The Marvelous Ethan Cole

Chapter 4

Not slowly. Not in pieces. All of it, at once, the way a light goes out when someone flips a switch. One moment it was everywhere, consuming everything. The next moment there was only darkness and the smell of smoke and the sound of the frames settling back against the wall.

Ethan stood in the quiet of what was left of his family's restaurant.

His face had changed.

Not the structure of it, still his face, still the same jaw and the same nose and the same eyes. But the expression was different from anything that had ever lived there before. Older. Quieter. The kind of still that comes not from having nothing to say but from having already decided what happens next.

He walked to the door and pushed it open.

Outside, the lead man was standing with his back to the restaurant, hands in his pockets, not watching anymore.

“Should be good by now,” one of the men said.

“Give it another ten minutes,” the lead man said. “I want the roof gone.”

“Hey.” Another one squinted at the building. “Why did the light just—did the fire just go out?”

At that moment the lead man turned around.

The restaurant stood there, dark and smoke-stained and intact. Every window still in its frame. The front door closed.

“What the—” He stepped forward. “Did you idiots not use enough gasoline? What is wrong with you? Nothing just puts out a fire like that. Not a sprinkler system, not a—go back in there and do it again, right now, I want the roof gone.”

The men exchanged looks. Two of them started moving toward the entrance.

They stopped.

The door was opening from the inside.

Ethan stepped out.

He walked the way a different man walks. His hands were at his sides, relaxed. His shoulders were back. His eyes moved across the group of them slowly, taking inventory, and there was nothing behind those eyes that resembled the man who had been bleeding on the floor twenty minutes ago. Nothing that resembled fear, or pain, or the small and desperate hope that someone might choose to show mercy.

The men nearest to him took a step backward without meaning to.

“That's—” one of them started.

“His legs,” another whispered. 

“We broke his legs. Both of them. I heard them.”

Ethan looked at them.

“You're all going to pay for what you did tonight,” he said. His voice was quiet. Completely level. “Every single one of you.”

For a moment, nobody moved.

Then two of the men at the back decided at the same moment to rush him, coming from slightly different angles, moving fast.

Ethan did not move to meet them.

He moved one hand, a small motion, the way anyone wave at someone they recognize across a parking lot, and both men left the ground. One of them traveled sideways through the air and hit the concrete electric pole on the far side of the road back-first and did not come back down. The other one hit the pavement with enough force to bounce once.

No one spoke.

One of the remaining men turned and ran without a word.

Ethan was already in front of him.

He hadn't moved fast enough for anyone to see it happen. He was simply there, the way something arrives in a dream, and his hand closed around the man's throat and the man made one short sound before the sound stopped.

Ethan set him down.

The lead man had not run. He stood where he was, watching everything that was happening to his crew, and the expression on his face had cycled through several things very quickly and had now arrived somewhere between rage and disbelief.

“Who are you?” His voice came out rough. 

“Who are you, actually?”

Ethan turned to look at him.

The lead man pulled himself together with visible effort. He put his shoulders back. 

“I'm sorry,” he said, and something in how quickly the word came out made it clear it was a calculation, not a feeling. “Whatever Mr. Hargrove is paying me to be here tonight, I'll walk away from it. You'll never hear from me—”

Ethan crossed the distance between them.

His hand closed around the man's throat and lifted him without effort, straight up, until the man's feet were off the ground and he was looking down at Ethan from above.

“I told you,” Ethan said, “you were going to pay.”

The man grabbed at Ethan's wrist with both hands. His feet kicked at the air.

Ethan looked at him for a moment longer, then let go.

The man dropped, and before he hit the ground something had already stopped working, his head was  no longer in his neck, and when he landed he did not move again.

The street was quiet.

Ethan stood in the middle of it.

From inside his jacket, a phone began to ring. The lead man's phone, still in the pocket where he'd kept it. Ethan crouched and picked it up.

The name on the screen read: "D. Hargrove."

He looked at it for a moment. Then he answered.

Silence on both ends, then the voice on the other side, sharp with impatience: “Is it done? Did you handle it?”

Nothing.

“Hello? Are you there?” The voice climbed slightly. “Why aren't you answering me? What is wrong with you people? I'm paying you to do a job, not to stand there and breathe into the phone. Say something.”

Ethan said, “It's done.”

A pause.

“...Who is this?”

“You know who this is,” Ethan said. “And I want you to hear me clearly.” His voice did not rise. It did not need to. 

“I'm coming for you Daniel

Don't make any plans. Don't go anywhere. I'll be there soon.”

He ended the call.