Dying for Revenge (5 page)

Exhaustion covered me but I couldn’t sleep. Didn’t sleep much. Never slept more than five hours at a time. Was up before dawn, logged on to my computer, entered the I.P. address of a computer inside a home in Powder Springs, Georgia, took control of that computer without the owner ever knowing the system had been compromised, connected to a surveillance system, reviewed some footage.

After being followed I wanted to look at a day’s worth of footage.

I saw her walking around the house, already up. The woman who had been my mother. The woman who had come inside my room and abused me. The woman who had called herself Thelma.

Separated by the Atlantic Ocean, I could see her, saw all of that history in her eyes, eyes that were soft and brown, fingernails short and clear, her eyebrows arched thin, like the American women, her hair in a motherly and chic bob, like the American mothers. A rough life hadn’t stolen her beauty. Her clothing was modest; today she had on soft pinks, very girlish, nothing cheap, clothing that came mostly from discount stores, her tastes conservative. She moved from the laundry room to the living room, folding clothes, doing laundry as she cooked. A world away, I saw everything she did.

Anger in my heart, I dialed her number.

 

I said, “Thelma . . . I mean, Catherine?”

I had called her by her old name, then corrected myself, called her by her new name, the name she had taken when we had run away to Montreal, after the first time I had killed a man.

She said, “Jean-Claude, how are you?”

Her accent was French. Years ago when we were on the run, living hand-to-mouth in Canada, she had told me she was a Yerroise, meaning she was born in Yerres, France, a commune in the southeastern suburbs of Paris, about eleven miles from the center of the City of Light and its Eiffel Tower. She had run away from a land of culture when she was a young girl. She said that she had been abused, had found her way out of Europe, working on her back to pay her fare, lived in America, had been all over the world working the same way, spoke many languages, but her French accent remained.

I heard all of that history in her voice.

She sounded excited. “I’m so happy to hear from you, Jean-Claude.”

She called me by that name and memories of Montreal, Canada, came and went.

I said, “I’m coming to see you and the kid.”

“Where are you now?”

“London.”

She paused. “Are you working there?”

“That’s not important.”

There was guilt in her voice whenever she talked to me. Guilt and fear. It was hard for me to not sound annoyed, a little angry, whenever we spoke. She knew a blood covenant existed between us.

I made myself smile when I talked to her; smiling while talking made the voice sound happy.

She was running her fingers through her hair. “My son . . . he asks about you all the time.”

“Sven is afraid of me. He doesn’t admit it, but I see it in his eyes.”

“He’s Steven now. Andrew-Sven is now Andrew Steven. Likes being called Steven.”

“Two-letter difference. Why did you get a new name for the kid?”

“Wanted him to have a nice North American name. Something they can say. People are nosey. So I wanted his name normal. Kids in North America, very racist. So hard on kids who are different.”

I had my own issues, issues that followed me wherever I went.

Wisdom was knowing what to do. Skill was the ability to do it. Virtue was doing it.

When wisdom didn’t subdue anger, anger destroyed everything.

I had planned on going back to North Carolina, back to where she had told me I was born, wanted to go back and pull up some old newspapers, search for birth certificates, do what I could to find out about the murder of a prostitute named Margaret, a murder that happened when I was a child, and then find out what I could find out about my father, find out what I could about his murder as well. Get his name. Reverse-engineer his life. But I wasn’t ready. Too much guilt. I had only seen him once.

Even then, like now, he wasn’t much more than a shadow in my mind.

Margaret was my mother, a woman who was less than a shadow. There was no memory of her.

I wanted to ask Catherine about my deceased father, find out what she hadn’t told me. She was a beautiful woman who told a million lies. Her lies were sweeter than any truth I had ever heard.

I kept the conversation on the kid. “How is he holding up? America is not like Europe.”

“He misses the few friends he had. He misses playing soccer with the friends he had in London.”

“He’s a tough kid. Tougher than I was.”

“You were teaching him to fight.”

