No Quarter

by John Jantunen

  Del, himself, knocked on his back door one night last fall, offering his pledge. Big Willy laughed at the fierce peel to his scowl, telling him he liked his spirit, but refused to give him a gun.

  Come back in a few years, he’d said, ruffling his hand through the boy’s hair like he was no more than a child. After you got more than peach fuzz on your pecker, then we’ll see.

  The young men gathered around the kitchen table beyond the door laughed along with their leader. It was their ridicule that had followed Del over the winter while he cured the strip of black ash, bending the wood’s will to his own.

  He would bring them the heart of a bear he’d kill with a bow made with his own two hands. And if that wasn’t enough, he’d drop his pants right there, show ’em he was plenty enough a man, any way you cared to measure it.

  It seems then like divine providence chancing upon Emma at a rest stop that, this late at night, might as well have been at the end of the world. Watching her fighting off the cop, thoughts of what her brother had said about Sarah had him reaching for his bow. Certain now that he was the same cop who’d killed his cousin and that he was in league with the driver of the van and that Emma had killed the latter for something he’d done, even though she’s now screaming, I didn’t do anything! Let me go! Stop! Let me go!

  Back kicking at the cop’s legs, thrashing against his grip, his hands clamped tight to her wrists, crossed over her chest, holding her tight, not saying a word, letting the girl wear herself out.

  Del’s bow is in his hand again, his fingers drawing back the arrow on its string. Aiming the point now at the space between the cop’s eyes. But even as he releases, the cop is dropping to his knees as if the hand of God has willed it so. The arrow misses its mark, instead striking his hat. It sweeps from the top of his head like in one of those old westerns his dad likes to watch. The cop startled, his hand chasing after it as if the wind is to blame. Realizing it’s not, his eyes darting about, frantic, now settling on the grove of cedars not ten feet in front of him. His hand drawing his sidearm from its holster.

  The sound then of footsteps crackling at a hard run through the underbrush. The brrm brrm of a motorcycle kick-starting followed by the high-pitched whine of its engine roaring to life. Couldn’t be more than 50 ccs. A child’s bike.

  The girl hearing none of this, lost as she is to her rage and her grief. Sobbing now. The cop turning her around, pulling her tight to his chest. She hammering at him with clenched fists, pleading, Please, let me go. He stroking the back of her head with his hand.

  Shhh, he says. It’s okay. Shhh. You’re safe now.

  * * *

  18

  Only when he’d reached the end of the chapter did Deacon look up from the page again.

  What George had written seemed oddly familiar but he couldn’t put into words exactly why. Staring up at the crevice of dark swallowing the far corner of the room, he thought back over what he’d read. A man picking up a hitchhiker, driving her off to a secluded rest stop. A red smear of blood over the car’s window, all there was to say about what had happened. Except he wasn’t driving a car, he was driving a . . . van.

  A van, he thought, yeah. And wasn’t Ronald Crane driving a van on the night he’d been murdered at a secluded rest stop just this side of the Moose River?

  Thinking back to the article he’d read in the Globe and Mail, how Ronald Crane’s throat had been slashed before he’d been set on fire.

  Biting his lip, shaking his head.

  It couldn’t be.

  Measuring the passage of time—barely a week since Ronald Crane had been killed—against the memory of the twin stacks of paper, five hundred combined pages at least. It would have been impossible for George to have started after Ronald Crane had died. And hadn’t George once told him, on most days writing felt like he was trying to force a sliver out of his thumb with a ball-peen hammer? It was a sentiment starkly at odds with the recollection of the clackety-clack of a train hurtling down its tracks, but then that had been him doing a rewrite. He would have to have been working on it for well over a year before Ronald Crane had been killed.

  Looking down then at the page in his lap, as if the answer might by lying in wait for him there, and seeing one more page beneath it. Slipping the top sheet under the manuscript, he traced past Chapter 2 his gaze trailing down to the first line, halfway towards the bottom.

