I'm squealing in delight over all the wonderful readers and reviewers out there! I've been hiding for the past few days to multitask between my studying and writing this chapter! There's a long-ish note from me at the end, but in the meantime, enjoy reading, thanks for reading, and be warned that the MacManus' boys are in fine form today!
Oh, and there a few spoilers as to BDS2 in this chapter. Don't read if you haven't seen it, unless you're really not worried, what with it coming out on DVD this week!!! I'm so going to be at the store at midnight and buy the first copy they put on the shelf and spend the next three months doing nothing but alternating between the two movies!
Now Who Might Ye Be?
Connor couldn't believe it. It wasn't possible. It was unfathomable. It was just... just... wrong! "Where the fuck is muh rope?" He dug around inside the pack he'd brought with him, looking for the missing rope. "'Ey, Murph!" Connor said, turning to him. "Did 'ya pack muh rope like I said ta?" Murphy looked up from loading his gun with an exasperated expression.
"Not again with the fuckin' rope." Murphy replied, shaking his head. "What the fuck do ya need rope for?" Connor looked up from his pack at his brother sharply, disbelief written clearly across his face.
"'What the fuck do we need rope for?'" Connor repeated. "Rope! Did ye not learn anything from the Yakavettas!" Connor scolded his brother as he went back to his digging. "What the fuck do ya need rope for? You need rope because it's fuckin' rope! You dun't go 'round without any fuckin' rope! Get fuckin' killed!" Connor growled, tossing his bag to the side and scowling at Murphy. "There's no fuckin' rope in ta fuckin' bag!"
"Oh, would ya get off the fuckin' rope! We're in the middle of somethin', in case ya fergot!" Murphy told Connor with a scowl.
"'Course I didn't ferget! That's why we need the rope!" Connor said pointedly, glaring daggers at Murphy. He paused suddenly, pointing an accusatory finger at his brother. "Ye hid it, didn't ya!?" Murphy returned Connor's glare in annoyance. "Ye hid muh rope!"
"I didn't touch yer fuckin' rope!" Murphy shot back defensively. "What ta fuck would I want yer fuckin' rope for? And anyway, if I had done such a thing, it would've been fer yer own good! Yer too attached to that fuckin' rope!" Taking it with him everywhere, Murphy thought. He practically slept with it lately. It simply wasn't healthy!
"Too attached?" Connor asked in a serious voice. "Too attached? Ye can't be too fuckin' attached to fuckin' rope!" he cried, stamping his foot. "It's rope!" Murphy adjusted the silencer on his desert eagle, growing impatient with his brother.
"What the fuck's yer problem? Our first job in two years and all ya care about's yer fuckin' rope. We're s'pposed to be administerin' justice, here. Rightin' wrongs. We're doin' the lords' work." Murphy told Connor, trying to bring him back into focus with the task at hand. Smecker had been staking out the bar they were about to head into for the past three weeks, tracking the movements of a mafia boss known as "the Jackal". His real name was Alexander Sumarokov, and while he traded in things like drugs and prostitution, his specialty was numbers. Specifically, running them. The police had been trying to make a case on him for the past six years, but like all good mafia bosses, Sumarokov always had a fall guy and just enough distance from any actual crimes to keep from getting caught.
That, and the witness for the DA, the one who was going to come forward with evidence that could potentially put him away forever, had just disappeared with his wife and three small children. Sumarokov had practically been begging for Saintly intervention. "Of course we're doin' the lord's work." Connor agreed easily, and for a moment, Murphy was hopeful. "And the lord demands we do it with rope!"
"That's it!" Murphy growled. He lunged for Connor, dropping his gun as he struck out in annoyance. Connor, never one to back down from a fight – especially one with his brother – lunged forward into Murphy, knocking him to the ground. They wrestled against each other for a long moment, each trying to push the other away with a slug and a kick while simultaneously grappling them into a headlock. "Ye and yer stupid fuckin' rope!"
"Fuck you!"
"Fuck you!"
