Broken (24 page)

He wonders if he’s going to find her in bed with someone, but rather he sees two figures panicked and stopped in their places.
The guy is standing over by the balcony while the woman is crouching over by the bed.

“Get up,” he tells her with the silver 500 aimed at her face.

Amos doesn’t want to see what the Smith and Wesson would do to her pretty little head.

The girl stands up and holds her hands above her shoulders.

“You, get over there by her. Now.”

Amos goes over and shuts the door to the open night.

“Cell phones. Give ’em to me.”

The guy finds his and tosses it to him while Laila shakes her head and tells him she doesn’t have one.

“I’ll shoot you if you’re lying.”

He examines the room quickly but doesn’t find anything.

“Who has a car?”

“I do,” Kyle says.

“And you?”

“I stole mine,” Laila says, which is good because he knows this and knows she isn’t lying.

“Give me the keys,” Amos says.

The guy stands valiantly in front of Laila, but a well-placed shot could end it for both of them. Amos waves the 500 toward
the hallway.

“You both are going to walk out of this hotel and through the lobby, and you’re not going to talk to another soul. You’re
going to lead me to your car. You got that?”

He nods.

“And if you try to do anything, I’ll kill her. Let’s go.”

They pass one man coming up the stairs who ignores them and doesn’t even look at Amos’ full hands. The desk is empty. They
exit to the empty street and pause for a moment as the guy seems to forget where he left the car.

“You better remember right now.”

“It’s that way,” Laila says.

When they reach the car, Amos puts one of the guns in his pants and then unlocks the doors, still holding the 500.

“Get in,” he says, tossing the keys to the guy. “You’re going to drive.”

Amos tells the woman to get in the backseat with him.

They’re going to leave the downtown area and get a look at the real heart of New Orleans.

And neither the pretty little girl or the young man are ever going to come back.

The night sometimes whispers.

Sometimes it sounds like the soft pedals of an organ not turned on. The pattering of raindrops against a window. The breath
of a baby sleeping.

The night haunts even without haunting. Nightmares come even without dreaming. I don’t have to be asleep to feel like I’m
falling. And I don’t have to wake up to shake it off.

Sometimes, at night, I’ll hear the voice. So light. So delicate.

And it’s saying my name, but it’s not saying Laila.

It’s speaking directly at me, but it’s not hearing a reply.

I try to ignore it, but it comes and it goes.

Echoes bouncing off the edges of a canyon, the voice murmurs but always meanders into nothing.

I reach out but never touch anything.

I reach out and then find myself clutching onto me. Realizing that I want and need to be held but no longer have the right
to be.

Realizing that the word I hear over and over and over again is “Mommy.”

K
yle takes directions and drives the car slowly as the stranger sits behind him with his left hand propped up on his shoulder
and the handgun aimed at the back of his neck. The
other gun—this one a monstrous silver revolver—is in his right hand that rests between his thigh and Laila. They’ve been
driving for twenty minutes, and the city seems to have disappeared along with its glow and its life. The city streets have
turned into single lanes that pass a graveyard of empty, crumbling houses. Wherever they might be going, the armed expressionless
stranger knows the destination.

Laila keeps her eyes on both Kyle and the man. Her hands are open on her legs, a sign that she’s not about to do anything.
Something in her knows this man won’t blink before killing Kyle and herself. She believes he’s going to do this but wants
to do it in a remote, abandoned part of the city.

Staring out the front window where the headlights get swallowed by the dense dark, Laila knows there is nobody around here.
Perhaps vagrants or perhaps the living dead. Random houses they pass occasionally have dull lights painted over their windows,
but most seem abandoned. One white house looks like a skeleton with the windows like eye sockets. She wonders if this man
is going to lead them into one of these rotting houses, kill them both, and leave them there to go bad just like the rest
of the neighborhood.

“Turn right,” the man says.

