Blackbird (25 page)

“What is all this?”

“My family used to shelter runaway slaves,” I tell her, panting. “Back during the Civil War. Before that, too, I guess.”

I can see the flames over the treeline. It’s all burning, everything.

“The house,” she says.

“Fuck the house. Pictures of my Mom and Dad. Pictures of you and me. My life was in that house…” I trail off.

“No,” I touch her shoulder and pull her to me. “My life is right here. The rest of it can be replaced. Let’s get out of here, I want you safe.”

“How?”

The Toyota is still parked under the trees. My neighbor the dairy farmer must not have noticed it. Please let the key still be in the ignition. Of course, it is. The door is still unlocked. I help Eve into the passenger’s seat, rush around to the other side, and start her up. It’s rough going back to the road.

Headlights flash in my rear view mirror. Oh shit.

I tromp the pedal and the little hatchback gives her all. I suddenly feel sorry for disparaging her before. I wish for the Firebird but the Firebird is sitting in a garage somewhere right when I need her. The Toyota tries her best, and I weave from one side of the road to the other, so they can’t ram me, but there’s headlights up ahead. I should have known. Martin wasn’t going to just leave us to die without some kind of plan B. I don’t think they figured on me, though. I weave around the oncoming truck, gripping the wheel so hard it creaks. The front tire hits soft shoulder but I wrestle the car back onto the road, a dazed Eve lurching this way and that in the seat behind me. Eve has the shotgun.

“You know how to load that?”

She shakes her head.

“Push the lever on the top. It opens in the middle. Stick the shells in the holes. They can only go in the one way. Don’t touch the triggers.”

As she fumbles with it, I drive. There’s two packs of them hot on our tail, and they’re catching up. The Toyota’s little motor is screaming, but it’s built light, to save weight for gas mileage. She holds her own, especially on these winding roads where the big lumbering trucks have to slow for turns. I don’t. Eve snaps the gun closed.

There’s a flash behind us. They say you never hear the one that gets you. That’s because the bullet goes faster than the sound, and the crack comes after the back glass shatters. Something spins and bounces on my lap. They hit the rear view mirror, knocked it right off the mount and popped a hole in the windshield, a spiderweb folding across my vision. I weave in the road as they fire again, more flashes, more pops. The mirror on Eve’s side shatters into a million pieces, and falls away into the night. Another crack and her window blows out.

“Get
down
,” I bark at her, pushing her down into the footwell.

It doesn’t matter. For bullets a car like this might as well be made of tinfoil. There’s no cover from a bullet in here. I see a flash. Headlamps, this time.

A Mercedes. It’s fucking Martin, weaving around the two trucks.

I can’t outrun them, but I can’t outdrive them. I can’t outdrive Martin, not in that. Fucking German engineering.

I pull Eve back against the seat. She winces, clutching her hand.

“Seat belt!” I bellow, and she doesn’t even blink before she yanks it on. I fumble at mine and take a sharp turn one-handed, the wheel straining against my wrist. I burned my hand somehow and I don’t even realize it until now, when the wheel starts to slide in my palm and grinds against the burn, sending lancing agony up my arm.

Martin swings wide. He’s trusting in the speed and handling of his machine. I can’t slow down in a sharp turn, have to put more power to the drive wheel to keep from losing control. He might be overcorrecting, he might be doing it on purpose, but the end result is the same. The big Benz side-swipes the little Toyota and then we’re bouncing and the cracked windshield is full of sky, then dirt. For a single gut-twisting moment I think we might roll but she stays upright, jounces down the hill into a dead field, crashing through more cut corn stalks. Fucking corn. Martin’s Mercedes grinds to a stop and he surges out, gun in hand.

I draw the shotgun out of Eve’s hands smoothly, in a single motion, but the seat belt catches my leg as I kick the door open and I go down. I squeeze one trigger. Martin is already down, but his driver’s side door window shatters along with the shocking report of the shotgun. I have another shot. I roll, free my leg, touch off the other trigger, punch a dozen holes in Martin’s door but he’s not there. He was moving around the other side. Eve is out of the car. Moving around the front, crawling. Good girl. The engine block will give her some cover, the bullets will go through the car but not the solid aluminum block of the engine. There are some shells on the floor. The box I was carrying split open sometime, maybe during the crash, maybe before. I grab a handful, shove two down the shotgun’s throat and get up.

