung fu tournament. The last link brought up a story about Blair putting an opponent—a fierce rival—into a coma with a roundhouse kick.

  “Holy shit,” Brody said. His nausea had abated, replaced by a fluttering that filled his rib cage like spooked birds. He wanted to run, to scream, to reach inside the photographs of Blair and Jimmy, and twist their necks until something broke.

  Leo and Joey looked tame in comparison. He bounced the side of his fist off their faces.

  “I know these motherfuckers, too.”

  “Leo Rossi and Joey Cabrini,” his mom said.

  “They jumped us in Mississippi, then let us go.” He recalled the misery of seeing Molly with a gun locked to her head, and the hard shift this had encouraged inside him. “They were herding us toward you.”

  “We need to talk,” Lola said, putting her phone away. “I want to know everything that happened. I do. But I have too many other things to think about right now.”

  Brody sagged against the wall. He hurt throughout. “Molly. Jesus, we . . . we need to warn her somehow. We can contact Renée—”

  “Brody—”

  “Or call the police—”

  “Brody, listen.” There was a snap to her voice that he recognized from when he was a kid—when he liberated brownies from the Tupperware on top of the fridge, or watched R-rated comedy skits on YouTube. “You’ve been here nearly twenty-four hours. If Jimmy wants to go after Molly, he’ll have her already.”

  “And this worst-case scenario didn’t occur to you yesterday?”

  “I expected an immediate attack,” Lola said. “When it didn’t happen, I started to run through alternative strategies. Everything from his assembling a battalion to air-dropping teargas on the house. The Molly scenario occurred to me late last night.”

  “Jesus Christ.”

  “The best thing we can do right now is stay focused. Stay strong.” Lola’s voice was taut, but not without compassion. “Jimmy will show his hand soon enough, and I will respond.”

  Brody nodded meekly, head low. She was a warrior—could hit without aiming, kill without qualm, dismantle armies. He wasn’t going to cry in front of her, but he wanted to. And she must have sensed this, because she took him into her arms and held him until the spooked birds quieted.

  “I’m not going to let anything happen to Molly,” she assured him. “And I’m not going to let anything happen to you.”

  Brody nodded, feeling small and young.

  “Do you hear me?”

  “Yes,” he croaked.

  “Do you hear me?”

  “Yes.”

  She continued to hold him—one hand just above his left hip, the other cupping the back of his neck—and he found comfort in her strength, her protection, while bleakly aware of the imagery: a deer and her fawn, viewed through a riflescope.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Brody cooked breakfast while his mom kept a lookout. This was her suggestion, and although he didn’t have much of an appetite, he obliged; he was happy to escape that upstairs room for a while and apply his mind to something normal. He fried bacon and scrambled eggs, trying not to think about Molly. The view from the kitchen window helped: a scratch of dusty yard, the chicken coops, the edge of a field where cows cropped grass and jostled their big, beautiful bodies against the fence. Once or twice, Brody imagined living here—in a more peaceful time—waking early to feed the chickens and muck out the stables, then sitting down to a hearty breakfast while cows lowed in the background. It was a simple, pleasing fantasy, but broken every time his mom’s footfalls thudded from one room to the next.

  They ate in the spare room, the photos of Jimmy, Blair, et al., staring down at them, the rifle hoisted on its tripod, sentinel-like. Lola wolfed her food and left not a morsel. Brody nudged his with a fork.

  “Good,” she said, wiping Tabasco from her chin.

  “You learn to cook in a hurry,” Brody said, “when your mom runs away and your dad has to pull double shifts to keep the roof over your head.”

  Lola ignored this. She pointed her fork at his plate. “You need to eat.”

  “Not hungry.”

  “Don’t care. Eat. Keep your strength up.”

  He ate, but listlessly, and didn’t enjoy it. Afterward, he washed the dishes—laughably normal behavior, and he reveled in it—then returned to his post. He scoped the back of her property for three hours, stopping only to use the bathroom and stretch when fatigue set in.

