Dragonfly by Jax Hill 

We thought Nikolai didn’t care what had happened to Caroline and Van. He’d told Torstein to send them back or something bad would happen ... and nothing bad had happened. Lots of great stuff had happened. As far as I knew, Torstein had never told Caroline that Nikolai had come to see him.

She’d told us he believed she’d come crawling back ... but she also told us he had never actually acknowledged the boy as his own; Van’s last name was Caroline’s last name, not Nikolai’s. He’d never paid child support (of course, up until then, Caroline had worked for him and lived with him, more or less). We were hoping he’d given up and wasn’t going to try to get his son back. And that was a huge relief to us, honestly. Okay, it was probably very wrong to hope that a man would just forget about his child. But that man ... we would all have rather he forgot us entirely.

            I don’t know what goes on in the head of a mob guy. I don’t know what was going on in Nikolai’s head at this time. Maybe he realized Caroline wasn’t coming back ... maybe he didn’t understand the new way of living that being with Torstein inspired — how you found yourself needing less and less for yourself and giving more and more away ... maybe that’s hard for a mob guy to grasp. Maybe he thought once Caroline was poor and tired of making an honest living, she’d come back. But she didn’t.

Here’s what we could piece together later. Nikolai saw the TV news feature with footage from the double wedding. Ariel Prince was right about one thing: on TV Torstein looked just great. He looked eccentric because of the green coat and glowing eyes, but he looked endearing. The Irresistible Charm just seemed to radiate from the TV. He looked like a charming crazy man who just might know more than he was telling, Big Secrets might be locked up in a crazy man’s mind. A modern-day Rasputin or Zoroaster.

That much made it a cinch that the video would be uploaded to You Tube as well as replayed a couple times on the news throughout the day. People were liking to see a sentimental wedding, and bright new face, a dazzling display of all kinds of people swept up in enthusiasm for Torstein ... and the little snippets of hope and joy that Ariel had edited together from interviews with various people whose lives had been touched by Torstein.

It was this whole feel-good thing, in a three-minute package. I guess Nikolai didn’t get “charm” from Torstein. What he got, apparently, from watching the video, was the idea that his son was now being raised more or less by a bunch of homeless bums with a crazy ring leader. He saw his son on the TV news, ring-bearer in a wedding of a crack whore and a stripper, and he must have decided this had gone far enough. It was time for the “something bad” to happen.

Thugs busted onto the school playground at recess and grabbed Van, who immediately grabbed onto his best friend, Sully, who immediately grabbed him back. They told us later, the two boys wrapped their arms around each other and would not let go. God bless the teachers, they came running to try to help, and they got the crap kicked out of them while the thugs jerked at the two boys and tried to pull them apart. Failing that, they sped away with both boys still wound tight around each other.

The police were called. Caroline was called. Maggie was called. She had to call Angel.

Detective Waverling came to the school to take statements. He immediately took the view that Caroline and Angel were a stripper and a crack whore who had not taken proper care of their children, and that if in fact the boy’s father had come for him, that was not a crime. Angel and her new husband Len insisted that the way the boys had been snatched was a crime, and the fact that their boy had also been taken was definitely a crime. Waverling said they should file a missing persons report once Sully had been missing for 24 hours, but until then, they should stay out of his sight. Maggie was there, too. In fact she was still Sully’s guardian because Angel had given her temporary guardianship for him while she was in rehab, and they had not had a chance to annul this before the wedding.

Maggie doesn’t take any crap, and Caroline was a tough woman, too — I guess she’d had to be tough working for Nikolai. She and Maggie told Waverling none of them were strippers or crack-heads and they were not going to wait for Sully to go missing 24 hours before they got his sorry ass fired, and at this point Waverling had Maggie, Angel, Len and Caroline handcuffed and taken away! They were deprived of their cell phones, jailed, but not charged with any crime. Waverling said they were disrupting an investigation and maybe once they cooled off he would deal with them.

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