Fractured Breaths Page 18

  Walking home from the train station, I stop at bodega around the corner from the house and pick up some snacks.

  Back on the sidewalk, I notice a black van parked at the corner. I don’t think much of it, other than its running and there doesn’t appear to be anyone inside. There are no windows in the back and no business logo on the side. I shrug it off and keep walking toward home.

  I stand on the corner, waiting for the light to change so I can cross the street. I’m alone, oddly alone. Finally the light changes, but the next thing I know I’m being dragged backwards, a hand over my mouth, and then a hood is thrown over my head.

  I bite the hand over my mouth and the man curses at me, “Do that shit again and I’ll kick all your fucking teeth out of your mouth.” I don’t recognize the voice, but the accent is easily identifiable. It’s Italian.

  I scream when the man throws me onto something that I can’t see, and then I hear a door slide closed and tires squealing as I’m thrown backwards. I’m in the van.

  “Livia! Come on, baby, wake up.”

  “Wha…” I scoot away from someone I can’t see in the dark room.

  “Livi, breathe,” a familiar voice says.

  I pull in a deep breath, but it doesn’t help. The memory is so real, so vivid. “Where am I?” I ask, still unable to see. The bed, a bed, the voice, Bryan. “Bryan?”

  “I’m here, baby.” A light flicks on and I blink rapidly trying to adjust to the sudden intrusion as the memory of the dream fades away.

  “I need that box,” I say, unsure what it means.

  “What box?” His eyebrows knit together in confusion.

  “A box my father had. It was in his closet.”

  Bryan’s brow unfurls and he settles next to me.

  “Do you think Liam kept it?” I ask him.

  “I don’t know. If you know what it looks like, he might be able to tell you.”

  I nod. “I’ll ask him.” I move to get up from the bed.

  His hand wraps around my wrist. “In the morning. It’s the middle of the night.”

  “Oh,” I blush, looking down at my naked body. “Good point.”

  I climb back into bed and he wraps his arms around me. “You want to talk about your dream?”

  “It was nothing,” I whisper.

  “It didn’t sound like nothing.” His voice is soft, concerned.

  I swallow. “I was reliving the day they took me off the streets. But it was odd; it started a couple weeks before that. I watched my father put this box up in the closet. When I asked him about it, he said it was nothing, but I knew that wasn’t true. I vowed to go after the box and look inside, but I’d forgotten about it. Until now.”

  “Do you have any idea what’s inside?”

  I shake my head. “I haven’t a clue. But I feel like I need to find out.”

  Bryan nods then yawns. “We leave in the morning.”

  I sigh, “I know.”

  After a few minutes, Bryan’s breathing evens out as he falls asleep. Me? I lay there awake, unable to turn my mind off. I can’t stop thinking about that box and what may or may not be in it. I desperately want to ask Liam if he knows about the box, but Bryan was right. It’s two-thirty in the morning. Liam deserves his rest; he’s got a lot going on in the next couple days.

  I can only imagine what’s inside that box or why it made my father so nervous. It didn’t dawn on me at the time, but then again, I didn’t know anything compared to what I know now.

  My father worked a lot, but he tried to stick mostly to overnight shifts so he could be home when I got home from school. We often ate dinner at four and five o’clock at night because he had to run off to work for the night. Many times he wouldn’t be home when I got up in the morning, so I cherished what little time we had in the afternoons and on the rare occasions that we got that time.

  For some reason, things had been different in the weeks leading up to Christmas but when I asked him about it, he’d just tell me work was slow. I found that hard to believe given it was New York and the holidays. He’d been a detective for as long as I can remember and I don’t ever remember having him around so much, especially close to Christmas. In hindsight, I’m glad he was there.

  By the time the sun rises through the windows of Bryan’s bedroom, I’m wiping away tears remembering that last Christmas with my father and I’m ready to face the storage locker Liam set up for me.

  I slide out of bed carefully. Thankfully, Bryan stays asleep.

  I stand there for a few minutes watching him sleep. He looks so peaceful. The last couple days have been a chaotic whirlwind of activity and this is the first time I’ve seen him sleep for longer than a couple hours. It’s nice to see.

  I go into the closet and find a t-shirt and a pair of pajama pants and then quietly leave the bedroom in search of Liam. I go to his room, but the door is slightly ajar and all the lights are off, indicating he’s probably not in there. I go to his office, a little closet of a room off the hallway on the way to the studio. I knock, but there’s no answer so I turn toward the kitchen and nearly collide with Liam. I nearly scream and fall over until he steadies me.

  “Looking for me?” he teases.

  “Don’t do that to me,” I pant. My breathing starts to slow to normal.

  “Sorry, lass. Everything alright?” he asks.

  I shake my head. “Not really. I had a dream last night. Or maybe it was a memory, I can’t quite tell the difference some days.”

  “About?”

  “My father’s closet. A few days before Christmas, before he was killed, I caught him putting a box up on his shelf. I didn’t think anything of it at the time, but seeing the memory, he looked paranoid, scared, when I caught him. I’m wondering if you remember the stuff that’s in the storage unit.”

