Lola on Fire Read online

  “But you had talent,” Brody said. “All those trophies you won. The shooting tournaments, the Xing Yi—”

  “I had ability,” Lola said. “So much ability. But without the heart, I was little more than a machine. I functioned, but didn’t feel. Vince brought that part of me to life.”

  Brody said, “Something else that Jimmy crushed.”

  A dark look from Lola. “Yes. And his timing was . . . well, heartbreaking. Vince and I had hatched a plan to escape the life—to get away from Jimmy once and for all. We were going to move to Northern California. A brand-new start. No gunrunning, burying bodies, or trading bullets with drug dealers. We had it all worked out.”

  “And Jimmy found out you were leaving?”

  “No, I don’t think so,” Lola said. “We didn’t tell anybody. We were smart. But Jimmy had been pursuing me for years. I spurned his advances, of course, but jealousy got the better of him.”

  “Son of a bitch didn’t like to lose,” Brody said, paraphrasing a quote from one of the articles he’d read.

  “We were this close to getting out.” Lola sighed and held her thumb and forefinger an inch apart. “Vince and I had purchased one-way tickets on a flight to San Francisco. Adios, Carver City. Adios, Jimmy. Three days before our departure, Vince got called on a job to Philly. Not our territory, but you do what the boss says. This was at ten-forty a.m. By seven p.m. that evening, I was identifying photographs of Vince’s body.”

  Other than lowering her eyes, she showed no sadness. It was there, though—a shadow on her aura. Brody never knew Vincent Petrescu. He didn’t really know Lola Bear, either. This was, for all intents and purposes, a stranger’s account, yet it was all he could do to keep from crossing the room and hugging her.

  “Jimmy tried to make it look like a rival gang hit. The Badland Brothers used to cut the ears off their victims, and that’s what Jimmy did to Vince.” Lola nodded and looked at Brody, her eyes cold and certain. “I would always have suspected that Jimmy was behind it, because of who and what he is: a goddamn psychotic lunatic. But I had conclusive proof that removed all doubt.”

  “And then you went on the warpath.”

  “I did. I went through attack dogs, bullets, and flamethrowers to get to Jimmy. Nothing was going to stop me.” Lola drew a deep breath into her lungs. “Although not a day goes by when I don’t wish I’d stopped myself . . . just walked away.”

  The breeze whipped rain through the open window. It hit the wall in tiny droplets and shone in the pale light. Swallows and wrens had joined the crows’ cawing. A peculiar discussion.

  “I miss Vince. I miss your father, oh, so much. And I miss you and Molly.” Lola wiped a speck of rain from the back of her hand. “I often think about the mess I’ve made, and how I didn’t do anything right. But I look at you now and know that I did.”

  Brody scooted along the floor, took her hand. She squeezed firmly, as if to assure herself that he was actually here. Words drifted across his mind. He reached, found the right ones—I don’t fully understand, but I don’t blame you, either—but before he could open his mouth, the alarm system sounded throughout the house.

  Lola removed her hand from his and got to her feet.

  “I think this is it,” she said.

  * * *

  Brody grabbed the MMR and took up position in the room next to Lola’s. He didn’t need the scope to see the large brown vehicle flashing between the trees.

  “I see a truck,” he called out.

  “A UPS delivery truck,” his mom called back.

  “What should I do?”

  “Hold position. Do not open fire unless I say.”

  He opened the window, mounted the rifle, watched the UPS truck round the curve in the driveway and rumble into view. Brody scoped. A male driver, in his forties. Nobody else up front. He wondered if Jimmy’s boys were packed into the back. A kind of Trojan horse.

  Thumb on the safety, ready. He felt his heartbeat through the rifle’s stock, all the way to the handguard.

  The driveway ended in a broad turning circle sixty feet from the front door. The driver steered through most of it, then stopped his truck with its rear doors facing the house. Brody imagined them banging open and Jimmy’s army spilling out. Twelve, fifteen, twenty guys packing muscle and heat. And Brody would open fire—on impulse, if nothing else—and wouldn’t stop pulling the trigger until the magazine was spent.

