In Nine Kinds of Pain

by Leonard Fritz

  Plan C is across the Rouge Bridge, behind the little white Irish bar near where the tugboats dock. Frady picks that spot as a Plan C spot for reasons unlike the reasons one would normally pick for a “hideout”—he likes the constant commotion of the bar traffic. It is untamed. It involves strangers who float into the city on the freighters then float out without notice. And Frady knows that the cops in the area stay clear of the Irish bar and that Wasteland called a neighborhood pinched off by the river. The cops know that trying to tame the untamable iss futile. Best to turn away and pretend that the bar and the neighborhood and the river don’t exist.

  That’s what Frady needs this night. A fight-filled Friday night at the Irish pub, lots of ruckus, hurly burly as far as the eye can (or cannot) see, distraction. Things need to be taken care of tonight, the inevitable, because he doesn’t have what he knows they want. And he knows, without a doubt, that tonight, here, at the river, this evening, it is either going to be him or them. And he prefers it be them.

  He hears a car pull up behind the house. The car is incredibly quiet, like a child slowly pussyfooting his way into his parents’ room to watch them have sex. Frady prides himself on believing that a normal person, a civilian, wouldn’t have heard the car approach. He believes this because he believes he’s a great cop. Well, maybe not a great cop in the sense that he actually abides by the law or enforces it, but a great cop in that his skills, the skills necessary to be a cop, are honed to pin-drop perfection. They have to be, in this city, in “The D,” in The Murder Capital of the World. If your skills aren’t honed here, you’ll be cold cuts by morning. And it’s because of these cop skills that Frady is able to outsmart not only the bad guys but the good guys and any other guy in between.

  He goes to the back porch to meet them.

  “Mr. Skills,” Man Number Two says. “Do you have the stuff?”

  Frady smiles. “You get right down to business, don’t you?”

  Man Number One doesn’t smile back. “Well, what do you think we’re here for?”

  In looking back at this moment, Frady sees this next move as his biggest blunder. He thought he would string the two men along a little more, take them a little more off-guard, but, in looking back, he can see that Man Number One didn’t want or need to be strung along any more, and that Frady should have tried to end it right there. The two men were all business. They had always been all business. Frady should have remembered that and calculated that into his scenario. He should have known better than to try to isolate the men on his turf. No execution is that easy.

  “Come on in, guys,” Frady says. “Let’s have something to drink.” Frady turns to motion inside, and in the half-second his head is turned, the men disappear.

  Frady drops then rolls to the picture window. The picture window only gives him an advantage for the next three seconds, during which time he can watch for shadows and get an idea of where the men can possibly be planting themselves. After the three seconds is over—which it now is—the picture window becomes a disadvantage. He sees no shadows.

  He figures he’s already being beaded. He needs to get out of the house. He crawls. He finds the hidden floorboards. He removes one. And the next. And the next. The opening is now big enough. He slides through. He’s now under the house. Luckily there is no basement. He’s about seven feet away from the porch. He sees the light from the parking lot through the fence. He waits. He watches. He sees a break in the light. Very fleeting. Hardly noticeable. By the oil drum. He knows it must either be Man Number One or Man Number Two setting up their nest.

  Frady evaluates the terrain and knows that he can move undetected to the porch’s underbelly. He knows this because this is Plan C, his turf. He knew he could get through the floorboards under the rug. That was his set-up. He knew he could get cleanly across to the porch. That was his set-up, too. He removed all the garbage and bricks and dead animals from beneath the house (the only thing that would be an X factor would be the amount of rats under the house at the time of an escape—that he couldn’t control). He knew he had multiple firearms attached to the crawl panel. That was his set-up as well. This place, Plan C, was intended to be a place where he could operate to his advantage, either during the daylight hours or at night. This was intended to be his mousetrap. But the mice now knew that.

  He targets the oil drum. But he knows he needs to be closer. He can only see the trigger side. He can’t make out the side away from the parking lot.

  Frady deplores violence. He sees it as a necessary evil, though, especially in his business, but if he had it his way he would replace all his firearms with daisies and spread love, sweet love. Or maybe not. He wouldn’t go that far. He wishes things like negotiations would be more acceptable, especially in his business, but they’re not. Things like this can’t be settled with negotiations, and even if negotiations are tried, which they sometimes are, someone always dies anyway. It doesn’t make much sense. Then again, not a lot of things make much sense, especially in his business.

  He kills one of them. With his sharpshooter precision, he rips the top of one of their heads off. He doesn’t know which one, not yet. He fired one shot. Frady could hear the shot echo through the parking lot, and beyond to the river. Luckily a freighter’s horn burped during the shot, which Frady did not do intentionally (it was just a happy coincidence), so the echo was sort of masked. But the other guy, either Man Number One or Man Number Two, which ever was still alive at this point in time, surely heard the shot.

  Frady unburrows from beneath the porch, leaving the other firearms locked in place in case he needs to come back <“My own personal Alamo”>. He assumes that the other man went the opposite way of his partner and that they’d set up a triangle (something they probably learned while in the Canadian Army, pending the investigation into the fact that Canada had an army), in which case the other man would be at a forty-five degree . . .

