Run With Me (26 page)

“
Where's the girl,” I say,
cutting him off. I have no time for his explanations, his lies.
Nothing that comes out of his mouth can be trusted.

“
She's safe,” he says.

“
Unhurt?” I ask quickly.

He nods his response.

We look at each other a moment,
trying to feel the other out. His eyes lack their usual steel and
indifference. They almost look regretful. Not feigned or put on this
time, but genuine.

“
I have an offer to make you
Colt. I'm afraid all of this has forced my hand. It's put me in a
spot I never wanted to end up in.”

A bad feeling begins to brew in
the pit of my stomach. “Go on,” I say.

“
I'd let the girl go
ordinarily. Perhaps I was rash before in thinking she'd speak of what
she saw. But now with everything that's happened, I'm afraid I have
no choice.”

“
You're going to kill her,”
I offer.

He nods, slowly. “I have to
Colt. To protect my interests. This has become too big now. It's
escalated beyond my control with the police getting involved...”

“
Your interests,” I say
quietly. “So what's the offer Michael. What exactly can you offer
that will be of any interest to
me
. What can you possibly say
that will compel me to step back and let you kill another innocent
person.” My hand is suddenly clutching at the pistol behind my
jacket. My finger shaking on the trigger. It takes everything I have
to not pull it out and send a bullet into his brain. But if I do
that, I know it will seal Kitty's fate.

His reaction isn't in line with
his words. He drops his eyes, his expression lost of its usual
cruelty, and yet speaks words that deliver the most potent of
threats. “Your life,” he says. “You can either share her fate
or walk away. It's the only offer I can give.”

“
There are others, but you're
too much of a coward to even consider them,” I bite, after a short
silence. “That girl is innocent. She's the only innocent one
involved in all of this. You, me, we're all guilty. And yet here we
are, deliberating over her death. And all because she witnessed
you
murdering someone. No, Michael, there are other options here. But a
man like you is blind to them.”

I'm trying to keep a lid on my
emotions right now, but it's hard. I continue to glance over his
shoulder, keeping a check on the car. I know the man inside is
watching me, monitoring my facial expressions and body language. If
he thinks his boss is under threat, if he sees me pull out my weapon,
he'll spring into action. Behind that glass, he might already have
his gun trained on me. The thought forces me to shuffle slightly to
my left, blocking my body with Carmine's.

Carmine nods, his eyes dropping
again. His regret seems real, but it's irrelevant if he doesn't act
upon it. An empty regret, completely meaningless and transient. It's
just another lure. One to make me consider his proposal. But that's
something I'd never do.

“
So you'll kill me if I kill
Kitty,” Carmine says ruefully. “Or maybe you'll try to kill me
and I'll kill you. So she dies, and one of us, maybe both of us, die
as well. What's the sense in that Colt?”

“
Because it's right,” I say.
“You can't expect to just carry on as if nothing's happened. Let
the girl go, Michael, and I'll make sure she's safe, that she won't
speak to the police about what she saw.”

“
And her friend? Her aunt and
uncle? What will she say about their deaths, I wonder. Is she just
going to live with all of that?” He begins shaking his head. “No
Colt. As soon as I let her go, you'll come after me anyway. You'll do
it for her, and for yourself. I know you. You don't trust anyone. And
with me still around, even with my word, you'll always be worried
that I'll be around the next corner.”

The man's seen straight through
me. I guess he knows me well, with that file he's accumulated on me.
He knows how I tick and yes, for all I say now, I'll never feel safe
for Kitty or myself with him still in the picture. There are no pacts
between men like us that count for anything. His word isn't written
in stone, it's written in sand. And as soon as the tide changes,
it'll wash away.

I have nothing left to say. I
see there will be no changing his mind, so my own thoughts turn to
what I have to do next. I begin to turn away, to walk back through
the growing crowd away from him. But his words stop me short in my
tracks.

“
Don't you want to ask me
about the file?” he calls.

I turn back and see the look on
his face. It's not smug, not quite, but his composure has returned.
He stares at me, back in control, giving a look that tells me there's
more to this, that he holds cards I wasn't aware of.

“
You saw the file I have on
you, didn't you?”

I quickly question in my head
how he knows. Does he have a secret camera in there that I didn't
see? Was he watching me the entire time as I snooped around his
office? Or is it an assumption? He knows me well enough to assume I'd
have looked through the filing cabinet. That I'd have come across my
name and scoured the file out of curiosity and suspicion.

Now the file is back at the
front of my mind. Ever since I saw the note on the door and made the
call I've thought of nothing but getting Kitty back. But now that
file is flooding back in. The details of my life, of my family's
death. The hand scribbled note...

I creep closer to Carmine again
so that my low voice can be heard among the din. “I saw the file,”
I say, waiting for an explanation.

“
You must think it's strange,”
he continues, “that I have such a file on you Colt.”

I shake my head. “You keep
files on anyone you are affiliated with. I wasn't surprised to find
myself in there.”

“
But one so extensive? Don't
you wonder why I've been keeping such a close eye on you?”

I half consider turning away
again. Why know? What's the point if I'm going to kill the man. Is
this just another ploy? Is he going to deliver another lie to throw
me off?

But I don't turn. I stand rooted
to the spot, waiting for him to continue. I can see him lapping up my
anticipation, carefully choosing his next words. When he delivers
them, I feel an immediate pang in the gut. It's one I always feel
whenever I think of either of them.

“
I knew your wife,” he says,
his words growing more delicate.