  “Hold steady,” his mom called. Maybe she’d read his mind.

  He couldn’t see the driver because of the angle he’d parked at, but the truck wobbled as he made his way from the front seat into the back. One of the two rear doors opened a few seconds later. The driver stepped out, on his own. He carried a small box beneath one arm. Brody watched him walk down the pathway that linked the turning circle to the front door. Three thuds as he mounted the porch steps—out of view now—and then the doorbell chimed.

  His delivery made, the driver returned to his big brown truck and drove away.

  * * *

  “Is it a bomb?”

  “No. It’s not heavy enough to be a bomb. And Jimmy won’t blow me up.” Lola gave Brody a wry smile. “He wants to kill me slowly.”

  “Maybe a chemical device?” Brody ventured. “You know, like fentanyl, or some kind of knockout gas?”

  The package sat on the kitchen table. A plain brown box, twelve inches long, seven inches wide. It was addressed, not to Margaret Ward, but to Lola Bear.

  “Doubtful,” Lola said, lifting one side of the box to look underneath it. “There’s no crystallization at the edges, no oily marks or strange odor. The return address is bogus, though.”

  She pointed at the smaller label in the top corner. It read: ic industries, phoenix, 54558.

  “Phoenix, Arizona?” Brody asked.

  “It’s a reference to the mythical bird that rose from the ashes. The zip is standard letter mapping, like you’d find on a phone keypad. It spells KILL U. The IC in IC Industries stands for Italian Cat.”

  “Jesus Christ.” Brody took a step back. “It’s from him. It’s really from him.”

  “Yes, it is.” Lola pulled a knife from the block on the counter behind her. “It’s a message.”

  She carefully cut the packing tape and lifted the box’s flaps. Inside, beneath a cushion of bubble wrap, was a dirty white sneaker with a crust of blood on the toe.

  The ground opened beneath Brody. He swayed, clasped the edge of the table. Everything dimmed for the first—but not the last—time that day.

  “Oh my God,” he moaned. “That’s Molly’s shoe.”

  “No,” Lola said. She took the sneaker out and turned it slowly in her hands. “It’s a love letter.”

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Lola had seen both sides of Vincent Petrescu. There was the enforcer, who would snap the fingers of drugs and weapons dealers who were short in their earnings. Then there was the man, intelligent, loyal, a son and brother who made regular donations to the children’s hospital in Reflection Park, and called his bunica in Romania every other Sunday. Lola would never deny her attraction to the bad boy with the .45 at his side, but it was the man that she fell in love with.

  The man who uncovered a warmth inside her she hadn’t known existed.

  The man who put her first, in everything.

  The man who wrote her love letters.

  It would brighten her day when she found them, and encourage that new and wonderful feeling inside. It’s all better with you here—written on a scrap of paper tucked between the pages of a magazine. Addicted to what you give me—on a Post-it note inside a CD case. Thanks for being my Happy Place—folded and tucked beneath the insole of her left shoe. This last was a favorite hiding place for his sweet nothings, and indeed the spot where he’d secreted his final note to her: one word—JIMMY—written in his own blood.

  Jimmy knew this story. Lola had told him as he lay dying in the hallway of his burning mansion. And now he’d borrowed Vince’s idea to send a note of
his own.

  Lola placed Molly’s sneaker on the kitchen table. It was her left sneaker, of course—closer to her heart, as Vince would say—and when Lola lifted the tongue and looked inside, she noticed the insole sticking up at the back, eerily similar to how Vince’s insole had been sticking up when she’d looked inside his shoe twenty-six years before.

  Deep breathing sounds from behind her. Brody was doubled over, leaning against the wall. Lola glanced at him, then turned back to Molly’s sneaker.

  She lifted the insole, expecting to find a folded piece of paper, probably with an address written on it, almost certainly written in Molly’s blood (Jimmy wouldn’t miss that trick). Instead she saw that a rectangle of the cushioning had been cut out, and neatly filled with a USB flash drive.

  Lola took the drive out and held it up, like an appraiser holding up a diamond.

  “What . . . the fuck?” Brody gasped.

