All familiar characters and events belong to Janet. Any mistakes are solely mine.
Frank managed another awkward hug with his daughter, though it appears slightly less uncomfortable each time one takes place, and we said goodbye to both men. I closed his apartment door behind my wife and I, and I then stood still so she could walk right into my arms.
"Proud of you, Babe," I said against her temple, a few curls tickling my face at the contact. "Your game face rivals Tank's."
She let out a breath, and then another one before she spoke. "That was not easy."
"Nothing worthwhile is. But you did good. You didn't purposely hurt your father, but you didn't take any shit or unearned blame either. As an outside observer, I can say that you and Frank have come a long way in just these past two weeks. As your husband, I want to punch him for ever hurting you."
I felt her lips form a smile against my T-shirt. "Thank you for restraining yourself."
"Don't thank me too much. It was touch and go for a few minutes there. If I didn't fully understand – and have experienced firsthand - what he's dealing with separate from what he has to repair with you and Valerie, I wouldn't have made it this long without beating some more sense into him."
She drew back, cupped my face in her hands, and kissed me in a way that's usually reserved for our bedroom.
"What was that for?" I asked, when she pulled back for air.
"For always being - and saying - exactly what I need."
"It will forever be my pleasure, Babe. Now that this first session is behind you, I am a little concerned what Olivia got Tank to do in our absence. Are you settled enough to get back to our daughter?"
"No. But I am worked up enough to meet this One Shot character. I know he's around here somewhere, since four is where all the apartments are."
"Are you sure you're up to this right now?"
"You're only asking that because I couldn't bite my Dad's head off, so now your mysterious friend's noggin could become the chopping block-target."
"And I ask again, are you sure you want to do this?"
"Yes. I'm not going to relax knowing he's in the building if I don't."
I really want to argue. She's tip-toed through enough emotional minefields today, but I also understand her need to judge for herself whether or not someone is a threat to her family or her own sanity. She'd normally take my word when I personally vouch for someone, but that was before Olivia and the vow she made to our daughter on the day she was born … to never clip her wings but protect them at all costs.
I slipped my arm around her and escorted her to the end of the hall, not feeling reassured by how heavily she's leaning into me. She puts up a good front, but being the loving woman she is … every emotion hits her twice as hard as they do a typical person, and her talk with her father has taken a toll.
I rapped on the door and it was immediately opened. "I've been expecting you," Atlas said, sizing Stephanie up as she was staring him down.
"You tried to kill my husband, didn't you?" She asked, coming out of the gate swinging.
He sighed, being used to explaining his previous life, but never enjoying it. "Yes. Come on in and I'll tell you why."
She stood taller and crossed her arms over her chest. "How about you tell me why I should listen to anything you have to say?"
"Steph," I said into her ear, "let him talk … if only because I come off really good in his story."
The smile she gave me had me less concerned. "Of course you do. And for that alone, I'll try to be nice long enough to hear all about it."
Atlas caught my eye over Steph's head. "Am I going to survive this?"
"If Steph had her shoulder bag with her, I'd say no. Since she's unarmed right now, you have a thirty-percent chance of survival. Her knee is a weapon of mass relocation though, so keep your distance."
"Stop making jokes about this," my wife ordered, moving into the apartment … knowing I'm right behind her. "This is serious. You may trust this guy, but I don't have that luxury yet. Our daughter is only a few floors away."
"I promised you from the very beginning, that you're safe here," I said for her ears alone. "And that's even more true today than it was back then. As I told your father, I never leave my family unprotected."
"I know. That's the only reason I'm willing to hear him out when I'd already made up my mind to be a hardass."
"I'm honored by your visit whether I deserve it or not," Atlas told her.
"Don't try to butter me up," Steph warned, pulling out a chair from the small kitchen table. "That crap doesn't work with me. Are you here to hurt Ranger or involve him in something I'd prefer he steer clear of?"
I sat down only after One Shot did. The look I shot him conveyed that my wife is judge, jury, and executioner here. If she's uncomfortable with him, he's gone.
"I didn't call your husband for any other reason than I needed a place where my past couldn't touch me."
"Start at the beginning, Atlas," I ordered him. "That'll help Stephanie understand a little better."
"I think she's already decided I'm the devil incarnate. I'm not sure what good it'll do."
"Try me," Steph told him, putting her elbows flat on the table and leaning forward. "I'm open-minded to almost a deadly degree at times, just not when it's about someone I love."
"My life isn't pretty and nothing's gonna make it that way, so I'm just gonna spit it out. My parents, and I use that term only for story-telling purposes. Neither one did shit for me. The state got stuck with me once the hospital decided I was healthy enough to kick out. I always joke that my shorter stature is due to a few cocaine smoothies and heroin chasers. My mother's womb was party central for a while. It caught up to her while in prison a year after I was hauled away. And I split from the last of eight foster homes as soon as I was old enough to survive on my own, not having a better home in any of them."
Stephanie's blue eyes never left his two-toned ones. "Which you did however you could, survived I mean."
