All the Way Down

by Eric Beetner

  As though emboldened by his girlfriend’s animal viciousness, Tat found a surge of energy and tried slamming his head back and into Dale. He pistoned his neck three times quickly, looking to make contact with Dale’s nose and break it. Dale shifted out of the way, tightened his grip on Tat’s underarms, and when that didn’t work, kicked at the back of Tat’s knees and brought him to the floor with another guttural yell.

  “Calm the fuck down, Tat. You’re starting to piss me off.”

  Dale buried a knee in Tat’s back to keep him in place. He didn’t feel too bad since he kept Tat’s face turned toward the two women brawling on the floor, a sight undoubtedly stirring sexual arousal in the sick bastard.

  Lauren had reversed the clench on Carolina and now had the Latina in a choke hold. She looked at Dale. “You gonna help me?”

  “What do you want me to do?” He indicated the man at the end of his knee.

  “Shoot her or something.”

  “I’m a cop. We only shoot people when necessary.”

  “What the hell would you call this?”

  Dale thought for a second and shrugged. He brought his gun around in front of him and squeezed off a round. It caught Carolina in the thigh. She screamed and Lauren leapt off of her.

  “Y’know what, fuck this.” Dale stood and grabbed the back of Tat’s shirt, started dragging him across the smooth wood floor. He pulled him up to a door, opened it, and eye-measured the space inside the closet. He decided it was enough and pushed Tat inside. He slammed the door and took a lacquered black chair with antelope horns for arms from a small table and wedged it under the doorknob, sealing Tat inside.

  “Check if she’s got a phone.”

  Lauren reached down into the pants pockets of the writhing woman. Second pocket in she came out with a cell phone and tossed it to Dale. He caught it and dialed his wife. While he called, Lauren went to the closet and took down the chair.

  It rang five times then Dahlia’s voicemail picked up. Maybe she didn’t answer the strange number, not knowing it was Dale. “Dahlia, it’s me. I’m calling from a different number. I need to know you’re all right. Pick up next time, okay?”

  He dialed again. Voicemail. Third time. Same thing.

  “Shit.” Dale turned to see Lauren pawing over Tat’s pockets, him off balance and leaning back into a pile of coats on hangers. She kept one hand on a gun pointed at his face and one hand rifled his clothes like a pickpocket on an off day.

  Lauren kept her voice low in Tat’s ear.

  “You keep any records up here? Accounts, things like that?”

  Tat ignored her, his eyes swimming and unfocused with pain.

  “You help me out and I’ll make sure he goes easy on you. Where can I find records of payments, things like that?” She gripped his chin in her hands and squeezed his face into a pucker. “And don’t go telling me you don’t keep records. Tyler told me you keep track of numbers better than the IRS.”

  Dale thumbed the phone off then hurled it against the wall, his emotions overrunning his good sense. With Dahlia at risk, he needed to get control of himself. He turned to see Lauren in close quarters with Tat.

  “What the fuck are you doing?”

  Lauren let go of Tat’s face and dug into his pockets again. “Going through her pockets, I figured I should go through his. You never know.”

  “What are you looking for?”

  “I don’t know.” She opened his wallet, passed over the money—all hundreds—and ignored his ID. She saw a thin card made of metal. Like a razor of steel cut into the same shape as a credit card. Some sort of pass key probably. She pocketed it and went on searching.

  Dale kept vigil over Carolina. “Well, hurry it up.”

  Lauren finished with Tat, shut him back in the closet. “Your wife not there?”

  “No. But she should be.”

  Lauren pointed her gun down at Carolina. “What about her?”

  “Tie her up.”

  “With him?” Lauren nodded to the closet.

  Dale looked around the room for options. “No. Keep them separate.”

  “Then what?”

  “Then we get out of here. Fast.”

  They hog tied her using strips of her own shirt and left her in her bra on the bear skin rug. Dale tried to think if there was any good reason to keep Tat with them, but he thought moving fast was a higher priority. By now the building would have been alerted to the bloodbath upstairs and that Tat was missing. Dale and Lauren needed to move.

