Mallicks_Back to the Beginning Read online

  I wondered at times how many crime scenes Helga had cleaned up over the years, how many times she removed evidence, helped him cover up murders.

  It was clear, as well, that he had been grooming Michael to be a mini him. Worse, honestly. Where my father simply demanded respect he felt due, Michael wanted everyone to know exactly how beneath him they were. I could remember countless times he had been in fights in school because someone couldn't keep their trap shut, nearly beating one of the guys to death on the beach one night.

  He was violently unpredictable with a cruel streak that ran even deeper than my father's.

  It made him lash out at Helga.

  It made him slam my finger in a drawer then not even bother to claim it was an accident.

  It made him seek out ways to hurt someone.

  He would be a vicious leader some day.

  And by that day, I hoped to hell to be long gone.

  I'd asked Helga one night when she was - like my mother used to - trying to pretend she wasn't crying, why she wouldn't just go with me, just run off with me, just leave all this behind finally.

  There is nowhere I can go that he can't find me.

  I had maybe never bothered to think of it in that way, always having figured women were disposable to my father seeing as none ever stuck around long save for Helga and myself.

  But, I reminded myself, Helga knew how many bodies were dead at his hands, what their blood felt like on her fingers, warm and sticky, the copper smell filling her nose, mingling with the bleach as she scrubbed his sins away.

  And I couldn't help but wonder why I was still around, what use he thought he would have for me.

  The very idea made goosebumps prickle over every inch of skin, forcing a shiver to rack my system as I stood at the sink, looking out the back window a bit wistfully, wishing for the days of innocent romps through the sprinkler, ignorant of what might become of me when I grew up.

  What if he wouldn't let me leave?

  What if I could never get away?

  My mother sure couldn't.

  Not alive anyway.

  My father was a man of pride. Being left by those who were supposed to be most loyal to him would have - and had - enraged him.

  It was disrespectful.

  Tolerating it made it look as though he could not keep his family in check. And if he couldn't keep his family in check, then who was to say he could keep his employees in line?

  I knew it then, even as I heard his voice in the other room, laughing like he hadn't a care in the world, I knew.

  I was never going to be able to leave.

  I was a chess piece in his game of life.

  And he was going to move me as he saw fit.

  "Pudge," Michael's voice called from behind me, making me start, making me hate myself for it because I knew how much he enjoyed it.

  Pudge was his favorite nickname for me through middle school when puberty had been doing wicked things to my poor body, making me round out in the center as my body weighted for the inevitable growth spurt in high school that would thin me back out again.

  Pudge.

  It was a word that used to make my cheeks redden when he said it in front of my friends - or worse yet, crushes - at school.

  It was a word that made me cry at night, then attempt to starve myself thin until Helga caught on, and forced me to eat.

  Pudge.

  It was still a sore spot even though I knew it no longer applied, that my weight was fine. Ideal, even. Maybe a bit fuller around the backside than was in vogue, but in no way pudgy.

  "What, Michael?" I asked, turning, not even bothering to hide my disdain. We were well beyond that. Ever since the night he had informed our sleeping father that I had come in late after curfew.

  And I had been dragged out of bed and whipped across my bare butt with a belt.

  At seventeen years old.

  I hadn't been able to sit down for days.

  And I had hated my brother ever since.

  Right down to my marrow.

  It was a rancid, festering thing.

  "Father needs coffee and scones in his office in ten minutes. Where is Helga?"

  "Doing laundry," I lied effortlessly, as had become a skill of mine, since I needed to do it so regularly as Helga struggled to find a doctor or treatment that might help.

  "I will handle it," I agreed, already moving over toward the pot.

  "Try not to make an ass out of yourself while you do it. You represent our father."

  I should have bit my tongue.

  I knew it.

  I knew it even as I opened my mouth to speak.

  "Maybe you should try not to be a dick sometimes, since you-"

  I didn't get the rest out.

  Michael was across the floor in three strides, hand closing around my throat, tightening, lifting until it was just my tiptoes touching the floor, providing no relief, no way to lessen his hold, to get more air in my lungs.

  "Watch it," he seethed, spittle jumping from his lips to my face, somehow troubling me more than the fact that my head was starting to feel a little fuzzy. "I tolerate you out of respect for our father. But don't push me, you stupid bitch."

  His hand squeezed tighter as I fought the urge to dig at his hands, to try to pry myself free, preferring to pass out than to give him the satisfaction of my frantic desperation.

  But he released me just as abruptly as he had grabbed me, dropping me down onto my feet as I fell back into the counter, gasping for air like a fish flopping on the deck.

  My brother was much like those fishermen I had watched as a girl, horrified as they laughed at the dying fish. He could have done the humane thing, ended the life quickly, painlessly. But, no. He, like them, got off on the suffering, on the superiority over another being, on their ability to inflict misery and pain.

  I could never eat fish after that. Not even when my father had insisted, forced fork-fulls into my mouth that I gagged up violently before being sent to bed without anything in my stomach.

