The Night's Legacy Page 3
As Lois waited for the pad Thai to warm up, she shook her head. It was just like Mom to leave her in the house alone the same night she returned after seven years. How Mom could trust her after all these years she didn’t know except that was more of Mom being Mom. She was naïve enough to think Lois wouldn’t sneak out on her first night.
And she was that committed to the museum. Lois had never considered her mother a Type-A workaholic so much as Mom felt it her responsibility as the museum’s director to put in the long hours. “Hundreds of people count on me for their jobs,” she had said when Lois complained about Mom not going to her soccer game. It wasn’t strictly true that people counted on her for employment since most of the museum’s funding came from a mix of private donors and public grants. But it was Mom who kept the donations and grants coming in and who made sure everything in the museum from the toilets on up functioned as they should.
Lois had often spent hours in her room sulking about Mom choosing work over her. Yet from an early age she was practical enough to know that Mom had to put the responsibility of the museum with its hundreds of people over her daughter. And even though she wasn’t there, Mom always knew everything that was going on; she would often surprise Lois at the breakfast table by asking, “How did your spelling test go?”
Even warmed up in the microwave the Thai food tasted better than anything Lois had eaten in the last seven years. She leaned against the kitchen counter, staring at the refrigerator. Mom still had Lois’s final report card from Brown on the door: all A’s of course. Lois had taken as little pleasure in her report cards as she had in winning science fairs. The magnet holding the report card to the door was a crude plaster flower Lois had made in fourth grade; art was one of the few subjects where she did not earn high marks.
Lois felt the strong temptation to smash the magnet and tear up the report card. For that matter she wanted to destroy the rest of the pictures of her in the house and then take a hammer to all the trophies in her bedroom. Why couldn’t Mom just leave her alone? Why couldn’t she take the hint and write Lois off already?
As Mom had said, she had put the old motorcycle in the basement. The Kawasaki’s chrome still shone as if it had come off the assembly line that day. Lois had always thought the chrome too ostentatious for a woman in her forties, but Mom had probably bought it because it was the safest with the best gas mileage.
Getting the bike up the stairs was a challenge not because of the bike’s weight so much as the narrowness of the old stairs. It might have been easier to try driving the motorcycle up the stairs than dragging it by its handlebars one step at a time. She was covered in sweat by the time she got to the top, but now she could get out of this place and all of its suffocating love.
Lois found the keys hanging up in the kitchen, along with the house key Lois had left behind in a restaurant bathroom years ago. She snatched both to tuck into her pocket. Then she wheeled the bike out to the street. It started up on the first try. She didn’t look back in the mirror as she zipped away once again from her childhood home.
* * *
She got as far as The Brass Drum on 148th Street, on the border between Centerton and Uptown. For one thing she had forgotten a helmet and was tired of getting bugs in her face and for another the bike was almost out of gas. She’d find a unicorn to ride home in Centerton before she found a gas station. So she might as well get a drink before she had to walk the bike five miles to the nearest station.
She had first gone to the Brass Drum when she was eleven years old. She had looked every bit of seven back then too with her short stature and freckles. The bouncer had stared down at her and asked, “You lose your teddy bear or something, kid?”
“I’m not a kid. I’m a little person and if you don’t let me in I’m going to sue your ass for discrimination.” The bluff and the Drum’s shady reputation got her inside, where she had drank her first beer. She hadn’t liked the taste of it so much as she enjoyed the idea of doing something Mom hated.
This time the bouncer didn’t give her a second glance as she went in. She found the same stool as back then, between two clones of Red and Blue T-shirt back in Durndell. The bartender was a woman who looked as if she doubled as the adult entertainment. “Give me a Jack Daniels and leave the bottle,” Lois said. She slapped down enough money to make certain that request was honored.
As she drank her first glass of whiskey, she looked around the bar. She hadn’t lied to Mom when she said she hadn’t done any prostitution or stripping while on the run. That didn’t mean she was a virgin by any stretch. She had gone to bed with a few guys over the last seven years out of first curiosity and later boredom more than anything.
Boys like the ones on either side of her didn’t interest her much. Most of them knew less about sex than she did and their idea of conversation usually involved their football team or how much they could bench. Surveying the bar, she hoped to find someone a little more interesting, someone with a brain.
She saw a likely target coming out of the VIP room. He had the brown skin and black hair of a Latino or Arab. That black hair was on the long side, but not too long. From the look of his trim frame he kept in shape but wasn’t a jock either. The jeans, button-down shirt with the top buttons open, and sport coat meant he probably wasn’t in college yet either.
As if he sensed her watching him, he turned in her direction. She didn’t try to make a pathetic attempt of minding her own business. Instead she smiled and held up her glass. He seemed to understand the message and walked over. His gait was confident enough that she knew he wasn’t a virgin either.
His eyes were brown and he had a five o’clock shadow that somehow made his face more handsome. His skin was still smooth enough that he couldn’t be thirty yet. She noticed these details as he came up to her. “You want to go sit down?” he asked, shouting to be heard over the noise from the band attempting to play rock music.