  “You probably don’t want to see what’s on this,” she said.

  * * *

  A single MP4 video file. Run time: 03:31. It opened on a shot of an oil-stained floor and scrolled slowly up to reveal a bare concrete wall. An abandoned factory or warehouse, Lola thought. The camera jigged left, lost focus, came back in. The same shot, except now she saw a man-shaped shadow against the wall.

  Mumbling in the background: “Please . . . let us go . . . please.” This was followed by a distinct, violent thud and then screaming. Both sounds cut through Lola. Next to her, Brody flinched. He’d chosen to watch. “I need to know,” he’d said. Now he covered his ears and took a broad step back. “That’s Molly,” he said.

  More screaming, followed by a muffled whimpering, closer to the camera. Two people, Lola thought, one of them gagged.

  The shadow moved. Lola heard footsteps (she imagined expensive Italian heels clicking off the floor). A man stepped into the shot. It was Jimmy. Lola knew this, even though he wore a black hood over his head, eyeholes cut into it. She could tell from the way he walked, the cant of his back, his narrow, almost boyish hips. He wore leather gloves to hide the scarring on his hands.

  “Hello, Lola.” Even his voice was disguised, pushed through a filter, almost robotic.

  “Is that Jimmy?” Brody asked.

  “Yes, but there’s no way of proving it.”

  “Why’s he hiding?”

  “To keep us from going to the police.”

  The camera followed Jimmy as he stepped left past two empty racks and a fire door and an old blue machine that probably hadn’t worked for a long time.

  “Hit that bitch again.”

  The same meaty thud and Molly screamed again—a hurt, hopeless wail, then tears and tears.

  “Again.”

  Jimmy flicked his hand, suggesting the camera follow the action. It did. A quick snap left. A different scene: red-painted cinder block, heating ducts, a low yellow light. Molly was chained at the wrists to an overhead crossbar that sagged a little with her weight. Her weaker left leg was drawn inward, like a cowering animal.

  “Don’t watch,” Lola said.

  “I’m going to kill him.”

  Lola paused the video at 01:21. Still two minutes and ten seconds of this nightmare to go. She turned to Brody.

  “Get the hell out of here.”

  “No. I need to see.”

  “You don’t.”

  He said, “This is a goddamn war. I don’t want to second-guess myself on the battlefield. I want every reason to put a bullet in Jimmy’s brain.”

  “Brody—”

  “Hit play.”

  She hit play. The camera jerked away from Molly, lost focus for a second, swam back, and here was the second person: Renée, strapped into her wheelchair, sobbing through the wad of flannel stuffed into her mouth. Blood flowed from her hairline and from a deep cut that looped from her left ear to her cheekbone.

  Back to Molly. The camera zoomed in on her face. She had a broken lip and bruising around her eye. The camera jerked again, zoomed out. Another hooded person stepped into the shot, smaller in frame. No gloves. He or she carried a heavy-duty pipe wrench in one hand. She, definitely a she; Brody noticed the bright pink varnish on her fingernails and flashed back to Rocky T’s.

  “Blair,” he said.

  Blair raised the wrench and brought it down in a blur, smashing it against Molly’s left leg, just above the knee. Molly screamed and thrashed, swinging from the chain. Blair hit her in the same place again.

  Brody groaned, covered his eyes, staggered away.

  Pause at 01:56.

  “Get out of here, Brody,” Lola insisted. “Please.”

  He cried out—a hurting, furious explosion of sound—and threw his fist against the wall, two solid thuds that made the window tremble in its frame. “I’m not going anywhere,” he said. “This is on me. I won’t back away.”

  “But you can.”

  “I’m the reason Molly and Renée are there.”

  “No, Brody. I am.”

  “I guess we’re both to blame, which means we’re in this together.” He flexed his right hand, examined the grazed skin on his knuckles, then nodded at the screen. “If I’m soldier enough to fire an assault rifle from your bedroom window, then I’m soldier enough to watch this.”