Hearing him speak of Sophie
really throws me. I swallow heavily and feel my pulse rising fast. My
mind begins to rush forward, jumping from one scenario to another
where he'd have met her. The bridge is becoming more busy, but I
don't care. I feel my hand move quickly to my pistol once more, ready
to shoot him dead. If he was involved in their murder, I'll kill him
right now, I swear it. I don't care who sees, how many witnesses
there are. I'll kill him.

I notice his eyes slide to my
hand, hidden inside my jacket and gripped hard to my weapon. “How
did
you
know them?” I growl. His eyes flash with alarm at my
intensity and he quickly offers an explanation.

“
She was a friend, Colt. She
worked for a time at one of my restaurants, that's all...”

“
She never worked at a
restaurant,” I cut in.

“
No, she did, I'm not lying.
It was when you were on a tour of duty...before she was killed. She
was a lovely girl Colt...”

“
She worked for you?” I ask
again. “Why didn't I know?”

“
It was cash in hand work, off
the books. She told me you had some money troubles and I helped her
out. I'm sure she would have told you when you got back. If she
didn't die....”

“
She was murdered!” I say,
my voice sizzling. “She didn't die. Someone killed her.”

That familiar burning rage is
bubbling to the surface now. Coupled with confusion and distrust. She
worked for him? For Michael Carmine? Why didn't she tell me on the
phone, in a letter? Why would she keep that quiet from me?

“
I know she was murdered Colt.
I know.”

The words storm into my brain.
He knows they were murdered
. But no one knows that. The police
investigated, but never confirmed it was murder or arson. It's only
been me, always me, who's known that my family were killed. And now I
find that Michael Carmine knows too.

I can only manage one word now.
“How.” I feel my mouth close tight and my jaw clench as I wait
for the explanation, my fingers still tightly tangled around the
handle of my gun.

“
Because I knew the man who
did it,” Carmine says. “Because that same man ran away and
changed his identity. Because that same man is the one Miss Munroe
saw me shoot dead outside my bar.”

His words hang in the air and
there's a silence between us as I process the information. It takes a
while to dawn on me fully that Carmine had done what I've been trying
to do for years. That he'd been the one to fulfill the revenge
mission that my life has become. That's why he pulled the trigger
himself, rather than let one of his men do it. Because it was
personal, because it meant something to him. And the great irony is
that because of that, Kitty was drawn into a hunt, and I was too.

I shake my head and half squint
my eyes as I attempt to put everything together. It's Carmine's voice
that breaks the silence and my train of thought, answering questions
that I haven't even got to yet.

“
I killed the man for your
family's memory, and for you Colt. I should have told you before I
sent you to find Kitty, but I needed you for the job...”

“
The job to hunt down the girl
who'd witnessed you killing the man who murdered my family?!” I
blurt out. It's even complicated to say. “And me? Why try to have
me killed as well?”

He shakes his head as he speaks.
“No, that was never the intention. Rugger acted on his own. He
never knew your significance in all this. He never knew who the man I
killed was, what it all meant. When you started to help the girl, he
did what he thought I'd want him to do. In any other case, he'd have
been right but...”

“
But what? But you should have
told me about the man before all this shit happened. But you
shouldn't have asked me to bring Kitty in in the first place. But you
should have let me kill him myself!”

“
You're right, on all of that.
It became a personal vendetta for me. Maybe I was selfish, or maybe I
felt....responsible.”

“
Responsible,” I say, my
eyes narrowing as I lean towards him.

He nods. I can tell there's more
he's not telling me. I can smell his hand in this.

“
I knew the man,” he says
reluctantly. “I'd hired him in the past and recommended him to
someone for a job. I had no idea that job would involve Sophie.”

Now all I'm doing is staring at
him, unblinking, as his eyes shift from side to side. I stand
motionless, preparing to strike. Another wrong word right now will
set me off, and he knows it.

So it was him trying to clear up
a mess that he'd created. The words, handwritten in my file,
were
of guilt and remorse:
I owe this man a debt, and I will repay it.

“
I'm so sorry Colt.” His
words are creeping out now, tentative. “I hunted him to get revenge
for your family...I...”

“
His name,” I say, cutting
him off. “What was his name?”

“
Robert Pullman,” says
Carmine immediately. “When I found him, he'd been living for years
as Mark Lambert in Canada. It took a lot of time and money to track
him, Colt.”

I snarl at his last comment.
Like any time or money can pay back what happened, what was taken
from me. What is all of this anyway? Is he trying to placate me,
using all of this to bargain for his life? Am I supposed to thank him
for killing this man? For getting revenge for my wife? Or should I be
more likely to pull the trigger because he's the one who recommended
the man, because he denied me the chance to kill him myself?

There's too much spinning around
my head right now to make sense of anything. And at the bottom of it
all remains Kitty, half forgotten amid all these revelations. Her
life is still in the balance here, still under threat. Her safety is
still the priority. But first, there's one last thing to know.

“
The man who hired this
Pullman....what was his name.”

Carmine's lips crawl into an odd
smile for the briefest of moments before collapsing again. “Teddy
Klein,” he says. It's a name that requires no further comment.

“
Teddy Klein,” I repeat
quietly. “And why?” I ask, my voice still shallow.

“
She owed him debt, I think.
So...he burned down your house.”

“
Thank you,” I say,
squeezing out the words. Then I turn, slowly, and begin dragging my
feet numbly across the bridge. Once more, Carmine's voice brings me
back.

“
What about us Colt? Are you
still going to kill me?”

I stop as before, but don't turn
back. “If you kill Kitty, then yes.” I say bluntly.

There's the shortest of delays
as I look forward to the far edge of the bridge.