"Fuck!" It would later be decided that only Connor and Murphy could carry on an argument consisting entirely of the word 'fuck' as they tried to beat the life out of each other. In the meantime, it took Sumarokov's goons only a few minutes to hear the echoes of a very frustrated Connor yelling "Fuck you and yer stupid fuckin' hair!" at his brother. As Victor eyed the door to the bar's kitchen, for he was sure that he'd been hearing some strange noises on the other side, Connor wished for once that he was not the one who was obviously more brilliant and thought about important things, like bringing rope.
That way he would have had something better to yell at Murphy about besides his hair, which Connor really didn't have a problem with in the first place. "Muh hair!?" Murphy growled, pausing with his fist midair. "What's wrong muh hair!?" Connor opened his mouth to reply, prepared to say something offensive, with the fabulous addition of the word 'fuck' thrown in, that he didn't really mean, when the door to the kitchen opened and Victor found the twins clad in their usual black shirts and jeans, lying one on top of the other with a fist raised and looking bruised. Connor and Murphy looked away from each other toward Victor and there was an exaggerated pause as the three stared between each other.
Then Victor came to his wits and yelled something in Russian.
Connor and Murphy pushed away from each other and rolled to the side, each grabbing their gun. Murphy was the first to have his at the ready, taking Victor out with two shots in the abdomen as Connor wrestled with loading his gun, having been far too occupied with his rope – stupid Murphy, hiding the fuckin' rope – to have prepared for their coming killing spree. When Connor was ready, he fired a few shots into the bar before he came out, perfectly instep with Murphy, firing nonstop as each thug in the bar fell to the floor. Connor and Murphy couldn't help the feeling of pride that washed over them as gunned down at least a third of the Russians in that area.
They were doing important work and they were doing it well.
Then Murphy paused to reload his gun and just as Connor was surveying their handiwork, pulling a handful of pennies from his pocket and noticing that Alexander Sumarokov was not one of the bodies awaiting their customary last rites, something hard collided with the side of Connor's face. Connor fell back instantly, crashing into his brother. Murphy tightened his grip on his gun as they fell to the floor, angling his wrist to keep it from hitting the hard surface and jarring the gun from his hands, and aimed a shot for Sumarokov as he ran for the door. His first instinct was a kill shot, but as Sumarokov was the one they'd come for, and the twins always used an execution style kill for the boss, he shot him in the back of both of his knees and noted with satisfaction that Sumarokov crumbled to the floor.
Murphy pushed Connor aside, watching him haphazardly regain consciousness. Connor rubbed his head, wincing at the contact. "Well..." he coughed out. "Fuck me."
"Yes." Murphy agreed. "Fuck you. And yer fuckin' rope."
Murphy helped Connor to his feet and, after steadying him once or twice and helping Connor find his gun, they made their way to the other side of the bar, where Sumarokov was crying and praying in Russian as he tried to pull and push himself further away from the twins, leaving a trail of blood as he moved. Connor looked to his brother. "Shall we do this, then?" he asked.
"Aye." Murphy replied with a nod. Reaching forward, he turned Sumarokov around as he sat him up on his destroyed knees, ignoring his screams of agony and fear as they left him positioned. Taking a step back and placing their guns to the back of his head, they took a synchronized breath before they spoke together.
"And shepherds we shall be. For thee, my lord, for thee. Power hath descended from Thy hand. Our feet may swiftly carry out Thy commands." Sumarokov wasn't a religious man. He'd never attended church, he'd never read the bible. He'd never sung a hymn or prayed or done a christian deed in his life.
"So we shall flow a river forth to thee." He was born to the Russian mafia. He had never needed to until that moment. He'd done a lot of things in his life that were evil, but at that moment, he was regretting them. He wished he'd done things differently. He'd wished he had lived a different life. "And teeming with souls shall it ever be." But mostly...
"In Nomeni Patri Et Fili-" Mostly, he just didn't want to die. "Spiritus Sancti."
Two bullets cut through the air at the exact same time, slicing into back of Alexander Sumarokov's skull and exiting through his eye sockets. It was a bloody mess that, had the Saints not been as steely and resolved as they were, might have given them reason pause as his body crumpled once again to the floor, dead. The Saints had completed their mission, for the moment. They pulled the crosses hanging on long chains from under their shirts as they began to go about the room, turning over bodies and crossing their arms, closing their eyes. It was quiet work, sacred work.