  “You say you know this building well?”

  “Yeah. By blueprints and stuff. I haven’t been to the other floors in real life.”

  “You’re one up on me. All I’ve ever seen is the top floor.” Dale looked around him. “And now this.”

  Lauren straightened her clothes. She tucked away her gun. “You have a car downstairs or something? Some way to get away from here?”

  “Yeah. There’s people waiting for us. I need to get to my wife, though.”

  “Then we need to get out of here.”

  “Yep.” Dale started for the stairwell again. “Let’s go.”

  CHAPTER 5

  Dahlia flat-palm slapped the back door like a misbehaving child. She’d made it as far as Mrs. Joosten’s house next door. The elderly lady had been in a cold war over trash can placement and her thoughts on how early on trash day it was neighborly to set out the cans. They hadn’t spoken in six months and Dahlia suspected Mrs. Joosten of stealing birdseed from their feeder.

  At the moment she pounded the old lady’s back door, she hoped to bury the hatchet. Or at least she hoped to find a hatchet and use it to defend herself against T, the goateed thug chasing her out of her house.

  Dahlia still didn’t know why the two men had come to her door, or where they wanted to take her so urgently that they would attack her to make her comply. She’d figure it out later.

  She shot glances over her shoulder back toward her house. She’d sprinted out the front door, doubled backed along the hedge and ducked through the gap where the shrub had turned brown and made it to Mrs. Joosten’s back door thinking it would be less visible. It also blocked most of her own house from view so she couldn’t see if T had followed her path or not.

  Dahlia slapped the door again, three times—hard. She saw a shape move inside through the pane of glass that made up the top half of the back door, thin curtains with sections of fruit on them made the shape blurry.

  Mrs. Joosten opened the door. “What the fuck is so urgent you gotta pound on my door like a teenager at a whorehouse?”

  Dale found Mrs. Joosten’s mouth, with her mixture of sailor, trucker, and longshoremen dialect, incredibly charming. He even endured the cranky fits like the bullshit with the trash cans because he thought she was so damn funny when she yelled at him in the driveway. He used to say he’d arrested guys with arm-length rap sheets and a dozen years of hard time behind them who would blush at one conversation with Mrs. J.

  “I need to call the police. Someone broke into my home and a man is dead.”

  Mrs. Joosten cocked her head. “Are you fucking with me?”

  “No. We need to get inside. There’s still one out there.”

  Dahlia heard the shrub move, a body slipping through the crispy brown branches of the dead spot where Mrs. Joosten’s Corgi liked to pee.

  “Go inside.” Dahlia pushed the old woman forward and shut the door behind her. Mrs. Joosten noticed the bloody knife in Dahlia’s hand.

  “Oh, good God.”

  Dahlia followed her eyes and saw the knife, now a permanent attachment to her palm. “No, no. I had to defend myself. They attacked me.”

  Mrs. Joosten put up her hands and backed away from Dahlia. “What’s going on?”

  “I told you.” Dahlia stopped herself from re-explaining. She knew raising her voice wouldn’t help alleviate Mrs. Joosten’s wariness of her, but it might motivate her into desperately needed action. “
We have to call the police!”

  Glass shattered. Dahlia turned. T’s elbow was pulling back through the smashed glass window. Shards fell and crashed to the floor, splintering into tiny slivers. He reached through with his hand, tattoos down almost past his wrist, and turned the knob.

  “Inside.” Dahlia pushed Mrs. Joosten again and moved them into the living room. Mrs. Joosten screamed.

  “Who the fuck just broke my door?”

  Dahlia shoved her deeper into the room past a floral couch. “Where’s the phone?”

  “In there.” Mrs. J pointed to the kitchen from where they’d come. Dahlia turned and watched T emerge into the living room. He slowed and looked around, confirming there were only the two women inside.

  “Lady, you gotta get a grip.”

  Dahlia wielded the knife. “You tried to kidnap me.”

  “I asked you nicely.”

