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I hadn't needed the guns, though.
By the next afternoon, I was a state away. The next day, another state was between us. Until I was as far east as I could go, and there was no way Eman could find me.
"What did you do when you hit the city?" Roderick asked.
"I stashed the guns in a storage unit in the apartment building I started living in. And went straight. Got jobs. Got my GED. And then I met Vasily.
Vas.
The Russian arms dealer.
He came into my diner, sitting at the counter, drinking bitter coffee that he spiked with vodka while I pretended not to notice.
And then some frat guy asshole who had been sitting next to him grabbed my ass as I walked past, startling me, making me drop my entire tray.
Before my boss could even come out to scream at me - me, not the frat guy asshole - Vas grabbed the guy's forearm, pinned it to the tabletop, and slammed his mug down onto the jerk's hand.
Bones cracked.
Screams followed.
And then my boss came out, yelling at me as expected.
"You," Vas said, pointing a giant hand at me. "You don't work here no more," he added in an accent so thick that I found him hard to fully understand. "No more. You have jacket?" he asked, waving a hand at my somewhat skimpy robin's egg blue waitress dress. "You," he added, turning to my boss. "You give her money," he demanded, not taking no for an answer until my boss took the money out of his own pocket, shoving it at me. "We go," Vas said as sirens got closer. "Now. We go now."
And, not having a whole hell of a lot of choice, I followed him out and into his sleek sports car.
I let him take me back to his apartment, so upscale that made me worry I might get my cheap all over his expensive furniture.
"Why you work there?" he asked, pouring me straight vodka without asking if I even liked it.
Vas was good looking in an older, very rough way, tall, wide, with a nose made crooked from one too many breakings. His skin was a bit ruddy around his cheeks, but his dark hair was full, his jaw strong, and his deep blue eyes wise.
"Because I needed money," I told him, shaking my head, trying not to be intimidated in all my twenty-year-old uncertainty about the whole situation. "To pay bills," I added when he simply stared at me, uncomprehending.
"You need money when men grab your ass? Why not work at strip club then?"
"I don't want men to grab my ass. But my boss. My former boss would fire me if I made a big deal about it."
"It is big deal, no? To be touch without permission?"
"It is," I agreed, finding myself almost misty-eyed, and horrified by that.
"Then no more. You work for me."
"Oh, ah, I'm not some kind of..."
"As maid. You clean. I see you clean at diner. You clean here," he invited, waving a hand around his massive space. "What you make a week?"
"About four-hundred."
"Four-hundred. I double it. Yes?"
And, really, was there any choice to be made?
"Yes."
"So Vas was an arms dealer?"
"He was an importer," I clarified.
I hadn't known that at first, of course. All I knew was he was rich, he paid me well to simply clean his apartment, and he never put his hands on me. Or let anyone who visited put theirs on me either.
It was safe.
Comfortable.
And after four years of anything but those things, it was welcome.
Even when I started to see things, notice things. Things I was wise enough to recognize as criminal.
Guns.
Stacks of cash.
Fake passports.
And I finally understood why there was a locked guest room I wasn't allowed to clean, a room that had a lock that could only be opened by a key Vas wore around his neck.
"I worked for him until I was twenty-three," I told Roderick, body flooding with a nostalgia I had forgotten all about. so much had happened. It was easy at times to forget the good times, the easy times.
"What happened?"
"I hurt my ankle falling off a ladder to clean his top shelves. It was just a sprain, but Vas didn't want me to have to walk all the way to the subway to go home. But he had a quick stop first."
"A drop," Roderick guessed.
"Yeah," I agreed, letting out a long breath, feeling the sting of pain, fresh as it had been that day.
He'd left me in the car parked at the corner of the street. He'd gotten a bag out of the back.
Then he walked to meet a trio of men.
He hadn't even gotten within ten feet of them before the gunshots rang out.
I remembered the way his body jolted - his massive, seemingly unshakeable body - jerked as each bullet ripped through his flesh.