  He shrugs. “I remember some stuff. I did pull some boxes from his closet, but I don’t know if there was anything in them of significance.”

  “Did you go through them?”

  He shakes his head. “Not really. I went looking for things like guns and stuff like that, but I didn’t pay much attention to his paperwork. Though…” he pauses, thinking, “Now that you mention it, there were a couple of boxes that looked like they had old case files in them.”

  “Please tell me you kept them?”

  “Of course I did, lass. I figured anything he kept, for whatever the reason, was important somehow. Like I said, I figured one day you’d like to go through it, decide what was important and what’s not.”

  “I’d like to see the unit.”

  “Are you sure?” he asks me.

  “Yes, I have to know if that box is in there.”

  “Alright, I’ll make arrangements,” he concedes.

  “Today?” I ask. “Bryan’s schedule is clear for travelling.”

  “Have you talked to Bryan about this?”

  I shake my head. “He woke me from the dream. I told him about the box, but I didn’t say anything about wanting to go today. I just don’t know if I can wait any longer,” I admit. There may be something in there that is somehow important. Though I can’t imagine what it would be or what it would do for anyone. Who knows, maybe it will give me some closure.

  “Alright, lass. We’ll clear it with Bryan.”

  “I’d like him to be there.”

  He hesitates, “I don’t know…”

  “Be where?” Bryan says from behind Liam.

  I peer around Liam’s shoulder to see him standing there half-naked in only pajama bottoms and bare feet. My mouth waters.

  “I want to go to the storage unit.”

  “The dream?” he asks.

  “Yes. I’d like to do it today.”

  Bryan nods. “If that’s what you want, we’ll go.”

  “Liam doesn’t think you should come.”

  Bryan looks at Liam with questions in his eyes. “I didn’t mean anything by it. I just…” Liam sighs, “I’ll make arrangements.”

  “You just, what?” I ask.


  Liam turns back to me. “I didn’t know if it would be something you’d want to do on your own. I can make arrangements to have the contents moved down here and you can go through them at your leisure.”

  “We’re leaving in a little over a week for three months. I highly doubt that’s enough time for me to go through the contents, provided you can get them to Nashville quickly. I know, for whatever the reason is, I have to find that box.”

  “Alright, why don’t we do this? We will go to the unit, see if we can locate the box. In the meantime, Liam, why don’t we work on arrangements for getting the contents shipped here for when we return from the tour. I mean, how much stuff is in this unit?”

  Chapter Twenty-One

  On a Mission.

  BRYAN

  “Holy shit,” Livia squeaks as Liam lifts the door on her storage unit. We haven’t even been to the hotel yet.

  During the flight from Nashville to New York, Livia was bouncing in her seat with anxiety and anticipation. I thought it had to do with coming to New York, but apparently it has everything to do with this box. She insisted we come straight here and neither Liam nor I were in the mood to argue with her.

  “Did you throw anything out?” she asks Liam as she steps inside the unit.

  “Sure, I did. Anything that was clearly trash and most everything in the kitchen, and a good majority of your dad’s stuff. I didn’t think you really wanted to be sifting through his clothes when and if you ever opened this unit.”

  “So you kept basically everything but the kitchen sink,” she snarks.

  “More or less,” Liam teases back.

  I look around the unit. It’s a large unit, probably the equivalent of two or three normal sized ones. It’s ridiculously well-organized and the boxes are all labeled. “How much time did you spend on this?” Livia asks him.

  “Too much time.”

  “I can tell,” she says as she starts reading his awful handwriting on the labels.

  From here I can see things marked, living room, kitchen, though there are only two. Then Livia’s room takes up a good majority of the boxes lining the walls. In the center of the unit is some furniture. Dressers and nightstands, plus a couch that looks like it fell out of the seventies. Livia’s hand slides along the backside of the orange, green and yellow, well-used sofa. “I hated this thing. It’s so gaudy and ugly.” The playfulness is gone, replaced by melancholy.

  Liam gives a little chuckle. “I moved that thing three times. It’s heavy as hell.”

  Livia continues to look around at the boxes until she stops in front of a stack labeled ‘Merc’. She points to them and turns back to Liam, “His room?”

  “Aye, lass.”

  UNKNOWN

  “What do you want?”

  “You told me to call when unit five-six-three was opened.”

  “Has it been opened?”

  “Yes, and as far as I can tell, it’s still open.”

  “Good.”

  The line goes dead.

  LIVIA

  I pull down a box. It’s the first of six that have my father’s nickname labeled on them. “Got a scissors?”

  “No, but I have a knife,” Liam answers as he flips open a knife and hands the hilt to me.

  “Thanks,” I offer without delight before sliding the knife along the tape and popping the top open. Inside are miscellaneous things from my father’s room- things from his night stands, some magazines, and a couple of books. My father was a sucker for true crime novels and this box has plenty of those. “Not there,” I say before shoving the box to the side.

  Bryan recloses the box. We don’t have any tape so he alternates the flaps to close it back up. I pull down the next box and slice into it. There is nothing of significance inside. Some more books, other miscellaneous things that aren’t what I’m after.

  “Is there any chance you emptied the contents into something else?”

