Lola on Fire Read online

  The interstate got tighter as they approached Des Moines. The landscape barely changed, though: a deep rolling green on both sides, punctuated by blue road signs and off-white buildings. The radio signal swam in and out. Lola hit scan a couple of times, found nothing to her taste, so shut it off.

  “I was always a quiet kid. Not much of an ego, never really open with my emotions.” Lola shook her head. “That changed, somewhere around ten or eleven years old.”

  Brody thought of Mav Hamm, the first to be introduced to Lola’s ego.

  “I developed strength, determination, and feelings,” she said. “But I always felt divided—torn—between that sad, emotionally repressed little girl and the fierce, ambitious woman she became. This is how I’ve lived, and how I’ve made decisions. I didn’t always make the right ones, but when it came to my family, I always tried.”

  A hawk circled above the interstate, then cut away to the north, where heavier clouds had gathered. It would rain before long. Lola looked in that direction, drumming one hand lightly on the wheel. Brody heard the quiver on her breath.

  “I’m sorry, Brody, for bringing you into a life you don’t deserve, and then running away from you. I’m sorry that all my shadows found Molly and your dad. And Renée. Poor, sweet Renée.” A hitch in her breath. She blinked her cold, dry eyes. “I can’t undo the suffering or make anything right. All I can do is stop the shadows, put an end to the pain.”

  “We’ll get Jimmy,” Brody said. “He’ll pay for every horrible thing he’s ever done, not just to you and me, but to everybody.”

  A shallow smile from Lola. “You’ve got some grit, son. I’ll give you that.”

  “It’s mostly rage,” Brody said. “If this truck breaks down, I’ll grab the guns and run to Carver City, and nothing will stop me.”

  The truck didn’t break down. It rolled smoothly east, through Iowa and into Illinois, where they stopped to refuel and grab a bite to eat. Brody reflected on his recent trip to the Prairie State with Molly, how they’d staggered through the doors of the New Zion Baptist Church with gospel music ringing, and the Reverend Wendell Mathias had offered his hand.

  It had been a hard journey, and it was about to get harder, but there’d been hope along the way, and kindness. Rare points of light in a cripplingly dark tunnel.

  A hard rain followed them into Indiana. Lola worked the wipers. She didn’t slow down. Understandably, their conversation got thinner as they chalked up the miles and the reality of what they were driving toward took hold. Brody closed his eyes and found a point in his rage—a bright, burning coal—that he could hold on to. He imagined that coal igniting a fire that started out small, but soon spread and set everything burning. With this in his mind—and with the lulling rhythm of the truck—he fell asleep.

  It must have been a deep sleep, because it was dusk when he stirred and a nearby road sign revealed they were forty miles from Cleveland, Ohio, which put them about two hundred miles—and three hours—from Carver City.

  Also, they’d parked, and Lola wasn’t in the truck.

  Brody sat up, wiping his eyes. He looked blearily through the fading light and saw they were in a rest area. His mom sat on a bench facing the interstate. He couldn’t be sure, but it looked like she was crying.

  * * *

  She pulled a shirtsleeve across her cheeks. Her rounded back bobbed and trembled. Brody approached slowly, knowing she wouldn’t want him to see, but wanting her to know that he cared. He got to within fifteen feet and was about to speak when she beat him to it; she knew he was there, even without turning around.

  “This was supposed to take two minutes,” she said, watching the traffic rush by. “Just a brief spell, alone, with my thoughts. But it’s been ten minutes and I’m still having that spell.”

  Brody pulled level with the bench. Even in the dull light he saw that her eyes were red and wet.

  “I don’t cry,” she said, giving her head a little shake. “This is . . .”

  “It’s okay,” Brody said. He sat beside her and looped an arm over her back. Such a simple thing, really—the act of reaching out and offering comfort. She had comforted him so often over the past few days. Now it was his turn, and it felt big and wonderful and not simple at all.

  She leaned into him, her head on his shoulder. Cars and trucks zipped along the eastbound lane, a thousand lives moving at sixty miles an hour, each multifaceted, with challenges, burdens, and travails. Although none, Brody surmised, were quite like theirs.

