When things fall apart, it’s from the center. The chaos spreads outward—out of control, out of reach. I know the pattern. We broke into Chuck Laraby’s Central Park West townhouse with the perfect plan. Planned for all external contingencies. The center would hold if I kept mouths shut and held on to the take longer than I promised.
Our own mistakes almost got us killed. Peaches needed money, Shakey had a big mouth, and I was young.
Shakey became Tongueless, but no amount of retribution could undo the central collapse of trust. The inside weakened, and the unit broke.
The Colonia know—after tonight—how strong I am, but when I drag my bloodstained soul home, I don’t feel strong. I feel tired. Bone-weary. Ready to explode.
The house is dark. She’s waiting for me on the couch, watching the front windows like a dark angel. She knows who I am. She knew it when I took her. She’s seen it for herself. Now she knows that I won’t deny the truth or pretend that I can protect her from it. She has feared me, but now she will hate me as well, and I will fall apart from the inside.
I stand in the doorway, waiting for Sarah to do something I can’t define. Once she does the indefinable, I’ll go to her. I’ll take her, or hold her, or destroy her in my arms. I have no plans because I can’t predict the external contingencies.
And so I wait an eternity, held together with string and paper glue, knowing she can’t hear the man’s screams echoing in my head—but fearing she can sense them, and that they disgust her.
“Dario.”
“I need you,” I blurt out before she’s done saying my name. I wait for her to finish—ask what she’s been waiting hours to ask—but she’s silent in the dark.
Need is not enough. She’s right.
“He’s alive,” I say. It’s so quiet I can hear her breathe. I step all the way into the house. “He’s alive and I was never going to kill him. Does that help?”
She says nothing. Not enough.
“No. It doesn’t. There’s more than one way to kill someone. You know that.” When I close the door, the room gets even darker. “Separating a man from his balls, that’s death. So, yes, you see through that. You don’t know how to do much in the world, but you know how to see through me.”
I walk to the couch and stand before her, taller and yet diminished. Her eyes follow me. They don’t judge me. They only invite me to judge myself.
“I need you,” I say. “I had the knife right between his legs, where the skin changes. Danny had a hot iron to cauterize it. The guy, Henry, he’d pissed and shit himself. He stank like the sidewalk under a hydrant. He was dead already. Begging us to kill him instead. Even after we gagged him. He didn’t even know what he was begging for. No. Maybe he knew. I didn’t know. All I kept hearing was you saying you’d never trust me again.”
My fingers brush along her cheek and her reaction is defined by what it’s not.
She’s not tilting her head into my touch.
She’s not putting her hand over mine.
She’s not asking a single question.
“But trust what?” I continue through her silence. “You saw what happened to Dafne. You saw the message they were sending. I’m supposed to pull this guy down and give him a token for the bus home? So you’d pat me on the head? For your version of trust? For keeping a promise I didn’t want to make? No. That’s not trust. Not to me. I need you to trust that I will take care of you. I will skin them. Leave muscle and bone and tan their hides. I will dismantle this city brick by brick. Level it to the bedrock. Nothing’s going to stop me from taking care of you, and I need you to trust me.”
Finally, she breaks her silence. “Did you give him the token?”
“We gave him a lift to 18th and Second.” I stopped the story at the corner of the Colonia’s clinic. She doesn’t need to hear the condition we dumped him in, but she tilts her head a little. My version of trust will win out, but I need her, so I bend, for now. “What they took from Dafne, I took from him. Not his life. Just the pleasure of life. He’ll still be able to piss without a head. Eventually. Maybe.”
Still, silence.
The frustrating torment of her silence pushes me toward a panic I didn’t know I was capable of. I can’t swear I won’t hurt anyone, ever. I won’t lie outright. Unless I’m desperate.
“What do you want from me?” I sound desperate already.
“I want you to trust yourself.” She reaches for my hands. “That you can be better. That you are better.”
She tugs me down to her. I lean on the back of the couch, surrounding her with my arms, and kiss her face. My senses awaken to a chemical change. She smells of home, and fulfillment, and a warm femininity—all of it fleeting. Her mind is being reshaped, and her body is reacting to it. She is in transit. Destination unknown.
Or maybe I’m changing the way I experience her.
We wrap our bodies together on the couch. I trace the lines of her face, memorizing the eyes that see through my defenses, the lips that speak my name, the ears that listen for our shared truth.
Then something in her shifts. She looks away. Swallows hard. I try to deny the change by kissing her. Instinctively, my hips grind into where she’s soft and warm.
“Dario.” She backs up a little and fondles my lapel. “I have to tell you something.”
“Tell me.” I bite the base of her neck and suck the skin between my teeth. When she gasps, I let go.
So much has changed between the day I took her and today, but her vulnerability pries me apart just the same. Big brown eyes, warm as her body from the inside, express a shy hesitance I haven’t seen since our first weeks—when I terrified her.
“Okay.” She clears her throat. “Apparently, I don’t know how a cell phone works.”
“That’s not really news.”
“And so…” She pats my chest, flicking a button under her nail.
When she parts her lips to speak, a loud double-beep fills the room.
“What’s that?” she asks.
“Someone’s at the front gate.” I get on my knees, pausing while she’s beneath me, wide-eyed and needy. “Don’t move.”
In the kitchen, I release a panel above the microwave, revealing a security monitor with a split screen. One side shows the entry gate from above. The other is from a camera that points right inside the car. Oria’s driving and she gives the signal that she’s alone.