Then Murphy realized that something was missing. He growled and turned to his brother in annoyance. "Oy! You fuckin' retard!" he yelled. "Ya dropped all the pennies!"
Scarlett rubbed her head at the aching that had begun the second the two men had entered the bar hours earlier. It was hard to stake out a favorite restaurant of the Russian mafia without them knowing them it under normal circumstances. It was even harder with some sort of law enforcement watch already on the place. She had resorted to waitressing and eventually quit two hours later, when a mafioso who called himself Chips smacked her ass and forced her to sit on his lap. She'd slapped him in response, which was never really a good move with a career criminal, and had been received her own slapping in return.
Five of them, actually. Just before they turned her over the bar and spanked her.
She'd eventually been escorted from the establishment later that night with a rough shove from the back door and she'd stumbled back to her makeshift apartment in an abandoned warehouse to lick her wounds and ice her backside. But, she'd reflected, it could always have been worse. Besides, she'd at least had time to plant that bug.
The one she'd been listening to constantly ever since. She'd barely had time to shower or pee. An illegal bug placed in a favorite hangout could yield a lot of results in police investigations, which could never be used in court or directly connected to Sumarokov himself with the ends of prosecution. She'd been making a list, nevertheless. Rape, murder, drugs, women. The list went on and on. Mostly, it was people who owed him money, people who gambled too much. People who, he'd decided, didn't gamble enough and should simply be made to gamble more, one way or another. Sumarokov liked the ponies.
Scarlett had a list of tips a mile long to turn in to the FBI as soon as her business there was concluded. Which, she thought, was likely to be soon.
She'd been following a lead, based entirely on nothing and that she was sure she'd conjured out of thin air from sheer hope, that the vigilante brothers known as the Saints of South Boston hadn't actually died in Hoag prison two years ago. After her father's funeral, she'd begun investigating her sisters' whereabouts, expecting them to end in Boston as her father's had.
The two were always together, planning a job or finishing another, or just getting ready and pulling one over on Scarlett. Elizabeth and Martin had always been thick as thieves – the saying made her chuckle quietly to herself.
Thick as thieves, indeed.
Instead, her sister had left no trace. Elizabeth Connolly, dark haired and brooding, sarcastic and passionate about nothing but the job, had disappeared entirely. She was absent. The universe itself had swallowed her up. Scarlett gave up looking for Elizabeth the day she'd read in the papers that the Saints had been attacked in prison and had been brutally stabbed to death with a shiv made from a toothbrush. Another account had been that one of the brothers had gotten an infection from his wounds and died and the other, in grief over the loss of his beloved twin, had taken his own life in the night. A reporter friend of hers had said that Romeo, their accomplice in the deaths of Concezio Yakavetta, a man known only as "The Roman", and a handful of Yakavettas' goons, attacked the guard in their hospital room, stole his gun, and took out his two friends in a blaze of gunfire because he finally got fed up with being called a spic.
As to the official report, Scarlett was unimpressed with the standard press statement that the brothers had "passed on in the night due to unforseeable and regrettable circumstances." Well, that and the skeptical, leering expression of the man who'd examined her press credentials for a tabloid whose most recent issue had run a human interest piece on a man who was celebrating his eight year anniversary and the birth of his third child with his domestic house cat, Fifi.
The closest to the truth that Scarlett could get would be to say that they'd gone the way of her older sister and the universe had swallowed them up as well. It'd taken a pretty penny to buy off the coroner and hospital doctor for their statements of "one minute they were alive and the next they weren't" with an uncaring shrug.
This meant, to Scarlett at least, that there was more to the death of the Saints of South Boston than met the eye.
And maybe more to her sister's disappearance, as well.
That had been two years ago, though, and Scarlett had spent untold hours listening to illegal surveillance until, at last, it seemed that she'd struck gold. Two Irish gentlemen were suddenly heard on the bug she'd placed in a Russian bar. The accent had been a welcome relief. The second she'd heard it, she'd left the old warehouse she'd been squatting in and made her way to her car to meet them at the bar. Hopefully, she thought to herself, this would be it and she wouldn't have to stalk whatever big time mafia sleazebag managed to make the papers this week. Then she had heard them arguing, about rope of all things, and she was positive that she'd been mistaken.