  Lola wiped her face, studied the tears on her fingers, as if evaluating their rarity. The trees around them rattled their naked branches.

  “I’m not going to make it out of there,” she said.

  Brody considered her skill with firearms. He’d watched her at the range as she racked up headshots on moving targets—with zero effort, it seemed. He recalled how she’d tackled him on her driveway. One moment he was staring at the farmhouse, wondering if he had the right place, and the next he was flat on his back with her knee planted on his chest.

  “You will,” he said, and he believed it.

  “I’m not what I used to be. Nothing like. I’m older. Slower.” She wiped more tears away. “And I’m scared.”

  “I know. And that’s okay.”

  Lola sat up, her eyelashes heavy and dark, her shoulders low. Brody rubbed her back and she looked at him gratefully.

  “I can’t say I’m glad you came, Brody,” she said, and a sad smile played across her face. “Except I am. I wish the situation had been different, of course, but seeing you again has lifted my lonely old heart.”

  They embraced warmly and with meaning. Lola sighed, kissed the top of his head, and stood up.

  “Okay,” she said. “Let’s go end this.”

  * * *

  They crossed into Pennsylvania a few minutes shy of seven p.m., Lola’s home state and the one place in America she had vowed never to return to. She followed the turnpike to Interstate 79, then cut south toward Pittsburgh. The darkness felt different here, she thought. The open skies of Nebraska allowed for a nighttime that breathed. Here, it felt crowded and ugly, or maybe that had more to do with the individual she was going to see.

  An hour outside Carver City, Lola veered off-route and pulled into a hotel parking lot.

  “We’re not stopping, are we?” Brody asked.

  “No,” Lola said. “I need to do something.”

  “Here?” Brody shook his head. “Can I help?”

  “It’s a female thing,” Lola said.

  She got out of the truck, walked across the parking lot, and into the hotel. It was not grand, but it had a waiting area with comfortable seats and reasonable privacy. She sat down, took out her cell phone, and brought up the information that Eddie the Smoke had provided while she had the muzzle of her pistol pressed into his ribs.

  A telephone number with a western Pennsylvania code.

  She started dialing but hit the wrong digit and had to restart, not once but three times. Deep breaths. Composure. She tried again and completed the number. A chill laddered her spine as she brought the phone to her ear.

  He answered on the second ring. His voice was as stale and suffocating as the air from an old grave.

  “I’ve been expecting you,” he said.

  “Hello, Jimmy,” she said.

  * * *

  The final hour of their long drive passed in silence. The tension was too thick for conversation. Even breathing was difficult. Brody focused on that single burning coal, and the fact that, within hours, this would all be over. All the running. All the bloodshed. Lola reflected on her childhood, and how wonderful it had sometimes been to feel nothing.

  The miles ticked by. The guns rattled on the backseat.

  They soon saw the burnt fog of light pollution hanging over Carver City.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Thousands of dreams. Thousands of miles. Hundreds of thousands of dollars. And blood, of course. Gallons of blood. This was what had filled th
e valley between him and Lola Bear. A broad valley, but he had built his bridge one piece at a time. He had persevered when the wind howled and the storm raged. And he had crossed.

  Jimmy sat in the front office of his Carver City warehouse. He’d owned this place for thirty-three years. Its location—behind the rail yard, and away from the other warehouses and units in the industrial zone—made it the perfect site to conduct business. Most of that business was legitimate, but it had stored and shipped out plenty of contraband over the years, and any number of corpses packed into barrels of sodium hydroxide—the last being Renée Giordano’s. He sat with his right leg twitching, his jaw anxiously clenched. The only light came from the warehouse floor, and it shone through the office glass, just enough for Jimmy to see the scars on his hands. If he were to strip naked, he’d see the other scars—these disfigurements he’d carried. An indignity, but a mere gloss over the real wound, the one inside, the one that still bled.

  “Even dogs run away,” he whispered.

  The clock on his cell phone read 20:11. Forty-seven minutes since Lola had called. Forty-seven minutes of nervous excitement and deep distrust. He’d vented and preened. He’d shadowboxed and prayed. A pinkie nail of coke—just a little bump—had aligned his self-control.

