Just a Lark

My eyes shoot open as I bolt upright with a gasp. Everything that happened in the past few hours comes back to me at once, and I’m overwhelmed with images and painful memories of all the yelling and screaming, the escape, and the accident. The accident!

“Are you all right, Maggie?”

I look up and see Claude sitting by the roadside. His face is badly scratched, but he seems like he’ll be fine. I nod my head at him slowly, and he looks relieved.
“Where’s Rico?” I ask quietly. Claude looks distant, the cover of his poker face momentarily broken and the grief evident. He shakes his head, and points behind me. I turn to see where the car broke through the guard rail and rolled mid-air to land in the reservoir. It remains there still, floating upside-down in the shallow water.

“I could only save you.”

Tears well up in my eyes. I begin to sob silently, and Claude gets up to comfort me. He hugs me briefly, telling me that everything will be fine. He tells me that as long as we’re together we’ll find a way. I believe him.

“Here, I was able to get this out for you.” Claude hands me Johnny, my teddy bear. “It’s still wet, but it’ll dry out.”

I smile at Claude and clutch my wet, stuffed bear tightly. I may be twelve years old, but I always have him with me, ever since Rico nonchalantly tossed him my way those years ago.

“I dunno much about kids,” Rico said back then, “but if I give this to you, will you stop your crying?” Ever since, Johnny was as inseparable from me as my brother was.

Claude stands, and I look up at him. “What do we do now?”

“We’re going back,” he pauses and looks down at me. “You want to go back too, don’t you?” My eyes dart hesitantly to the ground: my heart is heavy with all that we’ve already done, and I don’t know how much more I can take. Claude knows this, and crouches back down to face me. “Just this last time, OK? And then it’ll be over, and we’ll be free. We can’t let it end like this, can we? Not after what happened today, right?”

I look into his eyes for a moment, and I know that he’s right. I nod my head in approval. “Just this last time. Promise?”

“Promise.”

Ten minutes pass as I dry myself off in the sun while Claude watches cars drive by, picking out strangers by the side of the roadway. Finally, he sees a car that will do approaching in the distance, and motions me over.

I stand out in the street, holding my teddy closely and looking as pitiful as possible, and the Cadillac slows down when it sees me and pulls over. An elderly woman opens the door and looks at me, shocked.

“Oh my God! Are you all right little girl? Where are your parents?”

I begin to sob and point at the smashed guard rail, and when she sees the wreckage, she gasps and runs over to me, fumbling for a cellular phone to call in the emergency. She doesn’t notice my brother come up behind her.

The woman says something to me, but I’m not listening. Claude motions for me to step back, and I nod at him and move, something that seems to get her attention. She turns around to see him smiling oddly at her. Claude’s usually expressionless, but he always smiles like that when he works: it’s how he deals with it.

“Uh… Hello there. Are you with her?” the woman asks hesitantly. She doesn’t see the Beretta until it’s too late, and the silencer makes sure that no one else hears it. Claude and I drag her down to the reservoir and drop her off near the ruined vehicle.

It’s always the same; they never suspect a thing. After all, who would believe that a twelve year old girl and her fourteen year old brother were capable of murder? The idea is ridiculous, but it is our reality: we are murderers, with the deaths of dozens engraved into our consciousness.

This time, we were after people who knew us—knew what we were capable of. After the very people who trained us, who exploited us and our youth, who made us kill. We were going back to that hell one last time to put an end to it all. If we had any advantage, it was that they thought we were dead, just like Rico.

“Are you ready Maggie?”

I nod at him, and we get in the car. Hopefully we’d make it without running into a cop. Rico made sure we could drive, but Claude still looked too young to be behind a wheel.
“We need some stuff before we head back, so we’re going Home first,” Claude says as he starts the car and turns us around.

My parents were kind and loving people who did everything they could to make us happy. Mother was a beautiful woman who hovered over us all the time, nurturing us and caring for us exactly as a mother should. Father wasn’t home very often because of his work, but when he was he loved to tell us stories and play with us. Back then, we were different people: I was much more talkative and not so prone to cry, and Claude would laugh and smile just like any other child his age. We lived in a large house with a white picket fence, and we attended church regularly. We were a normal family.

It was Christmas, and I was eight years old. My brother and I were eagerly tearing through wrapping paper and ribbons to open up our gifts, while Mother and Father were in the kitchen making us hot cocoa. The joy of the moment was interrupted by the sound of our front door being kicked open. Our mother screamed and Claude led me by the hand over to the kitchen door where we saw two men holding our parents up against the wall.

A third man wearing a black leather coat stood several feet behind them fingering a revolver. “You shouldn’t have done it Tommy,” he told my father, “you shouldn’t have done it.” The man in black motioned for the others to step aside and raised his gun, firing a single shot. Father slid to his knees lifelessly, and Mother screamed once more before she joined him on the floor.

Claude and I watched helplessly as it happened, and frozen with a mixture of fear and horror, we were unable to even scream or cry—we just stood there silently until we were noticed by one of the men.