  Frady feels a silent bullet rip through his shoulder. He rolls, then finds himself in a hole dug by the fencing company. Thank you, fencing company. Other shots, quiet shots, kick up the dirt outside the hole, but Frady has his hole, so he’s covered for now.

  The bullet went though completely, he can tell. He has to do his business before he bleeds to death. He reaches and knows that his gun must be outside the hole. He looks up. He sees the barrel teetering the edge above his head. It’s a set-up. Frady feels as though his own firearm is setting him up, betraying him, making him expose some part of himself for Man Number One or Two to shoot at him. But he has no choice. At this second, he knows that Man Number One or Two knows he has no choice. And is probably targeting the pistol. But Frady has no choice.

  He reaches and fumbles, missing the pistol, and grabs the barrel as his right hand explodes. He quickly cradles his right hand in his left and feels a liquidy gush. And a large gash. And only three of his five fingers. And he’s right-handed.

  His quick pause plays a scene in his mind, where he takes his firearm and lobs it outside the hole (hoping it goes off, but if not, that’s okay), and hopes it distracts his would-be killer enough to allow him to escape the hole. Or he could fire his way out, hoping his would-be killer would be in the area of his fire (which is somewhere to the south of the house), forcing his killer to take cover long enough to . . .

 

  Or hope the cops show up.

  He sees the lights, red-blue-red-and-blue, over the once-gray siding of the dilapidated house and takes a chance and scurries from the hole. He sees and hears no shots. He crawls between the houses and looks. He sees that the cops, two squad cars, are over at the parking lot, and someone, a fat guy, the one who Frady thinks runs the bar, the grubby guy in the apron, is pointing at the houses. The officers are looking this way. They must have heard his shot. So much for the “freighter’s burp” theory.

  Frady looks down and sees that his entire right side is dark. His hand is dripping, and his shoulder feels dislodged, sort of like the time he broke his collarbo
ne. He knows that he’s not very good left-handed, so he needs to escape and fight another day.

  He jumps the fence and finds the riverfront, which is a small path along the shore. He follows that path to the old tug dock, which isn’t used anymore. He jumps some garbage cans and gets to the dead-end street. He feels woozy. His head is starting to swim. He knows that this means he has about fifteen minutes before he passes out to die. He crosses the dead-end street to the ballfield. Across the ballfield is the viaduct that goes under Fort Street, a place where homeless crackheads share their day’s wares. That, too, is a dead-end.

  He gets to the abandoned box cars and realizes his cell phone is missing. He must have dropped it back at the hole. Check that—he knows that he dropped it before that, because his pockets were empty at the hole. He must have dropped it in/at the house. But he hears someone talking, with the cadence of a phone conversation. He needs a cell phone, that cell phone, and he’ll kill to get that cell phone. It’s not a part of the success of his mission. The good thing is that no one will miss a crackhead, so the crackhead on the cell phone must die for the success of the mission. And does that make any sense? Why would a homeless crackhead be on a cell phone? Who does he or she have to call?

  He looks around the boxcar. Nothing for him to use as a weapon, really. He looks to the moonshine side of the boxcar. Nothing there to become a weapon either, really. He looks beneath the boxcar. Something. The emergency compartment. He opens the rusty seal. He finds an emergency ax.

  He rolls around the boxcar and lifts the ax over his head in the same motion. He pauses. It’s Man Number Two. Talking on a cell phone. Eyes like melons. Mouth to the ground. Cell phone to his ear. Lit by the orange light of a barrel fire.

  Man Number Two reaches for his holster when the first blow of the ax splits his face. He falls to the ground like a half-log. Frady looks to the right—two women in Pistons downcoats (in July?) scurry away. He looks back at the ax-murder statistic at his feet. It’s definitely Man Number Two, the child-fucker. The ax is heavy, and now blood-covered. Frady strikes the man’s head again. Then again, until Man Number Two’s head falls off his shoulders in two pieces. Then Frady cuts off the right arm at the shoulder, then the left. He’s tired. Bone is hard, muscle is thick, and this isn’t the movies.

  Keeping the ax close, Frady crosses back over the ballfield, back over the dead-end street, past the garbage cans, along the path along the shore, by the old tug dock, over the fence, and back to the house. The squad cars are gone. Frady’s head is reeling, and he’s seeing green sparks. But the squad cars are gone, so he can examine his situation. He walks near the parking lot’s edge and looks behind the oil drum. It’s Man Number One. He’s still alive. He’s stiff, and probably already convulsed. But he’s alive. Frady lifts the ax over his head and allows the laws of gravity to bury the ax into Man Number One’s neck. It nearly decapitates him. Frady wasn’t going for the neck, he was going for the face, trying to make the two killings look similar, the acts of the same man/woman/group, helping to expedite the investigation for the cops in case they find the bodies before he has a chance to do anything with the them. He takes the ax back and drops it again. He’s relieved to see it hit Man Number One square in the face, almost splitting his head in the identical manner as Man Number Two. He smiles. He’s done his duty for the investigators on this case.

