Page 34 of Penny for Your Saints

“Move it!” Seb screams at us from his place crouched in the kitchen—Caz and I shoot up from the floor just as the canister begins belching sinister looking plum colored smoke from one end.

“Cover your nose and mouth,” Caz snaps at me, pulling the sweatshirt’s collar up and over the lower half of my face—pushing me in front of him, behind Seb and Quentin, down thehall and toward one of the extra bedrooms down the narrow passage.

We scramble through Frank’s temporary bedroom and onto the rickety fire escape outside his window.

Beside me, Seb and Quentin clutch their guns as Caz dials Frank on his burner phone.

“We pulled up front—Q and I saw the Feds penetrating the building and he went in even though I fuckin told him not to! Now I see smoke—what the fuck is going on up there?” I can hear Frank loud and clear on the other end of the line as Caz kicks the fire escape ladder down its rusty tracks.

“Pull around the right side of the building,” Caz snaps as Seb reaches into the messenger bag slung over his shoulder—his hand emerging with another mysterious metal cylinder.

“But you’ve got company on the left,” Frank argues from a distance as a black SUV rounds the corner into the alley.

“Yeah, we’ll take care of that. Come around the right—keep the alley open from that side,” Seb quips at the phone in Caz’s hands, raising the mysterious metallic item to his face—his pearly canines closing over the metal ring threaded through the makeshift grenade’s pin.

“Cover your ears!” Seb spits the metal ring from his mouth before yelling to Caz, Quentin, and I.

I watch as one of Seb’s homemade incendiary devices sails through the air in a high arc—ending its downward trajectory on the hood of the big black monstrosity with a resounding, flaming BOOM!

An ugly, wine colored Lincoln sedan screeches around the right corner. Frank explodes from the driver’s seat—gun already in hand as he takes a wide, legged stance on the sidewalk beside the car.

“Let’s go!” Caz screams—hustling down the metal ladder—urging me after him.

The four of us all speed toward the Lincoln; Caz dropping easily into the driver’s seat with Quentin riding shotgun—Frank shoving me into the middle of the back bench seat, he and Seb lunging into the seats on either side of me before slamming their doors—tearing off into the busy city streets in the midday sun.

“Somebody wanna tell me why the fuck our hostage is running around uncuffed while we were getting raided by the goddamn FBI?” Frank bellows, cranking down the Lincoln’s ancient back window—his gun still drawn, eyes on the road, Caz’ side mirror all the while.

“Not particularly,” Caz groans as he screeches down another narrow side street, bound for one of the busy tunnel exits from Liberty City to the westbound highway that will carry us to our next destination—wherever that may be.

“Did you at least manage to bring the hard drives with us?” Quentin presses from the front passenger seat—his own gun drawn—his mirrored aviators obscuring his gaze.

“Yeah, I got ‘em, a good batch of night-night juice, and a few bric-à-brac for the road,” Seb pants, reaching a hand into the bag, rummaging around.

“Alright—then, what are you waiting for? Make Little Lucifer here go night-night; we need to start making tracks toward safehouse D,” Frank growls as we make our way into the westbound underpass, no evidence of a tail in our sights.

“She could have run!” Caz protests as Seb pulls an auto injector of the eponymous ‘night-night juice’ from his bag as Frank, satisfied that no one is following us, holsters his gun and grips my shoulders to keep me still. “She could have let them shoot me!” Caz keens—his icy blue eyes finding mine in the rear view mirror.

This gives Seb pause, even if neither Frank nor Quentin look unmoved.

“All of you fucking morons,” I croak a low laugh, going limp in Frank’s hands, my head lolling back as I laugh. “Whether crooked Saints or boys in blue—none of you sick fucks really care if I live or die, do you?”

I watch Q shift uncomfortably from his seat up front.

“What makes you fuckers any different from the people you say you’re fighting against, huh?”I laugh joylessly, hot salt tears streaming down my face.

“Absolutely fucking nothing, that’s what,” I snort, watching Seb’s hands—frozen above my right leg, the red safety knob of the autoinjector already disengaged.

“Oh, come the fuck on Seb!” Frank snaps—one of his hands flying from its place on my shoulder to snatch the tranquilizing serum from Seb’s hand, driving the needle into my thigh with a spring loaded click; the burning sensation in my leg is the last thing I feel before my consciousness melts away again.

We arrived at Safehouse D—unable to make the necessary transfers to get ourselves safely to Safehouse C to the south in Miami—a teensy old apartment wedged against a quiet community college campus in the greater Beach City area sometime before dawn; having ditched the Lincoln for another stolen car; a boxy old station wagon from a used car lot attached to a self-pump gas and service station. With luck, Koumaris Service Station and Used Vehicles won’t notice that the ancient Volvo has been lifted for another day or two.

Louise, still unconscious from the dose of night-night Frank administered to her earlier, lays across the three cushion couch in the one-bedroom’s postage-stamp of a ‘living room,’ a pair of large zip ties binding her wrists in place of the cuffs.

Caz, exhausted from the six hour drive, lies on the floor beside the sofa like the dutiful golden retriever he is—eyes closed, but breathing too irregular to be sleeping.

Frank, fuming and out of his mind with sleep deprivation after over 24 hours without rest—paced in the single, crampedbedroom talking to himself loudly enough that the rest of us could catch glimpses of his ravings here and there until such a point that the stomping and seething slowed to a stop followed by blissful silence.

Q, ever a problem-solver—a doer; put on a little incognito to skip out to the store and grab us a few basics. Once he got home—he set to work lining up the next safehouse, the next stepping stone across the metaphorical lake of fire that is fugitive life.

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