Jay
A dense white fog hovered over the bay, shrouding the dock so thoroughly that I could barely see.
It had been years since I'd been to this place, and I couldn't really say that I'd missed it. If this was the last I ever saw of the place, or anything and anyone to do with the way my life was connected to it, it would have been more than alright with me.
I stepped carefully along the dock, my hand on the pistol in my pocket, ready to reach for it the moment it became necessary to do so, but hoping that it wouldn't come to that.
I had a bad feeling that it might, though...
At the very least, I thought I would be a hell of a lot safer coming than I would be going. Marlon wouldn't snuff me out until he'd gotten the location of his daughter out of me. That much I could be sure of.
That was, at least, some slight consolation as I drew nearer and nearer to the water's edge. The further and further I went, however, the less and less clear it became to me that Marlon was actually here at all. I didn't see a sign of him anywhere.
Finally, I reached the end of the dock, having seen nothing and no one.
I wondered, suddenly, if I'd been set up.
But then I heard a voice calling out to me- a voice that made my head spin around, and my grip on the pistol in my pocket tighten, poised to whip it out in a heartbeat if need be.
“Glad to see you felt like doing what you were told for a change.”
Marlon was nothing but a silhouette through the fog at first, slowly drawing near, a suitcase in his hand. I looked around and didn't see any kind of reinforcements trailing him. No Tweedle-dees and Tweedle-dums.
It occurred to me that I didn't think I'd ever been around him when he was completely alone, without cameras or security guards lurking within earshot.
I guess that really should have been more of a red flag than it was to me at that moment. I assumed, though, that he was desperate to get his daughter back, and didn't want anything- namely, his trigger-happy goons- to get in the way of their reunion.
“Marlon. I'm sorry it had to come to this. I really am. You know I was always loyal to you. I always did my job. I always stayed faithful, until the very end. But then you forced my hand. You double-crossed me, and I did what I had to to get what was mine. I'm sorry, but you didn't leave me with much choice.”
I could see his face now. His dark, soulless eyes, glowering more fiercely than I'd ever seen them glower- more fiercely, really, than I thought should have been possible.
He spat contemptuously into the water, and I knew that he would have greatly preferred to spit at me instead.
“Take your goddamn money,” he snarled, “And tell me where the hell my daughter is.”
I stared at him, wondering if it could really be this easy. Not just this, but leaving her. My eyes drifted to the briefcase in his hand. I nodded at it.
“I'm assuming that's mine. Set it on the ground, and step back so I can have a look. And I'm warning you. Try any funny business while I'm doing it and your daughter's location dies with me.”
Marlon stared at me for a very long time. Aside from the situation, I could tell that he chaffed at being given orders. At letting someone, anyone, tell him what to do.
And especially me...
At length, though, he finally did as I asked.
I felt the thud of the case being sat down on the wood of the dock, and my heart started beating faster. Marlon stepped back from the spot, not taking his eyes off of me, even for a second. I waited until he'd settled into place for a moment. Then I took a deep breath, and I carefully approached the briefcase.
I turned it over onto its side, feeling its weight as I did so, and the shifting of its contents inside. It felt like what I was expecting, at least. Now to be sure.
I undid the clasp of the case, and pushed open the lid, looking up over its rim at the place where Marlon stood, making absolutely sure he wasn't thinking of pulling any kind of shit while my guard was down.
He didn't make a move, and my eyes returned to the case.
The thing was packed full of large bills. The greedy, conniving bastard had seemingly heeded my words or at least pretended to.
I thumbed through the stacks of cash, not counting precisely, but trying to come up with a ballpark estimate of how much was there. As far as I could tell, I thought it looked like about the amount he owed me for that final job.
Could he really be capitulating? Could Marlon Hillary, this shrewd, manipulative man, actually be giving me what I wanted? What he owed me?
I shouldn't have been so sure. But in my need to get the hell out of there, and out of the country, I let myself believe so.
I closed the case again. I lifted it up beside me, and gripped the handle firmly, staring back through the fog into Marlon's dark eyes. He hadn't moved a muscle in the moments that had ensued.
“Very good, Hillary. And they say old dogs can't learn new tricks. But look at you, following orders. You're just full of surprises, aren't you?”
“You will tell me where she is now,” he said, not a question. I looked at him for a long moment, wanting to draw this out. I didn't like the way he was so adamant about getting back to commanding me again. Like this settled the score between us by any means, and he could revert to considering himself my superior.
I would have liked very much to teach him a lesson, but I knew that doing so would have been a dangerous game. I relented without a fight.
“Yeah. I will. A deal is a deal. You delivered on your end. And now it's my turn. Your daughter is safe, Hillary. Totally unharmed, and well taken care of. She's in a safe house across town. The address is 129, Maplewood Avenue. She's secure in a room there, waiting for you.”
I waited.
Marlon stared for a moment, then repeated, slowly, “129, Maplewood Avenue.”
“That's right,” I said. “Don't leave her waiting long. This has been enough of an ordeal already for her thanks to you. She knows you're coming. So hurry along, and let's put this whole bullshit saga to bed already.”
It was another long moment, so much so that I began to grow tense. But then, at last, Marlon nodded at me. A single, curt nod, that somehow didn't sit quite right with me.
“Very good,” he said. “That's all I needed to know...”
I felt the tension subside, to at least a small degree. I started reaching into my pocket, where I held the key to Keisha's bedroom door. That was when, from the corner of my eye, I noticed something.
A flash of light.
No sound.
Not until the supersonic zip of the bullet, flying through the air right at me.
“Son of a fuck!”
I dove, just in time for the first shot to miss me.
