Friend of the Devil

by James D F Hannah

  “This why you killed Jimmy? He knew about the trafficking and said no?”

  “You are still trying to sell that old story, aren’t you? You are like a dog with a goddamn bone.”

  I ignored Mickey and kept on talking because it was what I do. “I bet Jimmy was fine with the guns since you had been doing it so long, and hijacking trucks had to be high risk but also high reward. But moving people for the Russians, that might have been something else entirely. Hard to keep selling yourself as someone who believes in freedom when you’re responsible for selling human beings.”

  “We ain’t nothing but intermediaries, man. We’re conduits, getting something from Point A to Point B.”

  I tried to laugh, but it hurt, so I stopped mid-chuckle. “What happened? They putting fancy words on the backs of Pabst Blue Ribbon cans? Expand your vocabulary while you drink shitty beer?”

  Woody cleared his throat and spit up a wad of phlegm. “That’s how Dave got involved, isn’t it? He’d had a CDL and he knew how to handle big rigs, so you shitrags thought he could drive these hijacked runs. That’s why you pushed harder on him, building up leverage so you could convince him to drive. Dave, though, he didn’t want anything to do with you. And Sheila, she didn’t know what was going on, so she slept with Jimmy again, hoping that would end the problem. No idea what was going on behind the scenes.”

  I stared at Mickey. “I bet you decided to kill Jimmy the night at the Dew Drop Inn. Night of the fight. Dave blows up at Jimmy, and it becomes the perfect excuse to take Jimmy out. Get your head seat at the table, am I right?”

  Woody did a slow head turn back toward Frog and Toad. “Which one of you assholes did it?”

  Frog’s eyes swelled to the size of soccer balls. It did nothing for his looks, and if anything, he resembled his namesake more than he had before. He shifted the gaze of those giant orbs between Mickey Nevada and Toad. A nervous twitch, like a tic, hit the corners of his mouth.

  Toad jammed his elbow hard into Frog’s ribs. Frog let out a weak grunt.

  “We went where the money was,” Toad said. “That’s the American way.”

  I shook my head. “Goddamn but can you please not be the one who explains this shit, because every time you talk, my life is a little worse than it was before you started.”

  Toad glared at me. “Fuck you, asshole.”

  I looked at Woody. “See right there. Somehow worse than it was just a second ago. How the hell does that shit happen?”

  At the gate, a truck horn sounded. The guards spoke to the driver and then swung the gates open. A green Jaguar with windows darkened blacker than six feet up a bull’s asshole pulled up.

  The pair who’d visited Billy and me stepped out from the front of the car. The albino had been driving. He wore a red jumpsuit and no shirt underneath the half-zipped jacket.

  Gold Teeth came around from the passenger side and opened the rear door. Out stepped a broad-shouldered, stocky woman, about fifty, with close-cropped hair flecked with gray, and dark eyes set close together. She wore an out-of-style purple suit that looked left over from Goodfellas, with the skirt hem just past the knees, short enough to show off thick, tattooed calves. She looked like a mix of a 1970s PTA mother and a merchant marine.

  Gold Teeth and the albino took protective stances on either side of the woman as she approached us. The albino removed a pack of cigarettes from his jacket pocket and handed them to her. She shook a cigarette loose and waited for Gold Teeth to produce a lighter. He touched the tip of the cigarette with the edge of the orange flame that erupted from the Zippo, and she sucked back a deep, unhealthy drag, sighing the smoke out of her lungs. They never stopped moving throughout the entire process, performing it all with a practiced assurance that said they’d done this a long ass time.

  She stopped and looked at Mickey Nevada. About now was when Mickey’s body language changed. That cockiness turned off, and what showed up in its place was an eagerness, like a child hoping to please his favorite teacher. He flashed a nervous smile at the woman. She responded by blowing smoke in his face. Mickey never flinched and kept on smiling like the shit-eating asshole he was.

  “You got my Mexicans?” she said. She said it with heavy vestiges of a Russian accent you expected from a James Bond bad guy.

  “Yes, Ms. Yakovna,” Mickey said. “They’re all ready for you.”

  She gestured toward the truck. “Open it up and let me see them.”