Kyle doesn’t say anything. The last few times he’s tried the man has told him to shut up. Laila is sure that Kyle is thinking
the same thing, that they’ve been led out here to be killed.

She knows she shouldn’t say anything. She doesn’t want to say anything, and she’s almost positive saying something will get
them nothing and nowhere.

But looking at Kyle, Laila knows she has to try.

“What do you want?”

He ignores the comment.

“I’m talking to you,” she says.

The man looks at her, and even in the shroud of the backseat of the car she can see the amused look on his face. It’s not
a smile nor is it smugness. It’s genuine amusement.

“Why are you taking us out here?”

“You probably have a good enough idea yourself.”

“What do you want?”

“Who says I want anything?”

“Look—you just let me know what you want and I’ll get it—you just have to give me time.”

“That what you said to James and Connor back there?”

“No.”

“ ’Cause you see, I’m not like James and Connor. Or you. Or this guy here.” The man moves Kyle’s head forward with the butt
of the gun. “All of you are down in this hellhole because of one thing: desperation. I don’t want to brag because God knows
something might suddenly happen to me like a stroke or a bolt of lightning or a brain aneurysm. We never know if tomorrow
will come, but I do know that when I wake up in the morning, I don’t breathe the same air you and him and those two other
clowns breathe. Want to know why?”

Laila shakes her head, confused, wondering what he’s talking about.

“I breathe the breath of a free man. Can you say the same?”

“What do you want?”

“Again, you’re not listening to me. Don’t slow down, keep going. That’s right. See, you’re not hearing me out. I don’t want
anything.”

“Why are you here then?”

“To take care of a problem. Come on, you’ve seen it before. In the movies. The cleaner who takes care of the trash. Who handles
situations.”

“Are you a cleaner?” Laila asks.

“No. I don’t even know if people are called that. I work for somebody, and this is my job. You have a job, right? Or you had
one. You had one in Chicago that paid some good money, didn’t you?”

She is quiet and glances at Kyle for a second.

He seems to realize this, that the driver doesn’t know.

“No problem,” the man says. “The past is the past. I’m not here to rub anyone’s nose in it. Not my business.”

“Then what is your business?” Kyle yells out.

“My business is to keep you driving and to keep your mouth shut. I don’t want to talk to you, so shut up.”

“Answer the question,” Laila says.

“You’re used to ordering men around, aren’t you?”

“When they need to be, yes.”

“Poor James and Connor. They probably didn’t have a clue what to do with you, did they?”

“This isn’t a laughing matter,” Laila says.

“I agree, and I’m not laughing.”

“Do you want money?”

“Stop asking what I want because I don’t want anything.”

“Everybody wants something.”

“Is that one of your mottos in life? Learned the hard way?”

Laila curses at him.

“What do I want? I want to know that when I get back in my car and head out of this God-forsaken city—and when I mean forsaken,
I mean absolutely forsaken—that I know I did the job I was paid to do.”

“I can pay you more.”

“Tell me something. Tell me what it feels like to be hunted. How is that for you?”

“What’s your name?”

He ignores her question. “What’s it feel like to wake up and wonder who’s out there? You think I’d want that? You think I’d
take money over freedom?”

“Nobody’s free in this life.”

“Sure they are. I wake up a free man and go to bed a free man without a care or a worry in the world.”

“Do you kill people for a living?”

He laughs. “Why, just because I’m carrying these guns? I do things for people, so yeah, if that involves killing, then sure,
I’ll do that. But that’s not my profession. I’m not a professional killer or assassin or however you want to call it. I make
things happen. I solve problems.”

“And you don’t carry any guilt?”

“Why should I? Here—that street right there—slow down. Take a left and drive for about a hundred yards.”

“Please—,” Laila says.

“Please what? Please don’t hurt you?”

“Yes.”

“Who says I’m going to hurt you?”

“Both of us.”

“No, this guy, he’s dead. And nothing you say is going to change that.”

“What do you want from me?”

“Stop the car.”