At some point, I hurt my leg. Can’t worry about that now. Martin is over there somewhere. I can’t see him.

I guess if this was a movie, wind would blow, the soundtrack would come up, and we’d face off, staring each other down for a moment before firing the climactic shot of our duel. Instead, Martin looks startled when he sees me and starts shooting wildly, and so do I.

Just like they said, I don’t hear the one that gets me. I never hear the sound, just feel as sledghammer in my thigh. A second too late I tug both triggers and the shotgun goes off. I lurch around and Martin spins. I see blood. I think I got him.

He turns back and clutches his face. Somehow I missed with a fucking
shotgun
. He strides over, clutching his face. There’s blood between his fingers. I got his ear. Hah.

I clutch my leg. That’s a lot of blood. It doesn’t hurt.

I’m pretty sure that’s bad. I’m sorry, Eve.

Martin kicks the shotgun away, not that I could have reloaded it. He raises the pistol and aims at my head.

“Boy, you are no end of trouble. It will be very difficult to explain this.”

“Yeah,” I manage to rasp, “Sorry about that.”

He shrugs, and then Eve picks up the shotgun and swings it like Ol’ Betsy in a cheap Western and bashes the buttstock right into Martin’s skull. His hands shock open and the pistol drops right out of his grip. He turns back, moves to grapple the gun away from Eve, but she recovers from the swing and puts her full weight into it, twisting it like she’s swinging a baseball bat. The stock hits his upper arm and there’s a solid meaty
crack,
and he howls, clutching at the limb. Her backswing catches him right on the kneecap.

Watching a man’s leg fold up the wrong way is unpleasant, even if it’s a simple fuck like Martin Ross.

He goes down to the ground, rolls. His hand slips behind his back.

Of course fucking Martin would have a backup. He slips the little black pistol from his back pocket. Eve doesn’t see it. She raises the shotgun over her head, ready to bring the sharp bottom corner of the buttstock right down on his fucking head, but
 
I can already see it playing out, as in slow motion. He’s going to shoot her right in the gut.

His pistol, the one he dropped, is slick with blood in my hand. Doesn’t matter. I put the muzzle against the side of Martin’s head. He stops as he feels it. Eve sees the pistol in his good hand.

Bang, bang. Once and then twice for sure. Eve screams. She’s covered in blood.

Mostly not hers. That works for me.

The shotgun falls with a thump in the dry dirt and suddenly she’s tugging at my arm.

I’m so tired. I need a nap. Just let me sleep, damn it.
 

When I don’t get up she locks both arms around mine and pulls me over the ground. She wraps something around my leg and shoves me in the passenger’s seat. I flop over as she pushes the door shut and climbs in the other side. The little Toyota groans as she pulls back up onto the road.

You know, I’ve never let her drive. I wasn’t even sure she
could
. Guess it doesn’t matter.

I fade in and out. Red and blue lights bruise the night sky. Eve stops the car, gets out screaming and waving her hands.

At some point, somebody picks me up. I keep calling for Eve.

A small, silky hand closes tight around mine.

“I’m here,” she says, over and over and over. “I’m here.”

I keep hearing it as I drift off.

When I finally wake up again I feel like I’m covered in concrete. The lights blind me, so I press my eyes shut. Eve’s soft hand grips mine.

“Hey,” she murmurs.

I still can’t open my eyes.

“Where the hell am I?”

“You’re in the hospital, Vic. You got shot in your leg and your hand was pretty badly burned.”

“Oh.”

That would explain why my leg hurts so badly I’d like to tear it off.

I finally manage to get my eyes open. Eve has a bandage around her head and a cast on her hand.

“It’s not as bad as it looks,” she says, quickly.

I touch her cheek. She rubs against my palm.

“They won’t let me get in the bed with you, but they can’t make me leave.”

I listen patiently as she tells me what’s going on. First, and most importantly, I’m not going back to prison. As soon as she was able, she sent Alicia and her lawyers to Martin’s house, gathered up a mound of evidence linking him to, well, everything, and papers were being filed to plead for an official pardon from the governor. There was quite a bit of proof that I was not involved in anything I was convicted of.