I had put a sixty-pound boxing bag up in their basement, suspended it from one of the beams, then spent some time showing the kid how to throw a punch, how to pronate when throwing a punch, then showed him a few combinations. After that I showed him some basic grappling. I told him boxing was cool, but in a real fight he needed to know how to work from the ground. Most fights were with knees and elbows, forearms, palms of the hand, sometimes head butts. Most fights were brutal and ended up on the ground; most battles were won or lost on the ground, not standing like two boxers.

There was no referee in a real fight. All about the last man standing. Last man breathing.

Like it had been inside the bathroom down in the Cayman Islands. When it had been about a strong side kick to take an opponent down to the tile, the years of studying mixed martial arts, submission wrestling, muay thai, wrestling, and boxing all coming down to a life-and-death battle that lasted less than two minutes. No gloves covering my hands, no shin guards, no soft mat to fall on. A battle in a toilet made of concrete and steel, a battle where I had been the last man standing, the last man breathing.

I said, “A boy needs to know how to take care of himself. And he has to take care of his mother.”

“He loves our home. He loves having his own room. And the basement. He says that when he gets older he’s going to finish the basement, move down there and have his own house. Said his wife would move in with us and they would stay down there. I’ve never had a house. He’s never had his own room. This is . . . it’s like a miracle. For both of us. He’d hate to have to leave here. So would I.”

She said that as if she were afraid her new life would be taken away.

The same way things had been taken away from me.

I said, “I will see both of you soon.”

“Be safe, Jean-Claude. Be safe.”

We disconnected. And I wondered if we had ever truly connected.

I took the picture out of my pocket again. Once again I stared at the picture of Catherine and the kid, both of them smiling and laughing at Six Flags over Georgia. My attention remained on the kid, the boy she told me was the son of her flesh.

They had a nice home, a place to rest their heads, stability and normalcy.

The blood on my hands made sure they had no blood on their hands.

I was homeless, living on the run, sleeping in rented beds, no stability whatsoever.

I needed a base, a place to live, a familiar bed with a comfortable pillow, a closet with clothes. I had grown tired of living with what I had on my back, tired of discarding my life on a daily basis.

Every day, everything was new; I wanted something to remain, something familiar.

And maybe a steady woman for a change. At least for a while. Had never had a steady woman. My loving had always been on the run, on the move, unexpected chances at intimacy accepted because I never knew when I would have a chance to defeat loneliness again. Every man needed a steady woman. But behind this man lived the boy who had wanted to become a man named Jean-Claude.

Again I rubbed my eyes, tried to rub away the burning sensation that came from lack of sleep.

A headache attacked me, made me cringe, rub my temples.

I dug in my bag, found a B.C. Powder, took it dry, washed the grainy powder down with tap water.

The whore on Berwick Street told me that Catherine had arrived with the kid, that no one had seen her pregnant, that no one had ever seen pictures of Catherine pregnant. The kid and Catherine, in the picture I had, I couldn’t see any resemblance. That was all I got for three hundred pounds.

That and an offer to get my dick sucked for another sixty pounds.

That last offer was passed on.

I had come to London to keep from confronting Catherine about the kid.

But the information I had obtained left me living inside that same darkness.

I needed evidence. I had to go see her and the boy because I needed conclusive evidence.

My every breath, the rise and fall of my chest, told me she could not be trusted.

Not with a child.

Not with the horrible things she had done to me when I was supposed to be her son.

Four

the woman hunter

She had fucked
up in London.

Seven days ago they had not killed the man called Gideon and the client wasn’t happy.

She had been distracted, had lost the target, then the target had outmaneuvered them.

No, outmaneuvered
her
. Matthew reminded her of that a thousand times.
He
was where
he
was supposed to be,
he
was doing what
he
was supposed to do.
He
was ready to dispose of the target.

She
was the one who had fucked it all up.

She
had been outmaneuvered,
she
had blown her cover, and
she
had fucked up the job.

Not today.

She didn’t fuck this one up. She had gotten it right. Forget about London.