  The siren reared as a sharp declaration through the open window like an exclamation point on the end of Nina Simone’s desperate plea from the stereo that she was feelin’ good. Rain was bent over the couch, her black and red, vaguely oriental, robe hiked up over her bare ass and he was behind her, his pants around his ankles. He had forty years on her own thirty-nine but the pill he’d taken made him feel half his age as he thrust into her with the precision of a—

  “Knock, knock.”

  “Jesus!” Deacon gasped, looking up, startled as much by what he’d just read as he was by the sight of Dylan craning his head through the barn’s open door.

  “Hey, Deke,” he said, grinning wide, taking untold delight in the fright he’d just caused. “I thought I might find you here.” And when that only resulted in Deacon gaping back at him, he added: “Shoot, boy, you look like you’ve seen a ghost. I catch you in the middle of something?”

  “No, I uh—” Deacon stammered, trying to think of something, anything he might say. He looked down at the pages in his lap as if there might be an answer waiting for him there. The words bare ass and thrust stood out against all the others, and neither did him a damn bit of good.

  “I mean,” he said, looking back up, “Loretta, she asked me to go through George’s papers. You know, for the, uh, library archives. I’ve been meaning to ever since.”

  That much was true anyway.

  “Find anything interesting?”

  “No, uh, mostly old manuscripts. Rough drafts, you know, that sort of thing. A few letters . . .” His voice trailing off, seeing Dylan smiling and nodding like he didn’t believe a word of it.

  The grandfather clock in the corner of the room chimed the half hour and that seemed to let him off the hook as Dylan checked the time against his own watch.

  “Shoot, it’s ten thirty already? I was supposed to be up at Moose Point Road a half hour ago.”

  “Moose Point Road?” Deacon asked in alarm, having read the same name on the page only moments ago.

  “I caught some overtime, on account of the manhunt.”

  “Manhunt?”

  “You haven’t heard.”

  Deacon shook his head.

  “No, I guess you wouldn’t’ve. What with Gramps and all.”

  His gaze then elevated to a dark corner, taking on a distant air. His brow furrowed as if maybe he was trying to figure out something he might say and knew there weren’t enough words to express even half of what he felt thinking about his grandfather dying like he had.

  Deacon didn’t much want to talk about it either.

  “You were saying?” he said. “About a manhunt?”

  “Yeah, it’s a helluva thing. I’d tell you all about it, except I’m late as it is.”

  He was already turning towards the door.

  “Oh shoot,” he said, turning back. “Almost forgot what I came for. Dad wants a few words. Whenever you have a moment. Something about the will? You’ll get in touch?”

  Deacon nodded and Dylan’s mouth opened like he was thinking of saying something else. Whatever it was he must have decided it could wait. He was slapping his hand against the door frame and checking his watch again.

  “Alright, then,” he said. “See you when I do.”

  TAYLOR

  The drugs had worn off some time ago.

  His arm, in a plastic bubble cast and a sling, throbbed like a nail had been driven through it. His two top front teeth were broken off at their roots and he greeted every
breath with stilted caution, even the slightest intake of air shooting electric shocks through his gums, same as if he was chewing on tinfoil. His nose was broken too and his throat felt like sandpaper, but the one and only time a nurse had offered him a drink of water, he might as well have been sucking it through a raspberry bramble as a straw, his lips were so swollen and raw.

  His hospital bed had been raised to a seventy-five-degree angle to afford him a clear view of the iPad his father’s lawyer had propped in its stand on the wheeled table where patients were meant to eat their meals. He’d known Garland Derby most of his life, though he could count on one hand the times they’d spent more than two minutes together off the golf course, Taylor having become the alternate for his father’s weekly round when business got in the way of pleasure for one of its foursome.

