Nathan was standing in the middle of the room waving a baseball bat.
Matilda hung onto the arm wielding the bat.
Dragon Lady was on his back. I didn't know where her knife was.
Nicky was throwing pathetic kicks into Nathan's shins as he clutched his awkwardly bent arm.
Everybody was screaming.
Groggily, I stood, blood in my eyes. Nathan must have only glanced the shot off my head, since I was still breathing. Thank God for the legendary thickness of the Malone skull.
Junior was still unconscious on the floor.
Rage boiled in me as I looked at Underwood. The man who tried to knock my brains in. The man who might have just killed my best friend.
The room went red. Redder than the blood in my eyes.
I launched myself across the room and swung a straight right to his jaw with everything I had, plus another hundred pounds or so p.s.i. of pure pissed-off-edness. Considering the melee, I was lucky to connect at all. My fist cracked off Nathan's stupid fucking face with sufficient force to pop out his glass eye. Three bodies flew off the floor and landed painfully onto the hardwood.
The eye bounced off the wall and rolled to a stop between Dragon Lady's legs. Nathan was out.
"Jesus," said Dragon Lady. "You knocked his eye out."
We got this much sorted out before Nathan woke up.
Junior was fine. Well, as fine as a stabbed and bludgeoned man could be. Some cold water on his face brought him back. He barely had a lump on his thick head.
My head, however, was busted open behind the ear. I held a compress on it until I could get some stitches.
Dragon Lady's name was Cecilia. She and Matilda had forged a friendship in recent months over a shared history of pain.
Cecilia sat on an ottoman, holding a cup of hot tea. She stared into the swirling tendrils of steam as she spoke, like they were the rising ghosts of her past. "In Canton, my husband beat me daily. I saw Matilda coming in with her bruises and I had to ask."
"Is that why you're in the States?"
"That…and other things."
"Like what?" Junior asked suspiciously as he held a bloody rag to his thigh. The wound wasn't terribly deep, but he'd probably need stitches too.
"You don't want to know," she said with a wink.
Junior glared at her nervously.
"Why the fake accent?"
She shrugged. "Fewer people screw with you if they think you don't know the language."
I couldn't argue with that. "Where did you learn English?"
"Buffy the Vampire Slayer reruns"
Nicky had been a regular customer at the laundromat for years. A few months back, he'd asked Cecilia about Matilda. Cecilia could see his attraction and did her best to facilitate their romance. Their problem was two-fold (no pun intended). Nathan rarely let Matilda out of his sight for more than the amount of time it took to run errands.
"I couldn't get away from him," Matilda said softly. "He's crazy jealous. We couldn't go anywhere. I couldn't go anywhere with him. He'd always get into fights. He'd accuse me of one thing or another, then…" She bit her lower lip. "I knew he'd find me-that he'd send people to find me."
My ears went red. Junior and I had allowed ourselves to become Nathan Underwood's 'people'. The thought made me nauseous.
Their second problem was money.
"We couldn't run without any." Nicky's color was sickly pale as he hung on the arm that Nathan had broken with the bat. He'd have to visit the hospital too. Maybe we could carpool. "So we came up with the kidnapping. We figured Nathan wouldn't miss ten grand."
He wouldn't, but he did miss his house slave. Enough to try and kill us all. Luckily, he was as much a failure as a murderer as he was as a human being. "Where were you going to go?"
Matilda answered. "I have a brother in Detroit. We needed the money to get there." Water started welling in her eyes. The tear glistened on her shiner. "We were…I was desperate.
"Did you bring him here?" Cecilia pointed at the unconscious Nathan.
"No. He must have followed us."
"And you didn't notice?"
"Hey," said Junior. "You didn't notice us following you."
She narrowed her eyes at him. "I can find my knife, you know."
"Try it."
"I have others."
"Cut it out," I said.
"Muuuhhhhhh…" interjected Nathan. He tied to stand, but found it more than difficult, him being all tied up on the floor and all.
With clothesline rope, of course.
Then somebody knocked at the door.
Casually, Cecilia stuffed a sock (dirty, I hoped) into Nathan's mouth and slapped a strip of duct tape over his lips. He groaned a muffled protest.
"Who is it?" she screamed towards the door, the Dragon Lady back in the driver's seat.
"It's the Police, ma'am." We all froze and looked at one another. How the hell were going to explain this scene? "We've received a noise complaint." Cecilia was still cool as she walked down the hall. We all lay low and shut the fuck up.
I heard her swing the door violently open. "I watcha movie," she yelled in a tone that could shatter brick. "Why donchoo leave me alone?"
"I'm sorry, we-" The cop's authoritative tones immediately shifted into the defensive. Cecilia was goooooood at this shit.
"Why don't you go catch burglar?"
"I…"
"If I get rape, you gonna show up this fast?"
"No, ma'am…I mean yes, ma'am. Just please turn the volume-"
Then I heard the door slam shut. Cecilia walked back in the room and dusted off her hands. "See?"
"What are we going to do with him?" asked Nicky.
"Let's find out." I pulled the tape off roughly. I was happy to see a few hairs from his hipster scruff stuck on the glue. "Morning, Nathan," I said sunnily. "I wanted to thank you for popping me on the head with your bat. Now tell me why I shouldn't just dump you in the Charles River?"
Nathan gave a defiant one-eyed glare to the room. "I paid you, Malone. You were going to fuck me."
"I actually wasn't at that point, but I sure am now."
"I want my money back."
"You said we could keep it if we found Matilda. There she is." I gestured at the timid girl, making her flinch with just the hand motion. Christ, the poor thing was damaged.
Nathan sneered at her. She shrunk into herself under his glower. "You're part of this. I'm calling the police. Then we're going home. You're all going to jail," he said to the room at large.
Junior laughed.
Cecilia laughed.
I laughed.
Even Nicky laughed.
Matilda just sat there, staring down at her feet.
Cecilia placed a hand on her shoulder. "Say it to him."
She mumbled something.
"What? You got something to say?" Nathan's arrogance was remarkable, considering his position at the moment.
She held her head up sharply, a strength pulled across her features that I wasn't sure she was capable of. "I am not going home with you. Ever. Again."
This time, Nathan shrunk under her words.
She lifted her chin high, even as her jaw trembled. "I'm breaking up with you."
"Atta girl," said Cecilia, sounding more than a little like Sarah Michelle Gellar.
"Boo? Junior? Fifty thousand. Right now if you untie me and take care of these assholes."
Junior and I didn't move. If anything, Junior looked insulted, which impressed me. We had a price (and frankly, we came cheap), but only under the right circumstances. This was way beyond our circumstances. I knelt in front of Nathan. "Y'know, buddy? My mother got abused by a couple of her boyfriends. It's taking every fiber of my being not to stomp your head into tartar right now."
He started sweating when he saw in my eyes that I wasn't kidding.
I wasn't.
"Fine," he said and swallowed hard. "Jail it is, then." His voice was clear, but his eye was rapidly losing its bravado. "You're all going to jail."
"Ho-kay," said Cecilia, exasperated. "It's time we finished this, Canton-style." She walked into her kitchen. I heard silverware rattling.