Flicker & Burn: A Cold Fury Novel Read online

  Funny, I thought with horror, Uncle Nicky seemed like such a sweet old man.

  He’d been Grandpa Enzo’s second cousin, a frail, elderly, soft-spoken presence at holidays and birthday parties when I was little. Even now I can see his watery blue eyes dotted with fading flecks of gold as he patted my head and slipped me a twenty-dollar bill. He was an old man by that time, an Outfit veteran past his prime and, as I learned from the notebook, known far and wide for his infamous “Look,” which froze adversaries like rats in a headlight. Of course I realized he was using cold fury—the ancient ghiaccio furioso of our ancestors. The notebook explained how from 1959 through 1983, on Outfit orders, Uncle Nicky murdered four hundred and thirty-three people in eight states and four countries—a gag-inducing average of twenty-four corpses a year. It was enough to dry out my tongue, but the next passage made me feel as if I’d mainlined Novocain:

  And although Daggers never revealed his precise method for pushing a button, it was clear Ben Franklin had nothing on him: every one of his “clients” met their maker through the tried and true procedure of electrocution. In fact, most of them were found with their eyes burnt out of their skulls and . . .

  I lowered the notebook. The Outfit had used violent death for punishment or profit, or both, for a hundred years. Sometimes killings were secret (bodies dumped into the Sanitary Canal), other times they were staged as grisly spectacles to maximize public shock (victims riddled with bullets in barber chairs). However, despite the existence of every possible depravity in the Outfit, it still wasn’t easy to find members willing to kill. It required a rare individual for whom murder was abnormally easy—guys like Uncle Nicky. Thinking of it now reminded me of my English lit teacher, Ms. Ishikawa, mesmerizing us with tales of ancient rulers who dealt with their most problematic enemies by deploying select groups of killers to wipe them out. Was it possible all of those rulers located their own personal Uncle Nicky, or battalions of Uncle Nickys, through sheer coincidence? Or was there a connection?

  My suspicion was grounded in the past, but the answer existed in the present, online.

  I flipped open Doug’s laptop and tapped tentatively, reading about the Macedonian Empire where it all began with Alexander the Great recruiting my Egyptian ancestors as his specialized corps of killers. I searched forward in time, using keywords—blue eyes, gold flecks, family of assassins—and tracked them through the ages. The Ptolemaic Dynasty (305 BC–30 BC), led by calculating Cleopatra, left behind proof of my family that made me gasp. I looked at a hieroglyphic image of a cunning assassin wielding neither spear nor knife, but a deadly pair of gleaming blue eyes. The same held true with a rice paper scroll from the Yuan Dynasty (1271–1368), where a platoon of soldiers stood cowering before just one of Kublai Khan’s men; he stared them into submission with a gaze as cold and blue as a frozen lake. I moved on to recent history, pausing at the Battle of Stalingrad (1943) between the Russian and German armies. The Russian premier, Joseph Stalin, sent in a select corps of soldiers called the , which swiftly and brutally ended the conflict. I pasted the term into a translator, and when the words popped onto the screen—Blue Lightning—I’d finally read enough.

  Cold fury ignited the electricity.

  The voltage powered an inhuman ability to kill without remorse.

  Taken as a whole, my ancestors were history’s hit men.

  I opened my tiny office window and let the midnight air whisper over my prickly skin. Nunzio staked his (and our) claim in Chicago as counselor-at-large, but it was obvious that, like the great white shark, we served a deadlier purpose. The term came to me from a movie—Natural Born Killers—and I shuddered. I understood genetic predisposition (thanks, health sciences class) and imagined an ominous cluster of cells floating through my body, searching for a place to fester. Just thinking about it felt like I’d stepped from a cliff in total darkness. The intense crying jags I used to experience had long since dried up, displaced by a dry sense of doom. What I’d discovered made me plummet again and fantasize about falling forever. I crossed the shadowy dance floor and stepped outside to the terrace. Looking at buildings that stretched away like tombstones, I wondered how Nunzio, Enzo, and my dad had resisted the urge to kill.

  And then it occurred to me—maybe they couldn’t stop themselves.