“Sure,” she said, nonchalantly, not trying to sound coy like a lot of women would. She snatched the bottle of Jack and followed him over to an empty table. She filled the glass and then pushed it towards him while taking hers from the bottle. They slammed their containers down in unison and then laughed. “I’m Lois.”
“Tony.”
“Your buddies in the VIP room going to miss you?”
“How do you know my girlfriend isn’t in there?”
“You don’t seem that stupid.”
He grinned at this. “You’re right. What brings you here?”
“Just got back in town.”
“From college?”
“Yeah. You been here long?”
“All my life.”
“That can’t have been too long.”
“Oh yeah? Maybe I have a really good plastic surgeon.”
“Maybe I do too.” She refilled his glass and then took another hit for herself. “So if you didn’t come here with anyone, why were you in the VIP room?”
“Looking for you.”
She laughed. “That’s a great line. How often does it work?”
“Enough.” He leaned in close and asked, “You want to get out of here?”
“Sure. You got a car?”
“Yeah, it’s out front.”
“Great. Think you can give me a lift to a gas station? My bike’s on E.”
He nodded. “Somehow I figured you for the type of girl who rides a motorcycle.”
“What type of girl is that?”
“They type I like.” They leaned forward to kiss at the same time. It was just a brief kiss, with the promise of much more to come.
* * *
Though she was short and thin, Lois had always had a high tolerance for alcohol. Two-thirds of a bottle of whiskey was enough to get her only a bit tipsy. She made it back home on her refueled bike without any cops noticing and without hitting anyone or anything. She couldn’t help laughing at the irony of that considering that she had been sober when she’d run into the McDonald’s sign and wound up back in Ren Cit
y.
The first time she snuck into the house she had been nine years old. That had been to sneak into an R-rated movie with her friends from middle school. She had learned quickly enough how to climb up the lattice on the side of the house, which led to the upstairs bathroom. From there it was just a short trip back to her room.
As she dropped onto her bed, she listened closely to the sounds of the old house. There was some creaking from the house “settling” and her own breathing, but otherwise nothing. She listened for a few more minutes and then rolled out of bed.
Without turning on the light she found one of her old nightgowns. It was too pink for her taste as an adult, but it still fit well enough to cover her chest and thighs. With the nightgown on, she slunk down the hallway, to the master bedroom. To her surprise the door was open. The bed was still made up too—Mom was neat but not that neat.
Mom was probably downstairs waiting for her. If so she might as well face the music now and be able to get some sleep than worry about it all night. She padded down the stairs soft enough not to make any of the steps creak. At the bottom of the stairs she turned right to head into the kitchen.
Mom wasn’t there. The carton of Thai food was still on the table as well in the same place where Lois had left it. She must not have been in the kitchen yet.
Lois searched the rest of the house to no avail. Her mother wasn’t home. Had she seen Lois gone and went out to look for her? That didn’t seem likely, not with the kitchen untouched. The more reasonable assumption was that Mom hadn’t come back yet.
It was two in the morning, though. Where could she be? Still at the office? She might have fallen asleep there. Lois went into the kitchen to use the phone. She dialed Mom’s direct line at the museum but got the voice mail.
With a sigh she settled onto the couch to wait. There wasn’t any sense to running around a city as big as Ren City trying to find her. She would just sit here and wait.
While she waited, Lois thought about Tony and what they had done in the backseat of his car. She was still reliving that as she fell asleep.
* * *
No one kept statistics, but it was estimated over sixty percent of the ships docking at Ren City carried something illegal: weapons, drugs, or even people. Jarko Rahnasto had his hand in all three ventures, but tonight he was concerned only with the first. The freighter known as El Pescado Grande was flying an Argentine flag but carrying a load of assault rifles and rocket launchers from Russia.
That was the nature of crime in Ren City anymore. It was a global marketplace all connected by computers and cell phones. Tomorrow Rahnasto would have a load of coke delivered from Colombia via a South African passenger ship. Sometimes he lamented that it had all been simpler back in Finland, smuggling Soviet defectors across the border to Sweden and from there to England or America.
He had been just a kid back then, as stupid and fearless as a sixteen-year-old could be. Then the Iron Curtain had fallen and business had dried up. So he made one last run to smuggle himself to America. In Ren City he had hooked on with the Russian mob as it began to infiltrate the city. Fluent in Russian and English, he had started as an interpreter for the Russian don.
Almost twenty years later, he was running the whole show. He flicked a cigarette into the water and checked his watch. The freighter was late. He reached into his jacket not for another cigarette but a roll of Tums. His doctor—a real doctor, not the mob doctor who took bullets out of his soldiers—had warned that he would need surgery on his ulcer. That carefree sixteen-year-old would never have understood how stressful running a racket could be. Long hours and a lot of greasy meals eaten in haste had wreaked havoc on his digestive system.
He turned to Salei, his lieutenant. “No cops yet?”
“Nothing, Boss.”
“No do-gooders either?”
“Not yet.”