  Lola lowered her eyes, recognizing the thick cord of resolve—stubbornness, Grandpa Bear would’ve called it—that ran through him. He truly was her son. Reinforcing this, their thoughts ran parallel; she had seen enough of the video, but for what she had to do, she needed to see more.

  She turned back to her laptop and clicked play.

  Molly drooped from the chain, turning a slow circle. A long thread of saliva hung from her mouth. The shot switched back to Jimmy. He stared at the camera for a long time.

  “I need you, Lola,” he said. “I need you very badly.”

  He took half a dozen slow steps to his right and stopped a yard or so from Renée’s chair. He touched her hair and she shrank away from him. The camera operator adjusted his or her position to get all four of them in the shot: Jimmy and Renée in the foreground, Blair and Molly behind. Molly lifted her head and moaned. The chain rattled. “Pleeeeeease,” she wailed. Jimmy reached behind him and pulled a semiautomatic pistol from the waistband of his pants. He pointed it at Renée’s head.

  “No,” Molly screamed. “Please, Pleeee—”

  Blair silenced her: one deft punch to the jaw. Molly went limp and spun on her chain.

  “You know where to find me,” Jimmy said to the camera. It looked for a moment like he was going to lower the gun but he pulled the trigger instead. The report was dull and shocking. Renée’s head snapped backward and the right side of her skull opened in a hail of bone and matter. The force lifted her chair onto one wheel. It almost tipped, then it settled and rolled a few inches. The movement caused Renée’s head to flop forward. Blood spouted from the entry wound and gushed from the exit.

  Jimmy tucked the pistol into the back of his pants and stepped close to the camera. His eyes blazed through the jagged holes cut into the hood.

  “Come get me, you bitch,” he said.

  End of video.

  * * *

  Ten seconds of painful, disbelieving silence, then Lola closed the laptop’s lid with a loud snap. She turned toward Brody. His eyes were big and wet.

  “We’ve got work to do,” she said.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  The message from Jimmy—the brutal, inhuman hand he had played—meant that Brody and Lola no longer had to scope the property. Nobody was coming, at any time of the day or night. Jimmy had been clear: he wanted Lola to go to him. This was hardly a source of relief, but they were at least free to suffer in their own way. Lola fell into an exhausted sleep. Brody was tired, too, but sleep wasn’t in the cards. He wandered the farm, drifting in and out of himself, the most hopeless of ghosts. He’d find himself in the barn or the basement with no memory of how he got there. He fed the chickens at midnight.

  The world returned, gradually. It fe
lt like a wound both opening and closing. At 6:50 a.m., with a scratch of light in the east, Brody stripped off his shirt and ran. He bolted across the yellowing land to the north—the very land he’d watched over since his arrival—and into the woods. He didn’t feel the cold or the sting of the branches as they whipped against his skin. Deer sprang ahead of him in beautiful shapes.

  The light climbed. A saffron mist clung to the understory. Brody broke from the woods and stumbled back to the house, bleeding and bruised. His mom was still asleep, curled up in an armchair in the living room. Brody draped a thick blanket over her and found one for himself. He sat in front of the empty fireplace and remembered Molly, age two, lying in a hospital bed, her legs in twin casts. He had cupped her hand and silently promised to be there if she needed him. If. She was such a determined girl.

  Brody eventually succumbed to sleep, but his dreams were like the mist in the woods: thin and crowded by darkness.

  * * *

  On any normal day—or as normal as her life ever got under a constant threat—Lola would wake at five a.m., shower, eat breakfast, then go to work. Hers was a small farm but there was always plenty to do, and an early start occasionally meant that she could dedicate her afternoon to other pursuits, like riding her horse or getting off a few shots at the range.

  Brody’s arrival had derailed Margaret Ward’s existence—ended it, in fact—but Lola woke late that Friday morning determined to play the role one last time. So she pulled on her dirty old denims and made her rounds. She groomed the horses and let them run in the arena. She cleaned and hosed the stables, mucked out the chicken coops, refreshed all the feeders and troughs. Hudson came at eleven and she gave him a vibrant, nothing-wrong-here smile, then handed him sixty fresh eggs stacked into two trays, just like she always did.