Black Mountain

by Laird Barron

  “Girls. They’re girls and women. I don’t think of them as hookers.”

  “You can’t save them in any meaningful sense. It’s the nature of their business. Wolves cut the weak from the herd, same as it ever was.”

  “They’re fated?” I said. “That’s my out, eh? Concede to the inevitable and hit the showers.”

  “Absolutely, they’re fated.”

  “There are times in a man’s life when he must make the grand gesture.”

  “Is the gesture you have in mind throwing a double bird at the cosmos? The cosmos will gesture back and you won’t like it.” He paused. I thought he was egging himself into mentioning our failure with Reba Walker as my prime motivator toward kamikaze behavior—and he would’ve been on the money. Instead, he changed course. “The man trusts you.”

  “Who? Curtis?”

  “No, Bellow. I’m positive that intel is classified. Damned sure not meant to be bandied about the underworld.”

  “Trust is less a factor than opportunity,” I said. “Bellow considers me a potentially important connection, an asset. And vice versa.”

  “What are we—I mean, what are you supposed to do?”

  “Dig and dig some more. That’s why I want to interview Delia. She and Harry were an item—”

  “Those two were cozy, okay,” he said. “Jury’s out on how cozy.”

  “Whatever strokes your ego, son. Depending upon how long the affair lasted, she likely met some of his pals and associates besides Royal.”

  He regarded the innards of the tractor with the air of a man contemplating the unpleasant side of divinity.

  “Suppose your future ex-girlfriend unwittingly encountered Oestryke?” I said, since he wasn’t going to bite.

  “Grasping at Straws for five hundred, Alex.”

  “Such is the essence of detection. Look, man. Bellow sent me a couple of file photos. All I want is for Delia to take a peek. Then you lovebirds can go canoodle to your hearts’ content, and God bless your unholy union.”

  “There won’t be any canoodling after you infuriate her. Cockblocked by my best friend. What a deal.”

  “I’m not blocking you.” I made a kung fu chopping motion. “More like deflecting.”

  He turned from me and walked through the door. Looped back a moment later to snag the last bottle. He glared sullenly.

  “You win, I’ll call her.”

  “Attaboy. Bros before crazy-hot heiresses.”

  “Laugh it up, pal. I’m not going to tell her about you until the third date.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Late-afternoon sunlight seeped over the mountains and illuminated my office desk, where I sat wrestling with a choice and my third or fourth nasty headache of late.

  My weekly progress report to Curtis was due, and though I wanted to grill him about Morris Oestryke, or whatever the Croatoan called himself these days, it was safer to gather more intelligence. The quandary—tell Curtis an abbreviated version of what I’d learned or stall him for a bit longer? I defaulted to the traditional wiseguy method and went with light obfuscation when I reported in—Early days, nobody admits nothin’. Might have a promising lead, stay tuned—that sort of jazz. He didn’t press; said to keep him informed, ciao. Mobster capos have plenty on their plates without double-checking on the spear-carriers at every turn.

  I stared out the window at the sunset and crushed a handball. Twenty-five reps with the left, twenty-five with the right. Repeat and repeat. Hand strength is crucial; life-or-death struggles come down to grip more often than one might suppose. My left still lacked in power since getting smashed.

  A strong breeze pushed the treetops around. Leaves shook loose and whirled down the empty street. Velvet bats and lace cobwebs adorned the windows of shops and homes. Pumpkin spice wafted from the art gallery below. The American version of the Day of the Dead loomed in the near distance. Superstition isn’t my bag; on the other hand, I tend to respect the notion of synchronicity. Butterfly wings, prophetic dreams, and so forth. The atmosphere and the Americanized, commercialized tokens of death and devilry collaborated to reinforce my sense of impending doom.

  I’d perused the files Bellow sent and pinned a handful of photographs to the virginal corkboard wall. Morris Oestryke as a baby-faced Army private and again as a smiling, clean-cut salesman, father of three. Other pics of sheet-covered bodies and chalk outlines alongside photocopied newspaper articles detailing the unsolved murders of transient women; the New York tri-state version of the Highway of Tears in British Columbia.