Pulling up across the street from the bar, she parked and glared at the quiet picture of the street, the firefight that had gone on inside only moments ago unknown to the outside world. Steam rose from the vents in the street and lights flickered, just as they always did. Scarlett stared at it for a long moment, debating whether she should enter or not. The two men inside, men she'd spent months pursuing, had gunned down an entire bar and executed a major mob boss. It wasn't exactly the safest situation to be carelessly walking into.
And why would her father have sent her to find two men who'd decided it was their calling from god to kill all the evil men in the world? Men who, Scarlett thought to herself, were not entirely unlike her father. For as long as Scarlett could remember, Martin Winslowe had been a member of their world, though perhaps with a slightly different trade than Sumarokov, and Scarlett by extension. She took a deep breath, unsure of exactly what she was doing.
She reached into the back seat of her inconspicuous Chevy and grabbed a bag, taking a quick look inside to make sure she had a gun if she should need it. She sighed, taking one last look at the bar before numbly opening the car door and stepping out, closing it quietly behind her. Her eyes scanned the street as she crossed it, looking for shadows in the darkness, anything that could mean danger on a dark night, which was basically everything on a mafia street in the middle of New York City. She was literally taking her life in her sweaty, clammy hands as her fingers gingerly closed around the handle to the front door. She had to force herself to turn it, to push the door open, to step inside quietly as two men in black made their way around the room, crossing themselves and laying pennies on the eyes of the dead. Her breath caught in her throat at the sight of the blood and she swallowed back against the bile that rose in her throat. "I see you found the pennies." she said, her voice sounding uncertain to her ears – though she knew it better than most people.
Immediately, she found herself looking down the barrels of two silencers as they jumped at the sound of her voice. She screamed and stumbled backwards against the door, dropping her bag and holding out her hands. There were few things she found so utterly disarming as having a gun in her face. She barely liked guns at all. "I'm not armed!" she screamed. The two men looked at her in confusion for a long moment before sharing a look. Seeming to think the better of blowing her brains out – which Scarlett found she was extremely thankful for – they put the guns to down to their sides, though she noticed they didn't forget them altogether.
"Sorry, lass. Ye surprised us." the one with lighter hair, whom she recognized as Connor, told her, his eyes flickering around to see if there was anyone else in the bar. "Anyone else with ya?"
"No. No, it's just me." Scarlett answered quickly. Connor nodded, his gaze still not resting fully on Scarlett and instead drifting down to the floor where her bag had fallen and spilled open. The darker haired one, who Scarlett knew must be Murphy, was eying her from top to bottom critically. Something that Scarlett reluctantly admitted to herself made her very nervous.
"Now who might ye be?" he asked, his tone not entirely unfriendly, but still not welcoming as he watched her carefully. Scarlett opened her mouth to speak, not quite sure what to say.
"I'm... uh..." she began.
"Who cares?" Connor asked suddenly, gaining the attention of both Murphy and Scarlett. He appeared to practically have tears in his eyes as he turned to his brother. "Look, Murph!" he commanded, directing Murphy's attention to her spilled bag. "She brought rope!"
Okay, some notes for the story. Basically, I had started the second chapter earlier, only to discover that my character's got a little ahead of me and the scene that I was writing wasn't really meant for the second chapter, but some point later on in the story. Be warned, the rating'll definitely be going up. If you want me to up it now, as I did shamelessly exploit darling Connor and his embarassing love for rope with a slightly excessive use of the F word, just let me know.
Also, I have no idea where this is going. XD I wrote the summary based entirely on the first chapter, which sort of spilled out of my head once I got the first line down on paper. I did write out a basic idea/plans for the story, but after that scene that isn't actually from the second chapter, taking into account what happened in the first chapter, and then what my characters MADE me write in this second one, I no longer have any insights to offer. The story has taken a life of it's own. I'm revising the summary and going back over my notes and I cannot be blamed for what happens here or how it turns out.