Kyle stops the car, and for a moment they are in pitch black. A mass of brick and wood and plaster that’s been half-burnt
to the ground sits next to them. The man looks at her and keeps both hands where they’ve been.

“All right. Both of you get out of the car.”

Laila feels that lost feeling again, a feeling she hasn’t felt for a long time, this sinking sick feeling that slowly runs
down her stomach and her legs like an oozing pus. She climbs out of the car and takes in the humid dead night. She can make
out Kyle’s face as he stares at her across the hood of the car. The night moon is there above the congestion of clouds.

The man turns off the car and the headlights.

“Okay, you, go to the hood of the car,” the man says to Kyle.

Kyle does. The man then tells Laila to go to the trunk.

“Let me do anything. Let me make this right. Let me help.”

The guy stares at her with an unmoving face. His expression and his eyes don’t change at all. “What are you going to make
right? What are you going to help?”

“This. This—you—us. I’ll go away. We can go away.”

“You’re right about that.”

“Please.”

The man looks at Laila for a second that feels like an hour with a solid, lifeless expression that reminds her of times spent
with men who needed and took and needed and took and then left. So many of them looked at her not as Laila Torres or even
as a woman but as a thing they took from.

He looks at her like that.

Then he walks to the front of the car.

And Laila is transported to the helpless, hurting teenager that can’t do a thing but watch as the whole entire universe spits
and vomits in her face.

There is nothing dramatic about his walk. There is nothing dramatic about the way he takes that big silver revolver and puts
it to the side of Kyle’s head. There is nothing dramatic about the way he fires a shot and sends Kyle’s body to the ground.

The second shot blasts through her skin and her soul and she jerks as she closes her eyes now, knowing the end is near. Then
a third shot goes off, and she holds on to the back of the car and stops breathing and braces herself for the same thing.
She sees Kyle’s face and sees his smile and sees his eyes, and it doesn’t make sense. Not him being here and not him lying
on the ground and not him dead.

Laila shakes.

She hears steps coming toward her.

She grimaces and holds her breath.

And she knows that things are almost over, and it’s going to end like this.

It’s going to end right here, and she’s no better off than she was six months ago. Or a dozen years ago.

“Open your eyes and look at me.”

She opens them to see the same face and the same expression.

“Do I have your attention now, Laila?”

She nods, and her lips seem shut for life. Laila still can’t take in a breath.

“Now I’m going to ask you some questions. And I assume you
know that I mean business and that I absolutely need to know everything. Okay?”

She nods again.

“Why did you come down to New Orleans?”

She tries to say something but nothing comes out. She can’t utter a word.

She keeps thinking of those shots, one after another after another.

“Breathe in and breathe out. Do that a few times. Take your time.”

She follows his instructions.

“Why are you here in New Orleans?” he asks again.

“I was—I came here when I was a teenager, and I was running away from that man—from James—and I figured I’d come here.”

“Who was that guy?”

“Kyle. Kyle Ewing.”

“Why’d he come here?”

“I don’t know.”

“That’s not a good answer.”

“He followed me here—I don’t know why. I don’t. He liked me. He worked with me, and he liked me. We were friends. That’s all.
There was nothing else, and it’s stupid and why—”

“Just slow down and breathe.”

She leans against the back of the car, feeling light-headed. She can smell death in the air and taste fear in her mouth.

“Who else came with him?”

“James and his brother,” she says.

“No. Who was the other guy? The one in the hotel?”

Laila stops and tries to think, but there is a haze in her mind. She doesn’t know what to say or do, and she knows that perhaps
every little thing she says and does now will result in living or dying.

“I don’t know,” she says.

“You’re lying.”

“I don’t know.”

“Do you want to die?”

“Why would I want to live anymore? Tell me that.” She feels her teeth grind against each other.

He lets out a sigh and stares at her. “Tell me something, Laila. Someone like you, what are you doing here in this mess? In
this filth? With filth like Connor and James? Why?”

She curses at him.