It’s a shame Martin died. Apparently head wounds like that are fatal. If he was alive he’d be under in investigation for murder. For Evelyn’s mother, for my father, for
my
mother; the police were looking into the possibility of poison. For all of them and for Brittany Andrews.

Martin wasn’t big on loose ends. Brittany bought a new car with her generous severance package after my trial, and moved to Arizona. A few weeks later her steering gave out and she crashed into a ditch. She wasn’t found out there for over a week. Crash wasn’t fatal.

Suddenly all my anger at her tastes bitter and cruel and I try to will it away, but I can’t stop myself from knowing I felt it, if that makes any sense.

After a long discussion, Eve and I decided to take Amsel public. As the sole owner she had the right. The company was in rough shape and the initial public offering was dicey. It cut her net worth by two-thirds, but it brought legitimate investors on board and Eve retained a large interest in the company, enough to turn things around. Good people there could bring some honor back to the family name, I guess. I was done with that, and so was she. The dividends from her stock go in the bank, and she took out a hefty chunk to help me follow my dreams and go along with me.

There was nothing to do about the house. By the time I was ready to limp my way out to see it, there was nothing but a burnt, charred shell, a few piles of bricks here and there sticking up like the carcass of a long dead animal, baked in the sun. It’s amazing the kind of things that survive a fire. A photo album came out, almost untouched, and my father’s magnifying glass, a few things here and there. In one wing of the house there was an antique chair just sitting there with some black soot on the seat. I don’t even know how to explain that. What could be salvaged, was salvaged. We sold off the land to a developer and banked the money, not needing all that much. There was an insurance claim, of course. Since Martin and Vitali set the fire, we cashed in big time. My parents and so on back through the generations were meticulous about inventorying the contents of the house, and those antiques inside were probably worth more than the land. The insurance hadn’t been updated since Dad died, but it was more than enough to set us up for life.
 

I had everything I needed. The garage, not being attached to the house, survive the fire. We sold all the cars.

Except one, obviously. She was waiting for me at the garage where I had the truck tow her. It was like the scene at the end of the movie where the hero’s dog has miraculously survived and runs up before they all head into the sunset. Except the car just sat there, being a car. I mean, I was conceived in the back seat of that thing, I’m pretty sure. It was my dad’s car, and now it’s all that’s left of him. Other than me, I mean. Eight generations of Amsel men fought in the Revolution and the Civil War, built a huge financial empire, built that house.
 
Now all that remains is me and my Trans-Am.

We could do lots of things, the two of us. Start a new business, buy into others, find work in the financial sector, become angel investors.

After I spend two days repairing the Firebird and find a body shop to fix up the paint scratches from the corn, Eve looks at me.

“Let’s open our own shop.”

Far be it from me to argue with her.

Chapter Twenty-Two

Evelyn

It took me a while to get used to the smell of motor oil, but here I am.

Carlisle, Pennsylvania is the last place I expected to end up. If you told me years ago I’d be sitting in a cramped office above a garage while my husband works under a ’68 Chevelle replacing the transmission, doing the books for his garage, I’d have laughed in your face. Yet here I am. This is child’s play compared to the kind of work I’m used to, mostly arithmetic. I should have known. We’ve been at it two years now and the Amsel Motors has gained a nationwide reputation for restorations of vintage General Motors automobiles. Just last week I oversaw taking out a loan to install a second rotisserie- not for cooking, a big machine that lifts cars and spins them around effortlessly, turning them all around for the restoration work. Victor can tell the year and model of just about any car with a glance at the headlights and I’ve seen him turn rusted out hulks into gleaming, beautiful works of art. Not least his Dad’s Firebird, his first project. It has pride of place out front, gleaming black and menacing in front of the office. The new paint job is incredible.

I’m done, ready to close the books. I take a certain enjoyment from doing it old school, keeping track of everything on paper. Everything around here is like that, mechanical, simple. It brings a certain comfort to our surroundings. The only computer in the shop is in the corner of the office here. I use it to process orders for parts when Vic sends them up. I glance up at the clock, and see it’s an hour past quitting time.