The Many Deaths of the Firefly Brothers. Thomas Mullen

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СКАЧАТЬ up on him, she’d left the apartment and walked down the stairs, clutching the banister with each step.

      It had stopped raining and the city glistened. Puddles like tiny mirrors lay on the roofs of parked cars. Every restaurant sign and arc light had been transformed into a leaky faucet. The city was so loud after a rainstorm, every movement shimmering with sound.

      How could she be in shock like this? Did she have that right, when all along she’d known his death was a possibility? Every time he’d walked into a bank it was possible. And lately, with so many people after them, it could have happened at any time—at a filling station, in the bathroom of a supposedly safe apartment, driving down the street in a small town, buying coffee and the paper. Hiding in a farmhouse in Points North, Indiana. Why Points North? What on earth had happened these past few days? She knew something didn’t make sense, but she lacked the energy to overturn these rocks and peer beneath them. All that mattered was she had been buried. He was gone. And the world was crying around her.

      She walked down the street, weaving, and realized it was later than she had thought. She could smell the lake, smell it receding. Everything was pulling away from her. She’d probably never even see Ronny again, not that that was such a terrible fate. But suddenly Darcy missed her, wanted desperately to share this with someone, wanted to talk to her about Jason and Whit, breathe the brothers back to life with their stories. They could not possibly be dead.

      Jason Fireson dead? Someone with such vibrancy, someone whose simple glance contained more energy than all the working stiffs trudging to work on the train each morning? Life was three-dimensional with him, the flatness of the mundane popped up into startling clarity, so many roads to navigate and mountains to climb. That’s what it was like with Jason; he made everything possible. Except death. That was unimaginable.

      The photographs, Jesus. How could they print photos like that? Gratuitous. The swine. Reveling in it. Was that all he was to them? All those people who had gladly hidden the brothers in their crumbling homes, lied to the police for them, sung their praises in taverns and factories. Now they were chuckling at the thought of a bunch of country officers stalking them in the night and—

      A car rushed past, turning a puddle into a weapon. She was soaked from the waist down. She hollered after it, pedestrians staring at this very unladylike wraith, this banshee of madness. Goddamn you! Goddamn you all!

      And now a police officer, Jesus, asking her to calm down. Sir, you insult me. I am calm. This is calmness. Wrath is calm. God, she could have slapped him, but that would have been a mistake. At least her father hadn’t shared her address with any reporters; at least there were no flashbulbs recording her dazed movements. Darcy loathed pity, but she found herself telling this beat cop, this fresh-faced rookie, that her husband had been killed last night. He told her he was sorry and took her by the arm to walk her back to her building. He asked if she had reported the crime and she said, yes, yes, it’s being looked into, that’s not the point. Jesus, she’d told a stranger, and he was helping her to walk straight, or close enough. She was crying on his shoulder, on his uniform, already wet from the rain, so maybe he didn’t mind. She wasn’t sure how long he let her do that, but it must have been a while, because when they finally reached her building again and he tipped his hat to her she felt spent. Dry.

      Where was she supposed to go?

      They had blindfolded her for the next portion of their getaway, squeezing her between two silent men in the backseat. She instantly regretted that comment about being able to identify them.

      “This is hardly the way to treat a lady,” she said, hoping her strong words could compensate for her increasing alarm. A final door was shut, the engine was turned on, and they were rolling away. Where, and for how long? Maybe he hadn’t been flirting; maybe he had less chivalrous ends in mind.

      “Let’s just say there are parts of this drive that we prefer to be secretive, and leave it at that.” Jason’s voice sounded the slightest bit different—not cold, exactly, but businesslike. She was a commodity, something to be held and then traded. She had felt this way before.

      The men didn’t talk anymore, so neither did she. She missed the exhilaration of the running boards, the wind in her hair. Already she was amazed she had felt that way—God, she was crazy. She was being kidnapped by gangsters and she had foolishly smiled her way into the executioner’s den. The freed hostages were likely offering her description to the police even now. Somewhere an obituary was being prepared.

      They drove for an hour, maybe two, stopping intermittently. A door would open and one of the shoulders beside her would depart. At least she had some room back here now.

      “I’ll have to ask you to lie down now, Miss Windham,” Jason said after the second stop. “Wouldn’t want any passersby to see your blindfold and get suspicious.”

      She obeyed, reluctantly. She began to wonder if she would ever see anything else again.

      “So how much money did we make today?” she asked them, again hoping her own words could lighten her mood. Even when she had nothing else, like in the sanatorium, she always had herself, always had her words. She used them to calm herself, reinvent herself.

      “Can’t say yet—haven’t had the opportunity to count it.”

      “Well, let’s imagine. Let’s imagine this was a pretty good day. What does that translate to in this line of work? Ten thousand? Forty thousand?”

      “That’d be nice” was all he said, but she heard a second voice grumble, “I’ll bet that’s a typical day for her daddy.”

      Minutes later the car stopped again, though the engine was still running.

      “All righty, Miss Windham, this is your stop,” Jason said as two doors opened. She sat up, and then another door was opened, and she felt a hand on hers. He gentlemanly guided her out of the car, then she felt him untying the blindfold.

      Her eyes needed a moment to adjust to the sun, and to him standing so close. She backed up despite herself, wishing she hadn’t.

      She was in a small field that looked as if it had once been a farm but had been lost to neglect. To her right was an abandoned farmhouse and a narrow pathway they had driven through. Surely this drab locale would not be her final resting place.

      “Sorry to leave you here, but this is where the adventure ends. Once we’ve driven off, you can start knocking on doors and I’m sure someone will have a phone.”

      She let herself exhale. All would be well, as she had originally believed. These weren’t such bad men, especially this one right here. After the period of enforced blindness, her nascent vision was fuzzy around the edges but just sharp enough in the center for her to appreciate his face. She hadn’t been imagining it before—he really was this handsome.

      “What a pity,” she said. “I was rather enjoying myself. For a moment, I thought the famous bank robber was moving into kidnapping.”

      “Not my style.”

      “Why is that? Not dramatic enough? Not enough witnesses for your vanity?”

      “Takes too long. Ransom notes, waiting for them to rustle up the money, phone calls…”

      “You prefer immediate gratification.”

      “Pretty much.”

      “Perhaps you need to learn the benefits of patience.”

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