  A pair of intensely macabre crime scene pics warranted closer examination. These photos were representative of the vast majority of victims—one of a mobster (male) whacked by the Croatoan in 1996 and retrieved shortly after death; the other of a hapless drifter (female), aged twenty-six, who’d disappeared in 2007 and was discovered in 2010 in a shallow grave and presumed to be a random victim of the Croatoan’s hooker-slaying hobby.

  According to a file summary, both victims struggled prior to decapitation. Both had been bound and tortured. Neither was sexually assaulted. Cause of death was attributed to the decapitation event, conducted with a heavy, serrated blade. Besides elements relating to their murders, nothing else linked the pair. They’d never met, didn’t associate with the same crowd, hadn’t attended school together, et cetera. Nonetheless, the ritual nature of the killings was nearly identical. Another constant—the missing murdered women were generally young and attractive. Caucasian blondes of medium- to full-figured builds.

  Eyeing the photos didn’t spark any leaps of deduction. I’d made a few calls to contacts who might have heard something. My preliminary takeaway after several phone interviews? Agent Bellow was on the money in terms of his dreary assessment of the Croatoan/tri-state murder cases and their lack of progress.

  Few within law enforcement dwelled upon the Croatoan’s mob activities—there was a sense that an era had passed. Even fewer cared about the possibility he’d taken to bagging civilians in his dotage. As Bellow had reported, the tri-state murders primarily targeted hookers and indigents. Infamous manhunts for the Green River and Zodiac killers notwithstanding, this type of crime wasn’t sexy enough to draw significant resources as it concerned populations that authorities weren’t particularly motivated to protect or avenge. Save the hookers! isn’t a popular cop rallying cry.

  Digging through the files left me with several basic questions, which I committed to my notes:

  Where had Oestryke gone from 1974 to 1978?

  Who had “Morris Oestryke” become after he faked his death in the factory inferno in ’87?

  Why had he decided to kill at least two fellow criminals?

  Where is he hiding? Though he’d ranged the length of the Atlantic seaboard plying his trade, documents confirmed the vast majority of his activities occurred all over New York. Home sweet home?

  Why have FBI bigwigs stonewalled the investigation? I had no reason to doubt Bellow’s interpretation of events. The intricacies of government politics lay well afield of my own expertise, so I could only hypothesize that Oestryke was, or had been, under protection. The FBI is infamous for cutting deals with small fry in order to land bigger fish. The involvement of the Department of Defense was the ringer. What did they want with a mob assassin and why had they redacted his military records?

  A tangential query—What is Marion Curtis’s angle? Sooner or later, I’d be forced to confront the question head-on. Discretion contested with pride. I’d hate for Lionel to be right about this one. He gloated, without fail.

  Another avenue of inquiry pointed toward Delia Labrador and her daddy’s corporation, Zircon. This could prove difficult. Billionaire tycoons and international businesses were hard nuts to crack. They employed armies of suits with guns to dissuade snoopers and armies of suits with fancy law degrees to guarantee the accounts balanced, fair or foul.


  Delightful as the sound of skulls smacking together might be, I stuck with socially acceptable tactics. Getting the goods on Delia Labrador and her family wasn’t difficult; our lives are compiled online here in the twenty-first century, with the real dirty dirt hidden behind a paywall. I paid and added the expenses to Curtis’s bill.

  Raising the curtain on Zircon and its myriad subsidiaries presented a stiffer challenge. Database research catalogues were my initial line of attack—resources such as Dun & Bradstreet. My second line? Because it is essentially a corporation unto itself, the mob knows everything worth knowing in the arena of business. The Outfit acquires vast stores of information covering a spectrum of companies, large and small. Some of the intel collection occurs via dubious means; the majority derives from entirely legal but esoteric sources not available to John Q. Public.

  I contacted somebody who knew somebody and put in a request for Zircon’s corporate history, as well as documents on the official background of Morris Oestryke’s civilian employers. Might as well go whole hog. A few dollars into the right pockets and several cartons of material were en route to my humble office.

