Too Little, Too Late

 The man stared down at me, his eyes cold. Hard. I gazed back; my teeth bared in a grin or grimace—I couldn't tell which, only that my mouth was open. His wasn't. It was a flat line under those cold, distant, lifeless eyes. Why did those matter to me so much? It was absurd that these were the things I focused on compared to the pain surging through my legs, the bone-deep fatigue in my arms, and the burning in my chest.

Especially compared to the gun in his hand. The gun in my face.

"You played hard," he said as if that meant anything to me. My grin—no, a grimace—grew. His eyes somehow got deader. "But you should've known this was how it'd end."

"I should've known?" I rasped. God, my throat was dry. "Qualify that a bit. Where did I go wrong?"

He shrugged with one shoulder, leaving the gun trained on me. "You went against the Family."

I rolled my eyes and blinked hard. The smoke and ash in the air was making them water. "Better to die free than live the life of a loyal dog. Isn't that what you used to say?"

His stoic mask cracked, a snarl bursting through like an undammed river. "At least I'll live! Better off than you, moron!"

Ah, there's that fire. I thought, somehow bemused at the outburst. "Are you? I'm not the one executing people for a mafia. I remember when Jay wanted to stop them. What happened to that guy?"

It had been a foolish idea years ago when we were both young and naive. We thought ourselves immortal in the way every teenager did. Jay had just lost his sister to the Mizetari Family, and I'd had a grudge against them on principle for my whole life. But two down-on-their-luck kids—god, we were so young—didn't have a chance of taking on a crime syndicate with fingers in every pie across the globe. But we were immortal and, more importantly, the good guys. The good guys always won in the end, so we made a plan to get there. We'd infiltrate the syndicate, sabotage their work where we could, and eventually bring them down.

Looking back, we were both idiots: such a huge risk and shoddy plan. But we were young, dumb, and grieving—so it didn't matter. We'd win, and live, and be heroes.

Joining up had been disgustingly easy, just a matter of finding the local casino owner—twenty percent of the Family's money came from gambling dens—and throwing ourselves at his feet. Honestly, most of the work was like any old job, just with the knowledge that the higher-ups who came in every so often, with their slicked-back hair and fancy suits, were cold-blooded murderers. Jay hated it, and I hated it, too.

Then we'd gotten our first 'real' job as part of the Family. An easy one, just running some boxes of merchandise—fifteen percent of the Family's money was drug money—to the other end of the city through a more local gang's turf. Jay had been shaking the whole time, afraid that we'd somehow get ourselves made and attacked for driving through a different part of the city. He'd always been a bit more skittish than me back then, so I'd had to talk him through the fact that we were just 'undercover-undercover,' a stupid description. But the childishness of it had calmed his nerves, and we'd done the job without trouble.

It'd gone on like that for a while, running money or other things through different parts of the city. Working as part-time cleaners and couriers was easy enough, but it didn't give us many chances to make good on our plan to bring the Family down. So we'd asked for more 'familial' jobs. The casino owner had laughed and waved us off. We'd had to badger the old crook into letting us in. With hindsight, I realized he'd been trying to protect us in his way.

I wish we'd done as he suggested and kept our heads down. But I only understood that too late.

But we hadn't, and the old crook finally relented after months of requests. We graduated from being couriers to thieves, an entirely different thing. It was different for us but for different reasons. I didn't like making victims of other people, even if it was only stuff we were taking. Jay had been furious when I voiced that complaint. For him, we needed to go faster. He wanted his revenge, and I wanted to help my friend. It burned that my principles weren't strong enough to see me through, but I kept on.

We stole around the city and neighboring towns for a few years. Mostly smash and grabs, sometimes framing other criminals to take the fall. We were good and had a natural talent. So good that we could even skim off our hauls, and no one cared or knew. A Robin Hood tax, we'd joked. We were balancing the scales in our way—robbers of the criminally rich, giving to the criminally poor, or something. Whatever we told ourselves, it was enough at the time.

Talent and luck could only take us so far, and both failed us one night. There was more security than we'd expected, better gates and doors, the whole shebang. We had a few close calls but nearly made it out despite all those odds stacked against us. Except there was a guard, we practically ran into.

The guard had seen us, raised his gun and radio, and promptly caught a fist to the face. Jay's anger hit a boiling point then, his fury at our slow progress translating to a brutal beating for the poor guard. I was too shocked to react. When Jay finally let up, the bloody remnants of the radio falling out of his bruised fingers, the guard didn't look like much of a person anymore. We ran.

I was shaking like a damn leaf the whole way back. I kept expecting Jay to react more strongly. But there was nothing. His face, usually so expressive, had gone blank and cold. He kept looking at his hands as I swerved across the road, his eyes dull and lifeless. It was like he'd spent all his emotions in that one beating. Maybe, now that I think of it, he had.

Our jobs continued for a while after that, but it wasn't the same. Where before, we'd be like shadows, slipping in and around armed guards, Jay was much more willing to get down and dirty with them: chokeholds, blunt force, anything to clear the path forward. Our record got steadily worse. Careful planning meant nothing once guard number thirty-seven missed a radio check-in. He didn't beat another man to a bloody pulp, not that I saw, but his fingers seemed perpetually bruised.

I brought it up with him once when we were both drinking after a job mediocrely done. He snapped, and I yelled back. We were doing well for ourselves, and here he was, ruining any chance of us getting closer to the top and tearing the Family down. Jay had to keep his cool and stop going off over everything.

Jay had snarled that I could only say such things because I was just a thief and a hypocrite who was happy to make money off crime while 'loathing' criminals. I'd have hit him, then, but I wasn't drunk enough to take that fight. The broken bits of radio rattled in the back of my mind. Cold sweat dripped down my back like blood. I left, feeling like far too little.