  Using cold fury to unwillingly preside as counselor-at-large was one thing, but electrically shape-shifting into a ruthless hit man was another, and I wondered then how long it would take until I morphed into a teenage version of Nicky “Daggers” Fratelli?

  “What are you doing out here?”

  I turned slowly, the breeze whipping hair at my face. “I’m a murderer, Doug,” I said softly, hearing my words blow away.

  He looked around. “Where’s the body?”

  “I mean it. I’m a murderer. It’s there, in the notebook.”

  “I think someone’s read enough scary secrets for tonight,” he said, extending a hand. “Come on, back to bed for you.”

  “No, goddamn it . . . it’s too much! It’s too goddamn . . .” I screamed, shaking violently, punching at the air. There were no tears, but none were necessary; I was choking on rage, babbling with frustration. It rattled Doug worse than when I’d blown out the windows, and he eased me to the terrace floor with an arm around my quivering shoulders. It wasn’t just the threat of being a natural born killer but also my constant sense of loss or loneliness, with loneliness being the sadder and grayer of the two. Loss means that someone beloved is irretrievable, and as bad as that is, a person can eventually accept the fact of permanent absence. But loneliness is terrible because it’s specific, open-ended, and alive. You want precisely whom you want, no one else, and it’s torturous because they’re out there somewhere but you can’t be with them—you can’t even find them—and that’s when you realize that the hollow isolation in your gut will never go away. Of course, it’s only made worse by the never-ending paranoia of being just about to have your brain pulled from your skull by an ice cream creature. As hard as I run, they’re always waiting around the corner.

  “Sara Jane,” Doug said quietly, “it’s okay.”

  But now all of those things felt remote and even childish compared to my genetic destiny of furious Jekyll and electrical Hyde awakening inside my cells, body, and brain, and I couldn’t see any way to avoid it or any reason to—

  “Come here,” Doug said, pulling me close, holding me like a panda bear embracing a kitten. “Calm down,” he whispered. I sat back, wiped my face, and told him everything—Uncle Nicky, my ancestors, my own DNA predisposition toward murder. Instead of the usual Doug Stuffins’s analysis of unbelievable facts, he said softly, “That’s complete bullshit.”

  “What?” I snuffled.

  “This isn’t some crappy movie, Sara Jane. Some fantasy about kids who are witches or magical douchebags shooting lightning bolts from their fingertips,” he said. “This is real life, your life. You don’t have to be anything you don’t want to be.”

  “But Uncle Nicky . . .”

  “Uncle Nicky was a psycho for hire. You’re not.”

  “The electricity. You saw the windows!”

  “I don’t know about that. I got a C minus in science, so don’t ask me,” he said. “Listen, after my dickweed father deserted my mom and me, she came out of her vodka stupor just long enough to see that I was eating my anxiety. You think I’m fat now?” He shook his head and said, “She sent me to a shrink. I lasted a session and a half and then quit because the guy said something so true, it scared the shit out of me.”

  “What’s that?”

  “The dude looked at me and said, and I quote, ‘Douglas, in the end, it doesn’t matter who your family is or what they’ve done or not done for you. As you become an adult, only you are responsible for who you become.’” He shook his head, saying, “I couldn’t handle it. Still can’t. But I know it’s true. No one but me chooses Munchitos over a Stairmaster. It’s not my fate to be overweight and alone. It’s a choice.” />
  “Then why do you do it?” I asked quietly.

  “Because it’s easy and I’m weak,” he said, holding my gaze. “But you’re not.”

  I bit my lip, shaking my head. “A couple of days ago. On the bridge, I almost . . . I thought about . . .” I felt tears inching down my cheek like cold snails. I was so ashamed of myself that the words wouldn’t come. “I’m just so tired.”

  “It’s late.”

  “I don’t mean that kind of tired.”

  “I know,” he said. “Look, I can’t make you feel any other way than how you feel. I can only tell you two things. First, you don’t know what’s true about your family and what’s not because they’re not here to ask. It’s the same with ‘Volta.’ Wherever that vault is, whatever the inscription on the brass key means, there’s no one to ask, so we’re going to have to figure it out ourselves. Second, if you kill yourself, I will too.”

  “What? Doug, that’s crazy.”