I press a button to open the gate.
“I really need to tell you something.” She’s moved to the kitchen doorway, heart protected by crossed arms.
“Let me see what she needs.” I close the panel, then kiss my wife. “Stay here. I’ll be right back.”
Crickets. A faraway boat’s horn. Sarah waits inside and I wait in front as the Toyota that came with Oria’s place crunches its way down the drive, headlights softened by gathering autumn fog.
Oria pulls up to the house and gets out as if the car’s on fire. “I talked to Nico.”
She’s shaking. I don’t know how she drove here in a straight line.
“You sure?”
“It was video.”
“How did he look? Where was he?” I ask.
“It was dark. I couldn’t see anything behind him.”
“So, what’s the problem?”
“He didn’t mention meeting me at Teterboro not one time, and you said he was. I made implications. I asked him about it. I brought that horse to water and got nothing.”
Sarah and I were coming to an understanding, and I don’t have the patience for the interruption of Oria’s paranoia.
“Look, just show up. He’ll be there.”
“He said ‘I’m sick of the junk all over this town.’”
Junktown.
I freeze, thinking of what that word means to us. That imaginary corner of peace and play that turned into a nightmare of freezing death.
“Junktown?” Sarah’s whisper is a scream in my mind. She’s at the top of the front steps, feet bare, arms crossed against the chill.
“Get inside,” I tell her.
“That’s the alley where your mother died.”
“You don’t even have shoes on!”
“Dario.” Oria gets my attention. “It wasn’t a mistake, was it? He was telling me something.”
“You’re meeting him at the airport in two days. I told you.”
“How do you know they didn’t find him instead?”
“Because they want me.” I thrust my arm in Sarah’s direction. “They want her. Their eyes aren’t on him.”
Oria and I are locked in a staring match, trying to read each other’s determination, when a rhythmic buzzing comes from behind me.
A phone.
Oria breaks the gaze to look over my shoulder. I turn to find Sarah pulling her phone from her pocket. It lays in her palm, flashing and vibrating.
I step toward her. She’s shaking, phone out like evidence of a crime. I’m aware that I’m intimidating her, but I can’t stop doing it.
Someone’s texting her, and it’s not me.
“What did you do, Sarah?”
“It was an accident, and I don’t know how it happened. I was seeing if I remembered his number. I hung up, then the texts started coming. I never replied.”
“Who?” I ask in a low growl.
“Ma-Ma-Mass—” She doesn’t have to finish. The puzzle comes together.
“Fuck!” I bark.
“Shit,” Oria says under her breath.
“Why, Sarah? Why. Did. You. Do. That?”
“I don’t understand how.” She glances from me to Oria, looking for sympathy. “I didn’t tell him my number.”
The buzzing stops.
“You don’t have to.” I grab the phone and flip it open.
“I didn’t say where we are. I didn’t say anything.”
“Cell tower pings,” Oria says it to me as if I don’t already know. “They can find us.”
I scroll through the texts. Bullshit, bullshit, and more brainwashing bullshit. She never answered him. I have no idea if that matters.
Sarah continues, “He says he misses me. He wouldn’t hurt me.”
She makes me want to laugh and embrace her and kill her at the same time. I can’t do any of those things. None could express the depth of my fear. Only anger finds a voice.
“And who is this?” I point at another number on the list.
“Denise. Her house phone. She didn’t pick up either.”
“God. Fucking God, how can I love an incompetent this much? You don’t even know how a fucking phone works!”
“I don’t get it.”
“You gave up your location,” Oria says with more compassion than I’m able to work up right now.
Sarah’s face twists as if she’s been punched. Confusion in the squint of her eyes. Hurt in the tightness of her chin.
She should be all of those things. Just for putting herself in danger, she should be too hurt and terrified to repeat it.
I hate myself for thinking this is justice.
I don’t want her to get hurt, but I especially don’t want to be the one who does the hurting.
Not anymore. Not ever again.
Lying to myself is still lying. I’m going to have to hurt her over and over for reasons I can’t predict.
“Fuck this.” In a few taps, I connect the line. “Fuck the fuck out of this.”
“Who are you calling?” Oria asks suspiciously.
I don’t answer. She’ll know soon enough.
“Goody?” Massimo Colonia’s voice comes over the phone.
“You alone?” I bark.
“Who is this?”
“Your brother-in-law. Are you alone or are you in earshot of a bunch of savages?”
“Very funny, coming from you.”
“Answer.”
“I’m home. Alone. Where’s Sarah?” he asks.
“On her knees, sucking my dick, as far as you’re concerned.”
“What do you want from me? You think you’re gonna provoke me?”
“Don’t call again. Don’t try to contact her. Don’t even let my wife cross your mind or I’m going to send you pieces of your sister, starting with her sweet cunt. In a box—”
“You’re sick.”
“—and we’ll keep sending pieces.”
“Until when? What do you want?”
I hang up.
“Fuck!” I shout my shame to a sky that doesn’t hear me.
Oria starts, “Do you want me to—”
I toss her Sarah’s phone. “Tamara’s going to need the SIM card. Ask her what she can do.” I turn my attention to Sarah. I know my look can wither every leaf in the forest, but I can’t soften it. “You weren’t ready for a phone.”
Sarah spins on her bare heel and storms into the house.