Page 26 of Freaks
TEN
SERA
“Let me go! Fix,please. I swear…I didn’t know he was going to send you to Oscar.Please!”
Monica was losing her shit, but I barely registered her frantic pleading. My ears were still ringing from the gunshot that had claimed Rabbit’s life. I was never going to stop hearing that sound. I was never going to be able to eradicate the sight of the guy’s head bursting like an over-ripe watermelon that someone had struck with a sledgehammer.
The blood…
There had been so much blood…
At a respectable distance, that shot would have created a neat little hole in the center of Rabbit’s forehead, but at the distance we’d been sitting—point blank range—things had gone a little differently. Rabbit’s cheekbone had caved under the pressure of the impact, and his jaw bone had been all but severed from the rest of his skull, leaving it hanging by a bloody rope of sinew. What had once been his mouth had transformed into a gruesome, yawning maw that I was going to be reliving whenever I closed my eyes for the foreseeable future.
No one had come running. The guards Rabbit had warned of hadn’t shown their faces—probably a calculated move on their part, if they’d known Fix was on site—and the guys dressed in black had been nowhere to be found when we’d made our exit. Fix had been grim and forbidding, his hand clamped like a vise around Monica’s arm as he’d dragged her out of the place. He’d growled like a rabid wolf when Monica had kicked and screamed, trying to free herself, and when she hadn’t calmed down, he’d thrown her over his shoulder and carried her out of the church.
We were almost back in Brooklyn now, and her anxious wailing had increased instead of tapered off. “Fix, please,” she sobbed. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I had no idea he would do that, I swear. Just…please!”
Finally, the deadly calm that had fallen over him after he pulled that trigger shattered. Slamming his fist into the steering wheel of our stolen sedan, he bared his teeth at the rear-view mirror, a brilliant silver storm flashing in his eyes. “Fuck, Monica!Really? You really think I’m going to fuckinghurtyou?”
“I—I don’t…” she whimpered. “You’re angry. I don’t know.”
“Then you don’t knowme,” he hissed at her reflection. “I promised I’d find the guy who hurt you. I promised I’d protect you. But fuck,” he said, grinding his teeth together. “I never thoughtI’dneed protecting fromyou.”
A miserable silence fell over the car.
I watched the city whip by in a stream of orange and red lights, and I tried to formulate something to say. I felt Fix’s eyes on me a number of times, but I couldn’t return the eye contact. I needed to unpack everything that was going on in my head before the pressure became too much and I ended up screaming at the top of my lungs like a lunatic.
Was I angry?
Was I horrified?
Was I scared?
Was I going crazy?
I couldn’t answer a single one of the questions that were furiously demanding my attention. All I could do was sit in the seat next to Fix and stare out of the window, replaying the moment when Rabbit’s head exploded on an endless, terrible loop.
Exhaustion gnawed at me, but I wasn’t going to sleep tonight. No chance of that. My thoughts were going to fester until I was mentally raw from their constant chaffing, and even then I wasn’t going to be able to pass out.
I didn’t know where we were going, and I didn’t even bother to ask. The tides of influence that affected my life were so far out of control now that trying to rein them in would be much like sticking my hand into a blender to try and catch hold of the spinning blades.
I realized Monica had stopped crying.
A cop car hurtled by, lights and sirens cutting into the night, but no one inside the car flinched. We were a group of friends on our way home from a night out. Fix was studiously observing every road traffic law there was, so there was no reason we should be noticed. The blood that spattered our skin couldn’t be seen; the gun tucked into Fix’s waistband was hidden from view. It was beyond strange, but I wasn’t worried we were going to get caught.
It seemed as if the events of the evening had taken place outside the realms of normal life, in some other place unreachable to anyone who might cause trouble for us. In my head, Rabbit’s body was going to rot and eventually turn to dust back there in the crypt, undisturbed for the rest of time.
At some point soon, someone was going to come across him, of course. Rabbit’s parties were frequent and popular, and by the sounds of things his client list was extensive. The question was, what was going to happen when he was discovered? I kept trying to picture someone calling the cops and reporting his death, and I just couldn’t do it.
Fix had located Rabbit’s office and destroyed all of the security camera footage before we’d left the church, so there was no direct evidence that we’d been there. There were so many fingerprints all over those crypts that it would be near impossible to separate one from the other.
Another cop car burned past us, heading in the opposite direction, and I finally twisted to look ahead out of the windshield. Fix didn’t even look at me, but I could sense his thoughts searching, reaching out to me, as if I were inside his head and I were able to read them as if they were my own. He had a thousand questions, I knew, but mostly he wanted to know if I was afraid of him.
Once upon a time, a set of rules had governed him. Ten non-negotiable commandments that provided a set guideline as to how he was supposed to live his life. Since he’d left the church, Fix had broken so many of those commandments. Theft. Adultery. Murder. But lying? Dishonesty wasn’t something Fix undertook lightly. As far as I knew, he’d only lied to me once, and that was a lie of omission. He hadn’t told me he’d been hired to kill me when we’d first met. Hehadtold me he was a paid assassin, however, and he hadn’t pulled any punches with me since then, even when the truth had been a hard thing to hear. So, if he asked me if I was frightened of him right now, putting his fears into words, I was going to have to tell him the truth.
Yes.
I was afraid of him.