  “I mean it. Just like I can’t make you feel differently, I also can’t make you not do it,” he said. “But I can do for you what you did for me, which is make you think before you do something stupid. And what I want you to think about is, if you kill yourself, you’ll kill me too, because I’ll follow you. You’re all I have. If I lose you, I lose everything, so I might as well die.”

  “No.”

  He grabbed my hand and squeezed. “There. We just made a suicide pact. So think hard, Sara Jane.”

  I tried to remove my hand, but he held tight. And I looked at him, seeing the truth in his eyes. “Okay, Doug,” I whispered. “Okay.”

  Harry gave a tentative bark from the terrace door and segued into a walking whine, circling before sitting between us. Doug scratched the little greyhound’s ears, and I extended a hand. Harry looked at me intently, like trying to read my mind, and then his gaze softened and he placed a paw in my palm, just once, a brief touch, and turned back to his darling Doug. As he massaged Harry’s bony spine, he said, “Gone with the Wind? Scarlett O’Hara lost her home, family, that goofy nerd she loved, Ashley. And then she sort of gets it all back when she marries the guy with the mustache . . .”

  “Rhett Butler,” I murmured.

  “But then he realizes what a bitch she is and leaves her. It’s that ‘Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn’ scene. First Scarlett’s weeping and falling apart, and then boom, she’s made of iron. She’s going to keep rolling until everything works out. Her last line, remember? ‘Tomorrow is another day.’”

  “Yeah. Right.”

  “I don’t really like the movie. The glorification of the Confederacy is actually pretty creepy,” Doug said, rising and carrying Harry toward the door. “But Scarlett had a point. In fact, second heads-up . . . tomorrow’s the first day of school.”

  “I know, I know,” I said, my stomach flipping as I thought of Max. It would be the first time we’d seen each other all summer. Of course we’d spoken on the phone. But to be safe, I never kept a cell for long, ditching the disposables in Lake Michigan at regular intervals and then activating a new one and blaming my lousy carrier. The fact that he’d been in Chicago for a day or two and we hadn’t spoken yet wasn’t unusual; actually, it made the anticipation of seeing him even greater. I sat up straight, feeling the encouraging nudge of something like hope, and said, “I can’t wait.”

  “No jumping,” Doug said with a yawn. “I’m too tired to follow.”

  Watching him shuffle away, I realized that he picked the wrong movie analogy. Instead of Gone with the Wind, my life was Jaws, dominated by the frenetic intensity of a great white shark.

  Then again, tomorrow really was another day, and at least I’d be there to see it.

  5

  THE LESSON DRILLED INTO MY HEAD SINCE THE day I was born—gently by my mom, urgently by my dad, in a singsong voice by Grandma Ottorina, with a raised eyebrow by Grandpa Enzo—was that a Rispoli never, ever draws attention to herself.

  I know now that it came from our place in the Outfit; anyone who wasn’t on guard was, in the words of Grandpa Enzo, una testa di nocca—a knucklehead. We were demonstrative at home (no one can hug and kiss like a Rispoli) but retained poker faces in public. Holding our feelings close to the vest was an ingrained defensive tactic, and as my parents and Lou have drifted further away and sinister elements have crowded in, I’ve become even more insular and withdrawn. Any expression of emotion, especially on the street, feels like I’m begging to be attacked, which is how I was able to refrain from making a spectacle of myself on the first day of school.

  I didn’t want to hold back. I wanted to explode but held my emotions in check.

  I saw Max in front of his locker at the end of the jostling hallway and gritted my teeth trying not to spin into a running-screaming-hugging whirlwind.

  He was California tan, brown hair a sun-bleached blond, and he seemed taller. And then he turned toward me with a smile that made me forget the last electrical, suicidal twenty-four hours. He eased through the crowd, and when he embraced me and didn’t let go, I wanted to cry. For an instant it felt like my family was at home and ice cream creatures were a silly nightmare. He looked down with his trademark grin, and before I could say anything, he leaned in and kissed me. The public display of affection set off internal alarm bells as a thought emerged—This is probably as dangerous for him as it is for me—but quickly faded as he wrapped his arms around me. “I’ve been waiting for two months to do that,” he said.

