It’s a shit day for driving. Palmer and I would know. We’re trapped up by the Docks watching the white stuff accumulate, still wondering how much longer we’re gonna have to sit it out for until the action hits.
I don’t know how Maya managed it down the highway driving for the first time, but she did. And with no tails or targets on her path wondering where the little pixie was going ninety miles a minute in a car that looked as least as expensive and rich as she. Turns out, it was the Clubhouse. To me. If I’d have known that then it sure as hell would have saved us a lot of trouble later on, but Maya wasn’t exactly keen on letting anyone else in on her plans. I’m almost sure she surprised herself by coming out to Easttown, or maybe it was the car talking. I didn’t think she was missing me bad enough to drag everything over to surprise me, but I guess that shows what I know.
It’s not hard to see where all of this is leading. Maya winds her way through the snow-clogged streets, and it’s by some kind of sixth sense or crazy intuition or photographic memory I still don’t understand that she manages to find the Clubhouse where I’d driven her the month before. Just one drive was all it took—she’d memorized the address.
She gets out of the car, turns around and takes one look at it. The thing is, over in Easttown, Palmer’s piece-of-shit pickup is just about the best thing you can find, meaning the best the whole place has to offer is a pair of wheels that can still turn and not turn over their own shredded rubber. A Maserati in Portsmouth means Family—but you take it to the backwoods and the people have got no idea it’s a mob man’s car. Why would they when they’ve never so much as heard the names Theo or Ceallaigh or any of that? So knowing how dangerous it is just leaving it in a snowbound parking lot, she rummages through her pack and comes up with this enormous blanket she must have packed for emergencies and drapes it over the car like the thing was an invisibility cloak. That’s it for protection. I don’t know how Maya feels about it, but she must have been satisfied enough because she didn’t move the blanket.
She goes up to the door of the Clubhouse, but there’s no Bolt. No Stitches to be found in the near or far vicinity—everyone’s gone to the Docks. The place looks closed down.
I figure right here Maya weighs her options. The Stitches have disappeared without a trace, and she can either wait in her blanketed Maserati for us to come back, or she can say ‘screw it’ to the whole slapdash plan and continue on to Sunrise Apartments like she was wanting to. Then I imagine a whole cluster of other thoughts descending on her, one after another after another really quick like a meteor shower.
Supposing that she could even make the long snowy and difficult drive along the highway, with the day already beginning to get dark: she couldn’t even hope that she’d be able to get an apartment that night. She would have to book into a hotel, and booking a hotel room required that she not only find one in the next few hours but pay for it, too. But money wasn’t the problem. It was the credit card - Theo’s credit card. The whole point of sneaking out in his car and making sure no one knew where she’d gone was to break free. Once she used the card, it would only be a matter of a few minutes before her father knew exactly where she was and exactly what she’d been doing. She would be back in her room by the next day, and that was if she was lucky.
The two options then quickly became one option, and with no Stitches in sight, that one option was waiting. A lot of waiting.
She gets the other blanket out of her bag (she’d told me once that she was always cold which I had thought then was just an exaggeration—but she really does bring blankets everywhere) and cocoons herself in the covered Maserati and flips off the engine to save gas and waits.
The wind is tearing so hard the blanket flies off, and Maya chases it down and plasters it down with the bricks she can find by the base of the Clubhouse. She works and fights and stretches the fabric over the top for I don’t know how long before asking herself what the point was—she hadn’t seen anyone around the Clubhouse for at least an hour. Plus, with all the new snow accumulating it would hardly even look like a Maserati in the snow. The weather was doing enough to keep her practically invisible.
So she stows the dirty wet blanket and decides to go back inside the car and give it another hour before finding somewhere where she can pick up a cheap dinner, in case she needs to make her cash last, when she hears something. Not something. Even with the wind roaring through her ears and ripping across the street like a snow tornado, there’s no mistaking the blasts.
She freezes. She’s not scared—not scared exactly—but she wants to be sure of what she’s heard, and so she says nothing, makes no movement, becomes as still as a statue and as concentrated as a philosopher on what follows.
And there’s a lot that follows.
***
I’m roping the story back to where I left off, which is with Palmer sitting there next to me as cool as a clam, calculating if he can make it to the shotgun in ten seconds or less: roughly how much time he’ll have before the two guys in red sweaters get wise and start blowing holes.
The guys are about fifty feet away and moving steadily towards us. It’s not shotgun range, but in less than a minute it will be.
“Kirill’s on his way. Bolt too. Ten minutes.” I put down my phone.
“You really wanna wait this out for ten minutes? Ain’t no way we’ll find them again if we let them go now.”
“We’ll tag them.”
“I’m not tagging anyone,” Palmer says. “Look around us. We’re the only motherfuckers in a mile. If those are our guys and this car starts moving, especially if it starts moving straight behind them, they’ll blast us to pieces faster than I can shift to fourth.”
I don’t like this. I thought there were options. Room for delays. Backup plans. Something that wouldn’t involve us jumping out, guns blazing, praying for solid accuracy. I’m a decent shot in a good environment, but I don’t like ambushes, and I don’t like having to concentrate on my fire when I’m nervous. Hand to hand is different. You get a feel for a guy’s strength when you’re the one handling it. But Items are the wild card. I’ve seen too many good guys and good fighters go down just ‘cause the other guy could blast more rounds a second.
“Q? Q?” Palmer’s been calling my name without me realizing it. “We need a decision here.”
“I’ll go.”
“What?”
“The shotgun,” I say. “I’ll get it. I’m faster than you, anyway. You wouldn’t make it there in ten.”
“Damn right I wouldn’t.”
I put my glock in Palmer’s hand. “You’re a better shot with it. But you have to keep them pinned so I can get close enough to unload. Got that?”
“Pinned where?”
“Wherever works for you. Now tell me you got it.”
Twenty feet. Definitely shotguns beneath those sweaters. Christ Christ Christ. When was the last time I’ve been in a firefight? When was the last time I’ve jumped a guy? Have we ever come out of something like this with all our parts still in one place? What the hell were we doing?
Then I think of Miles. Shredded up on his home turf. That could have been any of us not watching where he was going. And by some weird compound division process, I turn myself away from thinking of Miles and start thinking about Maya. Not at all the same deal with Miles but something close. She wasn’t safe on her home turf. She couldn’t just stay in one place without having to worry about someone else bullying her. These guys had made an attack on the Stitches and on Maya. There’s no way I’m letting them get away with even more.
“Closing in, Q,” Palmer says. “I pop the trunk you run. I fire. You fire. Easy peasy.”
“Easy peasy.”
Ten feet. I can see their faces. Then I run.