The second one didn't. It tore through my upper arm like a motherfucker, forcing me to cry out in pain. A third bullet grazed the side of my leg as I writhed on the ground, but didn't go through me. A fourth very nearly tore through the center of my head, but I rolled out of the way before it had the chance to take me out.
This asshole had a sniper hidden away somewhere- where, exactly, I couldn't even conceive at that moment, but he must have found a spot somehow.
“For Christ's sake! Finish him!” Marlon boomed, annoyed that his shooter was four shots in and still hadn't finished the job.
I was already to my feet though, and so far beyond done with all of this shit that it wasn't even funny.
I whipped out my gun and started firing, aiming at the general direction of where the sniper blasts were coming from, hoping to at least give the bastard a scare. Instead, I saw another flash of light, and I jerked up the suitcase to intersect its path. The shrapnel of dollar bills came bursting out as the bullet jammed into the case, thankfully preventing the shot before it had the chance to get to me.
I turned back to face the direction I was running in and saw that Marlon was reaching for a pistol of his own, intent on finishing what his lackey so clearly wasn't able to.
I drew my gun up and shot him in the knee.
He howled with pain, and something instinctively made me feel sorry for having done it, even though I really wasn't.
“You fucking bastard!” he howled, holding his leg with one hand as gravity tried to wrestle him down onto the dock, and still trying to lift his weapon to get a good shot at me with the other.
I tried to shoot at him again before he got the chance to, but then the sniper struck again.
I yelled in shock, certain I'd just been shot in the hand. I hadn't though. I'd moved just in time for the shot to hit me, and to hit my gun instead, the force knocking it free of my grip, and out into the bay.
“Shit!” I yelled through my teeth, and already I could see the light of another muzzle flash, piercing the fog as in slow motion.
I acted without thinking.
I lept.
I grabbed Marlon, just as he himself tried to shoot at me, his pistol discharging and blowing a hole through the wood of the dock. I wrestled the injured man's body up in front of me, using him as a human shield. And, sure enough, my human shield performed its function exactly as it was meant to.
The bullet that had been intended for me had, instead, traveled several inches into Marlon's head, leaving him staring wide-eyed out into space, his mouth still trembling in the throes of his demise.
All was silence for a long moment.
I felt like I was about to throw up.
“Oh no... No... No...” I stammered, not even fully able to wrap my head around the full implications of what this meant just yet. All I could piece together for certain was that this was bad. This was very, very, very bad.
And that's when I saw that he had an earpiece in. Other people had been listening in on our conversation, and that meant that other people knew the location of the safe house where Keisha was being kept.
“Oh fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck...”
Apparently, the sniper was as shaken by what had just taken place as I was, because it was a long time before another shot came. Finally, though, another shot did come. He may have just pulled the fuck up of a lifetime by killing his boss, but apparently, he figured he'd already gone this far, he might as well finish what he stared.
I grabbed the gun from Marlon's cold dead hand and hoisted him up in front of me once more, letting his corpse take yet another bullet for me. Then, once more as I heaved him forward, pushing him up so high that he nearly stood upright one last time.
A third bullet struck him, and I dove over his lifeless form as he plunged over the edge of the dock. I slammed into the water with my suitcase, and dove as deep and as far as I could, as fast as I could possibly manage.
It was pitch black beneath the surface, but I heard the bullets continuing to zoom past me in the water, missing their mark by distances that were way too close for comfort.
I swam and I swam, though, cursing the pain in my upper arm where the bullet was still lodged in the wound, and the sharp, persistent sting of the water from the bay inside my open wound.
I had to stay focused though. I had to keep my mind where it needed to be. I needed to survive, and to get the hell out of here, now more than ever. I had essentially just murdered the head of a massive, sprawling criminal enterprise.
I'd cut the head off of a hydra, and I would bet my ass that any number of snarling mouths full of jagged teeth would come regenerating after it, any number of his criminal associates rising up to seek revenge against me, determined to get even for murdering their cash cow.
In short, I had just kicked the base out from Marlon Hillary's house of cards, and now the whole bloodthirsty deck was about to come cascading down around me, hungry for retaliation though.
Even more pressing, though, I had to make it back to Keisha in time. Keisha... How the hell could I explain to her what happened? She would never forgive me.
I knew she wasn't close to Marlon, nobody was, but he was still her father. I grit my teeth. A lump formed in my throat.
I still had no business disrupting her life. No business putting her in the danger that I was in, and making her my accomplice.
But all of the sudden, it was like I couldn't live with the thought of one of Marlon's goons getting to that address before I did.
It was absurd to think that she'd be happy with me, that she could ever really love a man like me, who was just as bad as her father, if not worse. Marlon hadn't pulled the trigger himself as much as I had.
I didn't know where this could all possibly lead. I didn't know what I could promise her. Whether a man like me could ever possibly give her anything but heartbreak.
All I knew was that I needed to get to her.
I needed to see her again, even if it was only for one last time.
I couldn't let Marlon's men take her from me forever, without telling her how I felt...
And so I kept on swimming. I swam and swam. I stayed under the surface far longer than I'm sure it must have seemed possible. And after a while, the bullets stop coming. I'd either swam out of range of the sniper's line of fire, or he assumed it had been far too long since I'd surfaced for me to still be alive.
I kept on going, then, until I made it to a safe spot on dry land, right below a patch of trees a way off from the dock, where I'd parked my bike beforehand in order to remain out of sight.
The cold started to pierce through to my bone and my arm still hurt like hell from where I'd been shot. I couldn't let either of those things get in the way, though.
I needed to get back to Keisha, come hell or high water. And tonight, I'd had far too much of both of those things to let either one of them scare me now...
I started up my engine, and I took off like a rocket, jetting off into the night, my speedometer climbing, climbing, climbing, as I raced back to the safe house -- to Keisha.