“Jesus Christ! Rico, the kids! They saw it happen!” he cried out.

Rico took a look at us and pulled out the revolver again. “Dammit, this is just what I need. I don’t wanna have to kill some kids.”

He walked over to us and sighed, then raised his gun at Claude. Neither of us tried to run. In an act of pure defiance, we stood our ground and refused to budge—we just glared at him with hate-filled eyes. Rico smiled briefly and lowered his gun.

“Take care of the bodies,” he told one of his men. He turned to the other one. “Jimmy, you grab these kids. We’re taking them with us.”

Claude and I were stuffed into the backseat of Rico’s car, with his goons on either side of us. He’d told us to stay put: that he was going to go talk to his boss, and that he’d be back in a few minutes. It had already been a half hour, and even Jimmy and his partner were getting weary. Rico had warned us not to talk before he took us from our home, but he didn’t need to—we had nothing to say. Finally, Rico came out of the club and got back in the car.

“You two can leave now,” he said. He wasn’t talking to us.

“You sure about that?” asked Jimmy.

“Yeah. These kids are my responsibility from here on out.”

The two looked at each other and got out of the car to leave. “Hope you know what you’re doing, Rico.”

He started the car up and drove us down to the docks and through a series of abandoned warehouses before he finally parked. Never once during the trip did he say a thing. He stepped out of the car and held the door open, motioning for us to follow, but we just sat there and refused to move. He sighed.

“Listen,” he said, “Your daddy wasn’t as good a person as you thought. He hired guys like me to kill people for him. One day he decided he was gonna start taking money from the boss, and that didn’t go over well with him.” I looked over at Claude, and he shook his head at me. He didn’t care any more than I did.

“The point,” Rico continued, “is that your daddy fucked up, and so I got sent in to clean up the mess. You can blame me all you want for what I did, but you should really be blaming yourselves: you watched me do it and did nothing.”

My eyes grew wide. He couldn’t be serious!

“That’s not true!” Claude spoke for the first time since the shooting. “There was nothing we could do!”

“But there was!” Rico ducked low and got right into Claude’s face inside the car. “The will to act is all you needed! You didn’t have it then, and you don’t have it now.” He stepped back and removed himself from the car. “You kids are going to come with me. I’m going to train you—to give you the will and the ability to act so you’re never powerless again. You’re gonna come with me,” he pulled out his revolver and pointed it directly at Claude, “or you’re gonna die right here.”

For six months we endured Rico’s training day in and day out without rest. While other children our age were at school, watching television, or playing with friends we were shooting targets, learning how to pick locks, or jogging. We were quick learners, and we picked up new skills at a rate that astounded even Rico. Though our training was identical, Claude and I each developed our own abilities differently: I excelled at handling explosives and was comfortable with knives, and Claude shined with a handgun or two.

Though we both became incredibly skilled, I remained merely gifted, while Claude became exceptional. Rico solved our rat problem one day by blindfolding Claude and leaving him with two pistols in the center of the warehouse we lived in—he lured the rodents out by throwing food onto the ground, and Claude killed them all by sound alone.
At the end of our six month training period, we could take apart a semi-automatic pistol and reassemble it blindfolded, drive stick or automatic, and strike a target at a hundred paces—after six months of ceaseless preparation Rico finally said that we were ready for our first job.

The night before that job, Rico made the first—and last if we had our way—mistake in his time with us: he left the safe door open. Rico never trusted us with weapons longer than we needed them, and so he locked them up with his alcohol whenever he took them away. He knew that we hated him for what he did, and he kept a close eye on us when we were armed—there was more than one occasion when we thought he had dropped his guard and he glanced at us sharply as we thought to take advantage of it.

That night, we snuck over to the safe and removed our pistols, then carefully crept up behind the snoozing Rico, who had fallen asleep in the moonlight shadow nursing a bottle of Jack Daniel’s. As we prepared to unleash our vengeance, he startled us by sighing.

“When I first saw you kids, I didn’t know what to do,” he said. “I’d never killed kids before, and I didn’t want to start. The only thing I could do was take you with me, and the only way that would fly with the boss is if I got you involved in my business.

“When I was fifteen, I killed my old man. The prick used to get drunk and beat me up, and one day I snapped and slit his throat. Since then, the only thing I’ve ever been good at was killing. For me, it was the only way I could survive.

“I know it probably doesn’t mean much to you kids now, but I’m sorry for what I did to you. I took you with me because I thought that sparing your lives would somehow make up for all those that I’ve taken, but in the end I’ve done worse than kill you. You’re still young, and you’ve got your entire lives ahead of you. I don’t want you to turn out like I did.” He closed his eyes. “So do what you came here to do, and find yourselves another path.”

BANG!