  I steadied my breathing.

  I made coffee.

  I arranged scones on a tray beside cups, sugar, cream, and spoons.

  Because, right now, I was still that fish.

  Gasping for air.

  No relief in sight.

  But someday, I would be free of it.

  Even some of those fish, when they wanted it enough, when their drive was strong enough, they flopped themselves right to the end of the deck, fell under the rungs, and landed back in their ocean, able to breathe again, get free.

  When Helga was well, or when I could finally convince her that I could get her free, then I would do it.

  Fight like hell for my freedom.

  But today was not that day.

  Today I had to bring coffee into the office for my father's new employee

  Some guy named Charlie whose name I had been hearing a lot the past few days, but thought nothing of.

  But after this meeting, it would be hard, it seemed, to think of anything else.

  TWO

  Charlie

  Starting over was never fun.

  It didn't matter how many times I had to do it, I never could get used to it.

  New city.

  New apartment.

  New people.

  And, arguably the worst part, a new job.

  With a new boss.

  This situation was always exasperated by the fact that my jobs had nothing to do with serving up popcorn at the movie theater, or popping off tires at the shop, or even pushing papers at a desk.

  No.

  My jobs had a hell of a lot more risk.

  I'd never worked a concession stand, but I was pretty sure that if I screwed up on the job, the boss would just scold me or fire me.

  In my line of work, the boss might kill me.

  Literally.

  I had been dodging potential bullets, knife wounds, and strangulation over five years across two states.

  I'd tried to align myself
with four different bosses, hoping for a little job security, a way to breathe.

  The last one, I thought that was a keeper.

  Working the docks was long days in all kinds of weather, making sure no one stole or skimmed the products that needed to be carted off to the organizations that paid not only for the product and crew but a hefty dock fee to ensure it all made it where it was meant to.

  That was my job.

  Enforcing those standards.

  Enforcing was what I had been doing since I was eighteen.

  The jobs varied, the cities, the men I answered to, but inevitably, it all boiled down to people bleeding at my hands.

  It was an ugly job, one I didn't enjoy like some of my colleagues who got off on screams of pain, on the begging, on the red blood caked under their nails.

  I'd never been a sadist.

  I was a realist, plain and simple.

  I didn't have any special education aside from my high school diploma that I had just barely been able to finish while crashing in the spare bedroom of a distant aunt.

  She'd cast me out the day I graduated with just fifty bucks in my pocket from a job I had worked for her neighbor helping fix up his kitchen, and the car my father left me when he'd died the year before.

  It wasn't much, but it was enough.

  The car meant I had somewhere to sleep.

  The fifty bucks meant I had gas money to drive me out of that town, and to somewhere that might hire me.

  I'd ended up in the city first, getting a job bussing tables at a Russian restaurant, the air always thick with cigar smoke, the carpet always reeking of vodka even after getting them cleaned each week.

  Nothing interesting happened the first month.

  But then I caught the kid of one of the owner's getting his ass handed to him in the alley behind the restaurant, stepped in, and beat the shit out of the attacker.

  It was the next morning that I figured out the men who owned the place weren't just businessmen.

  No.

  They were the Bratva.

  And I had saved their son from a threat on his life by the Italians who had owned the city for decades.

  I never bussed a table again.

  I was given a suit, a gun, and a job that paid five times as much.

  Sure, it meant I had to get good at getting bloodstains out of many different types of fabrics, but it gave me some cash in my wallet, some stability after years of uncertainty following my father's sudden death.

  I'd been there six months when the place got shot up when I was on a different job.

  I'd driven by, seeing body bags, and hauled my ass right back out of the city, knowing I was too closely connected with the Russians to come out unscathed if the Italians came looking.

  I crossed over into Jersey, heading north first, getting a short-lived job chasing down players who tried to stiff the owner of an underground poker game before he got locked up on a drug charge.

  I'd gotten another gig in AC. But the jobs were too sporadic, the pay too measly.

  I went north again then, ending up in Navesink Bank, working the docks.

  It was a solid job, one that involved less bloodshed than the past few.

  And then the inevitable happened.

  The mob moved in.

  The gig was too good to pass up on, the import/export business. The fees you could charge all the other organizations who wanted to bring in product.

  They were a tight-knit group, the Cosa Nostra, wary of outsiders, usually cleaning house when they moved in.

  This guy - Grassi, he was called - was no older than me, dressed in a suit which cost more than my car, walking around the docks like he owned the place. Because he did.

  He kept most of us for a while, letting things run the way they always had as he made connections, as he greased palms in the NBPD, as he figured out how we operated things.

  He bought the old, run-down seafood restaurant in town, talking grand plans to turn it into some ritzy Italian place someday.

  And then, just when everyone was starting to get comfortable with the idea of getting to keep our jobs, the firing started. I'd say layoffs, but layoffs implied severance packages, or at the very least, the chance to collect unemployment. But none of us were technically employed, so we were all just out on our asses.