  The bitch was coming.

  All quiet on the warehouse floor. It ordinarily functioned around the clock but there were no employees tonight. Only soldiers, eleven of them (he’d drafted some extra muscle for this—he wasn’t going to fuck it up), armed with machine pistols and AR-15s. There were more outside, some equipped with riot gear. He felt a strong sense of déjà vu, but the outcome would be different this time around.

  The quiet lasted a moment longer, then Jimmy heard the hectic approach of a vehicle. Headlights splashed through the open bay door as Blair’s SUV pulled to a hard stop outside. She cut the engine and got out. Remarkable Blair, who’d delivered on her promise. Implacable Blair, who wouldn’t stop until the job was done. She entered the warehouse, passing in and out of the shadows. Her expression was harsh and focused. She had a .45 on each hip and a bandolier across her chest loaded with throwing knives.

  Jimmy relaxed in his seat as she entered the office, to give the impression of cool. Everything inside him jumped, though.

  “Got a call from Jared: a half-ton Sierra with Nebraska plates was just spotted on Corporation Boulevard. Eddie the Smoke confirmed it’s her.” There was no air of smugness about Blair. She was all business. “ETA is ten minutes, maybe fifteen if she catches all those red lights on Franklin.”

  Jimmy linked his fingers—cool, oh so cool—and asked, “Are you ready?”

  “The guys are taking up position now: ten flanking the approach, four on the roof. There’ll be two on you, and I’ll fill in any gaps.” She looked at him carefully. “Are you ready?”

  “Nobody kills her,” Jimmy said. It was an answer of sorts.

  “Everything south of the knees,” Blair agreed. “If that’s what it comes to.”

  Jimmy licked his lips. Snapshots from a hundred dreams flooded his mind, all violent, all beautiful. “I’ll take her hands tonight. Tomorrow I’ll take her feet.”

  “You can take whatever you want.”

  He stood up, feeling a hundred feet tall, as if he might smash through the office ceiling, up through the warehouse roof, and stand like a giant over Carver City.

  “Get the cripple,” he said.

  * * *

  Carver City had been a benign commuter town until the western Pennsylvania mob gave it a face-lift. Rudy Tucoletti—who controlled the city until his death in 1989—encouraged multifamily housing and retail development, which escalated industry of a different nature. “Americans love waffles,” Rudy used to say. “But we also love drugs and guns.” Rudy had a lock on these, too (always kicking up to Don Esposito), and the inevitable rise in crime offered lucrative extortion opportunities.

  Jimmy built on this during his brief tenure, and twenty-six years later—like Jimmy himself—the scars remained. Carver City held the dubious distinction of being the second most dangerous city in Pennsylvania, with a violent crime rate of 1,622 per 100,000 residents.

  “You used to live here?” Brody asked, looking at the gray brick buildings and boarded-over windows, the overpasses sprayed with graffiti, the trash-lined streets. “Jesus, it makes Rebel Point look like Disney World.”

  “I operated here,” Lola said. “I lived in Greensburg. A much nicer city.”

  They drove through the downtown core, where Brody saw the hunched shape of what might once have been a picturesque neighborhood. There was a colonial-style post office, an old movie house called the Fortuna, a broad park with two baseball diamonds and a water fountain. It was all run-down now. The cheerless streets were peppered with for lease signs, dive bars, and pawnbrokers. Call girls paraded beneath the Fortuna’s cracked marquee.

  “How far is Jimmy’s house from here?” Brody asked.

  “We’re not going to his house,” Lola said.

  East off Main Street, and here were the fruits of Rudy Tucoletti’s labors: strip malls, fast food joints, motels, and apartment buildings. Police cruisers prowled like sharks in shallow water. The industrial zone was beyond this, a nest of factories and warehouses, with a four-track railway running in and out, and smokestacks pumping refuse into the night sky.

  “Where the hell are we going?” Brody asked.