  He drags the body between the houses and goes in through the screened porch.

  He bandages his shoulder, bandages his hand, takes an adrenaline shot, snorts some coke, puts on his jazz CD, and flips on his cell phone. “Mr. Crawl. This is Mr. Skills. I need you Code Red. Bring the kit. You have to do some sewing. And I have collateral, so bring some lye bags. These need to go into the river.” He the phone shut.

  After he rests, hoping not to sleep, and after his wounds are taken care of, and before sun-up, he’ll leave. He doesn’t have to worry about any evidence of himself in the house, because nothing he has is traceable, not even his cell phone. Then he’ll go over to Dallas’ house and demand at gunpoint that Dallas tell him where Baby is with his bag of stuff. He needs it now, now more than ever, not so much the junk but the cash, so that he can get out of town. He knows he’s going to be visited shortly by Man Number Three, and probably Man Number Four, and Man Number Five, and Man Number Six, and Man Number Seven.

  Saturday

  Here is Wisdom

  You know that in order to make it through your life while living in the city of Detroit, you have to be skilled at lying. Lying is one of the only things that helps you to deal with the misery of your existence. You have to be able to lie to get by. You have to be able to lie to your family, your friends, and, especially, to yourself. You have to be able to look in the mirror and fool yourself into believing that everything is fine in your world and that you can move on, for your own mental survival. You can move on.

  You can.

  You know you can.

  It’s important that, for the most part, you are able to ignore your reality. Sometimes your reality is that you’re getting screwed over every five seconds, by strangers, friends, and family alike. Those people will screw you over and then offer you a consolation. They’ll say to you, “Let’s forget about the past. Let’s let bygones be bygones, and let’s just move on with our lives. It’ll never happen again.” This is one of those moments when you have to lie to yourself, because you have to look in the mirror at yourself again, and with a straight face convince yourself that what this person says is the truth, and not a lie, and that bygones will be bygones, and that this person will never screw you over again. You must convince yourself of this, because if you don’t, if you decide that this person isn’t being honest with you and that this person will do this again, you have to face the debauchery of this person, and sometimes that’s enough to blow your mind.

  For your own sanity, a lie is better.

  Even though you know you’ll get screwed over again, most of the time for money or power. Money and power takes precedence over anything when you have nothing.

  And for your family’s sanity, a lie is better. They don’t want to be embarrassed by saying how much of a drunk you really are, how much of a cheater you really are, how hurtful you are to them, how deceptive you are to them, so they are forced to lie, too. They are forced to lie to coexist with you. They are forced to turn the other way when you’ve been popping pills again, or drunk driving again, or just plain making an ass of yourself again. This has now become their reality too, this world of lies. But of course, everyone who knows you knows better. They know how you really are, and they laugh behind your family’s back when your family is forced to make yet another excuse for your absence. “He’s working overtime today, so he’ll be late.” Well, while you work overtime, buy another round for the house.

  There is a problem with lying to yourself on a regular basis, though. Your lie becomes your world. You begin to live a lie. You no longer recognize the truth of your existence. And then one day, one horrible, detrimental day, a major reality hits your world, your World of Lies, and that house of cards comes tumbling down surely and swiftly, and then, all is lost.

  And then, your world no longer exists.

  And then, you no longer exist.

  So all is lost.

  In Dallas’ House

  Baby listens as Dallas throws up in the bathroom. It’s the third time he’s thrown up. She can’t use this opportunity to get to her feet, though, at least she thinks, she’s not sure, and she tries to clear her head enough to try to do something. She doesn’t know what to do. She seems to remember that she and Dallas had been recreating the scene from Monster’s Ball for most of the night. Or maybe that didn’t happen, because Dallas is pathetic and probably couldn’t get hard enough. Maybe she just imagined it because he suggested it earlier in the evening. She knows that Dallas is just a taffy-puller.

  The room begins to sound, taste, and smell clearer to her now. She blinks. She blinks harder. Clearer still. She s
ees the couch, the radiator, scraps of duct tape everywhere, blood, vomit, little plastic baggies, cash, beer cans, liquor bottles, a smashed cell phone, a red-bloody baseball bat, a dead priest, and a snub-nosed revolver. She wearily pulls her jeans back up from around her ankles and buttons what she can button. She points herself in the direction of the revolver and fires herself as though she was a bullet (a very tired, beaten bullet). She feels herself soar in the general direction of the gun and hopes she doesn’t overshoot it or is caught with it as Dallas appears unexpectedly.

  She tumbles head-first over the coffee table and lands on her face. Suddenly, she’s awake. She can see much more clearly—stars swirl in the sky and form a perfect constellation, one of a fiery chariot. From her good eye she sees the gun right in front of her face.

  She hears the bathroom door open and can feel the air in the room pop. She glances over her shoulder. Dallas is there, stumbling toward her and the gun. He hits the coffee table and lands headfirst on the ground himself. She takes the gun. He lifts his head. She steadies her shaky hand. He looks at her. She squeezes the trigger. His hand reaches toward her. A gunfire