  “I thought it would be over by now,” he said to his mom. He’d walked to the guest room to work the tiredness from his legs. “I should be either dead or free.”

  “Stay alert,” Lola said. She sat cross-legged on the floor, weapons and paraphernalia arranged around her. There were three different pistols, a KA-BAR knife, a stun gun that looked like a cell phone, two cans of pepper spray. “Jimmy won’t be able to hold out much longer. Here, load this.” She tossed him an empty magazine and a box of 9mm rounds.

  “I . . . what?” He looked at her. “I don’t . . .”

  “Let me show you.” She stood and demonstrated. “This is the back of the mag. The flat end of the round goes against this. Now take your round, use it to push down on the follower—that’s this spring-loaded plate—then slide it all the way back. These little lips will keep it from popping out. Use your second round to push down on the first, slide it back. Then repeat with the third round, the fourth, and so on.”

  Lola handed the magazine back to him. He sat on the floor, the box of ammo beside him, and started to slide the rounds in one after the other. It was tricky to begin with—a couple of the cartridges slipped between his fingers and pinged across the floor—but he soon got the hang of it. Once the mag was full, he handed it back to Lola.

  “Thank you. Good job.”

  “You have any other guns?”

  “A shotgun in the barn,” she said. “I use that for shooting skeet with the neighbors. And I have a sawed-off in the truck, beneath the dash.”

  “No grenade launchers or RPGs?”

  “Wouldn’t that be nice?” Lola picked up her KA-BAR knife and started sliding it across a whetstone. “You can only buy that kind of firepower illegally, and I’ve been keeping off the criminal grid.”
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br />   “So that you don’t alert Jimmy?”

  “Exactly.” She looked, for a beat, quietly impressed, then went back to the whetstone. “The black market is big, but Jimmy has a lot of contacts. It’s best not to take any chances.”

  Brody watched Lola sharpen her knife—noting her technique—and was about to ask if he could try when her early warning system sounded. They sprang to their feet. Brody started for the bedroom to grab the MMR, but Lola held him with a raised hand. She stood in front of her rifle, looking at her cell phone.

  “Five of two,” she said, coolly sliding the phone into her pocket. “It’s probably Janey. She comes Wednesdays and Fridays to help with the horses.”

  Brody stood, locked in place. He felt his heartbeat in the balls of his feet. His mom scoped the driveway for what seemed an incredibly long time, then nodded and stepped away from the rifle.

  “Yeah, it’s Janey.” She scooted around Brody, onto the landing. “I’ll send her away. But listen, I’m going to need you to pull a few shifts around the place. These animals want looking after.”

  Brody smirked and shook his head. “You got me loading ammo and shoveling shit,” he said.

  “Welcome to my world,” Lola said.

  * * *

  Janey was in her early twenties, dressed in old clothes, not a spot of makeup, and disarmingly attractive. Under different circumstances, Brody would have liked her to stick around—maybe she could show him how to groom and feed the horses—but this was certainly not the time and his mom was right to send her away. Brody watched Janey’s truck rumble back down the driveway, around the curve, and out of sight. Not shy of fantasy, he imagined being in her passenger seat, the radio tuned to some country-and-western station, nothing but open road ahead.

  “So,” Lola said, joining him again. “About that horseshit.”

  He spent the next two hours mucking out the stables (the shit—and there was a lot of it—was wheelbarrowed to a dry stack behind the barn), then watering and feeding the horses and other animals. His mom gave him her cell phone with the instruction to return to the house, on the double, if it buzzed three times. “That’s my early warning system for when I’m working outside.” It did buzz, while he was feeding the chickens, and he tossed the sack of scratch down and bolted for the house. This time it was the vet, who’d come—a week early, apparently—to administer biannual cattle vaccinations. Again, Lola sent him on his way.