  Mickey glanced around nervously. “I’m not sure that’s a good idea, Ms. Yakovna. I—”

  “Mickey, if I wanted an idea from you, I’d tell you not to flush after you took a shit. But since I haven’t done that, and I haven’t had a stroke . . .” She looked at the albino. “I haven’t had a stroke, have I, Rudolph?”

  The albino smiled. His teeth were crusty and yellow, like dabs of butter left on the kitchen counter. “Not that I’m aware of, ma’am.”

  “I have not.” Attention back to Mickey. “Open the goddamn truck up and show me my fucking Mexicans, Mickey, or I’ll have Rudolph kill you and then I’ll let Wilhelm fuck your corpse.”

  Gold Teeth’s eyes swelled with joy at the potential of mid-afternoon necrophilia. He smiled the way kids smile when promised Dairy Queen on the way home from church.

  Mickey motioned to the other Saints. “Throw open this truck. Move your fucking asses now!”

  Despite the fact that the specter of death hung over our heads like birthday party balloons, there was something satisfying about watching Mickey Nevada seem like he was ready to fill his briefs with panic shits at any moment. Though, in my defense, I am often a small and petty man, and I take the pleasures in life where I can.

  A swarm of leather-clad bikers came down onto the truck, pulling down the ramp and swinging open the huge doors. Two of them walked into the truck and yelled commands in Spanish.

  A young woman came out of the rear of the semi first. She took tentative steps. I guessed she was about nineteen, twenty years old, with a lean figure and her dark hair cut so short, you’d have mistaken her for a boy about the same age. Clutched to her side was a little boy, three or four years old, a baseball cap pulled over his eyes, his thumb popped into his mouth. The young woman looked back into the truck. One of the Saints came out and gave her a push. She stumbled a few steps and then she and the boy walked down the ramp.

  Then came the others. Mostly young, mostly female. There were a few men, whip-thin and tense. They dressed in a variety of thrift store rags. No one looked more than mid-twenties. The men put on an edge of machismo, taking on a sheen of protectiveness of the women, ready for a fight. Then they got a look at the Saints and the guns, and they Realized that while there may have been more of them than there were of Saints, the Saints had the advantage via the number of bullets.

  They herded together into a pool of humanity, about thirty or so. I tried to count them as they came off the truck, and it was somewhere between despairing and overwhelming.

  Yakovna said, “The shoes still in there?”

  “You still want the shoes?” Mickey said it in a surprised tone. Like the humans weren’t enough, she wanted footwear as well.

  Yakovna clenched her cigarette between her teeth and smacked Mickey upside the head. Mickey grunted and drew back and pulled back a fist. Rudolph whipped a pistol out from underneath his jacket and crammed it into Mickey’s face.

  “Oh dear God, please do it,” Rudolph said.

  Gold Teeth licked his lips. Jesus Christ, but he licked his fucking lips at this shit. I could imagine his fate if Gold Teeth got hold of him. Something close to the content from those “secret” videotapes everyone heard about back in the 80s, the ones stores couldn’t stock on the shelves, that you had to rent from the back. The ones that were supposed to be the most repugnant, disgusting things your fevered brain could imagine, and that you wanted to watch until you realized there are things you can’t unsee and you can never forget. I almost felt bad for Mickey. Almost.

  Yakovna knoc
ked ash from her cigarette onto the ground. “Of course I want the fucking shoes. They’re on the fucking manifest, you fucking half-wit. You didn’t fuck with ’em, did you?”

  Mickey let his fist drop to the side and shook his head. “No, ma’am. But we had to leave most of them back at the accident. There wasn’t time—”

  Yakovna popped Mickey another one. Mickey didn’t even flinch this time and took it like a good little bitch. “Those shoes were money, you fuck-tard. Niggers and white trash show up at a flea market, buy those shoes, that’s fucking found money right there.” She ground out her cigarette underneath the toe of her white New Balance sneakers. “Put the gun away, Rudolph; you’re getting Wilhelm all excited over there.”

  A biker came halfway down the ramp and said, “Hey, Mickey! We got one in here, he ain’t moving.”