Claude fired a single shot, blowing a leg off of Rico’s chair and knocking the man to the ground. “I’m not going to kill you, Rico,” he said. “You’re going to live, and you’re going to take care of us to atone. In exchange, we’re going to work together to bear the sins of our profession.” Rico looked up at us in disbelief, but nodded. “But first,” Claude went on, “there are going to be some changes.” BANG! He fired another shot, shattering Rico’s bottle of whiskey.

From that day on, we lived as a makeshift family. For four years, we worked for the local Capo, Tony De Luca, killing our way to the top of the game. People whispered ghost stories in dark corners about us, but no one ever really believed they were true—that is, unless they had the unfortunate luck of ending up in our sights.

We were untouchable—or so we believed. After all, who would have thought that one of our own friends would have sold us out? It was a well known fact in our organization that Tony wasn’t a huge fan of ours—it was unnatural for kids to kill grown men, as he would say—but nonetheless he tolerated us because we got the job done. Assassination is a lucrative business, and if you’re the best, there’s always one or two jackals waiting—hoping—for you to fall down so they can take your place. Jimmy, Rico’s former goon, was one such person, but when we didn’t fall he decided to trip us.

Our latest job was to take out Giovanni Romano, a former Soldat who had decided to join the competition and share secrets. It was supposed to be a routine job: go in, hit the mark, and get out. Rico was driving, Claude was point, and I was support. It wasn’t that simple.

Giovanni wasn’t in his apartment, but he was kind enough to leave us C4 explosives rigged to the front door and windows. The explosion knocked us off the second floor emergency scaffolding into the dumpster below, but miraculously we were unharmed. Jimmy had been dumb enough to come watch the show himself, and when he saw us get up, he came to finish the job. Too bad he didn’t see Rico coming in time to dodge the moving car—I’d have liked to have dealt with him myself.

Without knowing what else to do, we returned to Tony’s club to find out what had happened, and were surprised to hear that word our failure had already reached the boss. Tony used the situation, despite Jimmy’s betrayal, as an excuse to kick us out of the organization, and he had us escorted out by several of his Soldati to ensure our silence. We had other plans.

Twenty minutes and a car chase straight out of the movies later, Claude and I drive our stolen Cadillac to the warehouse we had lived out of for the past four years, mentally preparing to avenge Rico and do what he had wanted us to do so long ago: to find another path.

When we arrive, Claude opens up the black steel safe and swings the heavy metal door open to reveal our weapons cache. I pick up my backpack—a silly pink Barbie bag, complete with flowers and hearts that Rico made me wear to accentuate my childhood—and hold it open for Claude so he could fill it with several firearms, a dozen or so clips of ammo, and two bricks of plastic explosives.

“Are you ready?” he asks me. I nod my head, and we head back to the car.

It’s now 10 o’clock at night, and we watch from behind a dumpster as the truck backs into the loading dock across the street. At midnight, Tony’s club would open up, and his shipment of cocaine had to be received and unloaded by then. Too bad I had made some modifications to the truck earlier in the day, because tonight was going to be a bad night for him.

The shutter door opens up and a man works a forklift to pull crates out while a half dozen others crack them open with crowbars. As the men go through the crates, one of them lifts up the brick of C4 I’d planted, the blasting cap dangling from it. “What’s this?” he asks his friends, as I hit the detonator, killing or maiming everyone in the area and throwing plastic baggies of cocaine everywhere.

Claude and I run into the ruined staging area and close and lock the shutter. Inside the main club area, we can hear men scrambling to respond to the explosion, and we prepare to fight. Claude fires off several rounds to smash the lights, and we’re covered in pitch black darkness as men rush into the room, unsure of what to expect. They fumble about and step on the bags of drugs popping them, and they are cut down by Claude’s flawless gunfire. By the time we leave the room to continue our pursuit of Tony, I had counted fifteen men dead.

As we make our way through the club towards Tony’s room, several men try to ambush us. Between Claude’s gunplay and my knives, they don’t even slow us down. Claude kicks the door to the small office in, and shoots the two men who rise from behind the desk. Behind their bodies, the window is wide open, the curtains blowing in the wind. I run to the window and see a figure headed towards the parking lot.

I grab Claude by the shirt as he starts to go through the window and stop him. He looks at me curiously, and I smile as I hold up my detonator: as Claude scouted the area earlier, I left my teddy bear, Johnny, stuffed with an entire brick of C4, in the back seat of Tony’s BMW. Now, as he gets inside and starts to drive off, I say my final farewells to Johnny, Rico, and the life of death we had lived for the past four years. I flip the switch. The resulting explosion is like a bittersweet period on the sentence of my life up until this point.

I look up to my brother and smile again, and for the first time in over a year he smiles back as he drops his guns. “It’s over,” he says, as he hugs me.

We walk together into the moonlight, with not a care in the world. Tomorrow is an entirely new day for us, and though we have no idea where it will bring us, we take heart in the knowledge that as long as we’re together, we can accomplish anything.

Picking Strangers by the Side of Roadways was written by Lark Anderson and originally published in Edition 57 (Fall 2005 - Spring 2006) of the Brushfire.