Rahnasto sighed at this. The do-gooders had contributed more to his indigestion than anything else. Some cities had one wacko running around in a mask but a city as big as Ren City could fit two of them. They’d been around longer than Rahnasto, longer than the Russians, back to when the Italians and Irish had run everything. They hadn’t put the mob out of business, but that didn’t stop them from trying.
He chomped down three more Tums and wondered which one would show up tonight. On rare occasions they worked together, but mostly they worked alone. The nut calling himself the Private Eye was easier to manage. He was just a freak in a costume, an ordinary man with a gun. An ordinary man who nonetheless was damned hard to kill.
The woman was a lot worse. She was a real comic book superhero, only instead of tights she had some kind of magic armor. No one had figured out how to kill her yet, despite a bounty of ten million dollars to the one who left her head on his desk. He doubted anyone would ever claim it even if he tripled it.
He finally saw the ship’s lights on the horizon. Maybe he would get lucky and tonight the do-gooders would be home washing their tights or something. If he were really lucky he might manage to get three hours of sleep without waking up with acid burning in his throat. Maybe it was time to start delegating authority as his wife suggested. He looked at Salei’s wolfish profile and then shook his head. No, delegating was the first step to winding up floating in the harbor.
He did allow himself the luxury of sitting on the hood of his Mercedes as he watched the freighter come in. He went through a whole roll of Tums while he watched El Pescado Grande dock safely. That was one headache out of the way. If they could get the weapons back to the warehouse for distribution then he could go home for the night.
The first crates had come down the ramp when Salei put a hand to the side of his head. He turned to Rahnasto, who already knew what his lieutenant would say. “She’s here.”
He swore in Finnish and then patted the pistol on his hip. He might as well pick up a rock for all the good it would do. “Try to tie her up and get as many weapons loaded as possible,” Rahnasto said.
He reached into his jacket for a pair of nightvision goggles. The goggles were frequently as useless as the pistol. He could only tell where she was by the soldiers she sent flying. That damnable armor of hers somehow let her turn invisible. Not so much the armor as the cape. Every now and then the silver cape would billow out and he would catch a glimpse of her.
Not that he needed to see her anymore; he saw her often enough in his nightmares. She was tall and thin with a dancer’s body. She moved like a dancer too, leaping over the head of one man to land behind him, where she pirouetted to kick him in the small of the back. Another soldier shot her right between the smallish breasts that along with the overly large feet were the only flaws of her body. Rahnasto already knew the bullet would ping off the armor to deflect into the night sky. Faster than any normal human, she chopped the gun away from the soldier and then swept his legs out from under him.
Then she turned and looked right at him. They had to be a city block apart and yet he knew she was looking at him. Her swan-winged helmet kept him from seeing any part of her face, but he could feel her eyes on him. He turned to Salei. “It’s time to go.”
“We’ve only got a few crates—”
“Then feel free to stay and finish the job.”
Salei wasn’t a fool. He spoke into his headset, giving orders to keep her tied up for a few minutes to cover their escape. Then they got into the Mercedes. He didn’t have time to sigh with relief before the doors locked and he heard the click of a pistol.
Instead of the driver he saw a man torn out of a Humphrey Bogart detective picture, with a brown trench coat and fedora. The only difference was the dark red ski mask the man wore to conceal his face. The .38 in his hand looked older than Rahnasto, but he knew it would still be deadly. “Drop your guns on the front seat,” the Private Eye hissed. “Then we’ll go for a ride.”
“What do you plan to charge us with?” Rahnasto asked.
“We can start with murder and go through the rest of the criminal code.”
“Quit stalling and drop the heaters.”
“Fine.” A musty odor wafted to the backseat. That was as much a calling card as the Private Eye’s costume. “You know, there’s a ten million-dollar reward for her head. You could retire to somewhere with a shower.”
“I’d rather retire you.”
“But another would take my place. You know that.” He dropped his weapon on the passenger’s front seat, as did Salei. They were effectively trapped now in the car with a lunatic who dressed like a film noir detective. There was one last card to play, though. “Why don’t you let Mr. Salei drive? Otherwise how will you be able to keep the gun pointed at us?”
The Private Eye considered this for a moment and then nodded. “Fine. But don’t try anything funny or I’ll put a few bullets in your boss.” The Private Eye slid over to the passenger’s side, directly across from Rahnasto while Salei tumbled over the driver’s seat. As he did, he reached for a gun hidden in the headrest.
The Private Eye emptied the gun into Salei. Rahnasto didn’t stick around to see if his lieutenant was dead. He had unlocked the doors and was already to the backup car when he heard the sixth shot ring out. Rahnasto dropped the dead body of the second driver out the door and then started the car. He took off into the night, already feeling the acid reflux building. There wasn’t going to be any sleep for him tonight.
* * *
Instead of the house he went to the Brass Drum, one of the many bars he owned. It was closed for the night, but Kamensky, his second lieutenant—now his first lieutenant with Salei’s death—let him in. “They got about a third of the shipment to the warehouse,” Kamensky said. “Cops got the rest of it.”
“Fine.” That was just as good as him receiving it. Within a few days he could arrange to have the weapons “disappear” from the evidence warehouse. “How many did we lose?”