  Mrs. Joosten stepped to her right and picked up a fireplace poker from an iron set by her hearth. “You better get the fuck outta my house before I beat your ass like your daddy should have.”

  T blank-faced stared at the woman, a full foot shorter and fifty pounds lighter than him.

  Dahlia held the boning knife out in front of her, the blood on the blade already dried. “We called the cops.”

  “You didn’t call any cops. Didn’t have time.”

  “She’s got one of those lifeline things. Like she’s fallen and can’t get up. All she had to do was press the button and cops come running.”

  T shifted his eyes between the two women, trying to discern the truth. “Bullshit.”

  “Stick around and find out.”

  Mrs. Joosten lifted the poker over her head. “Stick around and get this up your dick hole.”

  T set his feet. Dahlia watched his body. Hours in the gym, military-grade muscle structure. She didn’t see any weapons and somehow that scared her even more. She examined him down to his boots. She saw the bulge of a knife holster. When she looked again she noticed details in his all-black clothes. Another knife tucked into the waistband of his pants. At least she thought it was a knife. Too small to be a gun.

  “Look.” At his words she snapped her eyes back to his. “You come with me and we can all just walk out of here, okay?”

  “Who wants to see me so bad?”

  “A friend of your husband.”

  Dahlia almost dropped the knife. What the hell did that mean? Her husband dealt with cops, DAs, sometimes federal agents. Mostly though, he dealt with scumbags, criminals, drug dealers, killers. Lately she’d been wondering how closely he dealt with them. She felt a little more light shine on her answer. He’d said work lately had been “complicated.” Is this what he meant?

  “You’re lying.”

  “I only know what I’m told over the phone.”

  Dahlia noticed T had been inching closer. Subtle, slow movements, but he’d made it almost even with the hard candy dish on the reading table.

  She thrust the knife out farther in front of her, hoping to remind him of his dead friend back in her kitchen, no matter how incidental her role in that was. “Stay where you are.”

  “Just come with me.”

  Mrs. Joosten adjusted the fire poker into a two-handed baseball grip. “Is this what you do, you sick fucko? You come around breaking in and raping old ladies?” Through the threat of death in the room, Dahlia still managed to be offended at being lumped in with Mrs. J as an old lady.

  “This has got nothing to do with you, ma’am.”

  Dahlia wondered how long his polite gentleman criminal act would last.

  “You’re in my living room, punk. I’d say it has a lot to do with me.”

  “I’m only doing my job.”

  Mrs. Joosten took two steps forward. “And I’m only defending my house like it says in the fucking constitution.” She swung the fire poker at him, but she was still three steps too far away.

  “Lady…”

  She stepped forward and swung again. Too short.

  “Cut it out.”

  She stepped and swung. Missed.

  “Just go back in the kitchen and act like we were never here.”

  She swung again like she held a Louisville Slugger and his head was a fast ball. T leaned back, but the poker glanced off his collarbone as her swing sloped downward. As the momentum of her swing brought the iron poker around the far side of her body, T stepped up and reached for it.

  He put a hand over the long metal bar and twisted it from Mrs. Joosten’s hand. He turned so the small right-angle hook poked out. The little notch made for turning burning logs now looked like a metal claw to Dahlia as she watched him rear back and swing, one handed.

  The short metal spike caught Mrs. Joosten above her right breast, which hung fairly low, so the bar wedged itself between two of her ribs in the middle of her chest. The old lady whuffed out air from her lungs.

  Dahlia threatened with her knife again but didn’t step into his radius of swinging. “Stop it!”

  T pulled and the poker stayed stuck, the hook of metal notched around a rib. He pulled again, twisting the bar. It came free, unraveling the grey threads of her sweater as it came out. With a long string of wool dangling from the end of the poker, most of the fabric stained red with Mrs. Joosten’s blood, he swung again.

  Too stunned to defend herself, Mrs. Joosten stood by and took the hit in her upper arm. Again the spike pierced her, but without bone to catch onto, it came right out.

