Day 186 - Ruel Comes Home

Ruel comes home

 Matthew Ryan Fischer

 

Ruel came home and Kay was happy to see him, but she knew right away something was different. Ruel barely said a word to her and instead went right for a drink. A drink was nothing unusual, but two then three was mostly unheard of. Ruel didn’t explain where he had been, and instead sent men to go find Rendy.

Kay wanted to ask, but instead she told him about what she had seen – police in the neighborhood, arrests being made, people going missing, operations being attacked by rival gangs. Bagus, Maliq, Rama, Tarik. Trouble on nearly every street corner as the man named Arch moved in on the local prostitution rings and replaced the leaders with his own men. Someone was targeting all the local businesses, going street by street, swallowing up everyone. So far no one had come for the money lenders, or for Ruel, but Kay was scared the time was near.

She suggested they take their reserves and the hidden savings and get out of town.

It didn’t seem like Ruel was listening to her.

That had never happened before.

When Rendy arrived Ruel ordered him to gather all his forces, the thieves and pickpockets, the beggars and the street rats. Everyone who had any ear to the street. Ruel usually hated using kids to do his dirty work and barely tolerated Rendy, but now he seemed possessed. Rendy looked at Kay, but neither mentioned to Ruel they were already using the kids to spy on Arch. It seemed Ruel was on the same page.

Something terrible must have happened, thought Kay. Where had he been this past week? What had Arch made him do? Big and some of the others, Rendy and Ruel’s best bodyguards and fighters still hadn’t returned. They barely had enough men to collect their money. And now Ruel wanted to spread them thinner.

“Have any of them ever killed a man?”

Rendy shook his head.

Kay couldn’t believe what Ruel was asking.

“Best they learn how. Silent. Swift. Teach them to slit throats. They need to operate in the shadows, but will need to take down grown men. Achilles tendon to someone on the ground. Guts, wrists, eyes… Make them hard. Hard as can be.”

“Boss, where you been? What’s going on? This isn’t you. You never wanted anything like this before.”

“War is coming. You both better get used to it. If not, walk out that door now and don’t come back. But war is coming and all of us are going to have to do a lot of killing if we want to get out alive. Those kids are nothing. But we don’t have anything else. We have to use what we’ve got and use them well. They’ll never save us in a real fight, so we have to even the odds before anyone really comes looking.”

“And Arch?” asked Kay.

“He’s the list. Top of it. I doubt any kid will ever get close. If they get lucky, god bless them. But they won’t. It will come down to one of us. One of us will have to kill him and his top men. Probably all three of us against him and his best. And pray we get surprise on our side. Arch is so busy tearing up the town and killing other people he might not notice us coming from behind. But he’s picked fights he can’t possibly win and those families won’t see us as any different or wait for explanations. It’s kill or be killed time. Like the old days on the street. I survived that and I’ll survive this.”

Kay thought about her life with Ruel, her entire adult life spent following this man. He was right that he survived everything before, but nothing from their past compared to this. He risked their lives. He had already done it when he took the first payment from Arch. All of them were marked and she said nothing then. She said nothing when Arch wanted to attack his enemies, their allies. She said nothing, as Ruel threw it all away, chasing after some imaginary figure in his head. She stood and watched.

She stood and watched now. She didn’t know what to say.

Ruel looked at her. He had never asked anything of her that she wasn’t willing to do. Now he was asking for her life. Not out of love, not for a future, but because he had been a fool and gotten himself in too deep. He was asking for her to risk her life, give it for him if necessary, in the vain hopes that it would be enough and that he could survive this mess of his own making. He looked to her and she stood and stared.

She didn’t leave though. Kay stood right there. Still. After all this. No matter the danger. She still stood there. She didn’t know where else to go. There was no one and no where and nothing else, even if this too amounted to nothing.

Kay wanted to cry, but instead she nodded in agreement and forced a smile across her face.

“Let’s kill that bastard,” she said, and hoped it was possible.