“Never open that window,” Sonia always told them. “You never know who will be in the alley out there.” And just to make sure none of them was ever tempted, the window frame has been nailed shut.
Beau grabs the hammer from Risa, giving her a wrench instead. Risa nods her understanding, and Beau makes his way to window, taking the claw end of the hammer to the nails, trying to wrest them free from the wood.
While Beau works the window, Risa quietly makes her way to the stairs. A kid tries to stop her, but she gives him an evil enough eye to make him back away. She climbs the stairs to the dark recesses just beneath the trapdoor. She knows she’ll have warning before that door is pulled open. She’ll hear the sliding of the trunk.
Risa tilts her head, focusin
g all her attention on any sounds coming from upstairs. The violent noises of just a few moments ago have ended. Now there’s just talking. A man in conversation with Sonia. Risa takes a deep breath of relief just to know that the old woman’s still alive. She wants to go up there and help her, but there’s nothing Risa can do; the trapdoor can only be opened from the other side. She looks down the stairs to see the kids all armed with various basement items: pipes, scissors, bricks, and boards.
And then Sonia screams.
It’s muffled, but there’s no denying that it’s a scream of pain. Then the trunk is slid away. Risa feels more than hears it: a vibration in the wood of the stairs that resonates in her bones. She scrambles down to the bottom of the stairs, backing into shadows with everyone else.
Beau steps away from the basement window. He was able to remove only one nail. “This is it,” he tells Risa “This is the end for all of us if we don’t play this right.”
She wants to challenge that fatalistic view—but she can’t, because he’s right. Maybe Connor will come back just in time, she thinks. He’ll see what’s going on upstairs and do something about it. After all, Connor does have a talent for falling smack in the middle of bad situations.
“Whatever it is, we’ll fight,” Beau says.
The trapdoor opens, shedding harsh yellow light from above down the stairs, so much brighter than the single dangling bulb. And then up above, Sonia says the strangest thing.
“Lev!” she calls out. “Lev, can you come up? I need your help up here.”
It takes a moment for Risa to even process what she’s said. Lev? Why would she be calling for Lev? Beau looks at her, shaking his head, not getting it either.
“Lev! Get your ass up here!” Sonia calls, much louder. “I don’t have all day.”
And then it dawns on Risa exactly what Sonia is doing. I’m giving you the advantage, Sonia is saying. Something is horribly wrong, but I’m giving you the advantage. Take it!
Risa searches the group, and zeroes in on Jack, the blond, mousy kid who could pass for Lev for a whole of five seconds. She grabs him, and his eyes go manga-wide in surprise.
“Tell her you’ll be right up!”
“What?”
“Just tell her!”
Jack clears his throat and calls up the stairs. “Coming! I’ll be right up.” Then he looks at Risa, begging with his eyes, pleading, but Risa puts her hands on his shoulders. “You’ll be fine,” she tells him. “I promise. I’ll be right behind you!”
Beau nods to her and signals to all the others to stay hidden in shadows, then he gets behind Risa. “You’ve got his back, and I’ve got yours,” he says.
With Jack in the lead, they go up the stairs to face whatever is in store for them.
36 • Nelson
He has every intention of honoring their bargain. He is, after all, a man of conscience. A man of his word. As the boy he assumes is Lev comes up the stairs, Nelson allows himself a small moment to relish this half victory. He will tranq Lev, then he will take Lev to a place where no one will hear him scream, and he will make him divulge where Lassiter has gone, because he surely knows, even if the old woman doesn’t. Then, once Nelson has the information he needs, he will kill Lev in a most painful way—one he has yet to devise, because vengeance is best when experienced creatively and in the moment.
“You called for me, ma’am?” the boy says—and when he turns to face Nelson, Nelson immediately realizes he’s been duped—just as someone else coming up from below swings a wrench at his legs. Pain explodes in his shin the moment the wrench connects with it, and Nelson immediately realizes his mistake. Of course they would have known it was a ruse! They must have heard the gunshot. His pain is a measure of his miscalculation.
He reaches down to disarm the girl attacking him, but she pulls her arm back and swings again, this time catching the back of his hand. More pain, but Nelson can handle pain, and the damage isn’t enough to impair him. The third time she swings, he succeeds in grabbing the wrench from the girl and hurling it away—but there’s someone else coming up the stairs behind her, and he’s swinging a hammer. Nelson deflects the blow, backs away, and kicks the trunk toward the hammer-wielding AWOL to block him, but the trunk flips open and dumps at least a hundred envelopes on the floor. The kid takes one step forward, and begins slipping on the envelopes like they’re banana peels. It’s just the opening Nelson needs. He thrusts his palm to the imbalanced kid’s chest, and it sends him tumbling down the hole and into the basement. Nelson quickly kicks the trapdoor closed behind him, then tugs on a heavy bookshelf, which comes crashing down over the trapdoor, spilling its load of books. No one’s coming up that way anymore.
Now it’s just him, the girl, the blond kid, and the old woman, who’s telling them to run, but they’re not smart enough to save themselves. The girl scrambles on the floor for the wrench, and the blond kid is parrying toward Nelson with a letter opener he found on the desk. Nelson pulls out one of his guns, taking aim at the blond kid, because he’s closest, and because Nelson is profoundly pissed off at the kid’s lack of Lev-ness.
He meant to pull out the gun loaded with tranqs, but in the commotion, who could blame him for pulling the wrong gun?
He fires, and the kid’s chest shreds into a screaming red Rorschach. Blood splatters everywhere. He’s dead before he hits the floor.
“No!” yells the girl. “You bastard!”