Page 60 of Confession
I don’t want to see that again.
So it’s just road signs and headlights cutting through the night and the cold, silent company of six guns in the passenger seat.
I don’t think I’ve ever felt so sure of what I’m doing. I am, if anything, relieved.
It’s 2 a.m. and Boston is closing down for the night. It’s a weekday, so there isn’t too much traffic. It’s easy to get where I’m going.
I drive by the DiMaggio’s brick-faced club casually, looking for the vehicles I need to see. One. Two. A whole lot of others.
I thought so. Closing time is only enforced for some. It’s relative to position and wealth. What isn’t?
I loop back around to park on a dark street a few blocks from my destination. There’s a hidden entrance to the club, courtesy of the prohibition era. Someone will open it if I knock. I just have to be ready to kill them quietly. I’m not worried about it. That’s something I’ve done plenty of times.
Agent Cohen wasn’t wrong about me. There was never any chance I was going to become a good citizen.
I take my time double checking my guns before sliding them into their various holsters. Two on the chest, one on each hip, one on each thigh. Knives at my back.
I get out. Out of habit, I lock the door and pocket the keys. Habit is funny like that. You do what you always do.
Lock a door.
Lie.
Kill people.
Bury your love deep inside yourself so you can survive the pain of it.
Pretend you don’t need anything until you believe it.
All my habits are pulled together tonight, drawn tight around me like a shroud.
I’m getting morose here on this dark, solitary walk. And why not? One thing I trust in myself is that, at the first flash of pain, at the first lash of violence, a switch will flip inside me.
And Vitali won’t be there to transmute it into pleasure and the relief of submission. Not tonight.
I suddenly get shaky. I have to stop and lean against a building for a minute. More than a minute. I don’t know how long.
Beyond the shadows that hide me, a few cars pass by in the patches of streetlight. I don’t really see them. I just know they’re there beyond the walled-in space of my thoughts. Ahead, somewhere, a car door opens and closes like a door opens and closes in my mind, letting something through.
Vitali, of course.
It’s a memory I didn’t expect to look at tonight. Him, drunk and leaning into me while we sat on the front steps of the house the night of Nonna Maria’s funeral. My arm going ever so hesitantly around him, stealing a touch that didn’t belong to me.Him saying,Thank you for letting her love you. She needed it.Then I got drunk too and lost the rest of the memory.
When I get to that blank place, I’m able to push away from the wall and walk on.
There’s someone ahead of me now, a block or so away, and my mind fits Vitali over the image. His body language, his intensity. The way he would look around when hunting for something.
That mental overlay is so distracting that I forget to get out of sight with all my very obvious guns.
He turns my way and says in Vitali’s voice, “Jesus fucking Christ.”
I freeze.
He starts toward me, moving fast, clearly angry. My brain is malfunctioning, processing too slow, unable to sort out this tangle of imagining and reality. That is, until he grabs me.
I gasp at the contact as he grips the straps of my chest holster. He shakes me. “What the fuck, Quinn, what thefuck?”
The streetlight painting his face renders it severe in its beauty. It sharpens his cheekbones and the line of his nose. It leaves shallow pools in his cheeks and darker, deeper ones in his eyes.