  Sifting a mountain of papers hews too close to law enforcement drudgery. Being a man of action, I delegate monotonous tasks as much as is feasible. In that spirit, I got on the horn to bring in a data specialist from a local accounting firm. I’d provide a cheat sheet of key words and specific info pertinent to my investigation. This specialist would burn the midnight oil whittling the information to a manageable size, then collating and cross-referencing it for my approval.

  Banal, and counter to my career of investigation conducted via strong-arm tactics. In the meantime, I’d play it close to the vest and give Lionel a few days to work his magic and see where “canoodling” Ms. Labrador might lead.

  Yes, I’m a cynic.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  The accountant camped at my office, gobbling billable hours like candy as he and an assistant combed through stacks of files related to the Harold Lee investigation. There wasn’t anything to do except wait for data to crunch.

  Not one to twiddle my thumbs, I booked a round-trip plane ticket to Michigan; red-eye out of Stewart Airport. Rearranging Aubrey P’s protective detail was a small circus. In the end, Chuck Bachelor tagged a couple of his ne’er-do-well buddies to scope the salon during business hours while he camped in her living room at night. He had Lionel on speed dial if it hit the fan. I promised to return asap.

  Would a tour of Morris Oestryke’s childhood stomping grounds yield anything fruitful? Odds were long. Intuition, hard work, and luck are the fundamentals of tracking. Additionally, there’s the practical matter of osmosis. My powers of deduction aren’t worthy of Holmes, but my subconscious is a diesel thresher. The secret is to give it something to chew on. And so I set forth.

  I’ve traveled to far-flung locales to soak up the atmosphere, breathe in the smoke of strange bars, listen to the ebb and flow of conversation, and open myself to the background hum of humans doing their ant thing. It’s the hunter’s trick of observing a meadow from a blind—you watch nothing and everything at once.

  Occasionally, the cogwheels click into place of their own accord.

  The Feds had questioned Oestryke’s relatives and friends and presumably came away empty. A list of names, addresses, and phone numbers went, folded, into my pocket. No reason for me not to make a run at them as well. I budgeted seventy-two hours for the trip. Sounds reasonable, yes? Reasonable or not, I’d decided to stretch my legs and call it due diligence.

  Right before hitting the road, I dialed a number in Detroit and briefly explained to the brusque individual who answered where I intended to go and why. I reiterated that I wasn’t on the job. Wouldn’t want someone to glimpse me on the street and leap to errant conclusions. Technically, only Alaska and Chicago were off-limits following my breakup with the Outfit. Men frequently get it in the neck due to technicalities, so I exercised discretion.

  He requested basic details of my itinerary, which I gamely provided. He said, “Okay,” and disconnected. Did that qualify as permission? This exchange did not fill me with confidence. I squared my shoulders and soldiered on.

  * * *

  —

  A TAILWIND PUSHED MY JET into Detroit twenty minutes ahead of schedule. I rented a luxury car and escaped the city limits before rush hour. I tuned the radio to an oldies station and sank back into plush leather while the black-and-blue panorama morphed from urban blight to mile after mile of rural scarification.

  I motored northward into the sticks.

  It didn’t get any prettier when the sun rose, shivering cold. Crumbling secondary roads wove like clogged arteries into the poisoned backwoods. Industry had voided its bowels over the course of a prolonged death rattle, leaving behind a hollowed scene. Unless one could get a manufacturing job in Detroit, Lansing, or Grand Rapids, the forecast was for “hard times.” No presidential messiah was likely to resurrect this rusted-out carcass of a fallen empire anytime soon.

  * * *

  —

  I PITTED AT A REST AREA/TRUCK STOP. Sipped a cup of not-too-bad coffee and watched punchy travelers mill around the food court. I gave whatever might be in motion ten minutes to develop.

  A midnight-blue Cadillac nosed into a parking space near the huge glass façade of the court. It had tailed me from the airport. The five men who unloaded from the Caddy wore sunglasses and better-than-average suits, except for the fifth man in a crème-colored number—his tailoring tipped the scales in excess of a grand.

  I rose, stretched elaborately, bought a second, larger cup of coffee, and headed for the men’s room. Public bathrooms are excellent stages for murder and mayhem, second only to dark alleys. I faced a urinal, pretending to piss, coffee balanced atop, next to the flusher. A migraine stabbed into my eye like a bolt from the blue.