  Dahlia watched in horror as the lid came off T’s pressure cooker. His eyes went red with rage and he moved in closer to Mrs. Joosten. He brought the iron bar down again and again, sometimes only slapping the straight metal rod against her, sometimes driving the hooked spike into her body and tearing it out to leave behind an open gash of muscle and blood.

  Dahlia started backing away, realizing she could do nothing for Mrs. Joosten. She stepped backward toward the front door.

  T grunted with the effort of beating the old woman to death. After she slumped to the floor, he continued to rain down blows. The slap of iron against skin was punctuated by the cracking of bones. The fire poker started to bend and the single string of wool had unraveled to wrap around the shaft of the poker until it became ineffective as a bludgeon since it was so well padded with yarn.

  Dahlia slipped out the door unnoticed.

  CHAPTER 6

  Lewis entered the mayor’s office without knocking. “No word yet.”

  Mayor O’Brien turned his head away from staring at nothing. “Seriously?”

  “They said they’ll update me when they know.” Lewis held up a manila folder in his hand. “Meanwhile, we need to talk strategies for how to make the most of this.”

  O’Brien ignored his opportunistic chief of staff. “I gotta say, after it took eighteen years to get here, and six in office, this isn’t how I saw it ending.”

  “It won’t if we can spin this in our favor. And it already is in our favor. Your drug crackdown is paying benefits and for those who are still doubting it, or say it’s just window dressing—what more proof of how serious you are than to have your only daughter fall victim to the very people you’re trying to stop?”

  O’Brien let out a cynical chuckle. “The very people.”

  “Look, Mr. Mayor, when you’re done with this office, you’ll be fine. Even if you never hold office again, you’ve got speaking engagements, probably a book to write, maybe a job at a cable news network. But when we go, we go on our terms. Not like this.”

  O’Brien sat back in his chair. “You mean not with everyone hating me.”

  “They don’t hate you, sir.”

  “They think I’m corrupt.”

  Lewis stayed silent.

  “They think I stopped caring about the city and the people. That I’ve gotten lazy and ineffective. You got a spin for that?”

  Lewis held up the folder. “Yes, I do.”

  The mayor set both hands flat
against his face, dragged them slowly down, and exhaled. He felt tired. So damn tired. He’d all but given up after the latest poll numbers. He’d been getting hammered in the press. The city was stagnating, and on his watch. Then the first rumblings of corruption allegations. They always start when there’s an election. Put the candidate on the defensive. Even if he’s totally innocent, make him say the words. Make him say, “I didn’t take money. I didn’t do favors. I didn’t look the other way.”

  And if he had…

  “What have you got, Lewis?”

  Lewis moved forward, a grin on his face. He sat in the chair opposite the mayor’s desk, a chair where most of the decisions were being made recently.

  “I’ve asked the chief of police to move up the first round of sweeps through the known drug areas. This will pick up mostly low-level street dealers and users, but it looks good to the voters. Lots of hands in cuffs and usually on scary-looking dudes with neck tattoos and stuff.”

  “When do we tell people about Lauren?”

  “That’s up to you, sir. I still say, sooner is better. We want them rooting for her while she’s still inside. If voters only hear about it after the fact, it has less impact.”

  “Don’t you think it makes us look good that we got her out? Hostage rescues are always big deals.” He had to look down at his hands. Jesus, had he just said hostage rescue? It was his freaking daughter who was the hostage. He hated when he started speaking Lewis’ language, but he knew it was the language of winning elections.

  “The good news is, when she gets out, she has a platform. She’ll write about it and right in paragraph one is your war on drugs.”

  “If that’s the angle she takes.”

  Lewis leaned forward. “What other angle is there?”

  O’Brien again looked away. “Lauren and I haven’t exactly been getting along lately. She’s been crusading, typical rebellious kid stuff.”

  “How does it affect us?”

  “I don’t know.” O’Brien spun in his chair. He stood and walked to the corner liquor cabinet, a fixture in the mayor’s office since the end of prohibition. Keeping it stocked was only upholding a city tradition. “She’s been hinting that she’s looking into some of the allegations.” He poured two fingers of scotch into a glass. No ice.