"Yeah. When I joined a gang at thirteen, it was the first family I felt part of … and they used that to get me to do anything to stay. My appearance didn't scare a fucking bug, 'scuse the language, so I had to find some way to earn respect to keep myself alive as much as to keep being a member of the only 'family' I had."
"Unfortunately for Atlas, he was the gang's gunman and I was put at the top of his hit list," I added.
"How did you get wrapped up in a gang?" She asked me. "I know you had a tough time yourself growing up, but I don't remember a Newark gang being mentioned in any of your stories."
"One of the members beat up a friend of mine who happened to see something he shouldn't have according to them," I explained. "I'd gotten pretty good at hand-to-hand combat well before I enlisted, and my ability to track down the fucker who hurt someone I cared about to exact a little revenge, wasn't met with a round of applause for locating him."
"The guy Ranger beat the shit out of was a high-ranking member of the gang I was involved in. I was sent out for payback. I wasn't good at a lot, still ain't, but as soon as I had a gun shoved in my hand, I taught myself to shoot a tick off a blade of fucking grass."
"He claims his blue eye is the equivalent to a high-powered rifle scope," I told my wife, grinning at the shit he comes up with.
Steph wasn't nearly as amused. "You were ordered to shoot Ranger?"
"Yeah. And if I didn't, I wasn't just out of the gang, I was going to be taken out … the method was to be determined at the time of that threat. Personally, I thought your husband's retaliation was justified, but I had a job to do and nowhere else to go if I didn't do it."
"So what happened?" Steph asked. "You're both here and appear to even be friends …"
"Not only was your Ranger good at interrogating seventeen to twenty-two-year-olds to find the bastard who beat a buddy into silence, he wasn't too shabby at sensing when he's being followed. I thought I was King Shit about to pull off a surprisingly easy job, when I was actually a clueless idiot walking into a trap. Your husband lured me to a recently abandoned house, doubled back around before I even reached the door, and put a knife to my throat. I suddenly saw the error of my ways when I saw a stream of my own blood tricklin' into my T-shirt," One Shot joked.
My wife looked at me. "Does your mother know any of this happened?"
"Yes … well most of it. I omitted specific details to cut down on her worrying. That incident was the last straw and got me living in Miami for a time. To their credit, my parents listened to what I had to say after neighborhood elders shared that I could be in trouble, and they knew that time I wasn't just screwing around, stealing cars and doing other stupid shit they didn't approve of. On the flip side, they were genuinely worried about me and I thought they'd be safer if I weren't in Newark until fallout from an unsuccessful hit blew over."
"So you two bonded over both losing your families?" She asked us.
"You could say that," I replied. "One Shot learned he isn't immortal and that his life could end if he comes across someone faster, and time with my grandparents reinforced that my life could be taken away in a multitude of ways, but my family would be the ones who suffer because of it. It's one thing to die, it's an entirely other thing to actually want to. I kept myself out of trouble and graduated, came back to Jersey and tried out college, but decided to become a Ranger. I owed a debt of gratitude to the people who never gave up on me, so I made something of myself."
"I survived a beat-out from my gang and was given a new lease on life so to speak," Atlas told Steph. "When I was back on the streets, I met a woman who wanted to 'save me'. And for a time, I let her. But I couldn't keep being someone's charity case. I needed the feeling of being able to take care of myself. So when word on the street said 'ol Ranger here was home on leave, I looked him up and asked for help. He didn't kill me when he could have with no one even noticing I was gone. And he believed me when I said I was done settling other people's shit, so I thought he could point me in the direction of something better … and he's been doing it ever since."
"Not many men would've gone from a hitman with an impressive reputation, who was making serious money, to a dishwasher collecting barely minimum wage at a family friend's restaurant," I reminded him. "Don't sell your soul short. You could've sold it a long time before I ever met you."
One Shot shifted his blue and brown eyes towards my wife. "He's always saying shit like that. I thank him for getting me a crappy job, and he flips it and says he's glad I asked for one."
"Yeah, it's a personality quirk not many people have … always finding some deeply-hidden bit of good in almost everyone. I require a bit more convincing these days, though."
She lifted her cell from the table and searched for something stored in it. I leaned in to see what she was after, and I knew she was about to make a kill shot herself. She left the picture up on the screen and slid it over for Atlas to see. His multicolored eyes took in a photo Steph snapped of Julie when she had Olivia sitting on her lap, both enjoying a bite of pancake from the stack in front of them. It was taken on the third day of our yacht trip when we were enjoying the weather by having breakfast on deck.
"Do you see those two beautiful girls?" Steph asked One Shot.
Being a reasonably-smart man, he didn't say anything … he just let Stephanie get whatever she needed to off her chest.
"If you had killed Ranger back then, these two amazing people wouldn't exist," she continued. "And considering how many times he's saved me, I wouldn't be alive right now either. So you'll have to excuse me if I need a little more than a sanitized backstory, and a seemingly innocent job-request, to not want to kill you myself for almost taking the life of someone who's given life to so many."