  Garland was a confounding figure for the young man. He was shaped like a VW Beetle set on end and his sagging jowls had the pallor of someone who’d just choked to death on the last morsel of a thirty-six-ounce T-bone. Still, even on the best of days, there wasn’t a man in their group who could come within four strokes of his score approaching the nineteenth hole. As to his proclivity with a wood or an iron, he was real humble. The only words of explanation he’d ever offered Taylor was that golf is like most things: “The trick is to figure out where it is you want to land the ball,” he’d gone on to say. “Other than that, try not to swing too hard.”

  It had been a riddle at the time—Taylor then being eighteen and never feeling better than when he’d hammered the shit out of the ball off the tee. But he most certainly knew what he meant now, watching the screen in front of him and seeing Mike the Bouncer pressing the tip of the bat under the biker’s chin.

  “Goddamnit, Lester,” he is saying. “Take it outside.”

  The screen fades to black.

  Trevor had added three seconds of blank screen to draw out the suspense, and while Lester had been manhandling Taylor up the stairs on their way towards the sidewalk, he and Darren had hurried out the Diplomat’s back door. They’d taken up residence on the far side of the park, afraid to move more than a few paces from Trevor’s BMW. In the meantime, Trevor had traded the pinhole camera for the handy cam. It was a Sony FRD-AX100/B, a black cylinder about as thick as a roll of one-hundred twenty-

  dollar bills, which was how much it had cost Trevor’s dad on his last birthday, its price a reflection of Sony’s promise that its patented Nightshot ® Infrared System would render images taken in near dark as clear as those shot in the full light of day.

  So when the players reappear they are in sharp relief. Lester is pushing Taylor roughly up the path leading into the park beside the Diplomat Hotel, and the two Flaming Eagles who’d been sitting at his table are walking slightly ahead, guarding against the chance that Taylor might try to make a run for it. The Girl is hurrying to keep up behind and The Cripple is hobbling after her in his lopsided gait.

  Coming to the bench upon which The Junkie appears to have fallen asleep, the stouter of the two men grabs hold of one of Taylor’s arms, turning him to face Lester.

  “It’s all been a misunderstanding,” Taylor says, and the desperate whine in his voice makes it seem not altogether a lie.

  The shot then pans from Taylor to Lester, who’s drawing out the suspense by winnowing two sapphire-studded rings from their respective fingers on each of his hands. Taylor, for his part, is doing his best to play the role of a man begging for his life. “My dad’s rich,” he’s saying. “He’ll pay you. I’ll call him now. The money’ll be here in fifteen minutes, all you have to do is give me the word.”

  But his pleas are falling on deaf ears. The biker remains as grim-faced as an executioner.

  After he’s removed both of the rings, he drops them into The Girl’s cupped palm. She clamps them tight, then stands on her tippy-toes, giving him a peck on the cheek and whispering something into his ear. Lester nods. The expression on his face is more a scowl than a smile, though there’s plenty of joy in it. Crackling his knuckles backwards at the end of his outstretched arms, he motions for his friend to release the prisoner. As the stouter one obliges, the lankier of the two bends to Taylor’s ear, whispering loud enough that the microphone has no problem picking up the snarl in his voice as he says, “I told him to save your asshole for me.”

  The camera zooms out to a medium shot as Lester strides forward. Taylor’s hands are raised over his head in the traditional salute of surrender. As he circles away from the larger man, he says, “Can’t we talk about this?”

  Lester responds by taking a clumsy swipe at him. Taylor easily dodges that and responds with a shot of his own, his right hand as flat as an iron and moving too fast to be anything but a blur in twenty-four frames a second. Its fingertips catch Lester in the throat and stop him dead, stunned by the unseen stab that has rendered him momentarily breathless.

  “Suit yourself,” Taylor says, cracking his neck once to the left and once to the right.

  Lester’s mouth opens in an involuntary spasm as if he means to reply, but Taylor’s foot is already arching into a roundhouse. It strikes the biker on the side of his head, the camera struggling to keep him in frame as he reels backwards. When the focus again shifts to Taylor, he’s fitting his black leather sparring gloves over his hands and moving in on Lester fast, delivering three quick jabs, mostly to feel punching him in the face rather than trying to do any real damage beyond bloodying his nose.