  Yakovna exhaled an angry plume of gray smoke. Mickey Nevada’s knees may have trembled a little. Yakovna looked like a Russian high school principal. As that thought passed through my mind, I remembered Lily and her insistence I not get killed. I hated the idea I might break that promise to her.

  Yakovna jerked her head toward the trailer. “Get up there, find out what’s up with the merchandise.”

  Mickey Nevada raced up the ramp. He and the other biker mumbled words to one another, someone said, “Motherfuckers!” and then next they dragged a man down the ramp by his arms. The man’s dark skin was flushed red, his tongue pushed past swollen lips to dangle out of his mouth.

  A few of the Mexicans turned their heads. Others crossed themselves and cast their eyes toward heaven and said brief prayers. Some men moved as if they were about to charge toward Mickey and the other guy.

  A biker I remembered from the day at the tow lot—with horn-rimmed glasses and plenty of beard, named Eddie or Donny—rushed toward the men and threw a forearm that caught one younger guy in the windpipe. He gasped and grabbed at his throat and dropped to the ground. His friend paused and looked at the guy and put his hands out, open palms, deciding he didn’t want any of this.

  Mickey dragged the dead man off around and dropped him a few feet from us. He hadn’t been dead long—rigor mortis hadn’t set in yet—but sitting out in the sun, he would stiffen up soon, and he’d get ripe.

  Yakovna shook her head. “Not acceptable, Michael. You can’t be letting my merchandise ruin this way.”

  Mickey Nevada dropped his part of the dead man. The top half of the body slammed into the ground, the man’s head bouncing like a basketball against the floor. Women in the crowd screamed and cried.

  “Come on, Yulinka.” His voice took the edge of a salesman, working to convince his customer the product was still good. He might have missed his calling selling used cars. “These people are traveling a long way. You can’t ship strawberries that far and not expect some spoilage. What the hell do you suppose will happen with people?”

  She seemed to consider his words, though I doubted she listened to anything he had to say. Instead, she turned her head and seemed to consider Woody and me. She took another deep drag on her cigarette.

  “Who are these motherfuckers?” she said. “They look tougher than the rest of you.” She motioned toward Woody. “Especially him.”

  I nudged Woody in the ribs. He chuckled.

  “Comments like that, I might take personally,” I said.

  “You are a delicate flower,” he said.

  I raised my head high. “A goddamn fucking hothouse flower of a human being, I am.”

  Rudolph peered closer at Woody and me, and he pointed at me. “That’s the guy Wilhelm and I talked to the other day, to encourage the Saints to move faster on our business transaction.”

  “About that,” I said. “Since you never got around to asking, I don’t belong to this fetid sack of rancid cat turds. You busted into my dad’s house and beat up an old man when neither of us have nothing to do with these suck-ass loser junkies.”

  “But if that is true, then why are you here?” Yakovna said, her voice dripping with amusement. “You do indeed seem to be a part of all this.”

  I sighed. “I’m a victim of fate and divine providence.”

  Mickey said, “These assholes were poking around after we had to take care of some loose ends.” He tried to glare at me, but it came across more as a realization that he hadn’t had a bowel movement today.

  I looked over my shoulder to Frog and Toad. “How easy was it for these rat farts to convince you to kill Jimmy Omaha and frame Dave for it?”

  Frog shrugged. “Dave’s a nice guy, but this is America. You got to look out for yourself when no one else will.”

  “What about Big Country? What’s his part in this?”

  Toad laughed. At least, he intended to laugh. What it sounded like was your computer two seconds away from exploding. “That sawed-off pile of shit ain’t got the balls. He’d have gone down with the ship with Dave, the dumbass.”

  “What a goddamn shame he had something resembling loyalty and decency,” I said. “Proud that you two whored yourselves out without another thought.”

  Frog said, “Dude, you can talk all the shit you want to us, but once we’re done, we’re gonna walk out of here richer than we walked in. And you assholes, neither of you are walking out of here.”

  Rudolph said, “About that.” He raised his pistol and shot Frog in the head. Toad croaked out a noise like surprise. The noise was interrupted by a bullet that pounded through his forehead and blew his brains out through the back of his skull. The men slumped into one another as they fell and dropped to the ground together with a thud.