  Lola didn’t respond. She bounced the truck across a scrub lot and veered onto a road with flex units on one side and loading docks on the other. This intersected a narrow lane that paralleled the length of a rumbling, smoky factory. Lola followed it around the back, then turned onto a gravel track marked employee and delivery entrance only. There was a deserted rail yard to the left, enclosed by a sagging chain-link fence. Empty boxcars sat in the darkness. To the right, a posse of transmission towers stood protectively around a bleak, humming substation.

  Lola drove slowly down the middle of the track. Vehicles had been parked along both sides. Halfway down, she brought the truck to a stop but kept the engine running. The headlights picked out the exterior of an isolated warehouse fifty yards away.

  “Mom?” Brody asked, his voice cracking. “What’s going on?”

  She looked at him through a mask of fear and sadness—the face of a woman who has resolved to take a long, hot bath with a razor blade. “You said it yourself,” she said. “I’m either your savior or your sacrifice. And I’m too old to be your savior.” She grabbed her phone from where she’d slotted it in the cupholder, pulled up her recent calls, and tapped the number at the top of the list.

  Brody heard the ringing tone through the phone’s earpiece. It was picked up quickly, although the person at the other end was content to let Lola speak first.

  “I’m here,” she said.

  “I know,” came the reply.

  Floodlights flared above the warehouse’s bay door. A second later, a battalion of Jimmy’s goons emerged from behind their parked vehicles and surrounded the truck with weapons raised.

  * * *

  Brody counted ten mean-looking guys, with ten very serious guns. Joey—the meathead he’d one-inch punched in Bayonet—was on the left side, staring at him down the barrel of an AR-15. He was not acting this time.

  “Jesus Christ.” Brody’s skin crawled, his muscles contracted. He was vaguely aware of the guns on the backseat, but knew if he lunged for one of them, Jimmy’s guys would turn his mom’s truck into a cheese grater.

  What was the point of those guns if this was the plan? Or the time he’d spent at the range? I’m going to do everything I can to keep you from pulling a trigger, Lola had said. You might have to, though. It’s a good idea for you to know how.

  But a better idea, apparently, to just give up.

  The bay door rolled open, spilling more light into the loading area. Molly limped onto the dock. She was being bolstered from behind by Blair, who held a pistol to her head. Seeing Blair again triggered a fresh
rage inside Brody. It was like a shock wave, starting in his gut and radiating outward. Molly was the nullifier; if she hadn’t been here, Brody would have erupted.

  Two armed thugs followed. Leo—the other bozo from Bayonet—was one of them. Then came the star of the show, Jimmy Latzo, dressed in a sharp suit, his hair immaculately combed. He had a cell phone pressed to his ear.

  “Welcome home, Lola,” he hissed.

  * * *

  Lola tapped the mute button on her phone and turned to Brody.

  “I told you,” she said, “that I have a plan, and that I need you to do exactly what I say, when I say.”

  “I remember,” Brody murmured.

  “So here’s what I need you to do.” The humanness she’d displayed earlier was absent now. This was cold Lola. Machinelike Lola. “I need you to get Molly, and then get the hell out of here. Don’t look back. Do not go to the police. There’s not a cop in Carver City who’ll come out here tonight, anyway. And you’ll only put yourself back on Jimmy’s shit list.”

  “You’re giving up?” Brody said.

  “You’re free now,” Lola said. “Both of you. Go back to Nebraska. The farm is willed to you, Brody. You and Molly. Look after it.”

  “I don’t want the farm, I want . . .” He had no words. The air had been robbed from his lungs. He screwed his eyes closed and managed, “I want the three of us. Together. Riding the horses. Feeding the goddamn chickens.”

  “That’s not going to happen.”

  Jimmy’s voice came through the earpiece. “Get out of the truck, Lola. Hands in the air. Try anything stupid and I’ll have Blair put a bullet in this little cunt’s ear.”

  Lola unmuted the phone and spoke into it. “I’m not moving until my daughter is sitting in the backseat. You want to try shooting me out of here, go ahead.”

  Jimmy lowered the phone and said something to Blair. After a moment, she nodded, said something back. Her gun never left Molly’s temple.