Page 41 of Brutal for It
Every man in the room shifts. The air is heavier now. Names mean danger. Places mean jurisdiction.
“We’ve run transports for Caputo before. They had a change in leadership recently. Find us the head of Caputo family ,” Red orders.
Crunch nods. “We’ll get discreet. We’ll send two guys out in cars that don’t look Hellions. We’ll watch the sites—empty mill yard, the bar on the corner, any of the places nearby they may show their faces. We’ll watch traffic, incoming trucks, pick up patterns. We’ll track female movement. We find Jami and the route they use to push her out.”
I want to say fuck the discretion. I want to say we don’t watch patterns. We act. We smash patterns. But I’m breathing now with one lung from rage and one from reason.
“Who you sending?” Karma asks. “I’ll loop my cousins in and if they have anyone to help with a perimeter. We’ll need safe houses. Medical. People who can pull a woman without questions. This is a rescue mission. If she’s more than a girl under the weather, we need extraction.”
Crunch names a list of Hellions within riding distance to back us. The list is long enough to make me sick. Brothers, prospects, two guys disguised as delivery drivers, a woman with no Hellions ties but with a reputation as someone who can move a person unnoticed. Names come and go. Plans get drawn on napkins and tabletops. Tripp’s voice clicks off a schedule, surveillance tonight, recon tomorrow, votes Tuesday, go Friday. If we need to move sooner, we’ll call an emergency and roll out.
The vote is ugly and short. We’re Hellions. We are family and always will vote for family. The room moves from strategy to load-out without asking my permission. Pistols stay holstered. We don’t draw first. We take numbers. We get med people ready. We brief Jenni, if we have to, but no more than she needs to hear.
“You brief Jenni?” I ask Crunch, feeling a tug of ownership so strong it makes me growl. Jami would want her sister to know that we are getting her out of this.
Crunch meets my eyes, again steady and hard. “She’s her sister, Tommy. If things go sideways, we need someone who knows where she’s been. I’ll make sure her involvement is limited. We don’t want her walking into a line of fire. But those two are as close as we are if not closer, she’s not going to stand down.” He tries to soften it. He can’t. He’s seen the wild in me and knows how fast it eats.
“You don’t get to pick who I let near her,” I snap. “Nobody does.”
“No,” Crunch agrees. “But you also don’t get to run in staggering and get us all killed because you can’t see straight. We do this right, together. That’s the deal.”
I swallow. His words sink like stones. I hate his logic and need the sense of it the same breath.
Twelve
Jami
The room hums like a bad dream. Old AC, thin walls, the dull throb of a TV somewhere playing the same three commercials on an endless loop. There’s a stain on the ceiling shaped like a moth. I stare at it until the shape becomes wings and the wings become a door and the door becomes a sky I can’t reach.
I tell myself I’m fine. That I’m in control. That I can turn the volume down on everything inside me and still find the knob to turn it back up later. I can somehow move in and out of this reality like I used to.
That’s the lie. I know it and I say it to myself anyway.
My hands won’t stop shaking. Not with fear, not exactly. No, it’s with anticipation masquerading as relief. I’m tired of remembering.
I sit on the edge of the bed and count my breaths. Four in. Four hold. Four out. It’s a row boat on black water. I step into the boat and it lists. The oars aren’t there. I’m floating in the abyss.
I don’t look in the mirror. The mirror has opinions I can’t afford.
I don’t pray, either. I’ve done that already. I’ve studied the ceiling and asked it to turn into a reply. The silence felt like an answer I didn’t like.
The little pile on the nightstand looks harmless—like coarse salt, like dust in clumps. My mouth waters in a way that makes me hate my body. I know what happens next. Not the mechanics, I don’t have to play that over in my head, I’ve lived it a thousand times. I crave what comes after the hit. The surrender. The hush. The way the room loses corners and softens and, for a moment, everything agrees to be gentle.
I tell myself I’ll be careful. I tell myself there’s a version of this where I get to tiptoe and not fall. I tell myself I’ve learned so much; surely I can use what I know to keep from drowning in it. I am in control.
Then I stop telling myself anything and move the way my body remembers. Not a tutorial. Not a ritual, though it feels like one. Just the flick and press and sting that says, Okay. You can rest now. For a minute, you can escape.
The spoon is dirty so I let the flame of the lighter dance over the metal before pouring the little crystals and powder scraps in it. The lines of cocaine don’t help anymore. This is what I need, what I crave. I heat the heroin with a bit of water, watching the crystals dissolve before using my syringe to draw it up. Attaching the needle, I flick my middle finger against it to remove any air bubbles.
I take a deep breath. I just need to get by. One more then I can pick up the pieces of my life yet again.
I tie my own past around my arm and turn away from the part of me that begs me not to. The moment the needle pierces my skin, the heat hits my bloodstream, my whole body sighs like a house that’s been waiting all winter for spring.
There you are, the room says.
There you are, my bones say.
There you are, my ghosts say, jealous and relieved and all wrong.
