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Chapter 39
"Skylar," Brandon barely breathed in a low voice. "Get behind me. Now."
Instead, I turned around in his arms to face the owner of that voice. He was the man who still crept into my dreams from time to time, the man who had violated, in some way, nearly everyone who was important to me. Even though I knew he'd be standing there, my heart still lodged in my throat when I saw Victor Messina's rotund, sweaty shape leaning on the chain link fence across the street. In the mid-December air, his nose was red, and his knuckles were chapped. He was alone and looked a little worse for wear in a pair of ill-fitting brown pants that had stains on the thighs and a t-shirt that was yellowed under the arms and too tight. Stolen clothes for a man on the run.
His wrists still bore the marks of handcuffs, and there were scrapes up and down his forearms. Zola had said he had escaped in transit––had he actually thrown himself from a moving vehicle?
"It's too late, Victor," Brandon said as he pulled my frozen form roughly behind him and started to back us down the sidewalk. I began to shake. "They're going to find you––you know that. I don't know what you're doing here, but I can help. Get you a new lawyer. Get you out of the country if that's what you want."
Messina scoffed, his doughy face practically turning itself inside out with the motion.
"Whadda you take me for?" he asked. His voice was slurred, like he'd been drinking. "Some kinda idiot? Think I'm gonna believe the same people who been tryin' to lock me up are gonna get me off?"
He smirked down at the pavement, like he had a sidekick with whom he was sharing a private joke.
"You believe this guy?" he asked the nonexistent person.
I gripped Brandon's shoulder and fumbled in my pocket for my phone. It was on silent, but I was able to call 911 and stick it back in.
"I was just in the neighborhood, catchin' up with some old friends," Messina was saying. "You know, some'a them remember you, rich boy. They remember when you was one'a them. But you ain't one no more, are ya?"
"I'm just like you, brother," Brandon started to say, pulling out his accent, which wasn't hard since he'd slipped into it pretty easily since we'd stepped off the train anyway.
"I AIN'T YOUR BROTHER!" Messina shouted, suddenly whipping a gun from behind his back.
Brandon and I both froze, his hands still holding me behind him by the waist.
"You think I don't see you back there, Red?" Messina asked. "Come on out, sweetheart. I don't mind shooting pretty boy here to get to you, doll face."
"Don't," Brandon hissed over his shoulder. His face was calm, but the fingers on my hipbones were gripping hard enough to bruise.
There was no way I was going to stand behind Brandon while there was a gun pointed at us. At him. Forcefully, I pushed his hands off me and slipped around to face my accuser.
"What do you want?" I asked, willing my voice not to shake. I failed miserably.
Messina pointed the gun at me as he walked across the street and stood in the middle of the road.
"What do I want?" Messina repeated. "What do I want? Well, I'll tell ya, Red. I wanna go back to my own life. I wanna go back to when I didn't have no cops sniffin' around every little deal I made, thanks to you and your fuckin' family." He turned his head and spat profusely. "Danny ain't never been worth the trouble he is. I shoulda just finished him off like they did his dad."
The mention of my grandfather sent a cold shiver through my spine. His death had been ruled a suicide, but we had always known something had been off about it. His own gambling addiction, and his involvement with the Messina crime family to pay his debts, had been suspect.
"I was there, you know, when they did your grandpa," Messina said as he took another few steps closer. "Just a kid myself, but not so young I couldn't help out." He smiled, a wicked, nasty leer as he looked through me toward some distant scene. "He cried like a baby, at the end, you know that?" He clicked his tongue and shook his head. "It's always the fingernails that do 'em. He held out like a man through all the punches, all the heavy blows. But once we started yankin' out them fingernails, he was cryin' like a little girl."
Then Messina looked back at me.
"Wonder what kinda sound you'd make if I pulled out them pretty manicured nails, Red," he said with a nod at my hands.
I clenched at the pockets of my coat, praying that the 911 operators were hearing all of this through the wool fabric.
"I don't know," I said as I stepped to the side. "You almost had me at one point."
In his daze, Messina rotated with me as he kept the barrel of the gun trained right on my face. "So I did, so I did. In more ways than one, didn't I, green eyes?"
He took another step forward, and I had to steel myself not to move. A few steps away, Brandon's entire body tensed, poised for attack. I just needed to rotate Messina a little more...
"Katie seemed to like you," I said, biting back the retorts lodged in my throat as I shuffled a few more inches to the right. I couldn't afford to enrage the man unless I wanted a bullet in my skull. "Maybe I would have too."
Brandon looked like his head was about to burst off, but he still made no sound. Messina just cocked his head to the right, examining me with eyes that were thin slits.