  Rudolph hoisted his gun back into a firing position and aimed at me. I lifted my hands farther into the air and said, “Wait!”

  He froze and stared at me. Yakovna said, “What are you waiting for? Shoot him.”

  The air crackled around me. Rudolph looked at me the way I look at flies before I bring a rolled-up newspaper down on them, with utter disinterest. Killing Woody and me wasn’t a moral quandary but rather just another work order. Get me fifty copies of the Johnson report. File this memo. And kill those motherfuckers.

  I said, “We can help you.”

  Rudolph didn’t budge from his position. “Help us how?”

  I lowered my hands about an inch. Rudolph jerked the pistol, and I raised them back up. “Listen, we already know about your operation.” I motioned toward what remained of Frog and Toad. “Those guys were loose ends you had to get rid of. We are not fucking loose ends. There’s nothing in any of this we give a shit about.” I looked at Woody. “We got into this because he thought he needed to help out a guy’s wife. You kill us, you’re not doing anything but making this whole thing messier than it is already.”

  Yakovna lit a fresh cigarette. “What, then, should we do with you? This is where you tell us why we should let you live.”

  I mustered together the best smile I had. “This is where I tell you that you should hire us.”

  33

  “No,” Mickey Nevada said. “No. No. No fucking goddamn way. No.”

  His face was heart attack red, and he waved his arms around like he was struggling to swat away an attacking flock of birds.

  Yakovna continued to stare at us, her cigarette clenched between two fingers. Rudolph kept his aim on us. Wilhelm stood there with an utter lack of interest in the whole experience. I’d seen more internal life on a metal slab in the medical examiner’s office. He glanced at the dead Mexican man, then shifted his eyes to Frog and Toad. Nothing in him implied someone should leave him alone with a dead body.

  “Tell me more,” Yakovna said.

  “You can’t be fucking serious,” Mickey Nevada said. “Jesus Christ, you are serious. These assholes?”

  “Can they be worse than you?” Yakovna said. “Plus, they are obviously persistent.” She curled her lip into a snarl. “You, you are weak. You and your little motorcycles and all of these boys who say they are men. But here we are, two men and a woman, and you cower to us.”

&nbs
p; I smiled wide and made sure Mickey could see it. “I can see where this would be hurtful to you, Michael—”

  Mickey Nevada charged at me. I dropped my hands and caught him by his cut, using his momentum against him, pivoting on my right foot and swinging him around, throwing him behind me. He stumbled over the bodies of Frog and Toad and fell onto the ground.

  I moved toward him and kicked him in the face. Cartilage crunched as his nose blossomed with blood. He grunted and landed on his back. I made sure he was still breathing, watching as his chest rose and fell, then turned to walk away.

  Woody said, “Henry—”

  Mickey Nevada grabbed my left ankle and gave a hard yank, pulling my feet out from under me. I landed on my fake knee, and jolts of blue-tinted pain washed over me like high tide. I planted my hands on the ground and shut my eyes to quench the nausea.

  An arm wrapped around my neck and squeezed. Mickey Nevada climbed onto my back and bore his weight down on me. He tightened his grip, and my windpipe constricted as my lungs struggled to fill with air.

  I jutted my elbows behind me, trying to connect with some part of Mickey Nevada, to find some way to inflict damage. He pushed in harder on top of me and pulled his arm farther around my neck, pressing the inside crevice of his elbow hard against my trachea. I had a passing moment of sympathy for Toad that ended as black dots swirled in front of my eyes.

  Mickey Nevada pressed his mouth next to my ear. “Motherfucker, you think it’s bad now. Wait until you see what we’re gonna do to that bitch Sheila now.”

  I let my head roll about an inch to one side and then popped it back with all the force I could. My skull pounded into Mickey Nevada’s mouth and the clotted mess that had been his nose. His teeth ground together against one another as his jaw shifted out of place, and fresh blood soak through my hair to the scalp. He howled and let his hold around my neck loosen. I swung an elbow back and connected right below his ribs, pushing it deep into the soft tissue.