Fuck Gideon.

That was what she thought as she watched the sun begin to rise over the lush mountains.

No longer in London.

Now in the West Indies.

Working alone.

Like she used to work in the beginning. Before Matthew. Before all the goddamn criticism.

She took a deep breath, the smell of cordite in the air, covering her skin.

Sunrise on the island of Antigua was the most beautiful she had seen. The sunlight expanding over the hills and reflecting on the waters, spectacular. It was as if there was a different sun in the heart of the Caribbean. It paused her. This was her first time witnessing sunrise as she stood on a yacht.

She could see herself walking that deck wearing a bikini and Blahniks. Or naked wearing Blahniks. With Blahniks, clothing was not necessary. With a yacht, all a woman needed was a pair of Blahniks.

Falmouth Harbour Marina, north of English Harbour, this was a rich man’s playground.

From what she had seen, it was a dark man’s point of labor and a white man’s paradise.

She lowered her .22, stepped over dead bodies, and stared at the bullet hole lodged in teak.

She cursed. She had missed once. Countless hours had been spent at the shooting range.

First the screwup in London. Now this.

She had flown Heathrow to JFK, then JFK to the airport in San Juan, San Juan to Antigua.

Eighteen hours of flying on American, including the downtime between the two connections.

Five thousand three hundred and sixty-one frequent flier miles from her fuckup in the U.K.

But that error weighed on her mind. This was supposed to be perfect.

To prove a point, this was supposed to have zero mistakes.

She had tracked the target to cricket matches on Friday and Saturday, then on Sunday she followed him and his crew high into the hills over Nelson’s Dockyard to the party at Shirley Heights, almost killed him as he sipped rum punch and watched the glorious sunset, a steel-pan band onstage, but the place was too crowded, one narrow road in, one narrow road out, no way to get away clean. She had followed him down Fig Tree Drive, had trailed him when he went to look at land out at NonSuch Bay. His friends were with him at all times. If he went food shopping at Epicurean, they were there. If he went to the YMCA to watch young men shoot basketball, they were on both sides of him at all times. If he went to the Sticky Wicket to eat, if he went to Kings Casino, if he ate at Coconut Grove, they protected him like he was the prime minister of the island. They were always there, those men he called his friends.

Friends who carried hidden guns as he played golf at Jolly Harbour. Men who looked out for him as he went to Heritage Quay to eat lunch upstairs at Hemingways. Men who remained around him as he walked Redcliffe Quay shopping. Following him she had fallen in love with that area in St. John’s parish, with Redcliffe Quay, with all the restaurants and shopping on Redcliffe. She had trailed her assignment as he went from Blue Diamond, to Diamond Ice, to Skells, to Jam Dung, and had followed him into the red-light district on the edges of Heritage Quay, on Popeshead Street, watched him go inside Wendy’s with his four friends, watched them all leave with a Guyanese stripper-whore, watched his gun-carrying friends escort him to a house up the road, all of them with a Red Stripe or Wadadli or cups of Coke and Mount Gay rum in hand, watched his light-headed friends wait for him to finish with the whore.

She started to chance it then, started to creep down the streets that smelled of oil, refuse, and fresh sewage, was tempted to try to find a back way into that Caribbean-style house of sex, knowing the one-level homes weren’t air-conditioned, hardly any were on the islands, and on a warm night the windows had to be open. All she had to do was tiptoe through the darkness and find the bedroom window, one shot to the head as his rented lover gave him head or rode him, or as he fucked her from the back, then, after that pop that came from a silencer, as her sponsor’s head exploded and before the whore could scream, one shot to her head as well. But so many people were out in the red-light district at night, the two-laned street with no sidewalk, barely room for cars to pass each other; Popeshead Street was crowded with locals liming and eating, whores out and about in their shorts and flat shoes, a sex shop openly selling condoms and Viagra, snowy faces in shorts and T-shirts pussy shopping like they were in Amsterdam, nonstop traffic like this was their version of the Las Vegas Strip.