Ghosts by Matt Rogers (ap literature book list txt) 📕

in the head.

The hurricane of violence consumed him and broke him and he thought no more.

89

King watched Slater tear through the pack, his broken ankle forgotten, his movement unimpeded.

One man against four trained operatives.

A hot knife through butter.

The guy leading the charge looked competent enough, but wilted in the face of Slater’s rage. The guy lost his weapon, watched Slater kill his three comrades with it, then hesitated for a split second, still staggered, still reeling.

King raised his SIG and put a bullet in his face from across the loading bay.

Four bodies collapsed in and around the doorway.

He turned back to Icke. ‘See?’

Icke saw.

He moaned.

King said, ‘I’ll give you three days.’

‘I need more time than that.’

‘That’s your problem.’

Quiet.

Icke had lifted his face a few inches off the concrete to watch his final reinforcements slaughtered, and now he lowered it back to the bloody puddle, dejected.

King said, ‘Tick tock.’

He walked over to Slater, and they went upstairs.

90

The reunion at the estate was shaky.

It had been a night to remember.

Violetta undertook a panicked clean-up, but there’s no easy fix for bullet holes in the ceilings and walls and bloodstains soaked deep into the carpet. She quarantined the five bodies in an empty room — the same room they’d stored Gloria in — which proved difficult enough on its own. Moving two-hundred-plus pound deadweights left her sweaty and exhausted, and she dreaded the inevitable police response to deafening automatic gunfire in a gated community.

But then she remembered she had a powerful ally, if only temporarily.

She placed a call to Gloria, who in turn placed several calls to sergeants and vice detectives that she either had dirt on or trusted completely. The furious phone complaints from neighbours fell on deaf ears. Some of them rang back several times to stress the noise of the racket to the LVMPD, but were told after a brief investigation the chaos had been chalked up to hoodlums letting off illegal fireworks back-to-back. The suspects had been apprehended. There was nothing to fear. Go back to bed. Sleep peacefully.

So Violetta sat by the entranceway in a trance-like state as the house quietened around her.

No lights.

No sirens.

No handcuffs.

Upstairs, Alexis had put Melanie to bed, soothing her, insinuating the home invasion had been nothing more than a bad dream. Melanie would know better, but sometimes the brain believes things it knows not to be true, just for the warm embrace of false comfort.

King and Slater arrived thirty minutes later with Elsa Bell.

They stepped through the damaged front doors first, leading the way so she felt more comfortable. All three of them saw Violetta sitting by the staircase, knees up to her chest.

King said, ‘Hey.’

Violetta said, ‘Hey.’

‘Violetta, this is Elsa.’

The girl was skinny. Her features were gorgeous. She’d make a heartbreaker of a woman in a few years’ time.

Elsa said, ‘You look like my mom.’

Violetta smiled. ‘Funnily enough, that’s how this all started.’

Elsa cocked her head.

She looked up at King.

He said, ‘I’ll explain later. It’s late.’

‘I’m not tired.’

‘I am.’

For the first time Violetta noticed Slater’s makeshift crutches. He was standing on one leg, letting the other dangle, leaning his weight on a pair of hiking poles from the trunk of the Rezvani Tank. His foot had ballooned — the injury was grotesque. If his ankle hadn’t been broken before, now it was mangled. The bone would need to be set, the foot encased in a moon boot. He’d need to keep off it for weeks, maybe months.

He might never walk the same.

Violetta gestured to his ankle. ‘Is that the only major injury?’

King’s face was riddled with small cuts and bruises, the clear aftermath of a physical brawl, but he didn’t seem in any way debilitated. She knew concussions were invisible, and each one added up worse than the last, but her partner’s eyes were clear. So were Slater’s.

To her relief, Slater nodded.

He said, ‘Where’s Alexis?’

Violetta sighed. ‘Upstairs.’

Slater hesitated. ‘Is she okay?’

‘Physically? She’s fine.’

‘Why’d you say that?’

‘She killed a guy.’

Slater froze.

King didn’t react.

Neither did Elsa. She’d been a prisoner for months. She didn’t need coddling. She knew what this world involved, how it worked below the illusion of civility.

Slater said, ‘Shit.’

‘Yeah, shit,’ Violetta said. ‘There’s an animal inside of her, Will. She let it out tonight.’

Slater said, ‘What happened?’

Violetta told him.

The elbows, the beatdown, the taking of the rifle, the shot through the top of the head.

Slater said, ‘Can I see the body?’

‘I don’t see the point.’

‘I want to see what she saw.’

‘She didn’t just see it,’ Violetta said. ‘She did it.’

King said, ‘Just the way you taught her.’

There were a plethora of emotions fighting for control behind Slater’s eyes. Relief that it wasn’t Alexis on the receiving end, guilt for introducing her to this life, unrest over what the memories might do to her.

Violetta said, ‘What’s wrong?’

‘She can never go back now.’

‘You thought she could before?’ Violetta said. ‘She made her decision when she chose to run with us. Tonight was a formality. It was going to happen, sooner or later.’

Silence.

She said, ‘She’d kill or she’d die.’

Silence.

She said, ‘You always knew that, Will. You just didn’t want to dwell on it too long.’

He nodded.

She said, ‘Go upstairs and be with her. She needs you.’

‘What about what’s left to do?’ he said. ‘The bodies. The fallout. The cops. You had a gunfight in the richest community in Vegas.’

‘Kerr shut it down,’ Violetta said. ‘I told you she flipped. She’ll do anything we say.’

‘Anything?’

‘To an extent, I’m sure.’

‘So I’m off the clock?’ Slater said.

‘You need to get that looked at,’ Violetta said, gesturing to his swollen ankle.

‘In the morning,’ he said.

‘You won’t be able to sleep with the pain.’

‘You don’t know how tired I am.’

She knew.

To the bone.

She was the same.

This game required everything you had to give, and then a whole lot more.

He used the hiking poles to hop to the stairs, pausing beside her.

She said, ‘You need help?’

‘I’m good.’

Slater took the steps slow, taking care where he placed the poles. He winced the whole way up. At the second floor