  “Me too, for that to be done to me,” I said. “For you to do that. You know what I mean, right?”

  “I always know what you mean,” he said with a smile, reminding me of the talk we had the evening before he left for L.A.

  It had been a balmy night in June, just before dusk, and we’d ridden his motorcycle to Hollywood Avenue beach. Initially, we’d both been hesitant to start a real relationship. Max’s reason had to do with his parents’ divorce, which made him feel unsettled. And me? I was bottled up with dangerous secrets about my family and the Outfit; I couldn’t tell him anything for fear of putting him in danger. But then a couple of months passed and we kept talking, kept finding opportunities to be together, and soon we were a couple. Now he was leaving for the summer, and it was such an odd time for me, having endured the attacks of Elzy and Poor Kevin and then losing a connection to my family when Lou disappeared from the Ferris wheel. With Max about to leave, I’d never felt so alone. We sat on a blanket watching Lake Michigan turn gold from the setting sun, me hugging my knees, him with an arm around my shoulders. My feelings must’ve been etched on my face, because he glanced over and said, “Yeah. Me too.”

  I put on a smile. “It’s only a couple months. You’ll be back really soon.”

  He nodded silently, and said, “Hey . . . I stopped on Argyle Street and got a banh mi. I left it in the carrier on my motorcycle. We can dine by sunset.” He stood, touched my head, and walked away. As he did, the blanket buzzed. I moved it aside and saw his phone, which had slipped from his pocket. Against my better judgment, I lifted it and looked at a floating text box from someone named Chloe that read:

  Still can’t believe ur going to Cali . . . so sad . . .

  My gut felt like it was flooded with ice water, and the phone trembled in my hand. The suspicion I’d always had—that Max would dump me—made my index finger scroll up to the previous text, from Max to Chloe.

  This has got to stop, Chloe. Not good for me or u.

  And the previous one from Chloe to him:

  Remember the lake? Remember the private beach we found? Just the 2 of us . . .

  And I was about to look at the one before that when Max said, “Uh . . . are you reading my messages?” He stood over me, holding a paper bag, his brow crinkled.

  I looked from the phone to him and offered it up. “Chloe can’t believe you’re going to California,” I said, trying to keep my voice steady. “She’s taking it pretty hard.”

  “Oh . . . shit,” he said, reading the text and rolling his eye
s. He dropped to his knees on the blanket, stared at the ground, and then wearily moved a lock of brown curly hair from his eyes. “Okay, look,” he said. “So . . . um . . . I cheated.” I nodded slowly and began to rise without a word because I’d cry if I spoke, and I refused to do that in front of him. Max grabbed my arm, but I pulled away. Then he did it again, harder, and I sat back as he said, “Not with her! I cheated with you, Sara Jane! I cheated on Chloe.” I thumbed away tears and looked into his face, pinched and troubled, as he said, “When you and I first met, I said I needed some time before we really started dating because of my parents breaking up. That was true . . . but not the whole truth.”

  The other part was that he was still seeing Chloe, his girlfriend in the suburbs.

  Even before he’d moved back to Chicago with his mom, his feelings for Chloe were changing—“fading,” as Max said—and then he met me again. “And that was it,” he said. “The whole ‘love at first sight’ thing . . . what does Doug call it in movies, the ‘world slows down’ moment? It wasn’t like that.” He shrugged. “But there was love in it, right from the start.” He held my gaze even as the hint of a blush touched at his neck. “And then there was more and more, and here we are.”

  About a month after we met, he tried to end it with Chloe, but she’d gotten upset, made disturbing noises about hurting herself, and he backed off. “I should’ve gotten it over with, but to be honest, it was easier to let it linger,” he said. “The divorce, getting used to Chicago and a new school . . . Chloe was one more thing to deal with, and I didn’t. Instead I got closer to you and called her less and less. And then she ate a bunch of pills. I just . . . I didn’t think she was serious.” Luckily she recovered, and when the crisis was over, Max told her about me. Therapy helped Chloe move on, but now and then she started a text conversation, asking about Max’s life, talking about the past. He held the phone out. “Here, read the whole conversation. Call her if you want and ask about it. She’s sort of stalkerish but Chloe’s a good person. She won’t lie.”