  “No, I just packed stuff up as I found it,” Liam tells me.

  I shove the second box off to the side and go through two more boxes without seeing much, though I did find my father’s badge. That was the hardest thing to look at. Dirty cop or not, he loved his job and he was damn good at it. “Until the system failed me so bad, I wanted to be a cop. I wanted to be a detective like my father,” I share with no one in particular.

  Neither of them replies. I didn’t expect them to.

  I reach for the next box and there is a noise down the hall. Liam reaches for the gun on his hip, unlocking the holster and backing up toward the door. My heart starts pounding in my chest and my hands start shaking.

  I hear voices, I can’t make them out, but they sound like they’re happy-go-lucky types and another door closes down the way and Liam drops his guard. “Should I be worried?” I ask.

  “No, lass, I just haven’t been to this unit in a long time.”

  “Does anyone know you have it?” Bryan asks.

  “Aye, my brother.”

  “No one else?” I ask.

  “No, Livia, no one else.”

  I nod in understanding then go back to the box in front of me. I slide the blade of the knife through the tape and flip the flaps. My heart stops pounding and my breathing stops altogether. Inside this box are several smaller boxes. The ones on the top I remember from my dad’s closet. I flip the lid on the first one. Shoes. I roll my eyes. “For a cop, he had a fine taste in shoes,” Bryan says from where he’s observing at my side.

  “He used to spend hours polishing his shoes. Work boots, anything that went on his feet. The man didn’t own a pair of tennis shoes.” I recall the memory of watching him polish his boots. It was something he did often and I actually enjoyed watching him do it. It was almost methodic, rhythmic. I understand the appeal. It’s almost cathartic.

  I pull the lid up on the next box, more shoes. I pull both from the bigger box and reveal another below them. “That’s it,” I squeak. “That’s the box.” I pull a nondescript brown box from inside the larger box.

  “Can we take it with us, lass?”

  “Yeah,” I reply handing the box to Bryan who holds on to it while I reach in and open the next box only to find more shoes. I pull it out quick and flip open the last two boxes on the bottom. One has some file folders in it so I grab it. The other box has more shoes. I put the four boxes of shoes back inside and close it up. I hand Bryan the file folder box and take the other one from his hand. He doesn’t hesitate to hand it over to me. “Let’s go,” I tell them both.

  We step outside the unit and Liam pulls down the rolling door and locks it, then sets the alarm. We start walking down the hallway toward the stairs of the five story storage facility. “You seriously carried all that stuff up here?”

  “Nah, there’s an elevator around the corner,” Liam shares, his voice lighter now that we’re out of the unit. I look out the window, down in the parking lot and freeze. Sitting there in the lot is a black van, much like the van that was on the street corner that day. It’s like déjà vu all over again.

  “They’re here,” I breathe.

  “Who?” Bryan and Liam ask in unison.

  “That van, it’s just like…” I can’t speak anymore because I can’t draw air into my lungs.

  “Livia, relax,” Liam orders as he gets closer to me. “I will check it out, alright. But I’m pretty sure that van was here when we got here.”

  I nod, but I’m not sure I’m hearing him. “I knew I shouldn’t have come back here.”

  “Livia, breathe, it’s alright,” Bryan consoles me.

  “Come on, let’s go down, I will look into it, alright?” Liam asks.

  I nod, but I’m having a hard time getting my feet to move. Bryan wraps his arms around me, bringing me back to him. “You’re safe, Livia, no one can touch you now. Understand me?”

  I nod again, the fog clearing and reality returning. They’re both right. I’m overreacting. “I’m sorry, I just...”

  “No need to apologize. Okay? Let’s jus
t go.”

  I nod and Bryan releases me. I follow Liam down the stairs. Each stair makes me feel a little better. It’s irrational of me to think that after all this time they’d be keeping an eye on something they don’t even know exists, right? Right.

  UNKNOWN

  “Do they have it?”

  “I don’t think so. They just have two boxes. But I’ll be honest with you, it’s not her.”

  “What do you mean it’s not her?”

  “It looks nothing like her. And the two that are with her? I have never seen either one of them before. Are we sure it was in there?”

  “Yes, damn it. It’s in there. We need to find a way into that unit.”

  “They reset the alarm.”

  “That’s never stopped us before.”

  “If you’re so fucking confident it’s in there, why in the hell haven’t we gone in there before?”

  “Until they went back in there, I wasn’t even sure it was there, or that it even exists. Now I’m confident.”

  “And if you’re too late?”

  “Oh, we’re never too late.”

  The line goes dead.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  One Last Hope.

  LIVIA

  “Climb in back with her,” Liam tells Bryan as we exit the building, making a beeline for the SUV.

  “What’s going on?” I ask as we climb inside.

  “Nothing, Livia.”

  “Don’t give me that,” I snap.

  “I think it’s nothing, okay? Please, just try and relax,” Liam says as he starts the vehicle.

  “I knew I shouldn’t have come back here.”

  “Stop, please,” Bryan orders. “I understand your fear, but you’re being irrational here. After all this time, do you honestly believe someone has been watching this storage unit every day? Or that they just randomly picked today to come here?”