  The man in the fancy suit assumed the position at the next urinal. Civilians puttered around us obliviously. I wished for my guns and knives. I don’t carry any of those items for short hauls. Too dicey in this age of hyper-paranoid airline travel.

  “Where ya headin’, Mr. Coleridge?” The wiseguy didn’t introduce himself. We both knew he represented Detroit, and, by extension, the Chicago plexus. He rotated slightly and his jacket fell open, revealing the butt of a pistol.

  Blackness ate inward from the corners of my vision. Reality crumpled and bloomed like a cigarette burn on a movie screen. The hole let into an alternate universe, where the scene unfolded bloodily. No, in Universe B, Mr. Fancy Suit had no intention of conducting a peaceful exchange. He’d spoken to cover the stealthy approach of two of his goon buddies. I snatched the supersized cup and smashed it into his eyes. Hot coffee scalded my hand. He shrieked and clawed at his face—done for the day, at least. Fair trade. I elbowed a goon in the jaw and got my left forearm raised to protect my head and neck as the second goon tomahawk-chopped a switchblade into my forearm. The blade lodged in bone, and I pulled him close and scooped his eyeball with my thumb. He struggled wildly, and I used his momentum to drive his forehead into the urinal pipe. Bones crunched, and what was inside slopped on the wall and into the drain. The guy I’d smashed in the jaw gargled blood as he rolled on the dirty floor. A common symptom of chomping one’s tongue in half. I escaped the bathroom and ran like hell most of the way down the hall to the cafeteria. One of the reserve thugs stepped from behind a vending machine and let me have a full magazine from his automatic pistol. GAME OVER, as the video game screen says.

  Waves of agony and migraine-spawned dizziness receded.

  The cigarette burns reversed and I was in the regular space-time continuum once again, my future yet undecided. Mr. Fancy Suit studied me with a trace of a puzzled frown.

  Smiling with every iota of geniality I could muster, I explained my itinerary in a few words and passed him my card.

  “Thanks for calling ahead. The big guys appre
ciate your courtesy.” He glanced at the coffee and back to me. He washed his hands and walked out.

  I exhaled. Sometimes the elk is lucky and the wolves are only cruising.

  * * *

  —

  THE PANORAMA WASN’T as friendly or colorful as New York’s postcard autumn. The atmosphere had a death metal ambiance as winter approached Deering, Michigan. It would be the brutish type of winter that features ash in the snowflakes and black ice on playground slides. In the interim, everything was gray and bloody rust splashed with plague yellow.

  Deering was a quintessential blue-collar town gone to seed: shuttered factories and Main Street businesses with SPACE FOR RENT signs plastered everywhere; sullen men in ball caps and denim jackets at the wheel of late-1990s pickup trucks; pregnant teen girls, bright-lipped and exhausted, sucking diet sodas, toddlers attached at the thighs. The Christian Reformed Church looked sharp with a relatively new coat of paint, though. A jaunty placard advertised an upcoming penny social.

  I’d observed a bushel of Deering clones in my travels. Mobster capos eagerly recruit foot soldiers from the wastelands’ warring tribes. Whenever a life of not-so-organized crime goes sideways, the saps always beeline for home miserable home, where unemployment, alcoholism, and delinquency crest every year.

  Here lay the kind of town where wives wore sunglasses to hide black eyes, kids regularly missed school or came to school hungry in tattered shoes, and locals shot at each other, or brained each other with pool cues and bottles, on the regular. Such is the stultifying madness born of desperate poverty and hopelessness.

  One and all pledged his or her soul to the Deering Bucks High School football team. Because, of course, the peasants pay obeisance to their gods. Hometown sports were the nearest thing these modern-day Roman citizens had to bread and circuses. Recessions and state legislative malfeasance stifled financial resources to push the Deering Bucks into the upper echelon of high school powerhouses. This wasn’t Texas where even the poorest community collected its loose change for shiny new uniforms and a state-of-the-art coliseum. Deering High’s football field doubled as a baseball diamond; dirt and rocks instead of artificial turf. A history teacher and his brother coached both squads.