  If this were a real movie—of the Hollywood derivation—the ritualistic drawing of first blood would elicit a brief cessation. The stakes are on the table now, and whoever’s anteed in will take a moment to wipe at his nose with the back of his hand, maybe give the red smear a lick to taunt the other.

  That all you got?

  No such pomp here.

  The moment Taylor backs off a step, Lester charges at him with his arms raised into a nascent bear hug, meaning, no doubt, to grab that little shit, squeeze him until he hears the crack of his bones, and feels his body go limp. And maybe that’s the way it would have played out except Taylor is too fast by a factor of three. Ducking low, he slips from his grapple, popping up beside Lester and bringing the heel of his foot down at forty-five degrees onto the outside of his knee, caving it sideways.

  Lester’s hands pinwheel and his wounded leg lurches forward, the bottom half dragging along the ground, trying to find purchase in anything but the pain. Then his body is tilting at a precarious angle even as Taylor executes a gravity-defying lotus spin kick. His heel makes contact with the bridge of Lester’s nose, snapping him backwards, his unbroken leg seemingly planted in the ground, his body toppling at an ugly angle over it, pinning the broken one beneath his substantial girth. Such a blow might have killed a lesser man, or at least knocked him out. Lester isn’t so lucky and the guttural wail he unleashes serves as the perfect soundtrack to the frantic lash of his hands hammering at the ground.

  Taylor has by then succumbed to the earth’s pull and is standing over the vanquished, striking the same pose as Bruce Lee on the framed poster hanging on the door to his walk-in closet opposite a full-length mirror: his right arm stiff and pointed towards the ground, his left locked in a ninety-degree angle at his chest, his gaze tiger-eyed.

  “Behind you!” Darren calls out, his voice faint and altogether unnecessary, as Taylor’s right foot has already halved the distance between himself and the lankier Flaming Eagle, charging headlong towards him.

  The sole of his foot strikes at six foot two, catching the biker square in the chin, and the action onscreen slows to a quarter of its original speed. It’s the only alteration to the footage that Taylor had allowed, conceding that it did look pretty cool when viewed on the 152-inch plasma screen in the Wane’s entertainment room later that night, seeing two of the biker’s front teeth spraying from his mouth as his feet are flung out from under him.

  The camera doesn’t linger long enough to witnes
s the man’s fate, panning in real time again over to the third biker. Moonlight glints off the silver sheen of the telescopic steel baton he is flicking open in his right hand as he stalks towards Taylor. He swings it down hard but locates only grass, Taylor pivoting out of harm’s way with inches to spare and lashing out with a punishing jab. It strikes the biker’s temple causing him to reel sideways, his legs turned to rubber and the club lagging, harmless, on the ground after. But his infirmity is only a ruse, for the moment Taylor has come within three paces of him he lashes out with a quick flick of the baton. Taylor jumps backwards, catching only its wind. He then surges forward again, clamping his hands down on either side of the man’s elbow and bringing his knee up into the space between, snapping his arm at the joint, the sharp crack of bone now making Taylor wince, it sounding so similar to the way his own arm had sounded not twenty-four hours previous.

  Such a howl the biker lets out that the audio crackles under its anguish.

  The club has dropped from his hand. Taylor bends and picks it up, brandishing it as he turns back to the biker. But it’s clear that the fight has gone out of the man. He turns tail and flees, doing a fair impression of Dr. Frankenstein’s hunchback as he lurches away, bent over and coddling his broken arm as Igor might have a brain.

  The Cripple is already in flight and the camera zooms after his stiff-legged hobble as he scuttles after his friend. He all but disappears into the shade cast by the walnut tree, and here the scene fades to black though it was hardly the end, The Girl then jumping onto Taylor’s back, clawing for his eyes, Taylor grabbing her by the hair and wrenching her loose, spinning and smashing the baton into her jaw, her shriek as she fell enough to rouse The Junkie from his stupor so that it was he who had the last word.