Page 9 of Abduction
I hope I would, anyway.
“I’m going to bed,” I told Tommy as I threw back the last of my drink and left the glass sitting on the bar. I didn’t give him time to respond. I knew he would want to talk this out more, and I didn’t have anything to say to him. I needed to sleep. We could talk more in the morning if we needed to.
It was a cool night, so I threw open the doors to the balcony and pulled the comforter off the bed so I could sleep outside. It was a habit I had gotten into one particularly long, hot summer in Chicago, and it was one I found peaceful, even now, for when my mind was racing faster than I could slow it down. The sounds of the city always reminded me there was so much more going on than just what was contained inside my own head, and I had every intention of making sure I remembered it tonight.
I knew there was more to this world than just what I had been raised with. I knew there was. And yet...and yet, at the back of my mind, I couldn’t fight the feeling I was missing something fundamental. Something that would drive me to make the changes I needed to make, to make things different. I wanted to feel as though I was doing this for a reason, and the more time that passed, the more and more I doubted it. The more I wondered what it was, the missing piece, what it would take to drop the last puzzle piece into place so my life would make sense.
People would have killed to have the life I did, so why couldn’t I act a little more grateful for it? I knew I should have been glad for every opportunity I’d had over the years, every piece of luxury my family name and fortune had allowed me, but all of it seemed hollow now. Distant. As though it belonged to someone else. Maybe another person would have been better off living this life. Tommy always seemed comfortable taking up the role he had been given, never doubting or second-guessing it, never wondering what he might have missed out on. He focused on what mattered, and I tried my best to keep up, to find what he had that I didn’t.
But every day that passed, it seemed further and further from my understanding, more and more distant from what I could wrap my head around. A hollowness followed me everywhere, an empty hopelessness that never lifted, no matter how much I drank, no matter how many pretty girls hung on my arm the entire night.
It would get better. It had to, didn’t it? One day. One day, it had to improve, it had to lighten, the load had to lift from my shoulders. Maybe Tommy was right: It would get better once we were the ones in control and we didn’t have to worry about living by someone else’s rules.
Or maybe it wouldn’t. Maybe it would be just as painful as it was now, and maybe it was going to stay that way, no matter how hard I fought to change it. I didn’t know. I didn’t even know how I could work it out, one way or another, not really, but maybe I didn’t have to.
Maybe, tonight, I just had to get some sleep.
Chapter Six
Josh
––––––––
THE FLAME WHOOSHEDup from the lighter, and I closed the lid to snuff it, then repeated the process. The sound of my footsteps and the rush of the butane were the only sounds in the empty art gallery, and there was an odd peacefulness to it—even if I knew Laurence was feeling anything but.
First thing in the morning, I’d left to take care of business before my father or Tommy could say anything about what had happened last night. I didn’t want to stick around to listen to all the shit I was sure they were about to throw my way, not a chance in hell. I probably deserved at least some of it, but that was a whole different thing than sitting around and taking it.
Besides, this particular job was one of the only ones I actually enjoyed out of all of my duties. Laurence was an art forger and dealer of stolen and forged art who ran a gallery downtown; we’d gotten in on his racket when my father had nearly purchased a fake painting from him, and I had clocked it at the last second. Since then, he’d been paying us a decent amount to keep us from going to the cops about his little game, and as an apology for trying to scam my father out of a serious amount of cash.
He was gathering it all together now, and I had no doubt he was doing it with shaky hands. Laurence was genuinely passionate about art, and, in some ways, I could tell it killed him to have to forge and fake and steal it the way he did. He just wanted to see the industry thrive, and this was the best way he could come up with to make it happen. He himself was a painter, and a couple of his pieces hung near the doorway, large paintings of distant landscapes marked out with deep, rich reds and bright blues. Pretty good, I had to admit, especially for someone who was more known for his scams than his artwork.
I didn’t need to say much when I arrived, just flick the lighter a couple of times to let him know what the stakes were here, and he went hurrying off to his office to pull everything together for me. I had actually started asking for a little less from him than we normally would demand from someone in his position. I always told my father he paid up the full amount he owed, and it seemed to satisfy him. I respected what Laurence was trying to do here, even if he was going about it in the worst way possible.
I loved art. I’d never had much of a chance to delve into it when I was growing up—my father had been grooming me to take over the family business—but I always appreciated coming down here, to see the pieces Laurence had managed to gather together, even if most of them were fakes or forgeries. Some people would have dismissed them out of hand just for being false, but I could still appreciate some of the skill and talent that went into them. Not everyone had the ability to make pieces so striking and convincing, and I wondered if they had started out as legitimate artists, too, before they had shifted their focus on to something a little more...lucrative.
I flicked the lighter again, the flame reflecting off the glass that covered a large seascape in front of me. I could see my face in it, too, the hollows beneath my eyes, the tiredness written all over my features, and I quickly snapped the lighter shut once more.