Days later, I went to that old crook and told him I wanted to run jobs solo for a while. He'd snorted and said I was days late. Jay was gone, already moved on to other parts of the Family business. I didn't make much of it until I realized those other parts were also in other cities, with a very different type of merchandise—twenty percent of the Family's money was from human trafficking. I hadn't thought Jay would get anywhere near that end of the business, let alone volunteer for it, but he'd changed more than I knew.

Months later, I registered that he was looking for his sister. I realized he'd held off for my sake only years later—the idiot. Still, I was too late to do anything about that, either.

Life went on for both of us, though I didn't know—didn't want to know—what Jay did for those years. I did more jobs for the Family until someone finally noticed the Robin Hood tax. That had been a very productive meeting in that they produced a gun from within their coat and shot me twice. The intervening moments were a blur, but I'd managed to escape with my body and personal bank account primarily intact.

Retiring at thirty was a great feeling. Getting arrested at thirty-one because the Family tipped off the cops felt markedly worse.

Unfortunately for whatever petty bastard who ratted on me, I was a fast-talker by necessity and cut a plea deal that had me turning state's witness. Between my knowledge of the veins and arteries of the Family and the surprisingly competent—and uncorrupt—police, the Family's presence in my city was cut down rapidly.

It was just like we'd dreamt so long ago.

But, like any good weed, the Family didn't die until the roots were gone. That's what this had been—a final job to cut out the rot. A raid on a Family-owned warehouse I'd sussed out had some exotic wares on-site. My friends on the force—a phrase that still made my skin itch—took a very dim view of arms dealing and trafficking both. While I agreed, I was slightly insulted at the poor allotment of resources. The number one rule of crime: don't put all your assets in one easy-to-grab pile.

I'd been dragged along with the raid as a matter of safety. While most cops I'd worked with weren't on the take, it was better to be safe than sorry. I'd sit in a van a few blocks away and wait with the overwatch group, all of whom were clean.

Or, at least, they were supposed to be.

I noticed the gun quickly enough to shout a warning but not enough to stop the Family man from taking out two of the others before he was dropped. The remaining cops had to call it in, and I needed some air away from... that. I went a few feet away from the cops and took some breaths, my old wounds aching, and was promptly given new wounds by a second gunman in an alley. The other two with him were more focused on keeping the cops pinned behind the van, so I was mostly free to duck into another alley and run. The first shooter gave chase.

Unfortunately for him, I grew up in these alleys, and some things stuck no matter the age. I lost him in the first few twists and turns, but the memory of nearly dying years prior drove me to keep running. I had to get away.

Unfortunately for me, that need to escape landed me near the warehouse. I'll never know how I'd thought more bullets flying around would be a good thing.

Another shooter, or maybe the same one, had me slipping into the warehouse for cover. I ducked and dodged through rooms, trying to find somewhere to hide or something to defend myself with. The vest the cops had given me saved my life twice, but I wasn't keen on testing its luck more than needed. I found a baton and used it judiciously as I navigated the building, increasingly desperate for some way out. Following old instincts from my early days of stealing, I took the highest place possible. A catwalk overlooking the warehouse floor.

The fighting reached a fever pitch, then. Bullets and curses flew chaotically through the air, followed by choked screams and barked orders. The crates of weaponry were consistently reduced to sawdust as the fight wore on.

A gun spark hit a pile of munitions somewhere in the chaos, and the entire place went up. The last thing I saw before the catwalk gave out beneath my feet was someone climbing the same ladder I had.

When I came to, it was with a scream of my own. Something had snapped in one leg, and the other had a jagged piece of shrapnel buried in it. I painfully forced myself to my knees and started crawling over the wreckage when someone staggered in front of me, their clothes smoldering, their chest and arm bleeding, a gun in their hand.

"What happened to him? I killed him," Jay said in the present, only a few minutes after we reunited. His expression had calmed a bit, the lividity replaced by something harsher. Something resigned. "Had to. She'd have died otherwise."

I balked at that, my grimace wavering. She was alive. That... that was good.

"Then why are you still in the Family?" I asked.

"Because you don't leave the Family once you're a part of it," he replied. "I had to buy my own sister, dammit. And they'd kill me if I ratted like you. Kill her and me both."

"And how's she feel about you working with the people who took her in the first place?" I snapped, flexing my hands. Better than before.

His face livened again, the gun drawing closer to my own.

"You shut your damn mouth, Lee! You were only ever in it for the money, you heartless bastard," he hissed. "I let you drag me down for too long. Could've saved her from so much shit if I'd just cut you loose."

I was in far too much pain to be afraid of the outburst. Unlike that night so long ago, I didn't feel phantom blood down my back or hear a radio shatter against a man's skull.

"And now she's your leash to the Family. I'm sure she loves that, mutt." I laugh, testing my hands again—almost enough. "You sleep well at night in your kennel? You're nothing but a mad dog-"

The gun whipped across my face, drawing blood and an involuntary grunt of pain. "Damn you, Lee, damn you to hell."

"Go ahead, then!" I growled, suddenly enraged. Where did he get off acting all high and mighty just because he had the gun? He was the criminal, not me. Not anymore. "You killed Jay? Then you'd best kill Lee, too! They were best friends, you know. Go on!"

He glared again and brought the gun to rest against my forehead. "You always did talk too much."

I bent downward, bringing my hands—clumsy and wracked with agony—up to grab the gun. I just needed to get it out of his hands and-

The bark of gunfire deafened me as I fell backward, my legs caught awkwardly underneath my body. Sharp agony pierced the space above my right eye.

His face was alive with something. Guilt, surprise, or something else—I couldn't tell.

The gun smoked in his hand. My hands twitched. 

I'd been too slow.

I grimaced ruefully. No. Grinned.

Just like always. Too little, too late.