  "Most of those schmucks don't have two braincells to rub together," Grassi told me after canning me. "But you, you I think could be something."

  "I can't work for you," I admitted. "Got involved with the Russians in the city once. Don't think your connections would take kindly to you hiring me."

  "Fair enough. But I hate to see good men out of jobs, so maybe I can just do you a favor, and point you to Allberry. Lots of organizations up there looking for work. Plus, you get to spend a lot more time by the beach. Can't bitch about that."

  And I couldn't.

  Without any other leads, that was where I headed, sleeping in cheap motels with truckers and whores as neighbors while I tried to get an ear to the ground, figure out who the players were, where I might fit in.

  There were low-level street gangs, as there always were, but they did their own enforcing, these men who operated on their cred alone.

  I didn't want to work for someone like that anyway.

  I wanted to work for someone more established, someone who operated on their reputations and respect.

  I wanted a chance to really dig in, get some roots, stop having to jump from one job to the next, from one place to the next.

  Enter Christopher Eames.

  It was a name that made you picture a cop, or a paper pusher at some office somewhere, not the area's biggest cocaine dealer with an empire that had been established two decades before.

  That sounded like some much-needed stability.

  I got my name out there, got my face out there. Followed some of his men looking for a chance to step in, to help them in some way.

  I found it early that summer, seeing the local street gang trying to jump one of Eames's guys.

  In turn, I got a meeting.

  So I pulled the zipper on the garment bag holding my best suit from the Russians. I shaved the face I had allowed to go to a beard while working the docks in some half-hearted attempt to keep my face from getting whipped by the cold air in the winter. I slipped on a watch I had pulled off a wrist of someone as repayment to my boss who ran the gambling ring that he had allowed me to keep as a bonus.

  And I got in my car and drove to the address.

  His home address as it would turn out.

  I parked on the street, knowing my car was prone to leaking some fluid or another, and not wanting to piss him off by marking his driveway.

  The house was a massive thing, three stories of a cool gray stucco to fend off the aggressive salt air of the beach it was situated directly across the street from.

  The grounds were perfectly manicured, the shrubbery shaped and pruned so that not a single branch was out of place. The grass itself could put a fucking golf course to shame.

  A guard stood outside the front door in a black suit even in the sweltering heat, leaning back against the wall, looking as bored as he must have been to be shackled with such a useless job.

  "Mallick?" he asked, running his eyes up from my shoes to the top of my head, and it was impossible to tell whether or not he found me wanting.

  "Charlie," I agreed, wondering as I often did when meeting a new boss if that sounded like a five-year-old's name. But Charles was my grandfather. Chaz was my father. Charlie was what was left for me.

  "One minute," he demanded, ducking inside, coming back barely fifteen seconds later with someone else, someone around my age with dark hair, a tall though somewhat lanky frame, and green eyes in his sculpted face. Green eyes that had something dark within them. Having worked with criminals of all sorts the past few years, I was able to tell right off who was just in it for the money, and who was in it for the pleasure they got from it.

  Everything within me was
telling me that this man was in it because he got off on it.

  "Charlie Mallick, this is Michael Eames. The boss's son."

  "And right-hand man," Michael reminded the man in a tone that said he would likely pay for that introduction at some later time.

  I shot the man a look of pity as Michael held a hand out, leading me into the foyer.

  And it was a foyer.

  Most spaces inside the front door could be called nothing other than an entryway. This was not that.

  The space was as wide as a typical master bedroom with oversized entryways on either side, one to the dining room, the other a formal living room. A staircase wide enough to belong in a high school hugged one wall, white backs with black tops, curving up at the top in a half circle before - presumably - leading off to the bedrooms. The walls were the same cool stucco from outside, covered in places with pieces of artwork I knew - without knowing anything about such things - were originals. A long, dark table was pushed up under a gilded mirror, a very slight chip taken out of a corner, a strange, tiny defect that I couldn't seem to look away from until Michael cleared his throat.

  "You don't want to keep Christopher waiting."

  Christopher.

  Not my father.

  That was an interesting choice, I decided as we moved down the hallway, letting me catch the very corner of a kitchen before I was pulled into a room at the right of the hall.

  This man, Michael, he had plans.

  Plans to usurp his father.

  I wondered if his father was aware.

  Or if he naively just thought he was grooming the most loyal of employees, one who could run things when he decided to retire.

  But Michael Eames did not seem the patient kind.

  Or the kind I would want to work with for any length of time.

  So much for my idea of stability, job security.

  Christopher Eames's office was much like you'd expect from rich and powerful men with too much money to spare, and far too much interest in dark woods.

  Deep, almost black wainscoting lined the walls halfway up, met by a dark shade of chocolate brown on three walls except for the one behind the dark, gleaming executive desk made unnecessarily large just as some show of intimidation. That wall was lined with built-in bookshelves, the sturdy shelves unbending under the oppressive weight of leather and material bound hardcovers.