Page 56 of Roma Queen
When the man is finished and the task is complete, the man throws the meat onto the fire. He makes the boy watch it as it burns.
Twenty-Seven
ZARA
“I saw what he did?That makes no sense. I’ve never met Lazlo before. I’ve never even seen him before. I don’t have the slightest idea what he even looks like.”
Garrett shrugs.
You’d know him, if you saw him. No one ever forgets.
I want him to explain. I want more information. I want…shit, I want to face Lazlo in person and get these answers from him directly. More than anything, I want to find Pasha. He didn’t want me going with him to find the murdering fuck because he was worried about me. Well, I’m worried about him, too. We should never have come back here to the Bakersfield. I don’t even know why I told Garrett to bring us back here. It made sense at the time, but now? Now it’s time to face this thing head-on.
“Just get up, Garrett. You’re gonna take me to him.”
Garrett’s eyes go wide. He shakes his head.
“Yes, youare. You’re gonna take me to him, and then you’re going to help me stop him.”
For a second, he just stares at me blankly. Then he throws his head back and laughs. A deep, throaty, gargled sound floods the apartment, and I am rooted to the spot, winded and heartbroken when I see inside Garrett’s mouth.
He has no tongue.
The bulb of flesh at the back of his mouth is horrific, and obviously nowhere near long enough to enable him to speak. Most troublingly, the stump is uneven, twisted, as if the rest of the muscle was actually hacked off. This is the reason why Garrett is silent. I gasp, and Garrett stops laughing, clamping his mouth closed. His cheeks color with embarrassment, and despite everything, regardless of the fact that he threw Sarah in the back of a van and handed her over to a psychopath, I regret reacting so blatantly to his disfigurement.
I train my features into a neutral, calm expression and I do something really stupid: I lower Seo-Jun’s gun. “He did that to you, didn’t he?” I ask.
Garrett looks away, out of the window, the muscles in his jaw working.
“Garrett. Come on. Friends arenotweakness. I know you don’t believe that. You could have hurt me so many times over the last three years, but you didn’t. You’ve done the opposite, in fact. You’ve looked out for me. Protected me. If you didn’t think of me as a friend, you wouldn’t have done that.”
Without looking, Garrett picks up the white board and the pen and holds the two items in his lap. He’s still staring out of the window, but his mind is working furiously, I can see it on him. On the surface, he is a still, flat lake. Below the surface, he’s a roiling, seething, churning whirlpool of confusion.
“Garrett, please. I don’t know the whole story, but I do know this. You donotowe that man anything. Do you like that he hurt that kid? Do you like that he made you take Sarah? She cooks you Sunday dinner every week, Garrett, just like she cooks for me. She’s a good human being. She cares about you. Shelovesyou. Do you want her to die?”
He explodes then, face twisted into a rictus of rage and pain. One second he’s holding the white board, the next it’s hurtling across the room and hitting the wall, denting the plaster work before it clatters to the floor. Garrett blows down his nose, panting, his eyes burning with anger. For the first time since I realized it was Garrett who took Sarah, since I went and found him on that bus, I am afraid of him.
I raise the gun again, aiming it at his face, trying not to tremble. “Just take me to him, Garrett. Please. If you care about me at all, if you care about Sarah, or doing what’s right, then get up and walk out of this door with me now. It’s not too late. We can fix this. I swear, we’ll work it out.”
Garrett wears a dark, ominous look as he slowly gets to his feet.
* * *
The air’sshivering with snow as Garrett heads back toward the van. A parking ticket sticks out from underneath the windshield wiper; he plucks it out and tosses it on the ground, then unlocks the vehicle, giving me a meaningful look before he opens the door. I can read the look:Are you sure you want to do this? It’s a really bad fucking idea.
By way of an answer, I climb into the passenger’s seat and slam the door closed behind me. We sit in tense silence as Garrett drives us across the city. Thanks to the snow, there are only a few cars out on the roads, and traffic is non-existent. We make excellent time, though the twenty minutes that pass between leaving the Bakersfield and pulling up alongside the entrance to the old Rochester subway station are painful to say the least. I can’t get the image of his ruined tongue out of my head. I can’t stop myself from imagining how the hell it happened. I also can’t prevent myself from wondering how many people Garrett’s hurt over the years because Lazlo told him to.
This can't be the first time this has happened. According to Pasha, Lazlo is in his sixties, and the insidious, vile sickness that afflicts him doesn't suddenly come on in later life. He's probably always carried it with him, which means there are bound to be a string of lives that the bastard has ruined over the years. What part has Garrett played in the destruction Lazlo has wrought? Right now, all I know is that he's responsible for forcing Sarah into the back of the Sprinter and taking her to Lazlo, but has Lazlo assigned him much darker tasks in the past? Has Garrett ever abused or assaulted anyone the same way his master has? Has he seriously hurt people? Has he killed?
I'm disgusted, and furious, and more than a little afraid, but somehow I just can't seem to picture that. There's a softness to Garrett that's hard to fake. My friendship with him has been a lie. The last three years have all been an act. I obviously don't know him the way I thought I did, but it's impossible for me to accept that he's capable of such violence. As we approach the intersection of Cross Street and Delongpre, Garrett cuts down a side street and my stomach does a back flip. I've kept my gun in my hand the entire way here, but I've kept it resting in my lap, only loosely holding onto the handle. Now I hold up the weapon and aim it at him, adrenaline coursing through my body.
“What are you doing? Where are you taking me?” I hiss. My hands are shaking. The gun feels heavy and unstable as I aim it at his temple. Garrett huffs. We haven't brought the white board with us, and even if we had, he wouldn't be able to write down where he was taking me. He scowls at me out of the corner of his eye, shaking his head, then jerking his chin straight ahead, out of the windshield, grunting. He should have taken me straight to the entrance that leads down in the abandoned subway station, but instead he drives five hundred meters down the side street and pulls the van over, parking it outside an antique bookstore.
He kills the engine and removes the key from the ignition, holding it up between pinched fingers in his right hand. He grunts again, offering them out to me, rolling his eyes when I don't take them immediately. I accept them from him in the end, though. I insisted he bring me over here. What I actually said, specifically, was that I wanted him to take me to Lazlo. He points out of the windshield, off up the street, making a sound of frustration, and I get the picture that that's exactly what he's trying to do.
Fuck, I should just call Detective Holmes. I have no idea what I'm doing here. I'm probably walking into some sort of trap. It would take too long to try and explain all of this to the detective though. Too much has happened. There are too many moving pieces to this thing now. I'd have to go over everything three or four times before he had the information down, and then it would take hours to get the go-ahead from his superiors and get a task force down here. By then, god knows what will have happened to Pasha and Sarah. There's just no time for any of that. Carefully, I collect the backpack from the foot well, and slide the strap over my shoulder, hitching it onto my back.
“I'm serious, Garrett.” I imbue my voice with as much gravitas as possible. “I don't care that we're in the hood. I don't care that it's the middle of the damn day. I don't care that I'll end up going to jail for the rest of my life. Iwillshoot you if you try and screw with me. Do you understand? Are we on the same page?”
